Look, gwern sometimes behaves like an ass here, on IRC and possibly IRL, his charitable interpretation skills leave a lot to be desired, and this can be mildly annoying, but he more than makes up for this in the quality and quantity of the output he produces. He is a huge net benefit to this forum, probably more so than dozens of other regulars combined (possibly including yours truly), so deal with it. Ignore what you perceive to be unfair, and enjoy the rest. Not everyone can be Yvain-like insightful, productive and virtuous, all at the same time.
This is really dismissive and, if I’m honest, I’m disappointed it’s been upvoted so much. It’s very convenient to say something like this and score points by signalling self-sacrificing stoicism and tough skin, and a lot less convenient to take the time to actually try looking for solutions or even just hold off from making dismissive comments.
I believe I remember when I hopped on #lesswrong (on which I’ve spent maybe between fifteen and ninety minutes’ active time, so it’s telling that this happened), and within a few minutes you’d complained to me (when I wasn’t talking to you, if I recall correctly) about gwern not respecting others’ norms or something. I didn’t imply you were a crybaby or use my ignorance of your beef as an excuse to be Above It All. In fact, I made conscious effort to preempt my brain labelling it as ‘weirdly outspoken whining’ and to not be prejudicial in assessing what you’d said, but to treat it as a potentially legitimate complaint.
When someone is upset and potentially feels bullied by the community, telling them to deal with it as if they are inherently the problem by daring to rock the boat is unacceptable. It might be the case that they turn out to be in the wrong, but putting it like you’ve put it is basically never ever ever helpful and smacks of failure of consequentialism (only looking at whether gwern is net-positive, rather than if there are marginal improvements to be made).
If it’s your honest belief that there is nothing that can be done and that this thread shouldn’t have been made, there are much nicer, less dismissive, more effective ways of doing it, or actions you can take. For example, not commenting and moving on. Like seriously, if anybody should be above ‘Stop rocking the boat’, it should be LessWrongers, given how many of us have probably encountered that attitude dozens or hundreds of times in pursuit of truth or been bullied for being nerds, and how many of us have black belts in Social Justice theory (even those who have questioned or renounced that art). And if anybody should be above weird deontological rules like ‘Don’t criticize net-positive figures’ or ‘if u dont like it u can just leave’, it should be people who pride themselves on clearheaded thinking.
1) I’m annoyed by this and sleep deprived so forgive me if this response is incompletely coherent.
2) Those aren’t weird deontological rules and you’re just throwing in those words to describe those phrases as boo lights. MOST things people say aren’t meant as strict rules, but as contextual and limited responses to the conversation at hand. This guy is implicitly calling for Gwern to be banned, or saying that it’s either Them or Gwern. Shminux is simply explicitly conveying that we clearly choose to have Gwern rather than not. He’s not Making A Rule.
3) You can’t treat everyone who complains about being bullied by the community seriously. That’s like auto-cooperating in a world full of potential defectors. It creates an incentive to punish anyone you dislike by starting a thread about how mean they are to you, and also has a chilling effect on conversation in general. Despite the rudeness, Gwern’s replies in the linked conversation were lengthy and tried to convey information and thoughts. I’ve seen plenty of examples of people afraid to talk because they might offend someone online, and I don’t really want the threshold for being punished for rudeness to be that low on Lesswrong.
4) There is such a thing as overreaction. Regardless of whether this person feels bullied by Gwern, everyone can take a look at the threads involved and decide if it’s an appropriate response. I don’t think calling someone out for something like this in a top level post (not to mention that’s a pretty low quality post even for discussion) and impugning the entire community as irrational or whatever is at all proportional.
5) If thisspaceavailable (or you) want Lesswrong as a WHOLE to be less rude, rather than making a post that (clearly in my mind) is just getting back at Gwern, there are a LOT better ways to do it.
Those aren’t weird deontological rules and you’re just throwing in those words to describe those phrases as boo lights. MOST things people say aren’t meant as strict rules, but as contextual and limited responses to the conversation at hand.
