This transition also divides the period when Eliezer was writing the Sequences, and the rest of his corpus of Less Wrong writing, which even today stand as some of the clearest and most valuable writing I have ever had the great fortune to encounter, from the period (continuing, as far as I can tell, to this day) when Eliezer has been writing incomprehensible ramblings on his Facebook page, the contents of which can hardly be dignified by the label of ‘argument’.
Perhaps this is a coincidence. But I rather think not.
I mean, I think Inadequate Equilibria is on-par with all of Eliezer’s other writing (I actually think in terms of insight-per-page it is much denser than the average section of the sequence) and that that writing was produced completely without any ongoing input from online discussion, so I find this argument not that convincing.
It seems to me that Eliezer mostly burned out on writing publicly, due to the demands that were put on him, and that if he were to continue writing at similar volumes as he did in the past, we would get similar value from his writings as we did for sequences (discounting the fact that Eliezer has probably picked up a bunch of the low-hanging fruit in the paradigm he has stacked out).
I agree with you that there is value in comments, but I don’t the comments that you are advocating for had much to do with Eliezer’s ability to produce good writing and insights, and I trust Eliezer’s introspection when he says that those comments, and the associated expectations, were a major drain on his motivation and ability to write more, ultimately resulting in by far our best writer leaving the site. Yes, we can judge his reasons, but independently of his reasons, his absence is obviously a major loss for the site.
And importantly, this isn’t an isolated judgement. Almost every long-term and historically prominent LessWrong author I have ever talked to shares Eliezer’s experience. While I agree with you that models of collective intellectual progress are important here, we do not make progress by enforcing norms on our site that cause almost all of our historically best authors to leave. When dozens of people straightforwardly report about the psychological costs of an action, I am at least tempted to believe them, and take action to remedy the situation.
So, going back, is there anyone else who you would trust to settle the issue of norms on this reasonably decisively? How about Vaniver, or lukeprog, or Kaj Sotala, or Anna Salamon, or Jacobian, or Zvi, Raymond, or So8res? I am happy to set up some kind of board, or court here that helps us settle this issue, but I think it being unresolved is causing massive ongoing costs for the site.
The author could just choose to ignore questions they haven’t the time to answer. It’s not the job of the questioner to self-censor. It is especially not their job to turn a simple question into an essay on truth in order to satisfy some moderator. That wastes everyone’s time by having us read repetitive fluff instead of a single, sharp question.
If this were moderator policy, then I can’t see LW being of value and I know I’d leave. My time is not worth that BS.
I am definitely not arguing for this as moderator policy, and and at no point was suggesting that it should become one. I think this is something that seems best settled at the culture level, and not at the norm-enforcement level.
The author could just choose to ignore questions they haven’t the time to answer.
Note that at least as I understand Said, he would consider ignoring those questions to be a violation of a norm, and (from what I can tell) would prefer authors to not post at all to LessWrong, over posting but not responding (either via a comment or a follow-up post) to inquiries of this type. It is that judgement that I am trying to argue against. A world where authors can simply ignore questions like this without significant negative social consequences is also the world that I would prefer the most, though I think we are currently not in that world, and getting there requires some shift in norms in culture that I would like to see.
To provide the relevant quote:
There is always an obligation by any author to respond to anyone’s comment along these lines. If no response is provided to (what ought rightly to be) simple requests for clarification (such as requests to, at least roughly, define or explain an ambiguous or questionable term, or requests for examples of some purported phenomenon), the author should be interpreted as ignorant. These are not artifacts of my particular commenting style, nor are they unfortunate-but-erroneous implications—they are normatively correct general principles.
A world where authors can simply ignore questions like this without significant negative social consequences is also the world that I would prefer the most, though I think we are currently not in that world, and getting there requires some shift in norms in culture that I would like to see.
I occasionally ignore questions and comments and have not noticed any significant negative social consequences from doing so. Others have also sometimes ignored my questions/comments without incurring significant negative social consequences that I can see. It seems to me that the current culture is already one where authors can simply ignore questions/comments, especially ones that are not highly upvoted. (I’d actually like to switch to or experiment with a norm where people have to at least indicate why they’re ignoring something.)
Given this, I’m puzzled that other authors have complained to you about feeling obligated to answer questions. Can you explain more why they feel that way, or give some quotes of what people actually said?
Oh, I do recall someone saying that they feel obligated to answer all critical comments, but my interpretation is that it has more to do with their personal psychology than the site culture or potential consequences.
This illustrates one of the problems with the LW2 upvote system. It only takes 1-2 string upvotes to give a comment a sense of “strong agreement,” which provides social pressure for a response. The bar should be much higher imho.
Let me just note here that I entirely reject the dichotomy between “requests for clarification” and “requests for justification”, as you describe it. I disagree with everything you say about the difference between these things, and I think that this may be one of the most important disagreements I have with your views on this whole matter.
I do, in fact, (think that I) understand the source of the perceived dichotomy—but in my view, it is not at all what it is claimed (or, perhaps, seen) to be. (I am, of course, happy to elaborate on this if requested, though perhaps this deep comment thread is not the place for it.)
EDIT: AGH! You edited/removed your comment as I was posting my response! :(
Sorry for editing it! I accidentally hit the submit button before the comment was ready (the thing I posted was a first draft). I will make sure to edit back some version of the comment next week, just so that your comment here doesn’t end up lacking necessary context.
I note that we, as a culture, have reified a term for this, which is “sealioning.”
Naming the problem is not solving the problem; sticking a label on something is not the same as winning an argument; the tricky part is in determining which commentary is reasonably described by the term and which isn’t (and which is controversial, or costly-but-useful, and so forth).
But as I read through this whole comment chain, I noticed that I kept wanting Oliver to be able to say the short, simple sentence:
“My past experience has led me to have a prior that threads from you beginning like this turn out to be sealioning way more often than similar threads from other people.”
