I don’t have a clear and comprehensive solution. But I have an inkling of what’s needed, and according to me, it’s punch bug.
(Here I am using punch bug as an archetype, an example, a metaphor, and a flag. I’m not advocating the specific game, but rather using it as an instance of a class and trying to point at the thing that generated it, the type of culture that endorses it, and the characteristics of a person who grew up playing it.)
What happens in the game of punch bug?
You’re pretty routinely having your sovereignty violated.
You’re pretty routinely experiencing non-negligible physical pain (I tap very gently these days, but back in primary and secondary school, we … y’know … punched).
The pain and violation are mostly coming from people you care about—people you trust and who are supposed to have your back.
You’re heavily constrained in your ability to respond (a key ingredient of serious trauma)—pretty much the whole game is “no punching back,” and people who break that rule can get ostracized hard. You don’t even have the opportunity for retributive justice until there’s another Volkswagen beetle, at which point you’re basically just as likely to get hit again.
(And if you say “I’m not playing,” people will often smirk and reply, “well, you’re not hitting me back, so it sure looks like you’re playing.”)
This is at least an approving reference to punching people who express objections to playing punch-bug.
(I edited my comment’s first sentence to remove “overtly” & “against a class” because I’m not quite sure that’s right.)
I do not understand how you could have possibly construed approval, here—this is a list of overtly bad things which are connoted as bad in their very description. Sovereignty violations are bad, pain is bad, betrayal is bad, constraint is bad (I note that it’s a key ingredient of trauma!). Usually, in a list of five things, the last entry is not meant to have the exact opposite connotation of the previous four.
The fact that the list is followed by a “but”—that I pose the hypothesis that perhaps a small, measured amount of these unquestionably bad things might be instrumentally valuable—does not in any way mean that I approve of them generally, which should be obvious in the first place and which would definitely emerge from a reading of the piece which is either deliberately charitable or at least seriously questions its own knee-jerk rejections.
(Here I point to the literally hundreds of words I spent validating the other side of the debate in multiple places in the essay, including honoring their clearly philanthropic motives and making an explicit attempt to pass their ITT along with an explicit recognition that I might’ve failed. I would like you to attempt to meet the same standard of charity that I myself was shooting for, in the OP.)
Two analogies:
Murder and property destruction are bad. Sometimes we go to war. The murder and property destruction that take place thereby are no less terrible for the fact that war is occasionally justified. One can advocate for the actions of soldiers in justified wars, and yet also not be fundamentally pro-violence.
Cutting into people with knives is bad. Sometimes, people need surgery. The pain and injury that takes place thereby is no less terrible for the fact that it was inflicted in the service of further healing. One can advocate for the existence of surgeons and surgery, and yet also not be fundamentally pro-cutting.
I don’t think you said or meant to say that punch-bug has no costs. But it seems to me like the quoted text (1) expresses approval of punch-bug, and (2) defines punch-bug to include punching those who express objections to the game and don’t otherwise participate.
The sentence that expresses approval:
I don’t have a clear and comprehensive solution. But I have an inkling of what’s needed, and according to me, it’s punch bug.
The sentence that defines it to include punching those who express objections to the game and otherwise don’t participate:
(And if you say “I’m not playing,” people will often smirk and reply, “well, you’re not hitting me back, so it sure looks like you’re playing.”)
The reason I quoted a longer block initially, rather than just those two very short excerpts, was to keep them in context so that readers would have an easier time noticing if they disagreed with my reading.
And yet, despite all of that, literally millions of people still play the game (voluntarily!) and have a grand ol’ time while doing so.
… which contains the crucial phrase “despite all of that” and the surprise-signaled “voluntarily!” which makes the whole section way less open-to-interpretation and makes your reading more close-to-objectively incorrect.
(And leaving out the three lines after that, where I took the time to brainstorm three possible explanations that were ‘inconvenient’ to the point I was trying to make, and which explicitly turn the reader’s eye toward coherent frameworks in which people might be acting against the good when they play punch bug, i.e. in which the things on the list are bad and not even instrumentally valuable.)
