You continue to assert, with apparent complete confidence, a claim about Duncan’s motivations that (1) Duncan denies, (2) evidently seems to at least two people (me and dxu) to be far from obviously true, and (3) you provide no evidence for that engages with any specifics at all. The trouble with 3 is that it cuts you off from the possibility of getting less wrong. If in fact Duncan’s motivations were not as you think they are, how could you come to realise that?
(Maybe the answer is that you couldn’t, because you judge that in the situation we’re in the behaviour of someone with the motivations you claim is indistinguishable from that of someone with the motivations Duncan claims, and you’re willing to bite that bullet.)
I don’t agree with your analysis of the Alice/Bob situation. I think that in the situation as described, given only the information you give, we should be taking seriously at least these hypotheses: (1) Bob is just very ban-happy and bans anyone who criticizes him, (2) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, but the reason that happens is that he’s unreasonably provoking them, (3) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, for reasons that don’t reflect badly on Bob. And also various hybrids—it’s easy to envisage situations where 1,2,3 are all important aspects of what’s going on. And to form a firm opinion between 1,2,3 we need more information. For instance, what did Alice’s criticism actually look like? What did Bob say about his reasons? How have other people who are neither Alice nor Bob interpreted what happened?
Here’s Duncan’s actual description of what he says he finds unpleasant about interacting with you; it’s from Zack’s response to Duncan’s proposed discourse norms. (What happened next was that you made a brief reply, Duncan claimed that it was a demonstration of the exact dynamic he was complaining about, and said “Goodbye, Said”; I take it that’s the point at which he banned you from commenting on his frontpage posts. So I think it’s reasonable to take it as his account of why-Duncan-banned-Said.
I find that interacting with Said is overwhelmingly net negative; most of what he seems to me to do is sit back and demand that his conversational partners connect every single dot for him, doing no work himself while he nitpicks with the entitlement of a spoiled princeling. I think his mode of engagement is super unrewarding and makes a supermajority of the threads he participates in worse, by dint of draining away all the energy and recursively proliferating non-cruxy rabbitholes. It has never once felt cooperative or collaborative; I can make twice the intellectual progress with half the effort with a randomly selected LWer. I do not care to spend any more energy whatsoever correcting the misconceptions that he is extremely skilled at producing, ad infinitum, and I shan’t do so any longer; he’s welcome to carry on being however confused or wrong he wants to be about the points I’m making; I don’t find his confusion to be a proxy for any of the audiences whose understanding I care about.
Now, it seems clear to me that (1) if Duncan felt that way about interacting with you, it would be a very plausible explanation for the ban; (2) Duncan’s claimed perception does somewhat match my impression of your commenting style on LW (though I would not frame it nearly as negatively as he did; as already mentioned I think your presence on LW is clearly net positive); (3) I accordingly find it plausible that Duncan is fairly accurately describing his own subjective reasons for not wanting to interact with you.
Of course all of that is consistent with Duncan actually being upset by being criticized and then casting about for rationalizations. But, again, it doesn’t appear to me that he does anything like this every time someone strongly disagrees with him. In addition to dxu’s example in a sibling of this comment (to which you objected that the disagreement there wasn’t “robust”; like dxu I think it would be helpful to understand what you actually mean by “robust” and e.g. whether it implies what most people would call “rude”), here are a few more things people have said to Duncan without getting any sort of ban:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gbdqMaADqxMDwtgaf/exposure-to-lizardman-is-lethal?commentId=sneYCBckEFvL2hJdm and the thread descending from it (link is to jaspax saying that one of Duncan’s examples in the “lizardman” post is badly wrong; much of the subsequent discussion is a lengthy and vigorous dispute between tailcalled and Duncan; Duncan has not blocked either jaspax or tailcalled). There is a lot of other strong-disagreement-with-Duncan in that thread. One instance did result in Duncan blocking the user in question, but the fact that it’s currently sitting at −31/-28 suggests that Duncan isn’t the only person who considers it obnoxious.
I do, for the avoidance of doubt, think that Duncan is unusually willing to block people from commenting on his posts. But I don’t think “Duncan blocks anyone who disagrees robustly with him” is a tenable position unless you are defining “robustly” in a nonstandard way.
You continue to assert, with apparent complete confidence, a claim about Duncan’s motivations that (1) Duncan denies
Of course he denies it. I already explained that we’d expect him to deny it if it were true. Come on! This is extremely obvious stuff. Why would he not deny it?
And if indeed he’d deny it if it were true, and obviously would also deny it if it were false, then it’s not evidence. Right? Bayes!