There is a very particular mental process of deontological thinking that epistemic rationalists should train themselves to defuse, in which an argument is basically short-circuited by a magic, invalid step. If the mental process that actually takes place in someone’s head is, ‘This person criticised a net-positive figure. Therefore, they must be belittled’, and that’s as far as their ability to justify actually goes, that seems like the kind of thinking an epistemic rationalist would want to be alerted to and detrain, if it’s taking place subconsciously.
You’re proposing the alternative that shminux could justify it further but is using it as a shorthand, and that I’m confusing that omission for an absence of recursive justification. The bare bones of shminux’s comment would be “gwern is imperfect but hugely net positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.” If that’s not deontological thinking, then it remains such a general heuristic argument, bare of any specific details of the case at hand, that it’s a crappy comment to make to someone who feels that they’ve been bullied by a senior member and is probably worried the community will close ranks. It’s not just a matter of ‘What is the most charitable interpretation of shminux’s comment’, it’s also e.g. ‘What is the distribution over interpretations that would actually occur to someone who feels bullied and aggrieved?’
It looks like I’m making a fully general counterargument against arguments by calling anything short of a computer-verifiable argument deontological. It looks like you’re making a fully general counterargument against accusations of deontological argument.
Your point (3) is an example of a recurring thing where I question a particular comment someone makes to a post, and then someone comes along and makes a bunch of arguments about why the original poster is in fact an idiot or defector or whatever and gets a bunch of upvotes by (intentional or otherwise) sleight of hand; they look like they’re refuting my comment, but all they’ve done is justify general skepticism of the original poster, rather than a specific justification of the response that I questioned. It introduces a false dichotomy between belittling the original poster and ‘opening the floodgates’, and (intentionally or otherwise) makes me look like the naive idiot who wants to open the floodgates and the other person like the heroic, gritty defender of the forum. When all I was saying was that being mean in that specific way isn’t the best thing from a consequentialist perspective. Specifically:
You can’t treat everyone who complains about being bullied by the community seriously.
This is the false dichotomy. You are (intentionally or otherwise) completely misrepresenting what I’m saying. It looks to me like I got rounded off in your mind to ‘naive person who thinks all claims of bullying deontologically have to be taken seriously’, which is what annoyed you. You should be more careful when interpreting in future in such situations.
That’s like auto-cooperating in a world full of potential defectors.
Or I’m not using a deontological or generalised heuristic, and I’m just making the specific claim that the exact response from this exact person in this exact case was not great. Apply your own skepticism of assumptions of deontology to me, if you will insist they be applied to shminux.
It creates an incentive to punish anyone you dislike by starting a thread about how mean they are to you
It’s not obvious to me that this slippery slope is slippery enough to justify the specific response in this specific case.
and also has a chilling effect on conversation in general.
If I’m correct and shminux’s reply was inappropriate, then that also has a chilling effect on those who have grievances. Additionally, I found shminux’s reply and the amount of support it originally had very off-putting. I knew that I’d have to take a long time responding to it to try to point out what was wrong with it, and risk downvotes and obnoxious responses to do so. Then I found that some of the responses I did actually get (including yours) made me feel emotionally disgusted enough, and seemed so fundamentally crappy down several inferential layers, that it took me this long to respond and even begin to be able to roughly convey my position. I say this not as a definitive assertion that nobody should have challenged me, but to point out that you only mentioned the chilling effects on the accused without mentioning the effects on the accuser and other community members.
Despite the rudeness, Gwern’s replies in the linked conversation were lengthy and tried to convey information and thoughts. I’ve seen plenty of examples of people afraid to talk because they might offend someone online, and I don’t really want the threshold for being punished for rudeness to be that low on Lesswrong.
This seems very far away from my specific criticisms of shminux’s comment.
Point (4) also does not connect to the specifics of shminux’s comment.
