I have two responses, one very strong/confident, one less confident.
1) Strong/Confident – It is definitely not okay to attribute words to people they didn’t say, in the first place. This is a fundamental cornerstone of How to Have Nice Things. The fact that I’m further increasing the burden for highly-charged rewordings doesn’t seem like it should be coming into play here.
You literally said Duncan said people who didn’t like punchbug could have a ghetto. He didn’t say that. That isn’t okay.
If someone is advocating for something that will lead to ghettos, the way to say that is “All the interpretations I can think of how to implement this sound like a ghetto.” This does not seem at all like an unreasonable burden.
2) Weaker claim that I’m less certain of:
I think there is stronger pressure (on LW and elsewhere) not to say things that pattern-match to anything resembling abuse, than there is to not talk about Nazis. (Moreover, outside of LW, there is the reverse pattern – comparing people to Nazis is incentivizedso badly that for LW to be different than mediocre internet discourse, it has to exert a strong counterpressure to be more cautious with it).
Meanwhile, the last two times Duncan attempted to say anything nuanced that vaguely pattern-matched to “thing that might possibly be dangerous”, he got hounded with hateful internet rhetoric. Most of the the responses I’ve seen to Punch Bug have ranged from “this makes good points but I don’t like Punch Bug” to “this seems abusive and bad.” There might be possible worlds where this is risking escalating off a cliff, but this world doesn’t seem to be one of them.
Yes, it is important that we build a place with rules that protect everyone. I think they are in fact protecting you. But people are always incentivized to notice the times when the system is imposing costs on them.
You literally said Duncan said people who didn’t like punchbug could have a ghetto. He didn’t say that. That isn’t okay.
Thanks for making this clear and direct.
I characterized what I thought Duncan’s words meant, in my own words.
The first time I did this I quoted the passage I thought implied this in the same comment. I don’t think it’s a plausible construal of this at all that Duncan had literally written the words not explicitly quoted, which were directly pointing to a following, overtly blockquoted, verbatim quote.
The other times I did this, on the same page (but sometimes not in the same thread), it’s more plausible that a reader who hadn’t carefully read the whole page could get that impression. But this is not the same thing as a literal assertion that Duncan had said that thing in those words.
Usually when person X writes “person Y said that Z”, there is some ambiguity about whether Z is a quotation (exact or approximate) or a characterization in Y’s own voice. I meant to say the latter, but I see how I was unclear in a way that let people wrongly infer the former. If anyone was genuinely misled by this, I’m sorry for my negligence.
Your specific proposal seems like a substantial improvement over the way I worded things, and I hope to meet that standard in the future. I think that I made an inadequate effort to distinguish between those two possible construals. But it’s hard for me to engage with criticism that pretends that a case with genuine ambiguity is unambiguous.
This seems like a fair response in isolation; if the only thing were paraphrasing Duncan’s suggestion as forming a ghetto, that seems plausibly acceptable. In particular, my understanding is that some school cafeterias are entirely peanut-free (including barring children from bringing products containing peanuts from home) in order to make the environment more safe for children with peanut allergies; a proposal to move from that environment to one in which there is simply a peanut-free section of the cafeteria could be said to be isolating those students with allergies. Calling that ghettoizing those children might be extreme (because of the difference in scale), but would be correct about the direction of the change (especially since it is ‘for their protection,’ which was originally true of many of the Jewish ghettos in Europe).
It seems to me like the primary question then is something like: “is enough of the original claim maintained that this summary seems fair, at least to an outside observer?” (The original author agreeing is probably too high a standard, as a summary that’s harsh but fair is unlikely to be acknowledged as fair.) A paraphrase that loses too much in the way of nuance, or which ends up being too hostile or uncharitable, seems like it should call for some sort of criticism or correction. It’s easiest to settle claims about whether or not direct quotes are accurate, but it’s also important to be tracking whether summaries or interpretations are fair and sensible.
Furthermore, moderation often involves noticing patterns of behavior and responding to them as a whole, using particular pieces of behavior as examples and evidence rather than independent cases, so that a long sequences of small pieces of slack doesn’t result in large amounts of unaccountability. In the context of the whole conversation, it seems difficult to separate the question of whether or not this paraphrase is fair or accurate from the question of whether or not a picture is being painted of Duncan as proto-Nazi in ways that are epistemically unsound. (That is, the Litany of Tarski applies here; if Duncan is actually a proto-Nazi, I desire to believe it, and if not, I want to not believe it, and that relies on having epistemic machinery that reliably points towards the truth.)
I was specifically objecting to the details of Raemon’s framing. I agree that in the context of the other things I said I should have been much more careful about the term “ghetto.” I strongly agree that moderators should attend to things like this. Your explanation basically makes sense to me.
I’m very unhappy that this ended up in a place where “is Duncan a proto-Nazi?” is a plausible framing of the question. I’m going to put quite a bit of thought to whether there was a way to object to this clearly and vividly, in a way that didn’t obscure the underlying threat model, without accidentally making it about Duncan personally.
