I see LW as a place for collaborative truth seeking, emphasis on collaboration. Someone says something wrong, and then we figure out how to say something less wrong, together.

Agreed, except the “emphasis on collaboration” part (which is deeply misguided).

I think the best way to do that is with comments that are kind, truthful, useful, and curious

The best way to do it is the way that does it best. If a “kind” comment is the best way, then write a “kind” comment. If “kindness” is irrelevant, orthogonal, or even detrimental to efficiency and effectiveness of the process, then omit it.

and those are the norms that I, as a high enough karma members of this site, have earned the right to enforce on my posts.

You have been granted that privilege. That is very different from earning a right.

if someone posted on something you wrote that your ideas are stupid for obvious reasons, would you ignore it?

That obviously depends on whether the criticism is valid or not.

If it’s valid, then naturally I wouldn’t ignore it; I’d acknowledge it as valid.

If it’s not valid, then is it obviously invalid? Is that the consensus of other commenters? Do other LW members reply to it in my stead, and/or use the LW voting system to signal their disagreement?

If they do, then there’s no need for me to reply.

If they do not, then there may be a need for a brief reply.

If the criticism is invalid but not obviously so, then a more substantive reply is warranted.

If the criticism is valid but I ignore it, then readers would think less of me.

They would be right to do so. If my ideas are wrong and stupid, and especially if they are wrong and stupid for obvious reasons, then it is good that comments to that effect may be posted under my posts, and it is good that people should think less of me for ignoring those comments.

When people like your comments, it makes them worth responding to if I disagree, especially on my own posts, in order to engage with not just you, but everyone who reads the comments. To fail to do so would be to leave readers with an incomplete picture of my views.

If your post failed to provide a complete picture of your views, then I am doing you—and, much more importantly, all your other readers—a service by writing my comments, and thus giving you the opportunity to rectify that lacuna.

I also genuinely want to figure things out and try to engage with every comment on my posts that I meaningfully can. I’d actually be quite happy if we could some how work out our differences, find our cruxes, and at least if we are going to agree to disagree understand why that fundamentally is. I tried to do this with you a couple times years ago. It didn’t go well. And seeing your most recent comments I could see the same pattern again.

Irrelevant. All of this is irrelevant. However admirable this desire might be, and however understandable might be the failure to fulfill it, it has nothing whatever to do with the question of banning a critic from commenting on your posts, because that is not about you, it is about whether all of your readers, and the LW commentariat, is denied the ability to discuss your ideas without restrictions.

And if you want to “work out our differences, find our cruxes, and at least if we are going to agree to disagree understand why that fundamentally is”, great, I’m for it. If you don’t want to do that, that’s also fine; I am a strong believer in people’s rights to talk to whomever they want, or not. None of that has any bearing whatsoever on the matter of banning, because that, once again, is not about you.

It’s probably to a fault that I either want to find agreement or at least agreement on why we disagree. My persistence in this is also why I have a hard time dropping threads like this. Somewhere I believe that just one more comment and maybe we’ll crack it. It’s why I’m writing this reply right now! But the longer our threads go, the litter my probability of us figuring this out gets.

You are still, bizarrely, treating this as a one-on-one conversation. It simply does not matter why we disagree^[1], as far as the question of banning is concerned. It’s just beside the point. We don’t need to agree, or figure out why we disagree, or anything like that. If you don’t have anything to say to my comments, then say nothing. If saying nothing is intolerable, then reply with a link to this thread, or some sort of boilerplate “I think your criticisms are bad and wrong but I have no interest in arguing about it” reply (which you could perhaps copy-paste from a saved file somewhere, thus saving you even the trouble of typing it out every time).

But none of this—none of it!—is the slightest bit responsive to my point: comments on your posts are not primarily for you, and the question of whether to ban critics from your posts is not primarily about you.

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1. Not that I think it’s a mystery in any case. Really, the question has already been answered to my satisfaction. ↩︎

To say that Eliezer is a moral realist is deeply, deeply misleading.

No, it is not at all misleading. He is quite explicit about that in the linked Arbital article. You might want to read it.

I have read it. I am very familiar with Eliezer’s views on ethics and metaethics.

I repeat that Eliezer uses metaethical terminology in a highly idiosyncratic way. You simply cannot take at face value statements that he makes like “my theory is a moral-realist theory” etc. His uses of the terms “good”, “right”, etc., do not match the standard usages.

