Canât because Iâve received an indefinite, possibly permanent soft ban (severe rate limit of 2 comments per week) since January from the EA Forum mods with a warning that it may escalate to a full ban.
Itâs not really about something I can change â or at least that Iâm willing to change â because itâs ultimately an editorial decision by the mods about what kind of conversations, content, and disagreement they want on the EA Forum. In my understanding (which could be wrong), they want the EA Forum to be more of a collaborative space where contributors are uplifted, and not have too much emphasis on debate or criticism. And/âor they just fundamentally disagree with what I think and the way I think (e.g., they think that what I take to be the cruxes of disagreements in many cases is not whatâs really the crux), to such an extent they donât think itâs productive to discuss on the EA Forum. So, an editorial decision.[1]
Anyway, for people who do want to engage in these sorts of discussions, Substack is a great place for it. And if not Substack, where else do people have these sort of discussions these days? Uhh, Reddit?
(Really long footnote for people who want a longer explanation.) Also, in many cases the users agree with the mods on this, and thatâs part of why the mods made this decision. A lot of users donât want to engage with too much criticism or debate, and tend to downvote posts or comments that are negative or critical rather than collaborative and uplifting. Which is a perspective I can certainly understand and empathize with. (Although, in my opinion, it also contributes to a filter bubble/âecho chamber-type effect.)
This is all in my understanding and partially me reading between the lines, since I did not fully understand the explanation the mods gave me and found parts of it really confusing. This is me trying my best to reconstruct what they meant by what they said. I could be getting it wrong. I donât really know.
The mods also mentioned civility as one concern, but I never really got to the bottom of that with them. I got the impression this was a much less important consideration than the other things described above. The mods seem pretty reluctant to moderate for civility on the EA Forum in general, and mostly just let things slide. So, that seemed like a minor concern to them relative to the other stuff. (Again, this is all in my understanding and my attempt to make sense of an explanation I found difficult to follow. So, I could be wrong.)
Although I think you and I would have several disagreements on the AI topic, I will put my vote in, to the extent anyone cares, that a ban was not justified in this case. There are things youâve written that annoy me or that Iâd have said differently, but in general I donât think these are anywhere close to warranting a ban (or frankly the level of downvotes some of your comments have gotten). I also think in several discussions youâve been involved in that went unproductively, the people you were responding to or who responded to you are at least equally to blame and sometimes have behaved worse, including clearly uncivil behave (e.g. clearly intentionally insulting phrasing, unreasonable accusations of bad faith etc.).
Thanks for sharing, Yarrow. @Toby Tremlettđč, have you considered being transparent about the reasons for soft and hard bans? I think the EA Forum used to have a thread where they were announced. I believe transparency is important to keep the moderation team accountable.
In my understanding (which could be wrong), they want the EA Forum to be more of a collaborative space where contributors are uplifted, and not have too much emphasis on debate or criticism. And/âor they just fundamentally disagree with what I think and the way I think (e.g., they think that what I take to be the cruxes of disagreements in many cases is not whatâs really the crux), to such an extent they donât think itâs productive to discuss on the EA Forum. So, an editorial decision.
I have limited context. However, based on the above, I get the impression a soft ban is not justified. I do not think people should be banned due to disagreements with their thinking.
Itâs likely we should invest in public mod comments again, as this case underlines, itâs pretty unfair to Yarrow to have to explain it to their interlocutors.
As you might guess I strongly disagree with pretty much every aspect of Yarrowâs framing of the rate-limit we applied to their account. Iâll talk to other mods about whether we want to reinstate the public comments, and if so Iâll share more detail on the Yarrow decision in said public comment.
A quick version is that we made this decision because of the way that Yarrow disagrees with people, not the fact that they do. Primarily because of repeatedly sneer-y and snarky comments[1], but also because of generally unproductive and attritional disagreements, for example, see this description I sent to Yarrow at the time of the rate-limit:
âThere is a clear pattern in your comments â you seem to have particularly unproductive disagreements with other users, generally due to an overly literal interpretation on your part, or excess defensiveness. This is no great sin of yours, but it isnât great for the quality of Forum discussion, especially when you are naturally so prolific.â
This wasnât a decision taken lightly (many gdocs involved), as I also said in the message: âI still think you could be a particularly valuable Forum user if you changed how you engaged a bitâ.