(2) evidently seems to at least two people (me and dxu) to be far from obviously true,
Yes, many people on Less Wrong have implausible degrees of “charity” in their priors on human behavior.
and (3) you provide no evidence for that engages with any specifics at all. The trouble with 3 is that it cuts you off from the possibility of getting less wrong.
But of course it does no such thing! It means merely that I have a strong prior, and have seen no convincing evidence against.
If in fact Duncan’s motivations were not as you think they are, how could you come to realise that?
Same way I come to realize anything else: updating on evidence. (But it’d have to be some evidence!)
(Maybe the answer is that you couldn’t, because you judge that in the situation we’re in the behaviour of someone with the motivations you claim is indistinguishable from that of someone with the motivations Duncan claims, and you’re willing to bite that bullet.)
Pretty close to indistinguishable, yeah.
I don’t agree with your analysis of the Alice/Bob situation. I think that in the situation as described, given only the information you give, we should be taking seriously at least these hypotheses: (1) Bob is just very ban-happy and bans anyone who criticizes him, (2) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, but the reason that happens is that he’s unreasonably provoking them, (3) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, for reasons that don’t reflect badly on Bob. And also various hybrids—it’s easy to envisage situations where 1,2,3 are all important aspects of what’s going on.
(1) is the obvious default (because it’s quite common and ordinary). (2) seems to rest on the meaning of “unreasonably”; I think we can mostly conflate it with (3). And (3) certainly happens but isn’t anywhere close to the default.
Also, your (1) says “anyone”, but it could also be “anyone over a certain threshold of criticism strength/salience/etc.”. That makes it even more the obvious default.
And to form a firm opinion between 1,2,3 we need more information. For instance, what did Alice’s criticism actually look like? What did Bob say about his reasons? How have other people who are neither Alice nor Bob interpreted what happened?
Well, for one thing, “what did Bob say” can’t be given much weight, as I noted above.
The interpretation of third parties seems mostly irrelevant. If Carol observes the situation, she can reach her own conclusion without consulting Dave. Dave’s opinion shouldn’t be any kind of meaningful input into Carol’s evaluation.
As for “what did Alice’s criticism look like”, sure. We have to confirm that there aren’t any personal insults in there, for instance. Easy enough.
Here’s Duncan’s actual description of what he says he finds unpleasant about interacting with you … Now, it seems clear to me that (1) if Duncan felt that way about interacting with you, it would be a very plausible explanation for the ban … I accordingly find it plausible that Duncan is fairly accurately describing his own subjective reasons for not wanting to interact with you.
Yes, of course! I agree completely! In the quoted bit, Duncan says pretty much exactly what we’d expect him to say if what he were very annoyed at being repeatedly questioned, challenged, and contradicted by some other commenter, in ways that he found himself unable to convincingly respond to, and which inability made him look bad. It makes sense that Duncan would, indeed, describe said commenter’s remarks in tendentious ways, using emotionally charges descriptions with strongly negative valence but few details, and that he would dismiss said commenter’s contributions as irrelevant, unimportant, and unworthy of engagement. It is totally unsurprising both that Duncan would experience aversive feelings when interacting with said commenter, and that he would report so experiencing.
Of course all of that is consistent with Duncan actually being upset by being criticized and then casting about for rationalizations.
You don’t say…
Actually, even “rationalizations” is too harsh. It’s more like “describing in a negative light things that are actually neutral or positive”. And the “casting about” absolutely need not (and, indeed, is unlikely to be) conscious.
And I know I’ve been hammering on this point, but I’m going to do it again: this is the problem with the “authors can ban users from their posts” feature. It gives LW participants an incentive to have these sorts of entirely genuine and not at all faked emotional responses. (See this old comment thread by Vladimir_M for elaboration on the idea.) As I’ve said, I don’t think that Duncan is lying!
But, again, it doesn’t appear to me that he does anything like this every time someone strongly disagrees with him. In addition to dxu’s example in a sibling of this comment (to which you objected that the disagreement there wasn’t “robust”; like dxu I think it would be helpful to understand what you actually mean by “robust” and e.g. whether it implies what most people would call “rude”)
Nah, I don’t mean “rude”. But let’s take a look at your examples:
JBlack commenting on the “you don’t exist” post
User JBlack made a single comment on a single post by Duncan. Why ban him? What would that accomplish? Duncan isn’t some sort of unthinking ban-bot; he’s a quite intelligent person who, as far as I can tell, is generally capable of behaving reasonably with respect to his goals. Expecting that he’d ban JBlack as a result of this single comment doesn’t make much sense, even if we took everything I said about Duncan’s disposition were wholly true! It’s not even much of a criticism!