Note that that’s my model of Oliver; the real Oliver has not actually expressed that [edit: exact] sentiment [edit: in those exact words] and may have critical disagreements with my model of him, or critical caveats regarding the use of the term.
I note that we, as a culture, have reified a term for this, which is “sealioning.”
Perhaps in your culture. In my culture, use of the term “sealioning” is primarily understood as an expression of anti-intellectualism (framing requests for dialogue as aggression).
In my culture, while the need to say “I don’t expect engaging with you to be productive, therefore I must decline this and all future requests for dialogue from you” is not unheard of, it is seen as a sad and unusual occasion—definitely not something meriting a short codeword with connotations of contempt.
What I meant by the word “our” was “the broader context culture-at-large,” not Less Wrong or my own personal home culture or anything like that. Apologies, that could’ve been clearer.
I think there’s another point on the spectrum (plane?) that’s neither “overt anti-intellectualism” nor “It seems to me that engaging with you will be unproductive and I should disengage.” That point being something like, “It’s reasonable and justified to conclude that this questioning isn’t going to be productive to the overall goal of the discussion, and is either motivated-by or will-result-in some other effect entirely.”
Something stronger than “I’m disengaging according to my own boundaries” and more like “this is subtly but significantly transgressive, by abusing structures that are in place for epistemic inquiry.”
If the term “sealioning” is too tainted by connotation to serve, then it’s clearly the wrong word to use; TIL. But I disagree that we don’t need or shouldn’t have any short, simple handle in this concept space; it still seems useful to me to be able to label the hypothesis without (as Oliver did) having to write words and words and words and words. The analogy to the usefulness of the term “witchhunt” was carefully chosen; it’s the sort of thing that’s hard to see at first, and once you’ve put forth the effort to see it, it’s worth … idk, cacheing or something?
What I meant by the word “our” was “the broader context culture-at-large,” not Less Wrong or my own personal home culture or anything like that. Apologies, that could’ve been clearer.
No, I got that, I was just using the opportunity to riff off your “In My Culture” piece[1] while defending Said, who is a super valuable commenter who I think is being treated pretty unfairly in this 133-comment-and-counting meta trainwreck!
Sure, sometimes he’s insistent on pressing for rigor in a way could seem “nitpicky” or “dense” to readers who, like me, are more likely to just shrug and say, “Meh, I think I mostly get the gist of what the author is trying to say” rather than honing in on a particular word or phrase and writing a comment asking for clarification.
But that’s valuable. I am glad that a website nominally devoted to mastering the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition to the degree of precision required to write a recursively self-improving superintelligence to rule over our entire future lightcone has people whose innate need for rigor is more demanding than my sense of “Meh, I think I mostly get the gist”!
while defending Said, who is a super valuable commenter
Just wanted to note that, as a person who often finds Said’s style off-putting, I appreciate reading this counterpoint from you.
EDIT: In my ideal world, Said can find a way to still be nitpick-y and insistent on precision and rigor in a way that doesn’t frustrate me (and other readers) so much. I am unfortunately not exactly sure how to get to there from here.
Note that at least from the little I have read about the term, this seems like a reasonable stance to me, and my guess (as the person who instigated this thread) is that it is indeed better to avoid importing the existing connotations that term has.
My guess is that the term is still fine to bring up as something to be analyzed at a distance (e.g. asking questions like “why did people feel the need to invent the term sealioning?”), but my sense is that it’s better to not apply it directly to a person or interlocutor, given its set of associations.
This is a relatively weakly held position of mine though, given that I only learned about that term yesterday, so I don’t have a great map of its meanings and connotations.
Edit: I do want to say that the summary of “I don’t expect engaging with you to be productive, therefore I must decline this and all future requests for dialogue from you” doesn’t strike me as a very accurate summary of what people usually mean by sealioning. I don’t think it matters much for my response, but I figured I would point out that I disagree with that summary.
There was a mention of moderation regarding the term sealioning, so I’m addressing that. (We’re not yet addressing the thread-as-a-whole, but may do so later).
In general, it’s important to be able to give names to things. I looked into how the term sealioning seems to be defined and used on the internet-as-a-whole. It seems to have a lot of baggage, including (if used to refer to comments on LessWrong) false connotations about what sort of place LessWrong is and what behavior is appropriate on LessWrong. However, this baggage was not common knowledge. I see little reason to think those connotations were known or intended by Duncan. So, this looks to me look a good-faith proposal of terminology, but the terminology itself seems bad.
“Sealioning” is attempting to participate in “reasoned discourse” in a way that is insensitive to the appropriateness of the setting and to the buy-in of the other party. (Importantly, not “costs” of reasoned discourse; they are polite in some ways, like “oh sure, we can take an hour break for breakfast”.) People who have especially low buy-in to reasoned discourse use the word to paint the person asking for clarification as the oppressor, and themselves the victim. Importantly, they view attempting to have reasoned discourse as oppression. Thus it blends “not tracking buy-in” and “caring about reasoning over feelings” in a way that makes them challenging to unblend.
The part of sealioning that’s about setting can’t really apply to comments on LW. In the comic that originated the term, a sealion intrudes on a private conversation, follows them around and trespasses in their house; but LessWrong frontpage is a public space for public dialogue, so a LessWrong comment can’t have that problem no matter what it is.
So, conversational dynamics are worth talking about, and I do think there’s something in this space worth reifying with a term, preferably in a more abstract setting.
Huh, I am confused. I have expressed that sentiment multiple times. Here are the quotes:
My very first comment in the thread:
I wouldn’t downvote this comment for most users, but since I’ve seen a lot of threads of this type that were started by you played out, I am more confident than usual about whether I expect the resulting conversation to be valuable, and so feel more comfortable downvoting based on that.