If readers take anything away from this commentâI want to underline that we really donât want to discourage disagreement on this platform. Itâs a key part of our theory of why this forum is valuable. But valuable disagreement requires good faith and mutual understanding. Another line I sent to Yarrow:
âCritical voices like yours are a crucial part of a functioning epistemic (or epistemological if you prefer) community, but if we arenât careful about how we integrate more spirited voices, we could end up with a breakdown of trust and understanding on our platform.â
PS- I havenât spoken to the mod team about this so these are my takes.
And incidentally I disagree with the line: âThe mods seem pretty reluctant to moderate for civility on the EA Forum in general, and mostly just let things slideâ. If you see someone breaking our civility norms, please report the comment or post in the three dot menu.
Weighing in as a comment I made has been cited below: thank you for your moderation efforts.
Iâm an admittedly infrequent poster/âcommenter on the Forum, in no small part because I donât have a lot of time on my hands. As such Iâm often discouraged from engaging with certain topics or (potentially) productive disagreements because I simply cannot afford to engage with the kind of [charitable ? detailed : gish galloping] posts and comments exemplified in this thread.
Just wanted to provide something to counterbalance any adverse selection in responses.
Hey, just stepping into this thread to say that Tobyâs out with a family emergency. I know many of you put a lot of time and care into the Forum, and Iâm sorry the rest of moderation team doesnât have capacity to engage in this comment section in his stead.
I feel that there could be greater transparency in how these moderation decisions are done. In my opinion, although Yarrow has been quite confrontational at times, they havenât really done anything that would necessitate such a punishment. While the forum is allowed to moderate its users in any way it likes, one shouldnât be rate-limited just because they have disagreements, especially if their opinions go against the mainstream opinion on the forum. This puts the neutrality of the forum moderation at question.
Personally, I have pretty bad experiences writing on this forum. I get highly-upvoted comments from people who seemingly havenât even read what I wrote and instead throw in bad-faith arguments, which I find borderline insulting and certainly unwelcoming. See, for example, this comment that was given as a reply to my text, where I pointed out that many sources use narrative arguments (stories, parables, etc.) instead of technical evidence. The commenter accused me of writing a narrative argument⊠which is simply not true, as my text was not written in a form of a story. Either they didnât read at all what I wrote or intentionally misunderstood it. And that is the most upvoted comment!
In general, the quality of discussion on this forum is very low. I feel it is pretty harsh to say this, but it is my experience and it strongly discourages me from participating at all. In this atmosphere, rate-limiting Yarrow appears not as an impartial decision, since many other, much more problematic comments appear in the forum all the time.
I think it reflects poorly on you that a âhighly-upvotedâ comment was a stronger update towards âthe Forum at large is wrongâ more than âyou were wrongâ or even âyou should change how you communicateâ.
On the object level: I read your post, and like ~half of people who reacted to it, disagreed with it; specifically I think it has narrative-like qualities, and regardless of how much we quibble over the precise point at which text can be reasonably called ânarrativeâ, I thought it was non-evidence-based argumentation, which you were arguing against.
I think in general it is bad forum etiquette to âsnitch tagâ like this. I think youâre misrepresenting my comment and raising it in an irrelevant context.
In the context of my post, the term ânarrative argumentâ was really clearly used to refer to fictional stories embedded in a text as part of its argument, such as AI2027âČs short story or the parables in Y&Sâs book. My text simply does not have that.
By completely misunderstanding even basic concepts such as ânarrative argumentâ, your comment was just a snarky jab and had little value. It didnât comment the actual content of my text, instead, and largely unjustified by any real analysis, it tried to âget back at meâ by blaming me for things I blame others for, like non-evidence based argumentation and narrative arguments.
Since I find it difficult to believe that you really donât understand what a narrative argument is, I reasonably count a high probability for you simply acting in bad faith.
I donât know if âsnitchingâ you is allowed or not, and I apologize for the moderators if itâs not, but I think using examples of bad behavior is relevant in discussions of what is allowed on the forum.