Point (5) is defused by the obsevation that I was not defending ThisSpaceAvailable’s post, but rather was criticising shminux’s comment on the grounds that there are better responses than shminux’s to the post. I find it extremely telling that you then state there are much better ways to make Less Wrong less rude, when you failed to understand that my comment was saying to shminux that there are much better ways of responding to a post like this than making a comment that pattern-matches extremely strongly to closing ranks around a senior community member. I.e. the form of your (5) is similar to the form of my comment, yet you missed what my comment was saying, and this seems like significant evidence to me that you were mindkilled by my comment.
Asserting disagreement with a compound term engenders ambiguity. Are they not weird? Not deontological? Not rules? A combination?
It creates an incentive to punish anyone you dislike by starting a thread about how mean they are to you, and also has a chilling effect on conversation in general.
“Treating everyone who complaining about being bullied seriously” isn’t the same as “Automatically taking the side of everyone who complains”. It’s bizarre to claim that you must oppose the general phenomenon of complaints, rather than addressing a problem with a specific complaint. My karma is now 42% positive for the last month. This one thread has lost me more karma than I’ve accrued over the entire last month. And you’re saying that there’s a chilling effect against gwern?
Despite the rudeness, Gwern’s replies in the linked conversation were lengthy and tried to convey information and thoughts.
Really? In the first thread, gwern wrote that the threats were bluffs, and then said he had not said that and I was dishonest in thinking he did. In the other one, he spent several posts evading the question of how IQ is additive.
Regardless of whether this person feels bullied by Gwern, everyone can take a look at the threads involved and decide if it’s an appropriate response.
And everyone can look at posts and decide for themselves whether downvoting was justified. And yet that didn’t stop several people from making top level post complaining about mass downvoting. And really, what kind of response is “Everyone can decide whether the response was appropriate” to accusations of bullying?
I don’t think calling someone out for something like this in a top level post (not to mention that’s a pretty low quality post even for discussion) and impugning the entire community as irrational or whatever is at all proportional.
So, on the one hand, you say that everyone can see for themselves whether the behavior is appropriate, but on the other hand you take umbrage at my concluding from the lack of downvotes against gwern that the community as a whole is expressing a lack of concern regarding gwern’s behavior?
If thisspaceavailable (or you) want Lesswrong as a WHOLE to be less rude, rather than making a post that (clearly in my mind) is just getting back at Gwern, there are a LOT better ways to do it.
What are they? And is there a way to ask what those are, that don’t involve people calling me a whiner and massively downvoting me?
You’re clearly not communicating in good faith. I’m not really interested in talking to someone who is either a troll or so convinced of their rightness that they’re blindly misreading what people say.
And if 18 karma is more than you’ve earned in a month, you might try being a less terrible commenter.
I most certainly am communicating in good faith, and the fact that you find such a false conclusion “obvious” speaks poorly for your discernment skills. You, on the other hand, have engaged in such dishonest behavior as referring to one of my posts as “an underhanded attempt to shame someone into saying what you want them to say”. I do not have a particular thing that I am trying to get gwern to say. If he wants to disagree with me, that’s fine. What I have a problem with is him disagreeing with me, and not defending his disagreement, AND calling me a liar for not agreeing with him.
I’m not really interested in talking to someone who is either a troll or so convinced of their rightness that they’re blindly misreading what people say.
What have I misread?
And if 18 karma is more than you’ve earned in a month, you might try being a less terrible commenter.
The total downvotes in this thread for my posts is 43, and if you add in the downvotes I’ve gotten in other threads for posts regarding this matter, it’s probably more than 50.
How does having a low karma count mean that I am a “terrible commenter”? Does one have to have a minimum number of karma points before you consider them to not fair game for gratuitous insults? Before this issue arose, my karma rating was around 90% positive.
Huh, this is one of the worst misinterpretations of my LW comment in a long time. I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll just express my general disappointment with it, downvote and move on.
You more-or-less said, “gwern is imperfect but net-positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.”. I think such a response, in reply to someone who feels bullied by a senior members and worries the community is/will close ranks, is not the best course of action, and in fact is better off not being made. Even assuming your comment was not a deontological imperative, but rather a shorthand for a heuristic argument, I am very uncertain as to what heuristic you are suggesting and why you think it’s a good heuristic.