From my own personal perspective, I do not agree that you can reasonably claim to have been a) trying to be neutral/charitable, or b) have been holding a sufficiently high bar for “does the territory justify me holding my opinion here?” From my own personal perspective, and according to the standards that I think you and I and all of us should be striving to meet (which I acknowledge plenty of smart and good people may reasonably disagree with), if you had been doing due diligence as a rationalist, you could not in this case have ended up typing the sentence:
This is at least an approving reference to punching people who express objections to playing punch-bug.
...your truth-tracking algorithms should’ve stopped it at the border, or at the very least, if it slipped past in a moment of emotion or inattention, you should now unequivocally retract it.
(I reiterate that boiling things down into a pure binary of approves-or-disapproves is the wrong move in the first place; this is an oversimplification à la bucket errors.)
To be fair, he does suggest that people who don’t want to play Punch Bug be accommodated with permission to live in a ghetto instead:
If there are people among us who, because of their particular makeup, need a space safe from punch bug, I say we provide it the same way we provide a space free of peanuts for the allergic (rather than by banning peanuts entirely).
[Moderation Note – this comment is attributing things to Duncan he didn’t say, swapping in words with importantly different and inflammatory connotations. More thoughts on this here. – Ray]
[ETA (by Ben): Duncan strongly disputes the “ghetto” characterization. I don’t see how else the “safe spaces” proposal would work out, but “ghetto” is an inference I’m drawing, not the literal text of the OP.]
Since apparently literally no one else will say it, even after nine days:
This is grotesquely uncharitable and patently false even just from the quotation you cite in support. There is no ghetto into which we place people with peanut allergies; I went to school with them, went to summer camp with them, have worked with them, and have flown on planes with them.
I do not know what lens it is that you are using, as you read through my writings and attempt to judge my intentions and my character, but it is a lens with flaws, and it is causing you to reach alarmingly false conclusions all over this thread and in other places where we have interacted. Your statement is both wrong in truth and does not follow from its alleged source.
(This comment was edited to remove a false claim that wasn’t relevant to the central point anyway, pointed out in the subthread below. Appreciation to ESRogs for the highlight.)
Yes, the grandparent post is bad: it uses an unfair and extremely-inflammatory analogy which predictably made the conversation worse. But: Please ease up on the time pressure.
Earlier on in this thing (on Friday), I started a long post with an overview of what happened here as I understood it, and things everyone involved could have done differently to make things go better. ~6 hours in I set it aside because I wanted to be sure to get it right, because an outside view suggested that a cooldown would be wise, and because it was threatening to compete for time with paid work. To the extent that I’ve had time to devote to this narrative since, it’s been spent on collecting perspectives and on replying on easier-to-deal-with tangentially related to threads.
The overall situation pattern-matches somewhat with an experience I had in the Boston community awhile back; the main takeaway I took from that was that time pressure makes everything worse. Several people in that narrative felt like nothing was happening, and acted to create pressure to ensure their concerns hadn’t been dropped, but actually things were happening and this instead forced people into a defensive-reactive mode. (The end result was terrible for everyone involved.)
(Note: I am kinda-technically a moderator, in the sense that I have moderator power, but due to time constraints since the site launched I have not done any moderating.)
You’re not crediting the fact that having upvoted, unobjected-to libel of one’s personal character on LessWrong can be an active and ongoing hurt/threat; that in this case the LessWrong platform was being unfairly abused by Ben to make my lifeactively worse, and that this was allowed to go on for more than a week as if that hurt to me is of no consequence whatsoever.
Expecting some public action to be taken in nine days does not feel, to me, like an unreasonable request of a moderation team with at least five people on it. We’ll never know how long it would’ve taken, if I hadn’t caved and responded myself, but I think it’s reasonable to posit that it would’ve been at least a few more days, meaning something like two weeks in total.
It is the job of moderators to moderate. If, in nine days and with plenty of pointing, none of the moderators could manage to get here and just drop a quick note like “We’re going to follow up on this privately, but just for the record, this doesn’t match my reading of the quote,” then something has gone deeply wrong with moderation as a whole.
That one sentence would’ve been enough, to signal that Ben’s statement was recognized as problematic without harming Ben. Instead, users have been coming by for nine days and seeing an upvoted comment and drawing from that whatever conclusions they will—both about me and about the norms of the site as a whole.
