EDIT 2: The original comment was too harsh. I’ve struck the original below. Here is what I think I should have said:
I think you raise a valuable object-level point here, which I haven’t yet made up my mind on. That said, I think this meta-level commentary is unpleasant and mostly wrong. I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t speculate on my thought process like that, and would appreciate if you could edit the tone-relevant parts.
Warning: This comment, and your previous comment, violate my comment section guidelines: “Reign of terror // Be charitable.” You have made and publicly stated a range of unnecessary, unkind, and untrue inferences about my thinking process. You have also made non-obvious-to-me claims of questionable-to-me truth value, which you also treat as exceedingly obvious. Please edit these two comments to conform to my civility guidelines.
(EDIT: Thanks. I look forward to resuming object-level discussion!)
After more reflection, I now think that this moderation comment was too harsh. First, the parts I think I should have done differently:
Realized that who reads commenting guidelines anyways, let alone expects them to be enforced?
Realized that it’s probably ambiguous what counts as “charitable” or not, even though (illusion of transparency) it felt so obvious to me that this counted as “not that.”
Realized that predictably I would later consider the incident to be less upsetting than in the moment, and that John may not have been aware that I find this kind of situation unusually upsetting.
Therefore, I should have said something like “I think you raise a valuable object-level point here, which I haven’t yet made up my mind on. That said, I think this meta-level commentary is unpleasant and mostly wrong. I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t speculate on my thought process like that, and would appreciate if you could edit the tone-relevant parts.”
I’m striking the original warning, putting in (4), and I encourage John to unredact his comments (but that’s up to him).
I’ve thought more about what my policy should be going forward. What kind of space do I want my comment section to be? First, I want to be able to say “This seems wrong, and here’s why”, and other people can say the same back to me, and one or more of us can end up at the truth faster. Second, it’s also important that people know that, going forward, engaging with me in (what feels to them like) good-faith will not be randomly slapped with a moderation warning because they annoyed me.
Third, I want to feel comfortable in my interactions in my comment section. My current plan is:
If someone comment something which feels personally uncharitable to me (a rather rare occurrence, what with the hundreds of comments in the last year since this kind of situation last happened), then I’ll privately message them, explain my guidelines, and ask that they tweak tone / write more on the object-level / not do the particular thing.[1]
If necessary, I’ll also write a soft-ask (like (4) above) as a comment.
In cases where this is just getting ignored and the person is being antagonistic, I will indeed post a starker warning and then possibly just delete comments.
Oh, huh, I think this moderation action makes me substantially less likely to comment further on your posts, FWIW. It’s currently will within your rights to do so, and I am on the margin excited about more people moderating things, but I feel hesitant participating with the current level of norm-specification + enforcement.
I also turned my strong-upvote into a small-upvote, since I have less trust in the comment section surfacing counterarguments, which feels particularly sad for this post (e.g. I was planning to respond to your comment with examples of past arguments this post is ignoring, but am now unlikely to do so).
Again, I think that’s fine, but I think posts with idiosyncratic norm enforcement should get less exposure, or at least not be canonical references. Historically we’ve decided to not put posts on frontpage when they had particularly idiosyncratic norm enforcement. I think that’s the wrong call here, but not confident.
Sorry, I’m confused; for my own education, can you explain why these civility guidelines aren’t epistemically suicidal? Personally, I want people like John Wentworth to comment on my posts to tell me their inferences about my thinking process; moreover, controlling for quality, “unkind” inferences are better, because I learn more from people telling me what I’m doing wrong, than from people telling me what I’m already doing right. What am I missing? Please be unkind.
EDIT 2: The original comment was too harsh. I’ve struck the original below. Here is what I think I should have said:
I think you raise a valuable object-level point here, which I haven’t yet made up my mind on. That said, I think this meta-level commentary is unpleasant and mostly wrong. I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t speculate on my thought process like that, and would appreciate if you could edit the tone-relevant parts.
Warning: This comment, andyour previous comment, violate my comment section guidelines: “Reign of terror // Be charitable.” You have made and publicly stated a range of unnecessary, unkind, and untrue inferences about my thinking process. You have also made non-obvious-to-me claims of questionable-to-me truth value, which you also treat as exceedingly obvious. Please edit these two comments to conform to my civility guidelines.(EDIT: Thanks. I look forward to resuming object-level discussion!)After more reflection, I now think that this moderation comment was too harsh. First, the parts I think I should have done differently:
Realized that who reads commenting guidelines anyways, let alone expects them to be enforced?
Realized that it’s probably ambiguous what counts as “charitable” or not, even though (illusion of transparency) it felt so obvious to me that this counted as “not that.”
Realized that predictably I would later consider the incident to be less upsetting than in the moment, and that John may not have been aware that I find this kind of situation unusually upsetting.
Therefore, I should have said something like “I think you raise a valuable object-level point here, which I haven’t yet made up my mind on. That said, I think this meta-level commentary is unpleasant and mostly wrong. I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t speculate on my thought process like that, and would appreciate if you could edit the tone-relevant parts.”
I’m striking the original warning, putting in (4), and I encourage John to unredact his comments (but that’s up to him).
I’ve thought more about what my policy should be going forward. What kind of space do I want my comment section to be? First, I want to be able to say “This seems wrong, and here’s why”, and other people can say the same back to me, and one or more of us can end up at the truth faster. Second, it’s also important that people know that, going forward, engaging with me in (what feels to them like) good-faith will not be randomly slapped with a moderation warning because they annoyed me.
Third, I want to feel comfortable in my interactions in my comment section. My current plan is:
If someone comment something which feels personally uncharitable to me (a rather rare occurrence, what with the hundreds of comments in the last year since this kind of situation last happened), then I’ll privately message them, explain my guidelines, and ask that they tweak tone / write more on the object-level / not do the particular thing.[1]
If necessary, I’ll also write a soft-ask (like (4) above) as a comment.
In cases where this is just getting ignored and the person is being antagonistic, I will indeed post a starker warning and then possibly just delete comments.
I had spoken with John privately before posting the warning comment. I think my main mistake was jumping to (3) instead of doing more of (1) and (2).
Oh, huh, I think this moderation action makes me substantially less likely to comment further on your posts, FWIW. It’s currently will within your rights to do so, and I am on the margin excited about more people moderating things, but I feel hesitant participating with the current level of norm-specification + enforcement.
I also turned my strong-upvote into a small-upvote, since I have less trust in the comment section surfacing counterarguments, which feels particularly sad for this post (e.g. I was planning to respond to your comment with examples of past arguments this post is ignoring, but am now unlikely to do so).
Again, I think that’s fine, but I think posts with idiosyncratic norm enforcement should get less exposure, or at least not be canonical references. Historically we’ve decided to not put posts on frontpage when they had particularly idiosyncratic norm enforcement. I think that’s the wrong call here, but not confident.
Sorry, I’m confused; for my own education, can you explain why these civility guidelines aren’t epistemically suicidal? Personally, I want people like John Wentworth to comment on my posts to tell me their inferences about my thinking process; moreover, controlling for quality, “unkind” inferences are better, because I learn more from people telling me what I’m doing wrong, than from people telling me what I’m already doing right. What am I missing? Please be unkind.