I definitely see major falsehoods in this post, particularly with regards to cancellations (which happened online in places I read). Other parts of the post describe things I didn’t witness, but which seem dubious when placed in the context of a hit piece with known falsehoods in it.
The post apparently made it over to LessWrong [...] and Aella responded. [...] Aella’s comment is a bunch of assertions that don’t demonstrate that i got facts wrong. most of it is frame control. if i’m not mistaken, the one thing i was wrong about was that i thought she was mittenscautious
Looking at Aella’s comment myself, here are things (other than the mittenscautious mistake) that seem to me like obvious factual disagreements:
never played “drug roulette”
never said “you are never allowed to talk about it with anyone”
the torture is consensual and can be stopped at any time
the drug roulette and house rules stuff was hearsay and i represented it as such.
And that makes it somehow wrong for Aella to object that it actually didn’t happen?
Oh, I get it now! When you put those objections together, it’s like: “I posted an article saying lots of bad things about Aella, but I was careful enough to put accusations of specific actions behind words ‘a friend told me anonymously’—therefore, everything she says is either an objection against a clearly labeled hearsay (which is not my fault) or a frame control.”
EDIT:
Took me a while to pinpoint what irritates me on the “it was just hearsay, and clearly labeled as such” excuse. It is about assigning probability to the thing said by an anonymous friend being true.
If the probability is low, then perhaps you shouldn’t be saying it at all. (Especially given the preachy disclaimer about Buddhist right speech, and how dangerous it is to talk negatively about Aella, because she has a response prepared and will likely retaliate against author’s family and friends.) Or you should somehow indicate that you believe the probability to be low, but for some reason it is worth being said anyway.
If the probability is high, then you should be surprised when it turns out to be false.
So the thing that irritates me is the implied high probability together with the utter lack of surprise.
Yeaaah the response was weird. One, I deliberately only kept it to facts; I didn’t address his tone or the leadup or his framing, I was pretty bare bones like “the concrete claims are wrong.” I have a little annoyed if he thinks that’s frame control he has no idea. I suspect he might be seriously misunderstanding my writings on frame control.
But also like… for example this paragraph
”Many of the substances one can imagine employing here — most saliently, rohypnol, the date rape drug; but also others — would put people into compromised states in which they could not consent to further sexual activity imposed on them by people who may not even have known that their sexual partner was thus compromised.”
Afaik this isn’t information from the anonymous source, this is pure speculation on the author’s part where he independently brings up a date rape drug as a suggestion, and also speculates that “drug roulette” is used in conjunction with sexual activity, and where the context is such where there’s no consent involved and the participants would take advantage… And then to go and dismiss all this with “the drug roulette and house rules stuff was hearsay and i represented it as such” feels to me super inconsistent, apparently intentionally misleading, and confusing. I don’t know how to model the mind that would say both these things.
“My faith prevents me from talking gossip and bullshit. But this evil sexy ninja, my former friend, has threatened my friends and family. Therefore I must speak, even if that puts my future reincarnations in peril:
I have heard a rumor that Aella secretly tortures people and makes them take random drugs. I have not verified this rumor, nor do I have a particular reason to assume that it’s true, but it concerns me extremely, so I am sharing it online with my sangha. My imagination further suggests that when there are drugs, there is rape. If you never heard about people being raped in Aella’s dark lair, the most likely explanation is that this is a well-guarded secret. And that is criminal behavior that should be prosecuted.
Another rumor says that she owns bitcoins, and uses them to pay people to edit the drafts of her stories. This cunning strategy allows her to manipulate the group of ignorant cowards that call themselves the Rationalist community.”
When the bhikkhus heard this, they all cried: “Splendid, splendid, magnificient! That woman is truly demonic!”
Gautama must be spinning in his nirvana.
(Sorry, not the usual LW content, but I couldn’t resist.)
Buddhism is a huge part of Joshin’s life (which seems fine to note), but if there’s an implied argument ‘Buddhism is causally responsible for this style of discourse’, ‘all Buddhists tend to be like this’, etc., you’ll have to spell that out more.
The explicit argument I would make here is, the post makes some reference to the author being Buddhist, and therefore less likely to say things they can’t verify. Or even things believed true that would cause drama. And then elaborates that the post will do both these things anyway, because there is a “conflict of interest” between speaking divisively against Aella, and speaking(?) divisively against those Jōshin seeks to warn away.