Other occurrences:
As I mentioned in many other places, I am also very confident that dozens of authors have perceived Said’s comments to primarily be social attacks, and have found them to be major obstacles to engaging with LessWrong. Obviously basically all of these comments were on past threads, and not this specific thread, so there is a good chance that I am misunderstanding what precisely is causing their discomfort, but I am reasonably confident that I am identifying this instance as a correct example of the pattern that these authors point me to.
And:
What it demonstrates is that you, and specifically you, do not understand the concept, and that explaining it to you specifically is difficult. Your confusions do very rarely generalize. Your bafflement is not usually reflective of other people’s bafflement, and you not agreeing with a point is only very minor evidence that other people do not agree.
And:
The usual pattern of Said’s comments as I experience them has been (and I think this would be reasonably straightforward to verify):
Said makes a highly upvoted comment asking a question, usually implicitly pointing out something that is unclear to many in the post
Author makes a reasonably highly upvoted reply
Said says that the explanation was basically completely useless to him, this often gets some upvotes, but drastically less than the top-level question
Author tries to clarify some more, this gets much fewer upvotes than the original reply
Said expresses more confusion, this usually gets very few upvotes
More explanations from the author, almost no upvotes
Said expresses more confusion, often being downvoted and the author and others expressing frustration
As I said in my first comment on this thread, I don’t think the original comment is where a lot of the problem lies (and I wouldn’t usually downvote it from most users). The problems usually arise in the follow-up discussion, and in the case of Said, enough authors and users have experienced those follow-up discussions that the problems have backpropagated into a broader aversion to questions like Said’s top-level question.
And to say it very explicitly here. Yes, I am arguing that contextless questions specifically from Said turn out to waste a lot of people’s time and cause a lot of frustration in a highly predictable way.
I don’t have enough context about how “sealioning” is used to judge whether that’s a good fit for this situation, or how politicized that term is, so I don’t think I want to use that term (I had not actually encountered it until yesterday). Though the basic description on Wikipedia seems to relatively accurately describe at least the experience of people engaging with Said (independently of whether it describes the intentions of Said himself).
I agree that you’ve said this multiple times, in multiple places; I wanted you to be able to say it shortly and simply. To be able to do something analogous to saying “from where I’m currently standing, this looks to me like a witchhunt” rather than having to spell out, in many different sentences, what a witchhunt is and why it’s bad and how this situation resembles that one.
My caveats and hedges were mainly not wanting to be seen as putting words in your mouth, or presupposing your endorsement of the particular short sentence I proposed.
In general, I don’t think we’re going to have a moderator response time of ~4 hours (which is about how long Duncan’s comment had been up when you wrote yours). However, seeing a call for moderator action, we are going to be reviewing this thread and discussing what if anything to do here.
I’ve spent the last few hours catching up on the comments here. While Vaniver and Habryka have been participating in this thread and are site moderators, this seems like a case where moderation decisions should be made by people with more distance.
Hmm, my guess is you are misunderstanding the comment? I don’t think the above accuses you or anyone else of sealioning (I am also not super familiar with the term, as I said below, so I don’t think I know its full connotations).
It is bringing into the discussion a term that other people might have found useful, and from what I can tell opening up a discussion of whether that term makes sense to use in this context. In particular the comment explicitly says:
Naming the problem is not solving the problem; sticking a label on something is not the same as winning an argument; the tricky part is in determining which commentary is reasonably described by the term and which isn’t (and which is controversial, or costly-but-useful, and so forth).
I mean, I think I agree with you that (from the few minutes of reading I’ve done about that term) I very likely don’t want us to use the term in the way it is used in most of the rest of the internet. I do think it’s pointing at a real cluster of people’s experiences, so I don’t think I want to ban mention of that term completely from LessWrong. It seems valid for people to look at that term and see whether it helps them makes sense of some experiences, and in any case its use is at least a valid sociological phenomenon that people can analyze.
Edit: I think my feelings here are somewhat similar to Nazi comparisons or something like that. I think sometimes someone actions are indeed somewhat similar to the historical activities of nazis, and it’s sometimes fine to bring that up as a comparison, but I in the vast majority of cases I prefer others to use a less loaded and less-frequently-misused comparison. Again, I don’t know to what degree sealioning falls into that category, but your reaction suggests that you perceive it to have a similar history of misuse, so I think there might be a good argument here to avoid using that term unless really necessary. Though other users and moderators who have more context might want to chime in on what rules we want to have here.
I’m sorry, but it is entirely implausible to construe Duncan’s comment as not being an accusation. I no longer have any interest in doing the usual song-and-dance about how he didn’t literally say the specific sequence of words “Said is sealioning”, and so what he actually meant was something very nuanced and subtle and definitely, absolutely didn’t mean to actually accuse me, etc., etc.
(As for the word itself, and the concept behind it—I have found that its (unironic, non-quoted) use is an infallible indicator of bad faith. Zack’s characterization of the term is much too charitable.)
I thought the comment was pretty clear that it was trying to give a summary of my comments, and a suggestion for how I should phrase my comment in order to better get my point across. A suggestion which (at least for the case of the use of “sealioning”) I disagreed with.
I agree with you that there was an implicature in Duncan’s comment that he thought the term was an accurate characterization, though I am actually and honestly not that confident Duncan actually believes that the term accurately describes your commenting patterns (in addition to it accurately describing my model of your commenting patterns). I would currently give it about 75% probability, but not more.
In general, I think implicatures of this type should be treated differently than outright accusations, though I also don’t think they should be completely ignored.
On a more general note, since the term appears to be a relatively niche term that I haven’t heard before, it seems to me that the correct way for us to deal with this, would be for people to say openly what connotations the term has to them, and if enough people agree that the term has unhelpful connotations, then avoid using the term. I don’t think we should harshly punish introducing a term like this if there isn’t an established precedent of the connotations of that term.
