I agree with this point, and it’s what originally motivated this paragraph of the OP:
It does seem important to point out that some of the standards used to assess that risk stem from processing what happened in the wake of the allegations. A brief characterization is that I think the community started to take more seriously not just the question of “will I be better off adopting this idea?” but also the question “will this idea mislead someone else, or does it seem designed to?”. If I had my current standards in 2017, I think they would have sufficed to ban ialdabaoth then, or at least do more to identify the need for arguing against the misleading parts of his ideas.
One nonobvious point from this is that 2017 is well before the accusations were made, but a point at which I think there was sufficient community unease that a consensus could have been built if we had the systems to build that consensus absent accusations.
OK but what’s actually being done is a one-off ban of someone with multiple credible public rape allegations against them. The specific policy goal of developing better immune responses to epistemic corruption is just not relevant to that and I don’t see how anyone on the mod team is doing anything best explained by an attempt to solve that problem.
OK but what’s actually being done is a one-off ban of someone with multiple credible public rape allegations against them.
Also, what’s actually being done is a one-off ban of a user whose name starts with ‘i.’ That is, yes, I agree with the facts you present, and contest the claim of relevance / the act of presenting an interpretation as if it were a brute fact.
There is a symmetry to the situation, of course, where I am reporting what I believe my intentions are / the interpretation I was operating under while I made the decision, but no introspective access is perfect, and perhaps there are counterfactuals where our models predict different things and it would have gone the way you predict instead of the way I predict. Even so, I think it would be a mistake to not have the stated motivation as a hypothesis in your model to update towards or against as time goes on.
The specific policy goal of developing better immune responses to epistemic corruption is just not relevant to that
According to me, the relevance is that this action was taken to further that policy goal; I agree it is only weak evidence that we will succeed at that goal or even successfully implement policies that work towards that goal. I view this as a declaration of intent, not success, and specifically the intent that “next time, we will act against people who are highly manipulative and deceitful before they have clear victims” instead of the more achievable but less useful “once there’s consensus you committed crimes, not posting on LW is part of your punishment”.
I agree with this point, and it’s what originally motivated this paragraph of the OP:
One nonobvious point from this is that 2017 is well before the accusations were made, but a point at which I think there was sufficient community unease that a consensus could have been built if we had the systems to build that consensus absent accusations.
OK but what’s actually being done is a one-off ban of someone with multiple credible public rape allegations against them. The specific policy goal of developing better immune responses to epistemic corruption is just not relevant to that and I don’t see how anyone on the mod team is doing anything best explained by an attempt to solve that problem.
Also, what’s actually being done is a one-off ban of a user whose name starts with ‘i.’ That is, yes, I agree with the facts you present, and contest the claim of relevance / the act of presenting an interpretation as if it were a brute fact.
There is a symmetry to the situation, of course, where I am reporting what I believe my intentions are / the interpretation I was operating under while I made the decision, but no introspective access is perfect, and perhaps there are counterfactuals where our models predict different things and it would have gone the way you predict instead of the way I predict. Even so, I think it would be a mistake to not have the stated motivation as a hypothesis in your model to update towards or against as time goes on.
According to me, the relevance is that this action was taken to further that policy goal; I agree it is only weak evidence that we will succeed at that goal or even successfully implement policies that work towards that goal. I view this as a declaration of intent, not success, and specifically the intent that “next time, we will act against people who are highly manipulative and deceitful before they have clear victims” instead of the more achievable but less useful “once there’s consensus you committed crimes, not posting on LW is part of your punishment”.