I don’t want to engage with this too much right now, but do want to give a tiny bit more background that I don’t think settles this issue, but does complicate it a bit:
In practice, on this specific issue, the moderation team consisted of just Ray and me and not really anyone else. We discussed the issues with other moderators, but because of the high-stakes nature of this conflict, I thought that it was important that the relevant decisions and comments were made by the people who I thought had the most detailed background on both the people involved, and the long-term goals of LessWrong moderation. This usually would have also included Ben Pace, but he isn’t around for this month.
I don’t think that in retrospect (mostly implicitly) restricting moderation action on this issue to just Ray and me was a bad call, given the constraints at the time. I think criticizing us for not having scaled our moderation team better, and establishing procedures that allow everyone on the team to meaningfully contribute to this situation, is a valid criticism, and something I do think we could have done better. I also think that even with just me and Ray, being more immediately transparent would have been achievable, and something I plan to be better at in the future. But I do think the error is significantly less severe than it would have been had we had access to 5 moderators instead of just 2.
The people who upvoted you here must have done so out of personal politics, and not out of adherence to the goals of LessWrong
I agree with everything in your comment except this line. I think you are neglecting alternative explanations. For example, whenever someone answers a question I’ve asked them I upvote the response, whether I agree with it or not.
I’m editing the original post to correct this overreach, which I agree was an uncharitable overreach and an example of me not reaching the correct standard.
I should have been clearer. I don’t think you’re imagining a ghetto when you think of this proposal. I’d have to know the inside of your mind to know that, and only you know the inside of your mind.
I do think that the particular dynamics of a no-punchback rule push towards the creation of that sort of thing: there’s a particular sort of person who, when they wander out of their specially designated space without wearing a clearly visible marker of their minority status, gets punched by others but doesn’t punch others.
I don’t think most people who read the post actually bothered to imagine what a safe space with respect to punchbug in particular would look like.
Duncan makes it clear that the reason he doesn’t punch people hard is because he doesn’t think he can get away with that right now
In two places in this conversation so far, I have noticed you verbally espousing and endorsing a good and virtuous norm while not noticing that you have previously violated it. The other example is when, after accusing me of wanting to ghettoize people, you endorsed a norm of not attributing to people things they didn’t actually say.
To be clear: I do not want to be interacting with benquo on this thread. I asked for moderation for days and days and days and in the meantime no one stepped up to speak true words in my defense in the public sphere where damage was being done. I am here in violation of a very strongly held personal desire not to be posting on LW anywhere outside of meta. If anybody else is willing to take up the torch of preventing benquo from making comments as though he has not clearly been doing damage to me in order to make his points, I will gladly vanish and stop posting replies here.
It’s not clear to me that this is true, though I might not have read Duncan’s post closely enough (I confess that I skimmed).
I had interpreted Duncan as advocating that punch-bug is a fine game to play. Not that you should play punch-bug with people who don’t want to.
Did you interpret him as advocating the latter?
The following sure seems like it to me:
This is at least an approving reference to punching people who express objections to playing punch-bug.
(I edited my comment’s first sentence to remove “overtly” & “against a class” because I’m not quite sure that’s right.)
I do not understand how you could have possibly construed approval, here—this is a list of overtly bad things which are connoted as bad in their very description. Sovereignty violations are bad, pain is bad, betrayal is bad, constraint is bad (I note that it’s a key ingredient of trauma!). Usually, in a list of five things, the last entry is not meant to have the exact opposite connotation of the previous four.
The fact that the list is followed by a “but”—that I pose the hypothesis that perhaps a small, measured amount of these unquestionably bad things might be instrumentally valuable—does not in any way mean that I approve of them generally, which should be obvious in the first place and which would definitely emerge from a reading of the piece which is either deliberately charitable or at least seriously questions its own knee-jerk rejections.
(Here I point to the literally hundreds of words I spent validating the other side of the debate in multiple places in the essay, including honoring their clearly philanthropic motives and making an explicit attempt to pass their ITT along with an explicit recognition that I might’ve failed. I would like you to attempt to meet the same standard of charity that I myself was shooting for, in the OP.)
