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.
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.