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 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.)