Two analogies:
Murder and property destruction are bad. Sometimes we go to war. The murder and property destruction that take place thereby are no less terrible for the fact that war is occasionally justified. One can advocate for the actions of soldiers in justified wars, and yet also not be fundamentally pro-violence.
Cutting into people with knives is bad. Sometimes, people need surgery. The pain and injury that takes place thereby is no less terrible for the fact that it was inflicted in the service of further healing. One can advocate for the existence of surgeons and surgery, and yet also not be fundamentally pro-cutting.
I don’t think you said or meant to say that punch-bug has no costs. But it seems to me like the quoted text (1) expresses approval of punch-bug, and (2) defines punch-bug to include punching those who express objections to the game and don’t otherwise participate.
The sentence that expresses approval:
The sentence that defines it to include punching those who express objections to the game and otherwise don’t participate:
The reason I quoted a longer block initially, rather than just those two very short excerpts, was to keep them in context so that readers would have an easier time noticing if they disagreed with my reading.
Leaving out the immediately next line
… which contains the crucial phrase “despite all of that” and the surprise-signaled “voluntarily!” which makes the whole section way less open-to-interpretation and makes your reading more close-to-objectively incorrect.
(And leaving out the three lines after that, where I took the time to brainstorm three possible explanations that were ‘inconvenient’ to the point I was trying to make, and which explicitly turn the reader’s eye toward coherent frameworks in which people might be acting against the good when they play punch bug, i.e. in which the things on the list are bad and not even instrumentally valuable.)
From my own personal perspective, I do not agree that you can reasonably claim to have been a) trying to be neutral/charitable, or b) have been holding a sufficiently high bar for “does the territory justify me holding my opinion here?” From my own personal perspective, and according to the standards that I think you and I and all of us should be striving to meet (which I acknowledge plenty of smart and good people may reasonably disagree with), if you had been doing due diligence as a rationalist, you could not in this case have ended up typing the sentence:
...your truth-tracking algorithms should’ve stopped it at the border, or at the very least, if it slipped past in a moment of emotion or inattention, you should now unequivocally retract it.
(I reiterate that boiling things down into a pure binary of approves-or-disapproves is the wrong move in the first place; this is an oversimplification à la bucket errors.)
To be fair, he does suggest that people who don’t want to play Punch Bug be accommodated with permission to live in a ghetto instead:
[Moderation Note – this comment is attributing things to Duncan he didn’t say, swapping in words with importantly different and inflammatory connotations. More thoughts on this here. – Ray]
[ETA (by Ben): Duncan strongly disputes the “ghetto” characterization. I don’t see how else the “safe spaces” proposal would work out, but “ghetto” is an inference I’m drawing, not the literal text of the OP.]
Since apparently literally no one else will say it, even after nine days:
This is grotesquely uncharitable and patently false even just from the quotation you cite in support. There is no ghetto into which we place people with peanut allergies; I went to school with them, went to summer camp with them, have worked with them, and have flown on planes with them.
I do not know what lens it is that you are using, as you read through my writings and attempt to judge my intentions and my character, but it is a lens with flaws, and it is causing you to reach alarmingly false conclusions all over this thread and in other places where we have interacted. Your statement is both wrong in truth and does not follow from its alleged source.
(This comment was edited to remove a false claim that wasn’t relevant to the central point anyway, pointed out in the subthread below. Appreciation to ESRogs for the highlight.)
Yes, the grandparent post is bad: it uses an unfair and extremely-inflammatory analogy which predictably made the conversation worse. But: Please ease up on the time pressure.
Earlier on in this thing (on Friday), I started a long post with an overview of what happened here as I understood it, and things everyone involved could have done differently to make things go better. ~6 hours in I set it aside because I wanted to be sure to get it right, because an outside view suggested that a cooldown would be wise, and because it was threatening to compete for time with paid work. To the extent that I’ve had time to devote to this narrative since, it’s been spent on collecting perspectives and on replying on easier-to-deal-with tangentially related to threads.