I think it would be a mistake for us to use that term here; I think as well as describing a pattern of behavior it comes with an implied interpretation of blameworthiness that we really don’t want to import.
I mean, I think Inadequate Equilibria is on-par with all of Eliezer’s other writing (I actually think in terms of insight-per-page it is much denser than the average section of the sequence)
I do not concur with your evaluation. (But there is not much point in discussing this further, so we can leave it at that.)
Yes, we can judge [Eliezer’s] reasons, but independently of his reasons, his absence is obviously a major loss for the site.
Is it?
Here’s the thing: the loss of Eliezer, the author of the ~2007–2011 era Less Wrong posts (and comments) is, indeed, a major one. But it’s futile to bemoan that loss, as it was inflicted only by time. The loss we must examine instead is the counterfactual loss. Eliezer could be writing on Less Wrong right now (and for the last decade or so), but is not, and has not been; is that a major loss?
Suppose (as seems to be the implication of your comments) that Eliezer would write for Less Wrong if, and only if, the environment (both technical and social) were comparable to that which now exists on Facebook (his current platform of choice). It seems reasonable to conclude that Eliezer’s writings, therefore, would also be more or less the things he now is (and has been) writing on Facebook; the only difference would be that those very same writings would be hosted here—and the same discussion, too, would take place here—instead of on Facebook.
That we do not have these things—is that a great loss?
As I have alluded to earlier, I think the answer is “no”. In fact, I think that such writings, and (especially! emphatically!) the sorts of discussions that I have seen taking place in the comments on Eliezer’s Facebook posts, would substantially lower the average quality of Less Wrong.
There is some value to (counterfactually) having Eliezer’s stuff here, instead of on Facebook: accessibility, searchability, linkability, archiving, etc.—all the things I’ve noted, in the past. But would it be worth the corruption, the dismantling, of Less Wrong’s epistemic standards? I think not.
So, going back, is there anyone else who you would trust to settle the issue of norms on this reasonably decisively? How about Vaniver, or lukeprog, or Kaj Sotala, or Anna Salamon, or Jacobian, or Zvi, Raymond, or So8res? I am happy to set up some kind of board, or court here that helps us settle this issue, but I think it being unresolved is causing massive ongoing costs for the site.
There is no need to go that far (though of course I’ll participate if you feel it’s necessary). But I am happy to take your word for the views of any of these people; I certainly don’t disbelieve you when you say that such-and-such Less Wrong regular (or historical regular) has expressed to you such-and-such a view.
But what is the value in that? If, let us say, Zvi (to pick an author whose posts I’ve certainly found to have a lot of value, in the past) says “I don’t comment on Less Wrong because I don’t like responding to comments that challenge me to justify my claims, or provide examples, or explain my terms”, should I take this to mean that such comments are detrimental—or should I instead downgrade my assessment of Zvi’s posts, ideas, etc.? “One man’s modus ponens…”, after all…
You write as if an author’s posts simply have value, because of who the author is, on the basis of past performance, and regardless of any actual qualities of the actual (new) posts! But surely this is an absurd view? I have written things in the past, that are useful and good; and yet suppose that I were invited to write for a venue where my ideas would never be challenged, where my writing were not subjected to scrutiny, where no interested and intelligent readers would ask probing questions… shouldn’t I expect my writing (and my ideas!) to degrade? Shouldn’t I expect the proportion of dross and nonsense in my output to increase? Why should I expect to maintain whatever previous level of quality (modest as it may have already been) my writing had possessed? (Think of all the popular authors who, having “made it” in the literary world, gained the proverbial “immunity from editors”, and proceeded to write, and to publish, piles of of mediocre-at-best scribblings…)
In any case, it’s a moot point… you’ve asked me to abstain from commenting on posts like this, and in ways like this, and so I will. No further action is necessary.
Suppose (as seems to be the implication of your comments) that Eliezer would write for Less Wrong if, and only if, the environment (both technical and social) were comparable to that which now exists on Facebook (his current platform of choice).
I want to note that Eliezer now seems to spend more time on Twitter than on Facebook, and the discussion on Twitter is even lower quality than on Facebook or simply absent (i.e., I rarely see substantial back-and-forth discussions on Eliezer’s Twitter posts). This, plus the fact that the LW team already made a bunch of changes at Eliezer’s request to try to lure him back, without effect, makes me distrust habryka’s explanations in the grandparent comment.
Thanks, I do want to again say that I do appreciate a lot of your contributions to LessWrong.
To clarify one more thing:
You write as if an author’s posts simply have value, because of who the author is, on the basis of past performance, and regardless of any actual qualities of the actual (new) posts! But surely this is an absurd view?
I am not trying to argue that an author’s posts simply have value, only that the author writing at all is a necessary requirement for their posts to exist and therefore have value. A world in which all of our best authors leave the site, is one in which we see little to no progress. However, a world in which they stick around is definitely not sufficient for making real progress, and I agree with that, though I would guess that we have significant disagreements about what kind of interaction with the site will be sufficient for progress.
I think it’s a problem that you don’t see how this comment thread exemplifies a form of communication that people often interpret as hostile rather than attempting to clarify. You’ve also admitted in the past that you consider some of how you comment to be policing the standards you think LW should uphold. Obviously not everyone agrees with you as evidenced by the difference between what you strongly upvote and what the rest of LW strongly upvotes. I don’t find it surprising or bad that some people choose to interpret you as sealioning in light of this.
You’ve also admitted in the past that you consider some of how you comment to be policing the standards you think LW should uphold.
What a bizarre thing, to use the word “admitted” here!