“the gears to ascension” commenting on the “sazen” post
A brief exchange, at which point the user in question seems to have been deterred from commenting further. Their two comments were also downvoted, which is significant.
(Note, however, that if I were betting on “who will Duncan ban next”, user “the gears to ascension” would certainly be in the running—but not because of this one comment thread that you linked there.)
link is to jaspax saying that one of Duncan’s examples in the “lizardman” post is badly wrong; much of the subsequent discussion is a lengthy and vigorous dispute between tailcalled and Duncan
User jaspax made one comment on that post (and hasn’t commented on any of Duncan’s other posts, as far as I can find on a quick skim). User tailcalled is a more plausible candidate. I would likewise expect a ban if they commented in similar fashion on one or more subsequent posts by Duncan (this seems to have been the first such interaction).
I do, for the avoidance of doubt, think that Duncan is unusually willing to block people from commenting on his posts. But I don’t think “Duncan blocks anyone who disagrees robustly with him” is a tenable position unless you are defining “robustly” in a nonstandard way.
For one thing, I didn’t say “Duncan blocks anyone who disagrees robustly with him”. What I said (in response to your “other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts”) was “Let’s see some examples, then we can talk”. Well, we’ve got one example now (the last one, with tailcalled), so we can talk.
Like I said before—Duncan’s a smart guy, not some sort of ban-bot who reflexively bans anyone who disagrees with him. Here’s what seems to me to be the heuristic:
Some other user X comments on Duncan’s posts, criticizing Duncan in ways that he can’t easily counter.
Duncan does not consider the criticism to be fair or productive.
The critical comments are upvoted and/or endorsed or supported by others; there is no (or insufficient) convincing counter from any sympathetic third parties.
The gestalt impression left with most readers seems likely to be one of Duncan being mistaken/unreasonable/wrong/etc.
Duncan feels that this impression is false and unfair (he considers himself to have been in the right; see #2).
User X comments on more than one post of Duncan’s, and seems likely to continue to comment on his future posts.
X is undeterred by Duncan’s attempted pushback. (And why would they be? See #3.)
In such a scenario, the only way (other than leaving Less Wrong, or simply ceasing to write posts, which amounts to the same thing) to stop X from continuing to cast Duncan and his ideas and claims in a bad light—which Duncan feels is undeserved—is to ban X from his posts. So that’s what Duncan does.
Does this seem so far-fetched? I don’t think so. Indeed it seems almost reasonable, doesn’t it? I think there’s even a good chance that Duncan himself might endorse this characterization! (I certainly hope so, anyway; I’ve tried to ensure that there’s nothing in this description that would be implausible for Duncan to assent to.)
You say that if you were wrong about Duncan’s motivations then you would discover “by updating on evidence” but I don’t understand what sort of evidence you could possibly see that would make you update enough to make any difference. (Again, maybe this is a bullet you bite and you’re content with just assuming bad faith and having no realistic way to discover if you’re wrong.)
Although you say “Bayes!” it seems to me that what you’re actually doing involves an uncomfortable amount of (something like) snapping probabilities to 0 and 1. That’s a thing everyone does at least a bit, because we need to prune our hypothesis spaces to manageable size, but I think in this case it’s making your reasoning invalid.
E.g., you say: Duncan would deny your accusation if it were true, and he would deny it if it were false, hence his denial tells us nothing. But that’s all an oversimplification. If it were true, he might admit it; people do in fact not-so-infrequently admit it when they do bad things and get called out on it. Or he might deny it in a less specific way, rather than presenting a concrete explanation of what he did. Or he might just say nothing. (It’s not like your accusation had been made when he originally said what he did.) Or he might present a concrete explanation that is substantially less plausible than the one he actually presented. So his denial does tell us something. Obviously not as much as if no one ever lied, deceived themselves, etc., but still something.
… I need to be a bit more precise, because there are two different versions of your accusation and the details of the calculation are different in the two cases. A1 is “Duncan blocked Said because he couldn’t cope with being robustly criticized”. A2 is something like “Duncan blocked Said because he couldn’t cope with robustly criticized, but he was unaware that that was his real reason and sincerely thought he was doing it because of how Said goes about criticizing, the things he objects to being things that many others might also object to”. The claim “if it were true then he would behave that way” is much truer about A2 than about A1, but it is also much less probable a priori. (Compare “God created the universe 6000 years ago” with “God created the universe 6000 years ago, and carefully made it look exactly the same as it would have if it were billions of years old”: the evidence that makes the former very unlikely is powerless against the latter, but that is not in fact an advantage of the latter.)