Even if you ignored all that and rewrote your original comment differently, that might be sufficient to make headway.
Does that make things clearer? If this line of inquiry also seems too unweildy to begin replying to, can you go up meta levels and suggest a way to proceed?
gwern is not a “senior member”. He is not a moderator, as far as I know, though he did do some work for MIRI. He is a very prominent regular with superb research and analysis skills, quick wit, sharp tongue and occasionally bad attitude, apparently uninterested in applying the principle of charity. He’s been told as much and was unwilling to acknowledge this as a problem.
Like on any forum, you don’t have to engage everyone who replies to you. I ignore comments from a few regulars, some very active here, whom I have engaged in the past in repeated unproductive exchanges until I learned better. ThisSpaceAvailable should do likewise. This is basic internet hygiene. As long as the person you are unhappy to talk to does not run the place actively hounding you from thread to thread, downvoting and sniping, ignore them. If you feel that they break the forum rules, raise the issue with the mods. What ThisSpaceAvailable wrote comes across as drama-queening (an uncharitable term, but it fits in this case, hence all the downvotes of the OP). The very first sentence is an extreme put-off. Just now I have looked through the linked thread and my impression is that it’s the OP who lost his cool. Anyway, I agree that my original reply could have been written in a more charitable way, but the point (a “heuristic”, if you like) still stands: ignore those you don’t like, unless they clearly break forum rules, or don’t complain (or don’t participate). It’s not a “deontological imperative”, more like common sense in online discourse.
Oh, dear. Such complications over ThisSpaceAvailable just being Dennis… X-D
DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! --- HELP! HELP! I’m being repressed!
ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!
DENNIS: Oh, what a give away. Did you hear that, did you hear that, eh?.… That’s what I’m on about—did you see him repressing me, you saw it didn’t you?
On a general note, no one is telling Space to stop rocking the boat. People are telling him not to be a bloody idiot.
Telling someone who’s been harmed by a missing stair, “Well, the harm done to you is outweighed by all the benefit the rest of us have accrued, so you’re just going to accept being treated like crap so the rest of us can continue receiving this benefit” might sound reasonable from a utilitarian perspective, but from the perspective of the person who actually has to deal with it, it doesn’t sound so reasonable. If the people in charge of Less Wrong want to run it like the Catholic Church, handing out indulgences to those who make sufficient contributions, I suppose that’s their choice, but they might want to consider how that worked out for the Catholic Church.
“He’s one of leading figures, so no one should complain about anything he does” doesn’t sound at all like something a cult would say.
Ignore what you perceive to be unfair
Here’s a radical idea: how about we don’t shrug our shoulders and say “That’s the way it is”? How about instead we try to improve the world?
Not everyone can be Yvain-like insightful, productive and virtuous, all at the same time.
Yes, but people can refrain from being outright assholes, and other people can call them out when they do act like assholes.
Look, gwern sometimes behaves like an ass here, on IRC and possibly IRL, his charitable interpretation skills leave a lot to be desired, and this can be mildly annoying, but he more than makes up for this in the quality and quantity of the output he produces. He is a huge net benefit to this forum, probably more so than dozens of other regulars combined (possibly including yours truly), so deal with it. Ignore what you perceive to be unfair, and enjoy the rest. Not everyone can be Yvain-like insightful, productive and virtuous, all at the same time.
This is really dismissive and, if I’m honest, I’m disappointed it’s been upvoted so much. It’s very convenient to say something like this and score points by signalling self-sacrificing stoicism and tough skin, and a lot less convenient to take the time to actually try looking for solutions or even just hold off from making dismissive comments.
I believe I remember when I hopped on #lesswrong (on which I’ve spent maybe between fifteen and ninety minutes’ active time, so it’s telling that this happened), and within a few minutes you’d complained to me (when I wasn’t talking to you, if I recall correctly) about gwern not respecting others’ norms or something. I didn’t imply you were a crybaby or use my ignorance of your beef as an excuse to be Above It All. In fact, I made conscious effort to preempt my brain labelling it as ‘weirdly outspoken whining’ and to not be prejudicial in assessing what you’d said, but to treat it as a potentially legitimate complaint.