As if it is a bad thing, that users should help to enforce the norms of a community! As if it is a bad thing, that users should hold a forum to good and beneficial standards! As if it is—somehow, improbably—a bad thing, to speak up in defense of the norms of good discourse and good thinking—on Less Wrong, of all places!
Should I take this to be an admission that you do not do these things? And if so—why in the world not?
as evidenced by the difference between what you strongly upvote and what the rest of LW strongly upvotes
I do not have access to this information. Do you? How?
sealioning
If ever there was a strong signal of bad faith, using such terms as ‘sealioning’ is definitely it.
[...] and yet suppose that I were invited to write for a venue where my ideas would never be challenged, where my writing were not subjected to scrutiny, where no interested and intelligent readers would ask probing questions… shouldn’t I expect my writing (and my ideas!) to degrade?
I’m not completely swayed either way, but I want to acknowledge this as an important and interesting point.
I believe there is a possible middle way between two extremes:
1) There are no questions, ever.
2) When someone writes “today I had an ice-cream and it made me happy”, they get a comment: “define ‘happiness’, or you are not rational”.
As Habryka already explained somewhere, the problem is not asking question per se, but the specific low-effort way.
I assume that most of has some idea of what “authentic” (or other words) means, but also it would be difficult to provide a full definition. So the person who asks should provide some hints about the purpose of the question. Are they a p-zombie who has absolutely no idea what words refer to? Do they see multiple possible interpretations of the word? In that case it would help to point at the difference, which would allow the author to say “the first one” or maybe “neither, it’s actually more like X”. Do they see some contradiction in the naive definition? For example, what would “authentic” refer to, if the person simply has two brain modules that want contradictory things? Again, it would help to ask the specific thing. Otherwise there is a risk that the author would spend 20 minutes trying to write a good answer, only to get “nope, that’s not what I wanted” in return.
Asking a short question is not necessarily low effort. Asking the right question can actually take a lot of mental work, even if it ends up being a single sentence long. It takes a sharp knife to cleanly cut at the joints of an argument.
As mentioned elsewhere, I really, really don’t have an understanding of what an “authentic relationship” means in this context, and therefore it was an astute question to ask. It helped clarify the qualms I had about the article as well.
And it took all of 2 seconds to read, which I really appreciate.
I mean, I think Inadequate Equilibria is on-par with all of Eliezer’s other writing (I actually think in terms of insight-per-page it is much denser than the average section of the sequence) and that that writing was produced completely without any ongoing input from online discussion, so I find this argument not that convincing.
It seems to me that Eliezer mostly burned out on writing publicly, due to the demands that were put on him, and that if he were to continue writing at similar volumes as he did in the past, we would get similar value from his writings as we did for sequences (discounting the fact that Eliezer has probably picked up a bunch of the low-hanging fruit in the paradigm he has stacked out).
I agree with you that there is value in comments, but I don’t the comments that you are advocating for had much to do with Eliezer’s ability to produce good writing and insights, and I trust Eliezer’s introspection when he says that those comments, and the associated expectations, were a major drain on his motivation and ability to write more, ultimately resulting in by far our best writer leaving the site. Yes, we can judge his reasons, but independently of his reasons, his absence is obviously a major loss for the site.
And importantly, this isn’t an isolated judgement. Almost every long-term and historically prominent LessWrong author I have ever talked to shares Eliezer’s experience. While I agree with you that models of collective intellectual progress are important here, we do not make progress by enforcing norms on our site that cause almost all of our historically best authors to leave. When dozens of people straightforwardly report about the psychological costs of an action, I am at least tempted to believe them, and take action to remedy the situation.
So, going back, is there anyone else who you would trust to settle the issue of norms on this reasonably decisively? How about Vaniver, or lukeprog, or Kaj Sotala, or Anna Salamon, or Jacobian, or Zvi, Raymond, or So8res? I am happy to set up some kind of board, or court here that helps us settle this issue, but I think it being unresolved is causing massive ongoing costs for the site.
The author could just choose to ignore questions they haven’t the time to answer. It’s not the job of the questioner to self-censor. It is especially not their job to turn a simple question into an essay on truth in order to satisfy some moderator. That wastes everyone’s time by having us read repetitive fluff instead of a single, sharp question.
If this were moderator policy, then I can’t see LW being of value and I know I’d leave. My time is not worth that BS.
I am definitely not arguing for this as moderator policy, and and at no point was suggesting that it should become one. I think this is something that seems best settled at the culture level, and not at the norm-enforcement level.
Note that at least as I understand Said, he would consider ignoring those questions to be a violation of a norm, and (from what I can tell) would prefer authors to not post at all to LessWrong, over posting but not responding (either via a comment or a follow-up post) to inquiries of this type. It is that judgement that I am trying to argue against. A world where authors can simply ignore questions like this without significant negative social consequences is also the world that I would prefer the most, though I think we are currently not in that world, and getting there requires some shift in norms in culture that I would like to see.
To provide the relevant quote:
I occasionally ignore questions and comments and have not noticed any significant negative social consequences from doing so. Others have also sometimes ignored my questions/comments without incurring significant negative social consequences that I can see. It seems to me that the current culture is already one where authors can simply ignore questions/comments, especially ones that are not highly upvoted. (I’d actually like to switch to or experiment with a norm where people have to at least indicate why they’re ignoring something.)
Given this, I’m puzzled that other authors have complained to you about feeling obligated to answer questions. Can you explain more why they feel that way, or give some quotes of what people actually said?
Oh, I do recall someone saying that they feel obligated to answer all critical comments, but my interpretation is that it has more to do with their personal psychology than the site culture or potential consequences.
This illustrates one of the problems with the LW2 upvote system. It only takes 1-2 string upvotes to give a comment a sense of “strong agreement,” which provides social pressure for a response. The bar should be much higher imho.