I empathize with your experience on the EA Forum. The top comment on this post is a clear example where someone just fundamentally misunderstood the point you were trying to make, and responded in an unhelpful and kinda snarky way. Then when you clarified your point to them, they just repeated their original point again. Really frustrating. Sometimes it seems like people donât have the patience to deeply engage, yet they do have the patience to comment (often rudely). Which is not a good headspace for discussion.
It could potentially be nice to have alternatives to the EA Forum where stronger discussion norms around civility and generosity are upheld. I donât know if there is a critical mass of people to support that, though. I can potentially send a group chat invite to anyone who wants to message me privately here or on Substack, or email me.
The biggest thing for the mods to understand is when you let people act abusively, it pisses people off so much, and itâs so hurtful and feels so yucky, people donât want to engage anymore. There are people on the EA Forum who effectively have a hecklerâs veto because they just make the experience of using the forum too unpleasant to tolerate for anyone they disagree with. And the end result is you get an insular culture, where even pointing out objective, uncontroversial flaws in research or analysis gets strongly discouraged.
I had a horrible time pointing out errors in a survey. I got a brusque, dismissive response. And a lot of downvotes. The errors were later corrected, but I didnât get any apology or even acknowledgement. What a thankless job!
You have to be able to tolerate the discomfort of disagreement and intellectual criticism, to have the patience to deeply engage, to have curiosity about other peopleâs perspectives and humility about your own, in order to think well and do good analysis. Using personal insults and hostility to shut down disagreement and criticism is not intellectually healthy.
Hi Toby. Me and Toby had a back in forth about this back via private messages in December and January, and this public exchange of comments now is pretty much recreating the conversation we had privately. I didnât know then and still donât know now to what extent I just donât understand Tobyâs perspective but could understand it better with more investment, versus to what extent Toby and I just have an editorial, intellectual, or moral disagreement.
For instance, I noticed that some people were using the âMade me laughâ reaction not for its intended purpose but to express ridicule and mockery on comments they disagreed with. I reported this, and I think I may have even separately messaged the mods about this, and I also sent screenshots to Toby when we were talking privately about civility. I never got to the bottom of whether Toby (or the other mods) thinks this is within the bounds of acceptable civility on the EA Forum, or what.
To me, I feel like openly laughing at someone, expressing ridicule or mockery, is, like, paradigmatically uncivil. Right? Or maybe not everyone sees it that way. I donât know if Toby or the other mods agree with me on that or not. I never heard anything back about that other than Toby just saying he disagreed that some of the examples of behaviours I thought broke civility norms actually broke civility norms. Does this include laugh reacting in order to mock people? I really donât know. Toby, any thoughts on that? Maybe would be good to clarify to people if itâs open season on doing this or if they might get punished for it. I feel like it would be a good thing to discourage...
If you find yourself in a position in the future where you want to encourage someone to engage differently on the EA Forum, it would be helpful to be more specific in what youâre asking them to do. For instance, phrases like âunproductive disagreementsâ, âoverly literal interpretationâ, âexcess defensivenessâ are very general. What do you specifically mean? These are also subjective evaluations that are not self-explanatory. Thereâs no real way to intuit what someone means by this. I think a more effective approach would be something like:
Point to 1-2 examples of problematic comments
Explain in at least 1-2 sentences what you think the problem with the comment is (ideally in plain English)
(Optional) Possibly give a hypothetical example of the sort of thing you would have liked them to say instead
I found your explanations really hard to follow, as in, I didnât and still donât understand what youâre trying to say. At one point, I asked you to give me examples of comments you thought were problematic, and I didnât get an answer on that. So⊠whatâs the goal there? Whatâs the outcome supposed to be? I donât know how someone could adjust their behaviour without being given specific information. (The explanation you quoted also came after the soft ban or rate limit, not before. Before the soft ban, there was even less information.) In the future, you should explain what you want someone to change. If you just say things like âunproductiveâ, âoverly literalâ, âexcess defensivenessâ, etc., thatâs not particularly more helpful than just saying âwrite better commentsâ. I think everyone should try to have productive disagreements rather than unproductive ones, not interpret things too literally, and not be excessively defensive. I try to do these things. But saying that without any specifics is not really actionable input. What do you mean by that? What would you specifically like to change?