So, anyway, we have A1 and A2, and the alternative B: that Duncan blocked Said on account of features of Said’s interaction-style that genuinely don’t basically come down to “Said pointed out deficiencies in what Duncan said”. (Because to whatever extent Duncan’s objections are other things, whether they’re reasonable or not, his blocking of Said after Said said negative things about Duncan’s proposed norms doesn’t indicate that robust discussion of those norms is impossible.) You say that some version of A is an “obvious default”. Maybe so, but here again I think you’re rounding-to-0-and-1. How obvious a default? How much more likely than B? It seems to me that A1 is obviously not more than, say, 4:1 favoured over B. (I am not sure it’s favoured over B at all; 4:1 is not my best estimate, it’s my most generous estimate.) And how much evidence does Duncan’s own account of his motivations offer for B over A1? I think at least 2:1.
In other words, even if we agree that (1) Duncan’s words aren’t very much evidence of his motivations (most of the time, when someone says something it’s much more than 2:1 evidence in favour of that thing being true) and (2) the bad-faith scenario is a priori substantially more likely than the good-faith one, with what seem to me actually realistic numbers we don’t get more than 2:1 odds for bad faith over good faith.
I claim that that is very much not sufficient grounds for writing as if the bad-faith explanation is definitely correct. (And I reiterate that 2:1 for bad over good is not my best estimate, it’s my most charitable-to-Said’s-position estimate.)
(“Ah, but I meant A2 not A1!”. Fine, but A2 implies A1 and cannot be more probable than A1.)
As you refine your proposed Duncan-blocking-model, it seems to me, it becomes less capable of supporting the criticism you were originally making on the basis of Duncan’s blocking behaviour. You weren’t very specific about exactly what that criticism was—rather, you gestured broadly towards the fact of the blocking and invited us all to conclude that Duncan’s proposed norms are bad, without saying anything about your reasoning—and it still isn’t perfectly clear to me exactly how we’re supposed to get from the blocking-related facts to any conclusion about the merits of the proposed norms. But it seems like it has to be something along the lines of (a) “Duncan’s blocking behaviour has ensured that his proposals don’t get the sort of robust debate they should get before being treated as norms” and/or (b) “Duncan’s blocking behaviour demonstrates that his discourse-preferences are bad, so we shouldn’t be adopting guidelines he proposes”; and as we move from the original implicit “Duncan blocks everyone who disagrees with him” (which, no, you did not say explicitly in those words, nor did you say anything explicitly, but it definitely seemed like that was pretty much what you were gesturing at) to “Duncan blocks people who disagree with him persistently in multiple posts, in ways he considers unfair, and are in no way mollified by his responses to that disagreement”, the amount of support the proposition offers for (a) and/or (b) decreases considerably.
Incidentally, I am fairly sure that the vagueness I am being a bit complainy about in the previous paragraph is much the same thing (or part of the same thing) as Duncan was referring to when he said
most of what he seems to me to do is sit back and demand that his conversational partners connect every single dot for him, doing no work himself while he nitpicks
and one reason why I find Duncan’s account of his motivations more plausible than your rival account (not only as a description of the conscious motivations he permits himself to be aware of, but as a description of the actual causal history) is that the reasons he alleges do seem to me to correspond to elements of your behaviour that aren’t just a matter of making cogent criticisms that he doesn’t have good answers to.
I think you would do well to notice the extent to which your account of Duncan’s motivations is seemingly optimized to present you in a good light, and consider whether some of the psychological mechanisms you think are at work in Duncan might be at work in you too. No one likes to admit that someone else has presented cogent criticisms of their position that they can’t answer, true. But, also, no one likes to admit that when they thought they were presenting cogent criticisms they were being needlessly rude and uncooperative.
Also, while we’re on the subject of your model of Duncan’s motivations: a key element of that model seems to be that Duncan has trouble coping with criticisms that he can’t refute. But when looking for examples of other people disagreeing robustly with Duncan, I found several cases where other people made criticisms to which he responded along the lines of “Yes, I agree; that’s a deficiency in what I wrote.”. So criticisms Duncan can’t refute, as such, don’t seem to send him off the rails: maybe there’s an ingredient in the process that leads to his blocking people, but it can’t be the only ingredient.
[EDITED to add:] It is not clear to me whether this discussion is making much useful progress. It is quite likely that my next reply in this thread will be along the lines of “Here are answers to specific questions/criticisms; beyond that, I don’t think it’s productive for me to continue”.
