Happy to hear that I didn’t overreach too much, I debated posting that comment for a while.
To me this feels very relevant to a discussion of whether rationalists are allowing racism/sexism to ferment.
I do consider it an important piece of evidence, but for example ACX comments sections, open threads, and culture war sections of the ACX Reddit are still often quite nasty, and frequently feature some notorious bigots (most notoriously HBD people) who have been long banned from LessWrong. For example, Steven Sailer and Emil O. W. Kirkegaard are not all too uncommon commenters in ACX comment sections.
I think LessWrong itself is not very likely to allow bigoted content compared to many other platforms where rationalist congregate. This is not enough in my view, and it would be wise to hold a harder line.
For simplicity I’ll put aside some disagreements about which spaces are rationalist, and assume we’d agree on what lines we’d like to draw.
I think you’re assuming a higher level of control among rationalists than what actually exists. “Must” requires “can”, and I don’t think we have much of that.
If he wanted to, Scott could take a harsher moderation policy on his substack. I’d like it if he did. Frankly, some of the commenters are mindkilled morons, and my impression is there were less of those in the SSC days. But at the end of the day it’s his decision, and there’s no organization within the rationality community that could even say “he’s wrong to leave it like that” without it being a huge overreach. Similarly for whoever controls the ACX subreddit- I suppose you could try to convince the mods to run it like LW, but they’d be unlikely to change their mind, and if they did the most likely result would be the mindkilled types going off to make an “ACX 2″ subreddit.
Even more so with Twitter and in-person communications. Indicating or pattern-matching an association with rationalists does not give other rationalists any say over a misbehaving person.
Ehh I like this sentiment but feel like you overstate it a bit. We can’t control Scott and that’s good and normal and how things should be. But we sure can express our opinions about it, and he sure does listen to those opinions to some extent, and even if he doesn’t, spectators from other communities will draw conclusions from what we tend to vocally like or dislike.
I think it would be an improvement if we pushed out all the worst, most mindkilled commentators to an ACX 2 subreddit. I think it’s pretty silly to suggest that wouldn’t be a significant change in terms of what message we project about our norms and what spaces we make available for people to use.
Happy to hear that I didn’t overreach too much, I debated posting that comment for a while.
I do consider it an important piece of evidence, but for example ACX comments sections, open threads, and culture war sections of the ACX Reddit are still often quite nasty, and frequently feature some notorious bigots (most notoriously HBD people) who have been long banned from LessWrong. For example, Steven Sailer and Emil O. W. Kirkegaard are not all too uncommon commenters in ACX comment sections.
I think LessWrong itself is not very likely to allow bigoted content compared to many other platforms where rationalist congregate. This is not enough in my view, and it would be wise to hold a harder line.
For simplicity I’ll put aside some disagreements about which spaces are rationalist, and assume we’d agree on what lines we’d like to draw.
I think you’re assuming a higher level of control among rationalists than what actually exists. “Must” requires “can”, and I don’t think we have much of that.
If he wanted to, Scott could take a harsher moderation policy on his substack. I’d like it if he did. Frankly, some of the commenters are mindkilled morons, and my impression is there were less of those in the SSC days. But at the end of the day it’s his decision, and there’s no organization within the rationality community that could even say “he’s wrong to leave it like that” without it being a huge overreach. Similarly for whoever controls the ACX subreddit- I suppose you could try to convince the mods to run it like LW, but they’d be unlikely to change their mind, and if they did the most likely result would be the mindkilled types going off to make an “ACX 2″ subreddit.
Even more so with Twitter and in-person communications. Indicating or pattern-matching an association with rationalists does not give other rationalists any say over a misbehaving person.
Ehh I like this sentiment but feel like you overstate it a bit. We can’t control Scott and that’s good and normal and how things should be. But we sure can express our opinions about it, and he sure does listen to those opinions to some extent, and even if he doesn’t, spectators from other communities will draw conclusions from what we tend to vocally like or dislike.
I think it would be an improvement if we pushed out all the worst, most mindkilled commentators to an ACX 2 subreddit. I think it’s pretty silly to suggest that wouldn’t be a significant change in terms of what message we project about our norms and what spaces we make available for people to use.