I definitely agree that if I had a pattern of repeatedly making sneering and snarky comments, that would 100% be a justification to fully ban me from the forum forever â not just a rate limit or a soft ban. If I were moderating a forum like this one, I would certainly ban people who did that with very little lenience. But, I dunno, sneering and snarking just seems like par for the course for the EA Forum â including using laugh emojis to mock people you disagree with. (I donât think that justifies engaging in it, and I donât intentionally engage in it, Iâm just saying sneering and snark are part of the forumâs de facto norms. And reporting it seems to do nothing, so tolerating it seems to be de facto moderation policy.)
My experience of using the EA Forum was enduring people insulting me, making fun of me, or making accusations (e.g., of bad faith), and then not retaliating in response but remaining polite. (I never used the laugh emoji mockingly, I never insinuated that someone was stupid, I never accused someone of bad faith.) In retrospect, I think that was a very unwise and deeply unhealthy, masochistic decision. After like the third time this happened (and especially after seeing that moderators did not respond to reports), I should have just stopped posting on the EA Forum. I shouldnât have bothered. Continuing to engage was a mistake.
I think if you want high-quality disagreement or critical engagement on the EA Forum, you have to count on a person falling within the very thin segment of the Venn diagram where they have enough critical awareness to see some of the weaknesses in some popular EA ideas, yet also not enough critical awareness to realize that they should not make themselves suffer by arguing about those things on the EA Forum. And I guess Iâm glad that there are very few people like that, lol.
I think the EA Forum and the EA community represses disagreement and criticism pretty hard, and pretty much just doesnât want to hear it. At least when it comes to certain ideas like imminent AGI. On one hand, I would want to encourage people who disagree with ideas like imminent AGI to engage with the EA Forum to improve the discourse. On the other hand, I would probably warn them that itâs more pain than itâs worth, and ultimately is unlikely to go anywhere. So, honestly, I think Iâd just advise them not to do it.
I think intellectually maybe a lot of people in the EA community believe they want to hear disagreement and criticism, but then when they actually encounter it, they hate it, and they hate the person doing it. If this truly isnât the case and itâs something the EA Forum/âEA community wants to change, then donât look at intentions, look at outcomes. Is high-quality disagreement and criticism of popular ideas happening? If not, why not? If not, how could it be better encouraged and incentivized? A huge one would just to be nicer (e.g., not call people stupid), and to moderate the forum to disallow incivility (e.g., remove comments that call people stupid).
I think this discussion is all sort of a moot point, ultimately, because this disagreement about moderation of the EA Forum is just a microcosm of broader intellectual and moral disagreements between me and some of the most highly engaged EA Forum users that has been the focus of the conversation all along. That conversation sort of reached its natural conclusion anyway, and I summed up my concluding thoughts here. Moderation is just one more topic we disagree on, and we disagree on moderation mostly because of all our other intellectual and moral disagreements â like whatâs civility vs. incivility, what are good epistemic standards vs. bad ones, what are the real substantive cruxes of certain disagreements vs. what are semantic distractions or unimportant technicalities, what arguments are compelling vs. uncompelling, whatâs the appropriate role of scientific racism in effective altruism (i.e., none vs. some), etc. At this point, whatâs the point of talking about it further? Itâs been done to death.
Iâve about 99% given up on EA Forum, yet there is some nagging doubt in the back of my mind that thereâs some thread of something in here that Iâm not done with yet. Somehow I still have hope that there is some glimpse of possibility of constructive conversations still, continuing off of what was started here, but not on this platform (which I feel is hopeless at this point, particularly the level of incivility). Iâm not really sure if thereâs any point to it or not⊠I donât know. But I feel like maybe there is some potential for some constructive discussion on another platform like Substack. There would maybe even be some potential for someone to set up a platform focused on facilitating productive disagreement around EA-related ideas, where civility is enforced. But I have to imagine the interest in that is so tiny, there would be no point. Leaving this door open for anyone who wants to contact me here or by email, who feels curious or has a good idea...
But, I dunno, sneering and snarking just seems like par for the course for the EA Forum â including using laugh emojis to mock people you disagree with.
Again, this is another issue with the current lack of moderation transparency on the Forum. Misuse of the laugh react is seen as breaking forum norms, and (AFAIK) in almost every case has led to at least a moderator message.