Since it is a non-trivial cognitivist theory (it doesn’t make all ethical statements false, or all true, and your ethical beliefs can be mistaken, in contrast to subjectivism) it straightforwardly classifies as a “moral realist” theory in metaethics.

Yes, Eliezer claims that his moral theory is not a subjectivist one. But it is (straightforwardly!) a subjectivist theory.

You might perhaps be able to claim that Eliezer’s theory is a sort of “minimal moral realism”, but it’s certainly not “robust moral realism”.

Phenomenal consciousness (i.e., conscious self-awareness) is clearly not required for pain responses. Many more animals—and much simpler animals—exhibit pain responses, than plausibly possess phenomenal consciousness.

To say that Eliezer is a moral realist is deeply, deeply misleading. Eliezer’s ethical theories correspond to what most philosophers would identify as moral anti-realism (most likely as a form of ethical subjectivism, specifically).

(Eliezer himself has a highly idiosyncratic way of talking about ethical claims and problems in ethics, and while it is perfectly coherent and consistent and even reasonable once you grasp how he’s using words etc., it results in some serious pitfalls in trying to map his views onto the usual moral-philosophical categories.)

It’s worth nothing. How does any of that affect anything I wrote? What’s the idea, here—that if I don’t write my comments, then someone else will just say exactly the same thing, but “more nicely” (or something), therefore nothing is lost if you ban me?

Setting aside the fact that this is obviously false as a trivially demonstrable empirical fact… it strikes me as being absurdly arrogant to make this decision on behalf of everyone who might participate in, and read, your posts and the comments sections thereof.

This might possibly be somewhat justified in some more primitive (or deliberately simpler, or otherwise differently designed) forum/blog system, where there’s no way for the commentariat/readership to express their dissatisfaction with one of the discussion’s participants, so the forum owner/administrator/moderators/whoever have to take it upon themselves to ban commenters who degrade the discussion.

But LW has a voting system! And a fairly advanced one, at that—two-axis voting, reacts, not to mention the ability to collapse/hide entire comment threads… whatever criticism we may level at the design of LW’s commenting features, it certainly can’t be said that commenters and readers lack for ways to express their views on content posted here.

The weird thing is that you can’t even coherently claim to only be concerned about your own benefit. The very post that started this discussion was written (or so you claim therein) out of concern for the well-being and benefit of “the … rationalist crowd”, i.e. the readers and commenters on Less Wrong. So you’re concerned enough for the mental and spiritual well-being and benefit of the LW commentariat to write such a post, but not concerned enough to let them discuss the matter in whatever way they see fit?

How does this laser-like focus on how comments on your posts affect you, personally, fit with the motivation for writing a post like that?

If this were the really your motivation, then you could simply not respond to my comments. (Indeed you wouldn’t even have to read them. “A comment on my post? —oh, it’s Said Achmiz. Surely he has nothing useful to say, and I have nothing to gain by reading this. [dismiss notification]”)

This is as good a time as any to make the following point. In an earlier comment, you wrote:

We’ve gotten into it over many years and at no time have I felt the better for you commenting on my posts.

You seem to believe that this is a relevant, even decisive, consideration. (And you’re not the only one; I’ve seen such sentiments a few times.)

This seems to me to betray a view of Less Wrong discussions that I can only marvel at—but certainly not sympathize with, much less endorse.

If we were having a private, one-on-one conversation—in person, via email, via direct messages or chat or whatever—then of course it would make perfect sense to say “I am gaining nothing from this interaction; I do not expect to gain anything from this interaction; and I have no obligation to continue this interaction—therefore I now terminate it”. Perfectly normal, straightforwardly sensible.

But Less Wrong is a public forum!

Why do you think people post comments under your posts? What do you think is the purpose of doing this, in the minds of the comment authors? What do they get out of it? Do you think that your posts’ comments sections are a series of one-to-one conversations between you and various readers? Do you think that people are commenting on your posts for your benefit?

It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that I never have the authors’ interests in mind when commenting, or that this is of zero importance to me. But as far as I am concerned, insofar as the author of a post might benefit from reading my comments on his post, it is as one of the participants in the discussion. If the post author stands to benefit more, it is because his ideas are the focus of the discussion. (But this doesn’t even always apply.) It’s certainly not because the comments on his posts are being written for him, or to benefit him.

The point of writing a comment (or, for that matter, a post) is to make a contribution to a discussion, out of which some productive outcome (useful knowledge or understanding, etc.) may emerge—for the benefit of all participants, and all readers. That’s why we have a public forum in the first place! The central motivating idea of a public discussion forum is “we all talk to each other, and as a result, we all benefit; and everyone who reads what we write in these public discussions also benefits”.