When someone is upset and potentially feels bullied by the community, telling them to deal with it as if they are inherently the problem by daring to rock the boat is unacceptable. It might be the case that they turn out to be in the wrong, but putting it like you’ve put it is basically never ever ever helpful and smacks of failure of consequentialism (only looking at whether gwern is net-positive, rather than if there are marginal improvements to be made).
If it’s your honest belief that there is nothing that can be done and that this thread shouldn’t have been made, there are much nicer, less dismissive, more effective ways of doing it, or actions you can take. For example, not commenting and moving on. Like seriously, if anybody should be above ‘Stop rocking the boat’, it should be LessWrongers, given how many of us have probably encountered that attitude dozens or hundreds of times in pursuit of truth or been bullied for being nerds, and how many of us have black belts in Social Justice theory (even those who have questioned or renounced that art). And if anybody should be above weird deontological rules like ‘Don’t criticize net-positive figures’ or ‘if u dont like it u can just leave’, it should be people who pride themselves on clearheaded thinking.
1) I’m annoyed by this and sleep deprived so forgive me if this response is incompletely coherent.
2) Those aren’t weird deontological rules and you’re just throwing in those words to describe those phrases as boo lights. MOST things people say aren’t meant as strict rules, but as contextual and limited responses to the conversation at hand. This guy is implicitly calling for Gwern to be banned, or saying that it’s either Them or Gwern. Shminux is simply explicitly conveying that we clearly choose to have Gwern rather than not. He’s not Making A Rule.
3) You can’t treat everyone who complains about being bullied by the community seriously. That’s like auto-cooperating in a world full of potential defectors. It creates an incentive to punish anyone you dislike by starting a thread about how mean they are to you, and also has a chilling effect on conversation in general. Despite the rudeness, Gwern’s replies in the linked conversation were lengthy and tried to convey information and thoughts. I’ve seen plenty of examples of people afraid to talk because they might offend someone online, and I don’t really want the threshold for being punished for rudeness to be that low on Lesswrong.
4) There is such a thing as overreaction. Regardless of whether this person feels bullied by Gwern, everyone can take a look at the threads involved and decide if it’s an appropriate response. I don’t think calling someone out for something like this in a top level post (not to mention that’s a pretty low quality post even for discussion) and impugning the entire community as irrational or whatever is at all proportional.
5) If thisspaceavailable (or you) want Lesswrong as a WHOLE to be less rude, rather than making a post that (clearly in my mind) is just getting back at Gwern, there are a LOT better ways to do it.
There is a very particular mental process of deontological thinking that epistemic rationalists should train themselves to defuse, in which an argument is basically short-circuited by a magic, invalid step. If the mental process that actually takes place in someone’s head is, ‘This person criticised a net-positive figure. Therefore, they must be belittled’, and that’s as far as their ability to justify actually goes, that seems like the kind of thinking an epistemic rationalist would want to be alerted to and detrain, if it’s taking place subconsciously.
You’re proposing the alternative that shminux could justify it further but is using it as a shorthand, and that I’m confusing that omission for an absence of recursive justification. The bare bones of shminux’s comment would be “gwern is imperfect but hugely net positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.” If that’s not deontological thinking, then it remains such a general heuristic argument, bare of any specific details of the case at hand, that it’s a crappy comment to make to someone who feels that they’ve been bullied by a senior member and is probably worried the community will close ranks. It’s not just a matter of ‘What is the most charitable interpretation of shminux’s comment’, it’s also e.g. ‘What is the distribution over interpretations that would actually occur to someone who feels bullied and aggrieved?’
It looks like I’m making a fully general counterargument against arguments by calling anything short of a computer-verifiable argument deontological. It looks like you’re making a fully general counterargument against accusations of deontological argument.