I think I do want to ask everyone to stop this conversation because it seems weirdly anchored on one particular example, that, as far as I can tell, was basically a central of what we wanted the author-moderation norms to be for in Meta-tations on Moderation, and they shouldn’t be getting dragged through a trial-like thing for following the rules we gave them.
If I had an easy lock-thread button I’d probably have hit that ~last night. We do have a lock thread functionality but it’s a bit annoying to use.
they shouldn’t be getting dragged through a trial-like thing for following the rules we gave them
They don’t need to be personally involved. The rules protect author’s posts, they don’t give the author immunity from being discussed somewhere else.
This situation is a question that merits discussion, with implications for general policy. It might have no place in this particular thread, but it should have a place somewhere convenient (perhaps some sort of dedicated meta “subreddit”, or under a meta tag). Not discussing particular cases restricts allowed forms of argument, distorts understanding in systematic ways.
Please feel free to contact me via private message if you’re interested in continuing the discussion. But if you want to leave things here, that’s also perfectly fine. (Strictly speaking, the ball at this point is in my court, but I wouldn’t presume to take the discussion to PM unilaterally; my guess is that you don’t think that’s particularly worth the effort, and that seems to me to be a reasonable view.)
You continue to assert, with apparent complete confidence, a claim about Duncan’s motivations that (1) Duncan denies, (2) evidently seems to at least two people (me and dxu) to be far from obviously true, and (3) you provide no evidence for that engages with any specifics at all. The trouble with 3 is that it cuts you off from the possibility of getting less wrong. If in fact Duncan’s motivations were not as you think they are, how could you come to realise that?
(Maybe the answer is that you couldn’t, because you judge that in the situation we’re in the behaviour of someone with the motivations you claim is indistinguishable from that of someone with the motivations Duncan claims, and you’re willing to bite that bullet.)
I don’t agree with your analysis of the Alice/Bob situation. I think that in the situation as described, given only the information you give, we should be taking seriously at least these hypotheses: (1) Bob is just very ban-happy and bans anyone who criticizes him, (2) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, but the reason that happens is that he’s unreasonably provoking them, (3) Bob keeps getting attacked in ban-worthy ways, for reasons that don’t reflect badly on Bob. And also various hybrids—it’s easy to envisage situations where 1,2,3 are all important aspects of what’s going on. And to form a firm opinion between 1,2,3 we need more information. For instance, what did Alice’s criticism actually look like? What did Bob say about his reasons? How have other people who are neither Alice nor Bob interpreted what happened?
Here’s Duncan’s actual description of what he says he finds unpleasant about interacting with you; it’s from Zack’s response to Duncan’s proposed discourse norms. (What happened next was that you made a brief reply, Duncan claimed that it was a demonstration of the exact dynamic he was complaining about, and said “Goodbye, Said”; I take it that’s the point at which he banned you from commenting on his frontpage posts. So I think it’s reasonable to take it as his account of why-Duncan-banned-Said.
Now, it seems clear to me that (1) if Duncan felt that way about interacting with you, it would be a very plausible explanation for the ban; (2) Duncan’s claimed perception does somewhat match my impression of your commenting style on LW (though I would not frame it nearly as negatively as he did; as already mentioned I think your presence on LW is clearly net positive); (3) I accordingly find it plausible that Duncan is fairly accurately describing his own subjective reasons for not wanting to interact with you.
Of course all of that is consistent with Duncan actually being upset by being criticized and then casting about for rationalizations. But, again, it doesn’t appear to me that he does anything like this every time someone strongly disagrees with him. In addition to dxu’s example in a sibling of this comment (to which you objected that the disagreement there wasn’t “robust”; like dxu I think it would be helpful to understand what you actually mean by “robust” and e.g. whether it implies what most people would call “rude”), here are a few more things people have said to Duncan without getting any sort of ban:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yepKvM5rsvbpix75G/you-don-t-exist-duncan?commentId=ZChwgNps7KactBaHh (JBlack commenting on the “you don’t exist” post; more dismissive than disagreeing; how much that matters depends on just what your model of Duncan is); see also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yepKvM5rsvbpix75G/you-don-t-exist-duncan?commentId=H65ffCkthuDfkJafp (Charlie Steiner commenting on the same post, also kinda dismissive and rude, though my model of your model of Duncan isn’t all that bothered by it)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k9dsbn8LZ6tTesDS3/sazen?commentId=LdDqFSijLievEQiQv (“the gears to ascension” commenting on the “sazen” post; alleges that the whole post is a bad idea while apparently misunderstanding it badly; Duncan is clearly annoyed but no ban)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gbdqMaADqxMDwtgaf/exposure-to-lizardman-is-lethal?commentId=sneYCBckEFvL2hJdm and the thread descending from it (link is to jaspax saying that one of Duncan’s examples in the “lizardman” post is badly wrong; much of the subsequent discussion is a lengthy and vigorous dispute between tailcalled and Duncan; Duncan has not blocked either jaspax or tailcalled). There is a lot of other strong-disagreement-with-Duncan in that thread. One instance did result in Duncan blocking the user in question, but the fact that it’s currently sitting at −31/-28 suggests that Duncan isn’t the only person who considers it obnoxious.
