The problem is that I also think this of other users who we aren’t banning, which suggests that our standard for “allowed to post on Less Wrong” is lower than “would be a good master.”
I interpreted ialdabaoth as trying to be a master, in a way that I do not interpret most of the people who fail my “would be a good master” check. (Most of them are just not skilled in that sort of thing and don’t seek it out.) If there are people you think would both predictably mislead their students and appear to be trying to recruit students, I’m interested in hearing about it.
I think I’m much more worried than you about the failure mode where something claiming to make intellectual progress is actually doing something else
This is possible; my suspicion is that we have similar levels of dispreference for that and different models of how attempts to make intellectual progress go astray. I try to be upfront about when I make pragmatic concessions, as I think you’ve have some evidence of, in part so that when I am not making such a concession it’s more believable. [Of course, for someone without observations of that sort of thing, I don’t expect me claiming that I do it to be much evidence.]
I interpreted ialdabaoth as trying to be a master, in a way that I do not interpret most of the people who fail my “would be a good master” check. (Most of them are just not skilled in that sort of thing and don’t seek it out.) If there are people you think would both predictably mislead their students and appear to be trying to recruit students, I’m interested in hearing about it.
This is possible; my suspicion is that we have similar levels of dispreference for that and different models of how attempts to make intellectual progress go astray. I try to be upfront about when I make pragmatic concessions, as I think you’ve have some evidence of, in part so that when I am not making such a concession it’s more believable. [Of course, for someone without observations of that sort of thing, I don’t expect me claiming that I do it to be much evidence.]