Your point (3) is an example of a recurring thing where I question a particular comment someone makes to a post, and then someone comes along and makes a bunch of arguments about why the original poster is in fact an idiot or defector or whatever and gets a bunch of upvotes by (intentional or otherwise) sleight of hand; they look like they’re refuting my comment, but all they’ve done is justify general skepticism of the original poster, rather than a specific justification of the response that I questioned. It introduces a false dichotomy between belittling the original poster and ‘opening the floodgates’, and (intentionally or otherwise) makes me look like the naive idiot who wants to open the floodgates and the other person like the heroic, gritty defender of the forum. When all I was saying was that being mean in that specific way isn’t the best thing from a consequentialist perspective. Specifically:
This is the false dichotomy. You are (intentionally or otherwise) completely misrepresenting what I’m saying. It looks to me like I got rounded off in your mind to ‘naive person who thinks all claims of bullying deontologically have to be taken seriously’, which is what annoyed you. You should be more careful when interpreting in future in such situations.
Or I’m not using a deontological or generalised heuristic, and I’m just making the specific claim that the exact response from this exact person in this exact case was not great. Apply your own skepticism of assumptions of deontology to me, if you will insist they be applied to shminux.
It’s not obvious to me that this slippery slope is slippery enough to justify the specific response in this specific case.
If I’m correct and shminux’s reply was inappropriate, then that also has a chilling effect on those who have grievances. Additionally, I found shminux’s reply and the amount of support it originally had very off-putting. I knew that I’d have to take a long time responding to it to try to point out what was wrong with it, and risk downvotes and obnoxious responses to do so. Then I found that some of the responses I did actually get (including yours) made me feel emotionally disgusted enough, and seemed so fundamentally crappy down several inferential layers, that it took me this long to respond and even begin to be able to roughly convey my position. I say this not as a definitive assertion that nobody should have challenged me, but to point out that you only mentioned the chilling effects on the accused without mentioning the effects on the accuser and other community members.
This seems very far away from my specific criticisms of shminux’s comment.
Point (4) also does not connect to the specifics of shminux’s comment.
Point (5) is defused by the obsevation that I was not defending ThisSpaceAvailable’s post, but rather was criticising shminux’s comment on the grounds that there are better responses than shminux’s to the post. I find it extremely telling that you then state there are much better ways to make Less Wrong less rude, when you failed to understand that my comment was saying to shminux that there are much better ways of responding to a post like this than making a comment that pattern-matches extremely strongly to closing ranks around a senior community member. I.e. the form of your (5) is similar to the form of my comment, yet you missed what my comment was saying, and this seems like significant evidence to me that you were mindkilled by my comment.
I didn’t say anything about banning.
Asserting disagreement with a compound term engenders ambiguity. Are they not weird? Not deontological? Not rules? A combination?
“Treating everyone who complaining about being bullied seriously” isn’t the same as “Automatically taking the side of everyone who complains”. It’s bizarre to claim that you must oppose the general phenomenon of complaints, rather than addressing a problem with a specific complaint. My karma is now 42% positive for the last month. This one thread has lost me more karma than I’ve accrued over the entire last month. And you’re saying that there’s a chilling effect against gwern?
Really? In the first thread, gwern wrote that the threats were bluffs, and then said he had not said that and I was dishonest in thinking he did. In the other one, he spent several posts evading the question of how IQ is additive.
And everyone can look at posts and decide for themselves whether downvoting was justified. And yet that didn’t stop several people from making top level post complaining about mass downvoting. And really, what kind of response is “Everyone can decide whether the response was appropriate” to accusations of bullying?
So, on the one hand, you say that everyone can see for themselves whether the behavior is appropriate, but on the other hand you take umbrage at my concluding from the lack of downvotes against gwern that the community as a whole is expressing a lack of concern regarding gwern’s behavior?
What are they? And is there a way to ask what those are, that don’t involve people calling me a whiner and massively downvoting me?
You’re clearly not communicating in good faith. I’m not really interested in talking to someone who is either a troll or so convinced of their rightness that they’re blindly misreading what people say.
And if 18 karma is more than you’ve earned in a month, you might try being a less terrible commenter.
