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.
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.