The overall situation pattern-matches somewhat with an experience I had in the Boston community awhile back; the main takeaway I took from that was that time pressure makes everything worse. Several people in that narrative felt like nothing was happening, and acted to create pressure to ensure their concerns hadn’t been dropped, but actually things were happening and this instead forced people into a defensive-reactive mode. (The end result was terrible for everyone involved.)
(Note: I am kinda-technically a moderator, in the sense that I have moderator power, but due to time constraints since the site launched I have not done any moderating.)
You’re not crediting the fact that having upvoted, unobjected-to libel of one’s personal character on LessWrong can be an active and ongoing hurt/threat; that in this case the LessWrong platform was being unfairly abused by Ben to make my life actively worse, and that this was allowed to go on for more than a week as if that hurt to me is of no consequence whatsoever.
Expecting some public action to be taken in nine days does not feel, to me, like an unreasonable request of a moderation team with at least five people on it. We’ll never know how long it would’ve taken, if I hadn’t caved and responded myself, but I think it’s reasonable to posit that it would’ve been at least a few more days, meaning something like two weeks in total.
It is the job of moderators to moderate. If, in nine days and with plenty of pointing, none of the moderators could manage to get here and just drop a quick note like “We’re going to follow up on this privately, but just for the record, this doesn’t match my reading of the quote,” then something has gone deeply wrong with moderation as a whole.
That one sentence would’ve been enough, to signal that Ben’s statement was recognized as problematic without harming Ben. Instead, users have been coming by for nine days and seeing an upvoted comment and drawing from that whatever conclusions they will—both about me and about the norms of the site as a whole.
I don’t want to engage with this too much right now, but do want to give a tiny bit more background that I don’t think settles this issue, but does complicate it a bit:
In practice, on this specific issue, the moderation team consisted of just Ray and me and not really anyone else. We discussed the issues with other moderators, but because of the high-stakes nature of this conflict, I thought that it was important that the relevant decisions and comments were made by the people who I thought had the most detailed background on both the people involved, and the long-term goals of LessWrong moderation. This usually would have also included Ben Pace, but he isn’t around for this month.
I don’t think that in retrospect (mostly implicitly) restricting moderation action on this issue to just Ray and me was a bad call, given the constraints at the time. I think criticizing us for not having scaled our moderation team better, and establishing procedures that allow everyone on the team to meaningfully contribute to this situation, is a valid criticism, and something I do think we could have done better. I also think that even with just me and Ray, being more immediately transparent would have been achievable, and something I plan to be better at in the future. But I do think the error is significantly less severe than it would have been had we had access to 5 moderators instead of just 2.
I appreciate this for its position in the Venn diagram of (true things) and (olive branches).
I too would have preferred it if something like this had happened.
I agree with everything in your comment except this line. I think you are neglecting alternative explanations. For example, whenever someone answers a question I’ve asked them I upvote the response, whether I agree with it or not.
That’s true.
I’m editing the original post to correct this overreach, which I agree was an uncharitable overreach and an example of me not reaching the correct standard.
I should have been clearer. I don’t think you’re imagining a ghetto when you think of this proposal. I’d have to know the inside of your mind to know that, and only you know the inside of your mind.
I do think that the particular dynamics of a no-punchback rule push towards the creation of that sort of thing: there’s a particular sort of person who, when they wander out of their specially designated space without wearing a clearly visible marker of their minority status, gets punched by others but doesn’t punch others.
I don’t think most people who read the post actually bothered to imagine what a safe space with respect to punchbug in particular would look like.
In two places in this conversation so far, I have noticed you verbally espousing and endorsing a good and virtuous norm while not noticing that you have previously violated it. The other example is when, after accusing me of wanting to ghettoize people, you endorsed a norm of not attributing to people things they didn’t actually say.
To be clear: I do not want to be interacting with benquo on this thread. I asked for moderation for days and days and days and in the meantime no one stepped up to speak true words in my defense in the public sphere where damage was being done. I am here in violation of a very strongly held personal desire not to be posting on LW anywhere outside of meta. If anybody else is willing to take up the torch of preventing benquo from making comments as though he has not clearly been doing damage to me in order to make his points, I will gladly vanish and stop posting replies here.
Quick further update: my full response to Benquo is written, waiting on getting a final round of feedback from other moderators.
I’m in the process of writing a series of replies here.