I most certainly am communicating in good faith, and the fact that you find such a false conclusion “obvious” speaks poorly for your discernment skills. You, on the other hand, have engaged in such dishonest behavior as referring to one of my posts as “an underhanded attempt to shame someone into saying what you want them to say”. I do not have a particular thing that I am trying to get gwern to say. If he wants to disagree with me, that’s fine. What I have a problem with is him disagreeing with me, and not defending his disagreement, AND calling me a liar for not agreeing with him.
What have I misread?
The total downvotes in this thread for my posts is 43, and if you add in the downvotes I’ve gotten in other threads for posts regarding this matter, it’s probably more than 50.
How does having a low karma count mean that I am a “terrible commenter”? Does one have to have a minimum number of karma points before you consider them to not fair game for gratuitous insults? Before this issue arose, my karma rating was around 90% positive.
Huh, this is one of the worst misinterpretations of my LW comment in a long time. I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll just express my general disappointment with it, downvote and move on.
I liked the part with weird deontological rules.
You more-or-less said, “gwern is imperfect but net-positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.”. I think such a response, in reply to someone who feels bullied by a senior members and worries the community is/will close ranks, is not the best course of action, and in fact is better off not being made. Even assuming your comment was not a deontological imperative, but rather a shorthand for a heuristic argument, I am very uncertain as to what heuristic you are suggesting and why you think it’s a good heuristic.
Even if you ignored all that and rewrote your original comment differently, that might be sufficient to make headway.
Does that make things clearer? If this line of inquiry also seems too unweildy to begin replying to, can you go up meta levels and suggest a way to proceed?
I’ll try one more time...
gwern is not a “senior member”. He is not a moderator, as far as I know, though he did do some work for MIRI. He is a very prominent regular with superb research and analysis skills, quick wit, sharp tongue and occasionally bad attitude, apparently uninterested in applying the principle of charity. He’s been told as much and was unwilling to acknowledge this as a problem.
Like on any forum, you don’t have to engage everyone who replies to you. I ignore comments from a few regulars, some very active here, whom I have engaged in the past in repeated unproductive exchanges until I learned better. ThisSpaceAvailable should do likewise. This is basic internet hygiene. As long as the person you are unhappy to talk to does not run the place actively hounding you from thread to thread, downvoting and sniping, ignore them. If you feel that they break the forum rules, raise the issue with the mods. What ThisSpaceAvailable wrote comes across as drama-queening (an uncharitable term, but it fits in this case, hence all the downvotes of the OP). The very first sentence is an extreme put-off. Just now I have looked through the linked thread and my impression is that it’s the OP who lost his cool. Anyway, I agree that my original reply could have been written in a more charitable way, but the point (a “heuristic”, if you like) still stands: ignore those you don’t like, unless they clearly break forum rules, or don’t complain (or don’t participate). It’s not a “deontological imperative”, more like common sense in online discourse.
Oh, dear. Such complications over ThisSpaceAvailable just being Dennis… X-D
DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! --- HELP! HELP! I’m being repressed!
ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!
DENNIS: Oh, what a give away. Did you hear that, did you hear that, eh?.… That’s what I’m on about—did you see him repressing me, you saw it didn’t you?
On a general note, no one is telling Space to stop rocking the boat. People are telling him not to be a bloody idiot.
So, gwern is a missing stair? http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/06/missing-stair.html
Telling someone who’s been harmed by a missing stair, “Well, the harm done to you is outweighed by all the benefit the rest of us have accrued, so you’re just going to accept being treated like crap so the rest of us can continue receiving this benefit” might sound reasonable from a utilitarian perspective, but from the perspective of the person who actually has to deal with it, it doesn’t sound so reasonable. If the people in charge of Less Wrong want to run it like the Catholic Church, handing out indulgences to those who make sufficient contributions, I suppose that’s their choice, but they might want to consider how that worked out for the Catholic Church.
“He’s one of leading figures, so no one should complain about anything he does” doesn’t sound at all like something a cult would say.
Here’s a radical idea: how about we don’t shrug our shoulders and say “That’s the way it is”? How about instead we try to improve the world?
Yes, but people can refrain from being outright assholes, and other people can call them out when they do act like assholes.