It is my understanding that whatever value one assigns to whisper networks, cancellations, and so on, “devout buddhist” is a social role that practically defines itself as foregoing that value in favor of inner peace, and that this contradiction is what Duncan found perhaps worthy of scorn. (The particular one-word comment has been correctly downvoted as having no place on LessWrong, at least according to a discourse norms pledge Duncan himself authored and various other of his posts.) In Jōshin’s shoes of having committed to X and finding ￢X to have profound importance to the safety of those around me, I would either try to fob off the publishing of the accusations onto someone else more comfortable with X to keep somewhat to the letter of the pledges, or lay out a stronger case for reneging on X in a separate post.
At minimum, any “so normally I avoid doing this even when it seems like a good idea, but” normnotes ought to go in something like a footnote, not up-front to emphasize that because something was a significant update for you it ought to be a more significant update to the reader. Certainly for audiences already not sharing your priors, such attempted emphasis as we see falls flat.
There is no such implied argument; the scare-quotes were an attempt to signal humor. Next time I’ll try something like:
″ ” Buddhists ” ”
… although hm, that might imply a criticism of the trueness/validity of Jōshin’s claim to Buddhism, which would also not be intended (since I lack any expertise whatsoever by which to judge).
I note that I’m pretty sure this is the exact same genre of humor as Villiam’s reply riffing off the same core concept (currently at +18 to my comment’s −6, and with no moderator commentary).
Which makes my primary hypothesis that people’s objection is not to the genre of joke, but to the amount of effort or the ambiguity or lack thereof or whatever. “You can tell this joke but only if you do it more skillfully.”
I wasn’t going to mention this but then your comment (which I upvoted) got a bunch of other upvotes, too, and I think there’s an inconsistency lurking somewhere around here.
On one hand, I was not scanning the rest of the thread for other stuff I might think is good or bad and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I had ended up unfairly signaling you out. I also think the karma in these threads gets particularly wacky and I don’t know what to do about it (I think agree/disagree helps a little but can only do so much), so I expect the karma scores here to be more intensified than is normal/reasonable.
But also I’m not sure what you’re referring to in Villiam’s comment.? Villiam’s comment upthread is making an argument (as a bit of biting humor thrown in, which I think is probably also kinda bad, but the humor felt incidental to making a point), and the “Buddhist” comment wasn’t making an argument, and that seemed like a pretty important distinction.
(I don’t think of this as a particularly important subthread, I had intended to just give your comment a weak downvote and move on with my day, and when you replied about it I had intended to just write up a quick one-liner explaining my thoughts but also didn’t mean to be making a big deal about it)
[removing my own self-upvote so that this doesn’t show up in recent discussion]
Yeah, some of this gets the facts wrong, or a bit off. I don’t think this was fact-checked very competently, and in this sort of context, that does matter.
(ex: I can confirm that mittenscautious was not Aella, although Aella was indeed a housemate to Persephone.)
...I hate dishing based on something this speculative, but I do think it’s a potentially relevant piece of context...
Aella and Geoff (Executive Director of Leverage) have a lot of enmity towards each other. This is just straightforwardly true.
If I am identifying the author of this Aella-attacking post, correctly? The author of this post was a special guest on one of Geoff Anders’ Twitch streams.
I’m normally a mistake theorist, but I find it really tempting to interpret this as the end result of talking to a really skewed sample of people.
(And I might be assigning better-than-even odds that Geoff was involved in that process, somehow.)
UPDATE: I’m updating a few steps in the direction of “I may have gotten some of the causality here, backwards.” Tension with Aella predates that. Disliked Aella’s MAPLE post, and this might have been some of why he and Geoff got in touch.
If I am identifying the author of this Aella-attacking post, correctly? The author of this post was a special guest on one of Geoff Anders’ Twitch streams.
But after thinking a bit more, including hearing a little more background context from Aella? I think the tension here predates that, and that this is predominantly a reaction to the MAPLE post. Please treat this mostly as a side-note.
There’s no recording anymore, but I actually appreciated him on the stream. My overall take on the author is “has a lot of compassion, but I don’t always trust his discernment.”