One important thing I notice, that I hadn’t said, and I think would have been really helpful to figure-out-and-then-say-much-earlier:
If you find yourself wanting to communicate a concept that feels likely to get misinterpreted or escalate tensions in the conversation, I’d be very enthusiastic, both as a mod and as a person who knows Ben and thinks he’s trying to do and say important, nuanced things, to try to help do that. (esp if we hash out some thoughts privately before you post publicly)
This is easier the earlier it is in the conversation. I think it’d have been better if we reached out in that frame about your initial comment here, and it’d have been better still if you’d noticed as you were writing the comment that it was the sort of thing likely to get misinterpreted, and (if we had an easy way to do so), reach out to us about how to approach the conversation.
i.e. I think this sort of conversation requires a lot more interpretive labor than normal, but I’m happy to help that. (With limited bandwidth I can’t do this all the time, but it seems like a good approach insofar as we can, and worth prioritizing)
Yeah, I think there was something off about my framing, especially for a comment I was tagging as “high confidence.” I basically endorse Vaniver’s take here, and I think a more accurate and fair thing I would have said was:
1) I have strong sense, that I am quite confident is pointing at a real, important thing, that the ghetto comment was the sort of thing that reliably leads to a deteriorating discussion (and that this should be relatively common knowledge)
2) I had a moderate confidence that the shape-of-the-reason was close to the reason I gave (but, it did depend on context with other things), and I should have been some combination of “express less explicit confidence that I’m getting the details right” and “maybe orient more curiously about what some details/nuances were.”
On point 2, I think this is one of those cases where depending on your metric, there’s a strong power gradient in one or the other direction.
On one hand, I agree that Duncan’s faced a lot of often quite nasty criticism on the internet. While I haven’t looked at the stuff on Tumblr, I’m ready to believe that a lot of it was terrible and unfair. There is also a lot of criticism in the comments to this linkpost, and not a lot of praise or agreement by volume.
On the other, Duncan’s employed as an instructor at CFAR—an official representative of the community’s rationality standards, insofar as there’s any official apparatus at all—and the post was approvingly linked by another CFAR staff member.
Also, at the time of my initial comment, one of the top comments—maybe the most-upvoted at the time, not sure—was thanking Duncan for his bravery in writing this, with a response by a LessWrong moderator endorsing this. Other fairly central members of the Bay Area Rationalist and LessWrong communities participated in Dragon Army.
I agree that individuals’ perceptions of costs are likely to be biased in the way you say. I’m not asking you to privilege my perspective here.
I have two responses, one very strong/confident, one less confident.
1) Strong/Confident – It is definitely not okay to attribute words to people they didn’t say, in the first place. This is a fundamental cornerstone of How to Have Nice Things. The fact that I’m further increasing the burden for highly-charged rewordings doesn’t seem like it should be coming into play here.
You literally said Duncan said people who didn’t like punchbug could have a ghetto. He didn’t say that. That isn’t okay.
If someone is advocating for something that will lead to ghettos, the way to say that is “All the interpretations I can think of how to implement this sound like a ghetto.” This does not seem at all like an unreasonable burden.
2) Weaker claim that I’m less certain of:
I think there is stronger pressure (on LW and elsewhere) not to say things that pattern-match to anything resembling abuse, than there is to not talk about Nazis. (Moreover, outside of LW, there is the reverse pattern – comparing people to Nazis is incentivized so badly that for LW to be different than mediocre internet discourse, it has to exert a strong counterpressure to be more cautious with it).
Meanwhile, the last two times Duncan attempted to say anything nuanced that vaguely pattern-matched to “thing that might possibly be dangerous”, he got hounded with hateful internet rhetoric. Most of the the responses I’ve seen to Punch Bug have ranged from “this makes good points but I don’t like Punch Bug” to “this seems abusive and bad.” There might be possible worlds where this is risking escalating off a cliff, but this world doesn’t seem to be one of them.
Yes, it is important that we build a place with rules that protect everyone. I think they are in fact protecting you. But people are always incentivized to notice the times when the system is imposing costs on them.
Thanks for making this clear and direct.
I characterized what I thought Duncan’s words meant, in my own words.
The first time I did this I quoted the passage I thought implied this in the same comment. I don’t think it’s a plausible construal of this at all that Duncan had literally written the words not explicitly quoted, which were directly pointing to a following, overtly blockquoted, verbatim quote.
The other times I did this, on the same page (but sometimes not in the same thread), it’s more plausible that a reader who hadn’t carefully read the whole page could get that impression. But this is not the same thing as a literal assertion that Duncan had said that thing in those words.
Usually when person X writes “person Y said that Z”, there is some ambiguity about whether Z is a quotation (exact or approximate) or a characterization in Y’s own voice. I meant to say the latter, but I see how I was unclear in a way that let people wrongly infer the former. If anyone was genuinely misled by this, I’m sorry for my negligence.
Your specific proposal seems like a substantial improvement over the way I worded things, and I hope to meet that standard in the future. I think that I made an inadequate effort to distinguish between those two possible construals. But it’s hard for me to engage with criticism that pretends that a case with genuine ambiguity is unambiguous.