Civility enforcement is a major part of what we do as moderators. Itâs inevitable that some borderline cases will remain on the site such that someone motivated to find themâas you wereâwill be able to.
Bit of a side-point but the amount of civility enforcement we do has been one of the reasons Iâve been reluctant to publicise mod actions. I appreciate being able to send someone a more casual message for butting up against guidelines rather than having to call them out publicly (which is a far more embarassing result of what can be a fairly minor infraction).
If you find yourself in a position in the future where you want to encourage someone to engage differently on the EA Forum, it would be helpful to be more specific in what youâre asking them to do.
Itâs hard to respond to snark like this without snark, but itâd be pretty ironic if I did. What Iâll say is, firstly, itâs gone pretty well the other times Iâve done it.
Secondly, I have tried to be specific, but it has been easier to explain the snarkiness than the broader problem with how youâve interacted with people on the Forum.
Unfortunately, I donât have the time to write a post like Habrykaâs here, which might be required to explain the kind of impact that I think you were having on Forum discourse.
One section from that post raises the concept of âAsymmetric effort ratiosâ. This is definitely part of our moderation decision. At one point, if I remember correctly, you wrote almost a fifth of the words on the Forum in a week. You are very productive of long comments, which are often packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings. This is part of why a rate-limit was the solution we arrived at. In small doses, you can be a valuable contributor, but without limit, it becomes unfairly taxing on your interlocutors.
Apologies that I wonât be able to explain this to you to a degree you will find satisfying. Like I said, none of this was an easy decision, but I do think that it is whatâs best for the Forum.
Again, I havenât spoken with other mods about this comment, they are free to disagree.
One section from that post raises the concept of âAsymmetric effort ratiosâ. This is definitely part of our moderation decision. At one point, if I remember correctly, you wrote almost a fifth of the words on the Forum in a week. You are very productive of long comments, which are often packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings. This is part of why a rate-limit was the solution we arrived at. In small doses, you can be a valuable contributor, but without limit, it becomes unfairly taxing on your interlocutors.
I feel like the issue addressed in the Said Saga is somewhat the opposite of what it seems like Yarrow does. A paradigmatic example of the bad bahavior attributed to Said was posting extremely short comments, such as just saying âexamples?â. Its obviously extremely easy to type a one word comment, and the possibility of adding additional examples of something a poster describes isnât exactly a deep insight. The asymetry is that it is very easy for Said to post a comment like that but would take a lot of effort for the original poster to respond providing examples, giving rise to the complaint that Said wasnât willing to put in equal effort.
This doesnât seem to be true at all of Yarrow, and producing a large quantity of words on the forum seems like it is actually contrary to the type of behavior that Said was alleged to have engaged in. Part of the issue is that lots of Saidâs comments were super brief! Yarrow also seems to write plenty of top level posts and many of their comments are on their own posts, again this is the exact opposite of part of the issue identified with Said, where a critical part of thbe asymetry is about the dynamic of commenting vs posting.
Yarrow also doesnât seem to do the âjust asking questionsâ style that Habryka claims to identify in Saidâs comments, which I think is also a big part of why karma might not be sufficient. People may be hesitant to downvote comments on a post that are just a question, thus creating a possibility of negative behavior that systematically evades the karma system. But Yarrow seems to be pretty open in their criticism and often writes extended comments (not just one or two sentence questions), and you identify that the issue seems to be present in many of their downvoted comments. Why is the karma system not sufficient in that case? If the concern is posters feeling the need to respond to comments, I think that is mitigated strongly when those comments are downvoted.
In general, it seems like Yarrow actually does many of the things that supposedly would have improved Saidâs commenting, and the issues is essentially the opposite (writing too much rather than too little).
In both cases it seems like lots of moderator effort was devoted towards a specific user, which I definitely think is a reasonable thing for moderators to react too. At a certain point moderators canât just be expending infinite time and effort just devoted to stuff that is going on with one user.
At the same time, it does seem to me that there is another asymetry present here, where the voting/âmoderator attention/âbanning etc. is being deployed more harshly towards someone who is a critic/âdisagrees with popular ideas in the community vs people who express popular ideas or arenât critical. I think reviewing the context of Yarrowâs posts/âcomments and the reactions/âresponses to them on the forum strongly suggests this. There are definitely times when Yarrow reacts in ways that I donât see as ideal and which I can understand people having issues with, but many times this is in response to other forum users also behaving questionably, often in a more egregiously than Yarrow. It seems likely to me that Yarrow being critical of popular ideas in the community is an important factor in the different responses.