Is it known whether the author is the same person who commented on the “Frame Control” post under the name of “blueiris” (and, after that account was banned, “blueiris2”, and then “blueiris3″) complaining about how Aella was taking unfair advantage of her feminine wiles to get her stuff well received on Less Wrong?
Thanks. I am not sure I would trust the author of the post (1) not to lie outright and (2) to kinda-not-exactly-lie by taking the view that one doesn’t know oneself, but your report is certainly some evidence that they are two different people (with, apparently, somewhat similar attitudes to Aella and to Leverage).
I definitely see major falsehoods in this post, particularly with regards to cancellations (which happened online in places I read). Other parts of the post describe things I didn’t witness, but which seem dubious when placed in the context of a hit piece with known falsehoods in it.
Also, look at author’s comment below the article:
Looking at Aella’s comment myself, here are things (other than the mittenscautious mistake) that seem to me like obvious factual disagreements:
never played “drug roulette”
never said “you are never allowed to talk about it with anyone”
the torture is consensual and can be stopped at any time
And that makes it somehow wrong for Aella to object that it actually didn’t happen?
Oh, I get it now! When you put those objections together, it’s like: “I posted an article saying lots of bad things about Aella, but I was careful enough to put accusations of specific actions behind words ‘a friend told me anonymously’—therefore, everything she says is either an objection against a clearly labeled hearsay (which is not my fault) or a frame control.”
EDIT:
Took me a while to pinpoint what irritates me on the “it was just hearsay, and clearly labeled as such” excuse. It is about assigning probability to the thing said by an anonymous friend being true.
If the probability is low, then perhaps you shouldn’t be saying it at all. (Especially given the preachy disclaimer about Buddhist right speech, and how dangerous it is to talk negatively about Aella, because she has a response prepared and will likely retaliate against author’s family and friends.) Or you should somehow indicate that you believe the probability to be low, but for some reason it is worth being said anyway.
If the probability is high, then you should be surprised when it turns out to be false.
So the thing that irritates me is the implied high probability together with the utter lack of surprise.
Yeaaah the response was weird. One, I deliberately only kept it to facts; I didn’t address his tone or the leadup or his framing, I was pretty bare bones like “the concrete claims are wrong.” I have a little annoyed if he thinks that’s frame control he has no idea. I suspect he might be seriously misunderstanding my writings on frame control.
But also like… for example this paragraph
”Many of the substances one can imagine employing here — most saliently, rohypnol, the date rape drug; but also others — would put people into compromised states in which they could not consent to further sexual activity imposed on them by people who may not even have known that their sexual partner was thus compromised.”
Afaik this isn’t information from the anonymous source, this is pure speculation on the author’s part where he independently brings up a date rape drug as a suggestion, and also speculates that “drug roulette” is used in conjunction with sexual activity, and where the context is such where there’s no consent involved and the participants would take advantage… And then to go and dismiss all this with “the drug roulette and house rules stuff was hearsay and i represented it as such” feels to me super inconsistent, apparently intentionally misleading, and confusing. I don’t know how to model the mind that would say both these things.
“Buddhist.”
A Buddhist exercising his right speech.
Gautama must be spinning in his nirvana.
(Sorry, not the usual LW content, but I couldn’t resist.)
Buddhism is a huge part of Joshin’s life (which seems fine to note), but if there’s an implied argument ‘Buddhism is causally responsible for this style of discourse’, ‘all Buddhists tend to be like this’, etc., you’ll have to spell that out more.
The explicit argument I would make here is, the post makes some reference to the author being Buddhist, and therefore less likely to say things they can’t verify. Or even things believed true that would cause drama. And then elaborates that the post will do both these things anyway, because there is a “conflict of interest” between speaking divisively against Aella, and speaking(?) divisively against those Jōshin seeks to warn away.
It is my understanding that whatever value one assigns to whisper networks, cancellations, and so on, “devout buddhist” is a social role that practically defines itself as foregoing that value in favor of inner peace, and that this contradiction is what Duncan found perhaps worthy of scorn. (The particular one-word comment has been correctly downvoted as having no place on LessWrong, at least according to a discourse norms pledge Duncan himself authored and various other of his posts.) In Jōshin’s shoes of having committed to X and finding ￢X to have profound importance to the safety of those around me, I would either try to fob off the publishing of the accusations onto someone else more comfortable with X to keep somewhat to the letter of the pledges, or lay out a stronger case for reneging on X in a separate post.