[Accidentally submitted something, will probably respond sometime early next week]
Let me just note here that I entirely reject the dichotomy between “requests for clarification” and “requests for justification”, as you describe it. I disagree with everything you say about the difference between these things, and I think that this may be one of the most important disagreements I have with your views on this whole matter.
I do, in fact, (think that I) understand the source of the perceived dichotomy—but in my view, it is not at all what it is claimed (or, perhaps, seen) to be. (I am, of course, happy to elaborate on this if requested, though perhaps this deep comment thread is not the place for it.)
EDIT: AGH! You edited/removed your comment as I was posting my response! :(
Sorry for editing it! I accidentally hit the submit button before the comment was ready (the thing I posted was a first draft). I will make sure to edit back some version of the comment next week, just so that your comment here doesn’t end up lacking necessary context.
I note that we, as a culture, have reified a term for this, which is “sealioning.”
Naming the problem is not solving the problem; sticking a label on something is not the same as winning an argument; the tricky part is in determining which commentary is reasonably described by the term and which isn’t (and which is controversial, or costly-but-useful, and so forth).
But as I read through this whole comment chain, I noticed that I kept wanting Oliver to be able to say the short, simple sentence:
“My past experience has led me to have a prior that threads from you beginning like this turn out to be sealioning way more often than similar threads from other people.”
Note that that’s my model of Oliver; the real Oliver has not actually expressed that [edit: exact] sentiment [edit: in those exact words] and may have critical disagreements with my model of him, or critical caveats regarding the use of the term.
Perhaps in your culture. In my culture, use of the term “sealioning” is primarily understood as an expression of anti-intellectualism (framing requests for dialogue as aggression).
In my culture, while the need to say “I don’t expect engaging with you to be productive, therefore I must decline this and all future requests for dialogue from you” is not unheard of, it is seen as a sad and unusual occasion—definitely not something meriting a short codeword with connotations of contempt.
What I meant by the word “our” was “the broader context culture-at-large,” not Less Wrong or my own personal home culture or anything like that. Apologies, that could’ve been clearer.
I think there’s another point on the spectrum (plane?) that’s neither “overt anti-intellectualism” nor “It seems to me that engaging with you will be unproductive and I should disengage.” That point being something like, “It’s reasonable and justified to conclude that this questioning isn’t going to be productive to the overall goal of the discussion, and is either motivated-by or will-result-in some other effect entirely.”
Something stronger than “I’m disengaging according to my own boundaries” and more like “this is subtly but significantly transgressive, by abusing structures that are in place for epistemic inquiry.”
If the term “sealioning” is too tainted by connotation to serve, then it’s clearly the wrong word to use; TIL. But I disagree that we don’t need or shouldn’t have any short, simple handle in this concept space; it still seems useful to me to be able to label the hypothesis without (as Oliver did) having to write words and words and words and words. The analogy to the usefulness of the term “witchhunt” was carefully chosen; it’s the sort of thing that’s hard to see at first, and once you’ve put forth the effort to see it, it’s worth … idk, cacheing or something?
No, I got that, I was just using the opportunity to riff off your “In My Culture” piece[1] while defending Said, who is a super valuable commenter who I think is being treated pretty unfairly in this 133-comment-and-counting meta trainwreck!
Sure, sometimes he’s insistent on pressing for rigor in a way could seem “nitpicky” or “dense” to readers who, like me, are more likely to just shrug and say, “Meh, I think I mostly get the gist of what the author is trying to say” rather than honing in on a particular word or phrase and writing a comment asking for clarification.
But that’s valuable. I am glad that a website nominally devoted to mastering the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition to the degree of precision required to write a recursively self-improving superintelligence to rule over our entire future lightcone has people whose innate need for rigor is more demanding than my sense of “Meh, I think I mostly get the gist”!
This is actually the second time in four months. Sorry, it writes itself!
Just wanted to note that, as a person who often finds Said’s style off-putting, I appreciate reading this counterpoint from you.
EDIT: In my ideal world, Said can find a way to still be nitpick-y and insistent on precision and rigor in a way that doesn’t frustrate me (and other readers) so much. I am unfortunately not exactly sure how to get to there from here.
Note that at least from the little I have read about the term, this seems like a reasonable stance to me, and my guess (as the person who instigated this thread) is that it is indeed better to avoid importing the existing connotations that term has.
My guess is that the term is still fine to bring up as something to be analyzed at a distance (e.g. asking questions like “why did people feel the need to invent the term sealioning?”), but my sense is that it’s better to not apply it directly to a person or interlocutor, given its set of associations.
This is a relatively weakly held position of mine though, given that I only learned about that term yesterday, so I don’t have a great map of its meanings and connotations.
Edit: I do want to say that the summary of “I don’t expect engaging with you to be productive, therefore I must decline this and all future requests for dialogue from you” doesn’t strike me as a very accurate summary of what people usually mean by sealioning. I don’t think it matters much for my response, but I figured I would point out that I disagree with that summary.
There was a mention of moderation regarding the term sealioning, so I’m addressing that. (We’re not yet addressing the thread-as-a-whole, but may do so later).
In general, it’s important to be able to give names to things. I looked into how the term sealioning seems to be defined and used on the internet-as-a-whole. It seems to have a lot of baggage, including (if used to refer to comments on LessWrong) false connotations about what sort of place LessWrong is and what behavior is appropriate on LessWrong. However, this baggage was not common knowledge. I see little reason to think those connotations were known or intended by Duncan. So, this looks to me look a good-faith proposal of terminology, but the terminology itself seems bad.
“Sealioning” is attempting to participate in “reasoned discourse” in a way that is insensitive to the appropriateness of the setting and to the buy-in of the other party. (Importantly, not “costs” of reasoned discourse; they are polite in some ways, like “oh sure, we can take an hour break for breakfast”.) People who have especially low buy-in to reasoned discourse use the word to paint the person asking for clarification as the oppressor, and themselves the victim. Importantly, they view attempting to have reasoned discourse as oppression. Thus it blends “not tracking buy-in” and “caring about reasoning over feelings” in a way that makes them challenging to unblend.