Why I care
I feel like I semi-frequently find myself defending people who I probably have significant disagreements with (such as in this case with Yarrow) on here/âlesswrong because it seems like there is a tendency within the EA/ârationality community to make convoluted meta-arguments for why critics are doing something bad/ââinsuffciently truthseekingâ/ââburning the commonsâ-y and I think this is bad and not productive. These communities are indeed much more open to criticism than a lot of online communities (where disagreeing with popular ideas with just get you instantly insulted and/âor banned), but I still think a more sophisticated defense mechanism against critics is alive and well.
Iâm particularly interested/âconcerned about this because I believe that we will need pretty substantial policy actions on AI, and that this will likely require convincing people who have very different worldviews of certain things about AI. I view conversations on places like the EA forum or lesswrong as good testing grounds for how this might go, but in a place where it should be substanially easier than it would be in the policy arena. In my mind, if people are struggling to have conversations about AI with Yarrow (who is likely going to be more pleasant to discuss this issue with than 90% of people who donât already agree), I donât think that is a good sign for how this community is approaching that challenge of getting a diverse coalition on-side on the AI issue.
Thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it. Iâm grateful for how kind and thoughtful this comment is.
On the moderator time thing, I just want to say that Toby only ever sent me 3 messages regarding moderation on the EA Forum. There was an initial message (452 words) informing me of a temporary rate limit/âsoft ban. This was my first communication from any of the moderators. After I replied, there was a shorter follow-up message (200 words) where Toby mentioned he didnât have time to provide examples of problematic comments. Then there was a third and final message (319 words) informing me the temporary rate limit/âsoft ban had been made permanent. That was the full extent of the communication.
That third and final comment was the first and only time Toby explained this reason for the ban, which heâs quoted in this thread a few times:
However there is a clear pattern in your comments â you seem to have particularly unproductive disagreements with other users, generally due to an overly literal interpretation on your part, or excess defensiveness. This is no great sin of yours, but it isnât great for the quality of Forum discussion, especially when you are naturally so prolific.
Prior to that, the reason he had cited was snarkiness. But by the time I was banned, that explanation had changed to the above. As mentioned, I asked for examples of snarky comments and Toby said he didnât have time to provide them.
At some point between messages, I explained to Toby how I was taking the feedback to heart. I described writing three drafts of the same comment to soften the tone, and linked to the end result.
By the time the soft ban was made permanent, the explanation for the ban had changed from snarkiness to âunproductive disagreements, overly literal interpretation, excess defensivenessâ which Toby had not mentioned previously, and didnât explain in any more specificity than whatâs quoted above.
Toby sent me 971 words by private message and wrote 863 words in this thread (not including quotes). So, the amount of writing he did on this thread is about the same as he did with me via private message.
For comparison, your comment â the one above Iâm replying to now â is 820 words (excluding quotes). So, that comment is about the total length of the correspondence I received regarding my soft ban.
Tobyâs comments on this thread are way more candid than the private messages, and present entirely new reasoning for the soft ban that he had never explained previously. For example, the idea of writing comments that are too long, or writing too many comments, or writing comments âpacked with hard to dispel misunderstandingsâ was never brought up to me before now. (I also find this to be pretty harsh language.)
If this took up a lot of Tobyâs time behind the scenes, or other moderatorsâ time, I guess I wouldnât know. Iâm just reporting what I was able to see on my end. If a lot of time was spent on moderation behind the scenes, I guess I would wonder on what, exactly?
Yeah, Iâm trying to maintain openness to different possibilities on the time issue to an extent since I donât really know what happened. If I had to venture a guess (which could obviously be wrong), Iâd say something like this:
Other forum users who got frustrated with your posts/âcomments reach out to the mod team privately, mod team has extended discussions amongst themselves, decides on the soft ban, and then reaches out to you to tell you. If this is what happened, I can imagine that it did take a reasonable amount of time and also its understandable that the mod team would want to incorporate feedback from users, but I would say this is a mistake on the part of the mod team if thatâs what happened. If youâre talking here about the value of being able to reach out privately, wouldnât this be the time to do that, before going to the soft ban? If youâre not making the decision lightly and discussing a lot and writing google docs, couldnât you copy some examples of problematic comments or posts from these documents fairly easily?