I do, for the avoidance of doubt, think that Duncan is unusually willing to block people from commenting on his posts. But I don’t think “Duncan blocks anyone who disagrees robustly with him” is a tenable position unless you are defining “robustly” in a nonstandard way.
Of course he denies it. I already explained that we’d expect him to deny it if it were true. Come on! This is extremely obvious stuff. Why would he not deny it?
And if indeed he’d deny it if it were true, and obviously would also deny it if it were false, then it’s not evidence. Right? Bayes!
Yes, many people on Less Wrong have implausible degrees of “charity” in their priors on human behavior.
But of course it does no such thing! It means merely that I have a strong prior, and have seen no convincing evidence against.
Same way I come to realize anything else: updating on evidence. (But it’d have to be some evidence!)
Pretty close to indistinguishable, yeah.
(1) is the obvious default (because it’s quite common and ordinary). (2) seems to rest on the meaning of “unreasonably”; I think we can mostly conflate it with (3). And (3) certainly happens but isn’t anywhere close to the default.
Also, your (1) says “anyone”, but it could also be “anyone over a certain threshold of criticism strength/salience/etc.”. That makes it even more the obvious default.
Well, for one thing, “what did Bob say” can’t be given much weight, as I noted above.
The interpretation of third parties seems mostly irrelevant. If Carol observes the situation, she can reach her own conclusion without consulting Dave. Dave’s opinion shouldn’t be any kind of meaningful input into Carol’s evaluation.
As for “what did Alice’s criticism look like”, sure. We have to confirm that there aren’t any personal insults in there, for instance. Easy enough.
Yes, of course! I agree completely! In the quoted bit, Duncan says pretty much exactly what we’d expect him to say if what he were very annoyed at being repeatedly questioned, challenged, and contradicted by some other commenter, in ways that he found himself unable to convincingly respond to, and which inability made him look bad. It makes sense that Duncan would, indeed, describe said commenter’s remarks in tendentious ways, using emotionally charges descriptions with strongly negative valence but few details, and that he would dismiss said commenter’s contributions as irrelevant, unimportant, and unworthy of engagement. It is totally unsurprising both that Duncan would experience aversive feelings when interacting with said commenter, and that he would report so experiencing.
You don’t say…
Actually, even “rationalizations” is too harsh. It’s more like “describing in a negative light things that are actually neutral or positive”. And the “casting about” absolutely need not (and, indeed, is unlikely to be) conscious.
And I know I’ve been hammering on this point, but I’m going to do it again: this is the problem with the “authors can ban users from their posts” feature. It gives LW participants an incentive to have these sorts of entirely genuine and not at all faked emotional responses. (See this old comment thread by Vladimir_M for elaboration on the idea.) As I’ve said, I don’t think that Duncan is lying!
Nah, I don’t mean “rude”. But let’s take a look at your examples:
User JBlack made a single comment on a single post by Duncan. Why ban him? What would that accomplish? Duncan isn’t some sort of unthinking ban-bot; he’s a quite intelligent person who, as far as I can tell, is generally capable of behaving reasonably with respect to his goals. Expecting that he’d ban JBlack as a result of this single comment doesn’t make much sense, even if we took everything I said about Duncan’s disposition were wholly true! It’s not even much of a criticism!
A brief exchange, at which point the user in question seems to have been deterred from commenting further. Their two comments were also downvoted, which is significant.
(Note, however, that if I were betting on “who will Duncan ban next”, user “the gears to ascension” would certainly be in the running—but not because of this one comment thread that you linked there.)
User jaspax made one comment on that post (and hasn’t commented on any of Duncan’s other posts, as far as I can find on a quick skim). User tailcalled is a more plausible candidate. I would likewise expect a ban if they commented in similar fashion on one or more subsequent posts by Duncan (this seems to have been the first such interaction).
For one thing, I didn’t say “Duncan blocks anyone who disagrees robustly with him”. What I said (in response to your “other people have disagreed robustly with Duncan and not had him ban them from commenting on his posts”) was “Let’s see some examples, then we can talk”. Well, we’ve got one example now (the last one, with tailcalled), so we can talk.