The part of sealioning that’s about setting can’t really apply to comments on LW. In the comic that originated the term, a sealion intrudes on a private conversation, follows them around and trespasses in their house; but LessWrong frontpage is a public space for public dialogue, so a LessWrong comment can’t have that problem no matter what it is.
So, conversational dynamics are worth talking about, and I do think there’s something in this space worth reifying with a term, preferably in a more abstract setting.
Huh, I am confused. I have expressed that sentiment multiple times. Here are the quotes:
My very first comment in the thread:
Other occurrences:
And:
And:
And to say it very explicitly here. Yes, I am arguing that contextless questions specifically from Said turn out to waste a lot of people’s time and cause a lot of frustration in a highly predictable way.
I don’t have enough context about how “sealioning” is used to judge whether that’s a good fit for this situation, or how politicized that term is, so I don’t think I want to use that term (I had not actually encountered it until yesterday). Though the basic description on Wikipedia seems to relatively accurately describe at least the experience of people engaging with Said (independently of whether it describes the intentions of Said himself).
I agree that you’ve said this multiple times, in multiple places; I wanted you to be able to say it shortly and simply. To be able to do something analogous to saying “from where I’m currently standing, this looks to me like a witchhunt” rather than having to spell out, in many different sentences, what a witchhunt is and why it’s bad and how this situation resembles that one.
My caveats and hedges were mainly not wanting to be seen as putting words in your mouth, or presupposing your endorsement of the particular short sentence I proposed.
nods Cool, that clarifies it.
… “sealioning”?
This is what Less Wrong is, now? Accusing people of ‘sealioning’? This is permitted, and receives neither massive downvotes nor moderator censure?
I said before that I disagreed with namespace’s view of the site. I was wrong; he was right.
Moderator hat on.
In general, I don’t think we’re going to have a moderator response time of ~4 hours (which is about how long Duncan’s comment had been up when you wrote yours). However, seeing a call for moderator action, we are going to be reviewing this thread and discussing what if anything to do here.
I’ve spent the last few hours catching up on the comments here. While Vaniver and Habryka have been participating in this thread and are site moderators, this seems like a case where moderation decisions should be made by people with more distance.
Hmm, my guess is you are misunderstanding the comment? I don’t think the above accuses you or anyone else of sealioning (I am also not super familiar with the term, as I said below, so I don’t think I know its full connotations).
It is bringing into the discussion a term that other people might have found useful, and from what I can tell opening up a discussion of whether that term makes sense to use in this context. In particular the comment explicitly says:
I mean, I think I agree with you that (from the few minutes of reading I’ve done about that term) I very likely don’t want us to use the term in the way it is used in most of the rest of the internet. I do think it’s pointing at a real cluster of people’s experiences, so I don’t think I want to ban mention of that term completely from LessWrong. It seems valid for people to look at that term and see whether it helps them makes sense of some experiences, and in any case its use is at least a valid sociological phenomenon that people can analyze.
Edit: I think my feelings here are somewhat similar to Nazi comparisons or something like that. I think sometimes someone actions are indeed somewhat similar to the historical activities of nazis, and it’s sometimes fine to bring that up as a comparison, but I in the vast majority of cases I prefer others to use a less loaded and less-frequently-misused comparison. Again, I don’t know to what degree sealioning falls into that category, but your reaction suggests that you perceive it to have a similar history of misuse, so I think there might be a good argument here to avoid using that term unless really necessary. Though other users and moderators who have more context might want to chime in on what rules we want to have here.
I’m sorry, but it is entirely implausible to construe Duncan’s comment as not being an accusation. I no longer have any interest in doing the usual song-and-dance about how he didn’t literally say the specific sequence of words “Said is sealioning”, and so what he actually meant was something very nuanced and subtle and definitely, absolutely didn’t mean to actually accuse me, etc., etc.
(As for the word itself, and the concept behind it—I have found that its (unironic, non-quoted) use is an infallible indicator of bad faith. Zack’s characterization of the term is much too charitable.)
I thought the comment was pretty clear that it was trying to give a summary of my comments, and a suggestion for how I should phrase my comment in order to better get my point across. A suggestion which (at least for the case of the use of “sealioning”) I disagreed with.
I agree with you that there was an implicature in Duncan’s comment that he thought the term was an accurate characterization, though I am actually and honestly not that confident Duncan actually believes that the term accurately describes your commenting patterns (in addition to it accurately describing my model of your commenting patterns). I would currently give it about 75% probability, but not more.
In general, I think implicatures of this type should be treated differently than outright accusations, though I also don’t think they should be completely ignored.
On a more general note, since the term appears to be a relatively niche term that I haven’t heard before, it seems to me that the correct way for us to deal with this, would be for people to say openly what connotations the term has to them, and if enough people agree that the term has unhelpful connotations, then avoid using the term. I don’t think we should harshly punish introducing a term like this if there isn’t an established precedent of the connotations of that term.
I think it would be a mistake for us to use that term here; I think as well as describing a pattern of behavior it comes with an implied interpretation of blameworthiness that we really don’t want to import.
I do not concur with your evaluation. (But there is not much point in discussing this further, so we can leave it at that.)
Is it?
Here’s the thing: the loss of Eliezer, the author of the ~2007–2011 era Less Wrong posts (and comments) is, indeed, a major one. But it’s futile to bemoan that loss, as it was inflicted only by time. The loss we must examine instead is the counterfactual loss. Eliezer could be writing on Less Wrong right now (and for the last decade or so), but is not, and has not been; is that a major loss?