So when you motivate your banning of my comments from your posts by asking “what do I, personally, gain from Said Achmiz commenting on my posts”, this strikes me as a bizarrely selfish view.

(And I use the word “bizarrely” quite deliberately. An ordinarily selfish view might be, say, the idea that you write your posts in order to promote your ideas, to convince others, etc., and therefore any comment is evaluated only on whether it helps you to do that. But the idea that comments are to be evaluated by whether they make you, personally, “better”—but not by whether any other participant in the discussion (never mind any readers) are benefited—I don’t think such a view would ever have even occurred to me, had I not seen it expressed by you and others.)

In short: why in the world should it matter whether you “feel the better” for me commenting? If you don’t like my comments—fine; just don’t read them and don’t respond to them. Easy.

If instead you ban me from posting them at all, then it seems reasonable to suspect other motives.

P.S.: Here’s Tycho of Penny Arcade opining on a similar situation:

I go to the comments not to find consensus but literally to find people criticizing the article. I want to see the idea of that article discussed. I am not of the opinion that most articles I see are very good; and even if they were, they're not scripture. For me they're like the sausage casing that contains the actual food, which is the community processing the data. Independent of any other consideration, just at a lower level of magnification, I don't think we get smarter this way. I don't think we achieve robustness just rolling around in a bunch of ideologically hermetic spheres.

Well, it’s true that this post is completely ignorant of literally decades of discussion about this—from mailing list posts to blog posts to articles to books (including an entire chapter in R:AZ, and of course Superintelligence, etc.). The author seems to have made no effort at all, not only to review, but to even acknowledge the existence, of previous work on the subject.

But it’s also AI slop:

About the authors: Max Abecassis in collaboration with Claude Sonnet 4.

This, of course, also (at least partially) explains the first point.

(As the next paragraph tells us, the author seems to have something of a specialty in writing and posting this sort of “written in collaboration with [some LLM]” stuff.)

So what possible reason is there to engage with this stuff?

I think most people’s most burning question if they were talking to a superintelligence … would be “is there a god? …”

“Answer”

Everyone else who leaves critical comments does so in a way that does not so consistently feel like an attack, and I often feel like I can engage with them in ways where, even if we don’t end up agreeing, we at least had a productive conversation.

Of course they do, because the people who would criticize you in substantive, serious ways… just don’t bother.

If you see only one person saying a thing, then the correct conclusion isn’t “only that guy thinks that thing”—it’s “out of all those who think that thing, only that guy cares enough / is contrarian enough / has the time and energy / etc. to speak up”.

This is especially true if you actively discourage saying that thing.

You earlier gave the example of this 2018 post. Well, I went back and read through the comments section. None of the top-level comments were mine. The most critical comments were not mine. The comments that referenced the Sequences were not mine. The comments you deleted from that comments section (and whose author you threatened with banning from your posts) were not mine. Much (I think most, though I haven’t counted) of that comments section consists of strongly critical comments, written by people who aren’t me.

That was in 2018. But those other critical commenters either stopped engaging with you or essentially stopped commenting on LW entirely, largely as a result of this sort of “ban the critics” behavior. I’m the one who’s still around. You’ve had to resort to banning me from your posts, not because my comments were somehow unusually “adversarial” or “unproductive” or any such thing—nothing remotely like that is true (and I invite anyone who doubts this to check out the above link)—but simply because I haven’t gotten fed up with Less Wrong and left on my own, and am still pointing out when you write things that are wrong and/or nonsensical. That’s all.

There’s something subtle about Said’s style of commenting that is hard for me to pin down that makes it unhelpfully adversarial in a way that I’m sure some people like but I find incredibly frustrating.

“Subtle”! No, it’s actually not subtle at all. It’s a very simple dynamic: you write something that is wrong and/or nonsensical; I point this out; you do not like this being pointed out. Well, who does? It’s embarrassing! Or, in other words:

Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right.

Schopenhauer also suggests a sure-fire remedy, to prevent such unpleasant scenarios:

The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment.

Hmm. Yeah, that’s a tough row to hoe.

I don’t know about you, but to me, “frank discussion, out of which correct judgments emerge” seems a lot easier and more reliable than “always be correct, right from the start”. Of course, if you banish from your comment sections anyone who tells you that you’re wrong, then you only have the harder option available to you. I don’t envy you in that case.