Like I said before—Duncan’s a smart guy, not some sort of ban-bot who reflexively bans anyone who disagrees with him. Here’s what seems to me to be the heuristic:
Some other user X comments on Duncan’s posts, criticizing Duncan in ways that he can’t easily counter.
Duncan does not consider the criticism to be fair or productive.
The critical comments are upvoted and/or endorsed or supported by others; there is no (or insufficient) convincing counter from any sympathetic third parties.
The gestalt impression left with most readers seems likely to be one of Duncan being mistaken/unreasonable/wrong/etc.
Duncan feels that this impression is false and unfair (he considers himself to have been in the right; see #2).
User X comments on more than one post of Duncan’s, and seems likely to continue to comment on his future posts.
X is undeterred by Duncan’s attempted pushback. (And why would they be? See #3.)
In such a scenario, the only way (other than leaving Less Wrong, or simply ceasing to write posts, which amounts to the same thing) to stop X from continuing to cast Duncan and his ideas and claims in a bad light—which Duncan feels is undeserved—is to ban X from his posts. So that’s what Duncan does.
Does this seem so far-fetched? I don’t think so. Indeed it seems almost reasonable, doesn’t it? I think there’s even a good chance that Duncan himself might endorse this characterization! (I certainly hope so, anyway; I’ve tried to ensure that there’s nothing in this description that would be implausible for Duncan to assent to.)
Do you disagree?
You say that if you were wrong about Duncan’s motivations then you would discover “by updating on evidence” but I don’t understand what sort of evidence you could possibly see that would make you update enough to make any difference. (Again, maybe this is a bullet you bite and you’re content with just assuming bad faith and having no realistic way to discover if you’re wrong.)
Although you say “Bayes!” it seems to me that what you’re actually doing involves an uncomfortable amount of (something like) snapping probabilities to 0 and 1. That’s a thing everyone does at least a bit, because we need to prune our hypothesis spaces to manageable size, but I think in this case it’s making your reasoning invalid.
E.g., you say: Duncan would deny your accusation if it were true, and he would deny it if it were false, hence his denial tells us nothing. But that’s all an oversimplification. If it were true, he might admit it; people do in fact not-so-infrequently admit it when they do bad things and get called out on it. Or he might deny it in a less specific way, rather than presenting a concrete explanation of what he did. Or he might just say nothing. (It’s not like your accusation had been made when he originally said what he did.) Or he might present a concrete explanation that is substantially less plausible than the one he actually presented. So his denial does tell us something. Obviously not as much as if no one ever lied, deceived themselves, etc., but still something.
… I need to be a bit more precise, because there are two different versions of your accusation and the details of the calculation are different in the two cases. A1 is “Duncan blocked Said because he couldn’t cope with being robustly criticized”. A2 is something like “Duncan blocked Said because he couldn’t cope with robustly criticized, but he was unaware that that was his real reason and sincerely thought he was doing it because of how Said goes about criticizing, the things he objects to being things that many others might also object to”. The claim “if it were true then he would behave that way” is much truer about A2 than about A1, but it is also much less probable a priori. (Compare “God created the universe 6000 years ago” with “God created the universe 6000 years ago, and carefully made it look exactly the same as it would have if it were billions of years old”: the evidence that makes the former very unlikely is powerless against the latter, but that is not in fact an advantage of the latter.)
So, anyway, we have A1 and A2, and the alternative B: that Duncan blocked Said on account of features of Said’s interaction-style that genuinely don’t basically come down to “Said pointed out deficiencies in what Duncan said”. (Because to whatever extent Duncan’s objections are other things, whether they’re reasonable or not, his blocking of Said after Said said negative things about Duncan’s proposed norms doesn’t indicate that robust discussion of those norms is impossible.) You say that some version of A is an “obvious default”. Maybe so, but here again I think you’re rounding-to-0-and-1. How obvious a default? How much more likely than B? It seems to me that A1 is obviously not more than, say, 4:1 favoured over B. (I am not sure it’s favoured over B at all; 4:1 is not my best estimate, it’s my most generous estimate.) And how much evidence does Duncan’s own account of his motivations offer for B over A1? I think at least 2:1.
In other words, even if we agree that (1) Duncan’s words aren’t very much evidence of his motivations (most of the time, when someone says something it’s much more than 2:1 evidence in favour of that thing being true) and (2) the bad-faith scenario is a priori substantially more likely than the good-faith one, with what seem to me actually realistic numbers we don’t get more than 2:1 odds for bad faith over good faith.