At minimum, any “so normally I avoid doing this even when it seems like a good idea, but” normnotes ought to go in something like a footnote, not up-front to emphasize that because something was a significant update for you it ought to be a more significant update to the reader. Certainly for audiences already not sharing your priors, such attempted emphasis as we see falls flat.
There is no such implied argument; the scare-quotes were an attempt to signal humor. Next time I’ll try something like:
″ ” Buddhists ” ”
… although hm, that might imply a criticism of the trueness/validity of Jōshin’s claim to Buddhism, which would also not be intended (since I lack any expertise whatsoever by which to judge).
(fyi I think this genre of humor isn’t very good, or at least requires a higher trust group of people for me to think it’s good)
I note that I’m pretty sure this is the exact same genre of humor as Villiam’s reply riffing off the same core concept (currently at +18 to my comment’s −6, and with no moderator commentary).
Which makes my primary hypothesis that people’s objection is not to the genre of joke, but to the amount of effort or the ambiguity or lack thereof or whatever. “You can tell this joke but only if you do it more skillfully.”
I wasn’t going to mention this but then your comment (which I upvoted) got a bunch of other upvotes, too, and I think there’s an inconsistency lurking somewhere around here.
On one hand, I was not scanning the rest of the thread for other stuff I might think is good or bad and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I had ended up unfairly signaling you out. I also think the karma in these threads gets particularly wacky and I don’t know what to do about it (I think agree/disagree helps a little but can only do so much), so I expect the karma scores here to be more intensified than is normal/reasonable.
But also I’m not sure what you’re referring to in Villiam’s comment.? Villiam’s comment upthread is making an argument (as a bit of biting humor thrown in, which I think is probably also kinda bad, but the humor felt incidental to making a point), and the “Buddhist” comment wasn’t making an argument, and that seemed like a pretty important distinction.
(I don’t think of this as a particularly important subthread, I had intended to just give your comment a weak downvote and move on with my day, and when you replied about it I had intended to just write up a quick one-liner explaining my thoughts but also didn’t mean to be making a big deal about it)
[removing my own self-upvote so that this doesn’t show up in recent discussion]
Yeah, some of this gets the facts wrong, or a bit off. I don’t think this was fact-checked very competently, and in this sort of context, that does matter.
(ex: I can confirm that mittenscautious was not Aella, although Aella was indeed a housemate to Persephone.)
...I hate dishing based on something this speculative, but I do think it’s a potentially relevant piece of context...
Aella and Geoff (Executive Director of Leverage) have a lot of enmity towards each other. This is just straightforwardly true.
If I am identifying the author of this Aella-attacking post, correctly? The author of this post was a special guest on one of Geoff Anders’ Twitch streams.
I’m normally a mistake theorist, but I find it really tempting to interpret this as the end result of talking to a really skewed sample of people.
(And I might be assigning better-than-even odds that Geoff was involved in that process, somehow.)
UPDATE: I’m updating a few steps in the direction of “I may have gotten some of the causality here, backwards.” Tension with Aella predates that. Disliked Aella’s MAPLE post, and this might have been some of why he and Geoff got in touch.
I’d love it if someone can confirm or deny this.
Geoff tweeted about it, I forwarded that to you.
But after thinking a bit more, including hearing a little more background context from Aella? I think the tension here predates that, and that this is predominantly a reaction to the MAPLE post. Please treat this mostly as a side-note.
There’s no recording anymore, but I actually appreciated him on the stream. My overall take on the author is “has a lot of compassion, but I don’t always trust his discernment.”
I can confirm this. There’s a transcript from the interview somewhere, I can dig it up if you want.
Is it known whether the author is the same person who commented on the “Frame Control” post under the name of “blueiris” (and, after that account was banned, “blueiris2”, and then “blueiris3″) complaining about how Aella was taking unfair advantage of her feminine wiles to get her stuff well received on Less Wrong?
I asked the author of this post whether they knew blueiris. He said he did not.
Thanks. I am not sure I would trust the author of the post (1) not to lie outright and (2) to kinda-not-exactly-lie by taking the view that one doesn’t know oneself, but your report is certainly some evidence that they are two different people (with, apparently, somewhat similar attitudes to Aella and to Leverage).