Suppose (as seems to be the implication of your comments) that Eliezer would write for Less Wrong if, and only if, the environment (both technical and social) were comparable to that which now exists on Facebook (his current platform of choice). It seems reasonable to conclude that Eliezer’s writings, therefore, would also be more or less the things he now is (and has been) writing on Facebook; the only difference would be that those very same writings would be hosted here—and the same discussion, too, would take place here—instead of on Facebook.
That we do not have these things—is that a great loss?
As I have alluded to earlier, I think the answer is “no”. In fact, I think that such writings, and (especially! emphatically!) the sorts of discussions that I have seen taking place in the comments on Eliezer’s Facebook posts, would substantially lower the average quality of Less Wrong.
There is some value to (counterfactually) having Eliezer’s stuff here, instead of on Facebook: accessibility, searchability, linkability, archiving, etc.—all the things I’ve noted, in the past. But would it be worth the corruption, the dismantling, of Less Wrong’s epistemic standards? I think not.
There is no need to go that far (though of course I’ll participate if you feel it’s necessary). But I am happy to take your word for the views of any of these people; I certainly don’t disbelieve you when you say that such-and-such Less Wrong regular (or historical regular) has expressed to you such-and-such a view.
But what is the value in that? If, let us say, Zvi (to pick an author whose posts I’ve certainly found to have a lot of value, in the past) says “I don’t comment on Less Wrong because I don’t like responding to comments that challenge me to justify my claims, or provide examples, or explain my terms”, should I take this to mean that such comments are detrimental—or should I instead downgrade my assessment of Zvi’s posts, ideas, etc.? “One man’s modus ponens…”, after all…
You write as if an author’s posts simply have value, because of who the author is, on the basis of past performance, and regardless of any actual qualities of the actual (new) posts! But surely this is an absurd view? I have written things in the past, that are useful and good; and yet suppose that I were invited to write for a venue where my ideas would never be challenged, where my writing were not subjected to scrutiny, where no interested and intelligent readers would ask probing questions… shouldn’t I expect my writing (and my ideas!) to degrade? Shouldn’t I expect the proportion of dross and nonsense in my output to increase? Why should I expect to maintain whatever previous level of quality (modest as it may have already been) my writing had possessed? (Think of all the popular authors who, having “made it” in the literary world, gained the proverbial “immunity from editors”, and proceeded to write, and to publish, piles of of mediocre-at-best scribblings…)
In any case, it’s a moot point… you’ve asked me to abstain from commenting on posts like this, and in ways like this, and so I will. No further action is necessary.
I want to note that Eliezer now seems to spend more time on Twitter than on Facebook, and the discussion on Twitter is even lower quality than on Facebook or simply absent (i.e., I rarely see substantial back-and-forth discussions on Eliezer’s Twitter posts). This, plus the fact that the LW team already made a bunch of changes at Eliezer’s request to try to lure him back, without effect, makes me distrust habryka’s explanations in the grandparent comment.
Thanks, I do want to again say that I do appreciate a lot of your contributions to LessWrong.
To clarify one more thing:
I am not trying to argue that an author’s posts simply have value, only that the author writing at all is a necessary requirement for their posts to exist and therefore have value. A world in which all of our best authors leave the site, is one in which we see little to no progress. However, a world in which they stick around is definitely not sufficient for making real progress, and I agree with that, though I would guess that we have significant disagreements about what kind of interaction with the site will be sufficient for progress.
I think it’s a problem that you don’t see how this comment thread exemplifies a form of communication that people often interpret as hostile rather than attempting to clarify. You’ve also admitted in the past that you consider some of how you comment to be policing the standards you think LW should uphold. Obviously not everyone agrees with you as evidenced by the difference between what you strongly upvote and what the rest of LW strongly upvotes. I don’t find it surprising or bad that some people choose to interpret you as sealioning in light of this.
What a bizarre thing, to use the word “admitted” here!
As if it is a bad thing, that users should help to enforce the norms of a community! As if it is a bad thing, that users should hold a forum to good and beneficial standards! As if it is—somehow, improbably—a bad thing, to speak up in defense of the norms of good discourse and good thinking—on Less Wrong, of all places!
Should I take this to be an admission that you do not do these things? And if so—why in the world not?
I do not have access to this information. Do you? How?
If ever there was a strong signal of bad faith, using such terms as ‘sealioning’ is definitely it.
I’m not completely swayed either way, but I want to acknowledge this as an important and interesting point.
I believe there is a possible middle way between two extremes:
1) There are no questions, ever.
2) When someone writes “today I had an ice-cream and it made me happy”, they get a comment: “define ‘happiness’, or you are not rational”.
As Habryka already explained somewhere, the problem is not asking question per se, but the specific low-effort way.
I assume that most of has some idea of what “authentic” (or other words) means, but also it would be difficult to provide a full definition. So the person who asks should provide some hints about the purpose of the question. Are they a p-zombie who has absolutely no idea what words refer to? Do they see multiple possible interpretations of the word? In that case it would help to point at the difference, which would allow the author to say “the first one” or maybe “neither, it’s actually more like X”. Do they see some contradiction in the naive definition? For example, what would “authentic” refer to, if the person simply has two brain modules that want contradictory things? Again, it would help to ask the specific thing. Otherwise there is a risk that the author would spend 20 minutes trying to write a good answer, only to get “nope, that’s not what I wanted” in return.
Asking a short question is not necessarily low effort. Asking the right question can actually take a lot of mental work, even if it ends up being a single sentence long. It takes a sharp knife to cleanly cut at the joints of an argument.
As mentioned elsewhere, I really, really don’t have an understanding of what an “authentic relationship” means in this context, and therefore it was an astute question to ask. It helped clarify the qualms I had about the article as well.
And it took all of 2 seconds to read, which I really appreciate.