I claim that that is very much not sufficient grounds for writing as if the bad-faith explanation is definitely correct. (And I reiterate that 2:1 for bad over good is not my best estimate, it’s my most charitable-to-Said’s-position estimate.)
(“Ah, but I meant A2 not A1!”. Fine, but A2 implies A1 and cannot be more probable than A1.)
As you refine your proposed Duncan-blocking-model, it seems to me, it becomes less capable of supporting the criticism you were originally making on the basis of Duncan’s blocking behaviour. You weren’t very specific about exactly what that criticism was—rather, you gestured broadly towards the fact of the blocking and invited us all to conclude that Duncan’s proposed norms are bad, without saying anything about your reasoning—and it still isn’t perfectly clear to me exactly how we’re supposed to get from the blocking-related facts to any conclusion about the merits of the proposed norms. But it seems like it has to be something along the lines of (a) “Duncan’s blocking behaviour has ensured that his proposals don’t get the sort of robust debate they should get before being treated as norms” and/or (b) “Duncan’s blocking behaviour demonstrates that his discourse-preferences are bad, so we shouldn’t be adopting guidelines he proposes”; and as we move from the original implicit “Duncan blocks everyone who disagrees with him” (which, no, you did not say explicitly in those words, nor did you say anything explicitly, but it definitely seemed like that was pretty much what you were gesturing at) to “Duncan blocks people who disagree with him persistently in multiple posts, in ways he considers unfair, and are in no way mollified by his responses to that disagreement”, the amount of support the proposition offers for (a) and/or (b) decreases considerably.
Incidentally, I am fairly sure that the vagueness I am being a bit complainy about in the previous paragraph is much the same thing (or part of the same thing) as Duncan was referring to when he said
and one reason why I find Duncan’s account of his motivations more plausible than your rival account (not only as a description of the conscious motivations he permits himself to be aware of, but as a description of the actual causal history) is that the reasons he alleges do seem to me to correspond to elements of your behaviour that aren’t just a matter of making cogent criticisms that he doesn’t have good answers to.
I think you would do well to notice the extent to which your account of Duncan’s motivations is seemingly optimized to present you in a good light, and consider whether some of the psychological mechanisms you think are at work in Duncan might be at work in you too. No one likes to admit that someone else has presented cogent criticisms of their position that they can’t answer, true. But, also, no one likes to admit that when they thought they were presenting cogent criticisms they were being needlessly rude and uncooperative.
Also, while we’re on the subject of your model of Duncan’s motivations: a key element of that model seems to be that Duncan has trouble coping with criticisms that he can’t refute. But when looking for examples of other people disagreeing robustly with Duncan, I found several cases where other people made criticisms to which he responded along the lines of “Yes, I agree; that’s a deficiency in what I wrote.”. So criticisms Duncan can’t refute, as such, don’t seem to send him off the rails: maybe there’s an ingredient in the process that leads to his blocking people, but it can’t be the only ingredient.
[EDITED to add:] It is not clear to me whether this discussion is making much useful progress. It is quite likely that my next reply in this thread will be along the lines of “Here are answers to specific questions/criticisms; beyond that, I don’t think it’s productive for me to continue”.
I think I do want to ask everyone to stop this conversation because it seems weirdly anchored on one particular example, that, as far as I can tell, was basically a central of what we wanted the author-moderation norms to be for in Meta-tations on Moderation, and they shouldn’t be getting dragged through a trial-like thing for following the rules we gave them.
If I had an easy lock-thread button I’d probably have hit that ~last night. We do have a lock thread functionality but it’s a bit annoying to use.
They don’t need to be personally involved. The rules protect author’s posts, they don’t give the author immunity from being discussed somewhere else.
This situation is a question that merits discussion, with implications for general policy. It might have no place in this particular thread, but it should have a place somewhere convenient (perhaps some sort of dedicated meta “subreddit”, or under a meta tag). Not discussing particular cases restricts allowed forms of argument, distorts understanding in systematic ways.
Replying just to acknowledge that I’ve seen this and am entirely content to drop it here.
Tangentially, isn’t there already plenty of onboarding material that’s had input from most of the moderating team?
Just not including the stuff that hasn’t been vetted by a large majority/unanimity of the team seems to be straightforward.
Apologies, but I have now been forbidden from discussing the matter further.
Please feel free to contact me via private message if you’re interested in continuing the discussion. But if you want to leave things here, that’s also perfectly fine. (Strictly speaking, the ball at this point is in my court, but I wouldn’t presume to take the discussion to PM unilaterally; my guess is that you don’t think that’s particularly worth the effort, and that seems to me to be a reasonable view.)