This seems like a fair response in isolation; if the only thing were paraphrasing Duncan’s suggestion as forming a ghetto, that seems plausibly acceptable. In particular, my understanding is that some school cafeterias are entirely peanut-free (including barring children from bringing products containing peanuts from home) in order to make the environment more safe for children with peanut allergies; a proposal to move from that environment to one in which there is simply a peanut-free section of the cafeteria could be said to be isolating those students with allergies. Calling that ghettoizing those children might be extreme (because of the difference in scale), but would be correct about the direction of the change (especially since it is ‘for their protection,’ which was originally true of many of the Jewish ghettos in Europe).
It seems to me like the primary question then is something like: “is enough of the original claim maintained that this summary seems fair, at least to an outside observer?” (The original author agreeing is probably too high a standard, as a summary that’s harsh but fair is unlikely to be acknowledged as fair.) A paraphrase that loses too much in the way of nuance, or which ends up being too hostile or uncharitable, seems like it should call for some sort of criticism or correction. It’s easiest to settle claims about whether or not direct quotes are accurate, but it’s also important to be tracking whether summaries or interpretations are fair and sensible.
Furthermore, moderation often involves noticing patterns of behavior and responding to them as a whole, using particular pieces of behavior as examples and evidence rather than independent cases, so that a long sequences of small pieces of slack doesn’t result in large amounts of unaccountability. In the context of the whole conversation, it seems difficult to separate the question of whether or not this paraphrase is fair or accurate from the question of whether or not a picture is being painted of Duncan as proto-Nazi in ways that are epistemically unsound. (That is, the Litany of Tarski applies here; if Duncan is actually a proto-Nazi, I desire to believe it, and if not, I want to not believe it, and that relies on having epistemic machinery that reliably points towards the truth.)
I was specifically objecting to the details of Raemon’s framing. I agree that in the context of the other things I said I should have been much more careful about the term “ghetto.” I strongly agree that moderators should attend to things like this. Your explanation basically makes sense to me.
I’m very unhappy that this ended up in a place where “is Duncan a proto-Nazi?” is a plausible framing of the question. I’m going to put quite a bit of thought to whether there was a way to object to this clearly and vividly, in a way that didn’t obscure the underlying threat model, without accidentally making it about Duncan personally.
[note: Somewhat off the cuff]
One important thing I notice, that I hadn’t said, and I think would have been really helpful to figure-out-and-then-say-much-earlier:
If you find yourself wanting to communicate a concept that feels likely to get misinterpreted or escalate tensions in the conversation, I’d be very enthusiastic, both as a mod and as a person who knows Ben and thinks he’s trying to do and say important, nuanced things, to try to help do that. (esp if we hash out some thoughts privately before you post publicly)
This is easier the earlier it is in the conversation. I think it’d have been better if we reached out in that frame about your initial comment here, and it’d have been better still if you’d noticed as you were writing the comment that it was the sort of thing likely to get misinterpreted, and (if we had an easy way to do so), reach out to us about how to approach the conversation.
i.e. I think this sort of conversation requires a lot more interpretive labor than normal, but I’m happy to help that. (With limited bandwidth I can’t do this all the time, but it seems like a good approach insofar as we can, and worth prioritizing)
Thanks, good to have this offer :)
Yeah, I think there was something off about my framing, especially for a comment I was tagging as “high confidence.” I basically endorse Vaniver’s take here, and I think a more accurate and fair thing I would have said was:
1) I have strong sense, that I am quite confident is pointing at a real, important thing, that the ghetto comment was the sort of thing that reliably leads to a deteriorating discussion (and that this should be relatively common knowledge)
2) I had a moderate confidence that the shape-of-the-reason was close to the reason I gave (but, it did depend on context with other things), and I should have been some combination of “express less explicit confidence that I’m getting the details right” and “maybe orient more curiously about what some details/nuances were.”
(Note: I am running low on bandwidth to talk about this particular issue. I’ll respond up to 2 more times to clarify any remaining points)
On point 2, I think this is one of those cases where depending on your metric, there’s a strong power gradient in one or the other direction.
On one hand, I agree that Duncan’s faced a lot of often quite nasty criticism on the internet. While I haven’t looked at the stuff on Tumblr, I’m ready to believe that a lot of it was terrible and unfair. There is also a lot of criticism in the comments to this linkpost, and not a lot of praise or agreement by volume.
On the other, Duncan’s employed as an instructor at CFAR—an official representative of the community’s rationality standards, insofar as there’s any official apparatus at all—and the post was approvingly linked by another CFAR staff member.
Also, at the time of my initial comment, one of the top comments—maybe the most-upvoted at the time, not sure—was thanking Duncan for his bravery in writing this, with a response by a LessWrong moderator endorsing this. Other fairly central members of the Bay Area Rationalist and LessWrong communities participated in Dragon Army.
I agree that individuals’ perceptions of costs are likely to be biased in the way you say. I’m not asking you to privilege my perspective here.