I think a prcess where there is a lot of back channelling has a siginificant risk of filter bubble/âecho chamber issues as you mention, similar to what Habryka calls the âlinkedin attractorâ in the post linked above.
Iâm generally of the belief that people should work on hashing out their own disagreements more rather than escalating to meta/âmoderation issues. Taking moderation actions because someone writes a lot of âhard to dispel misunderstandingsâ seems like it is extremely likely to be filtered through the lens of what a mod already agrees/âdisagrees with, and so is likely to be unevenly applied against critics.
Yeah, totally, I wondered the same thing. Am I seeing the tip of the iceberg and the other 90% of the time spent is all behind the scenes? Could totally be possible, but is that really the best way to do things?
I really want to see stricter moderation of online spaces to maintain respect, kindness, and psychological safety, as much as possible. I think this would mean mods often intervening in cases they donât normally now (not just on the EA Forum, elsewhere too). I want mods to be less hands-off in that way. I think the end result is online spaces would bring more enjoyment, less suffering, and would facilitate more open-minded, curious, creative, stimulating discussions, rather than the amount of arguing to win we see.
But mods making editorial decisions about content from the perspective of what they think is incorrect vs. correct or unreasonable vs. reasonable is dicey territory. Obviously, you just have to ban people posting ChatGPT rants about homeopathy or whatever. But if youâre getting into really subtle and contested ideas about which there is widespread disagreement, then do the users of a site like the EA Forum actually want moderators to make the call about whatâs correct and acceptable vs. incorrect and ban-worthy?
Itâs particularly relevant to the EA Forum for the reasons you said. Some popular ideas on the EA Forum, most of all that there will soon be an existentially dangerous AGI, are things that, I donât know, something like 95% or 99% or 99.9% of people disagree with. If you want to convince the skeptics, who are the overwhelming majority, then how is this approach going to work? You say skepticsâ ideas are stupid and then ban them. Okay⊠is that⊠scalable?
Moderators have a hard job, I think it canât be entirely on moderation to drive the culture of a website. A lot of the work has to be on the users. Starting with moderation issues though, I have a couple ideas:
Clarity: I think moderation benefits from simplicity and clarity. It isnât a good sign when you are taking mod action against someone but canât really explain why because its too difficult or would take too long. I feel like that indicates that the underlying rules/âprinciples arenât really clear or simple enough. It is hard for people to adapt to comply with complicated and unclear rules and the road to motivated reasoning is also paved in vague principles that are easily applied differently to different stituations.
Proportionality: This one goes in both directions. I think sometimes it would be better for mods to step in early but with a lighter touch, something like âthis seems to be getting a bit heated/âunproductive, friendly reminder to everyone to keep it civilâ. An ounce of prevention and all that.
For what users can do:
Stick to the topic/âdonât go meta: Stay grounded in the discussion, try not to import assumptions based on previous arguments with people vaguely on the same âsideâ as who you are talking to, focus on their arguments. Try to make the discussion more specific rather than more general. Try not to take your argument in a meta direction, donât talk about what arguments are good in the abstract or focus too much on claiming that the other personâs arguments are an example of a general phenonemon, try to respond to their claims specifically.
Try to stay calm: It is common that people feel a bit uncomfortable when faced with strong disagreements, including that the person they are talking to is being unfair or mean in some way. The problem is that if both people go along with this feeling it often leads to a bad place. If one person temporarily lapses into a less friendly tonw but the other person stays calm, sometimes the conversation is salvagable. Try to be that calm person sometimes in hopes that when you are the one who isnât calm, the person who you are talking to can cover for you a little.
You never have an obligation to respond: I think some of the stress in arguing online comes from a feeling of being trapped, like you will be judged if the person you are talking to gets the last word. We should try to cultivate a culture where it is okay to respond within your own time limitations. If you get the sense the person you are talking to is feeling tapped out, you can openly raise this issue or try to take the peddle off the gas a little.
An idea
I will also take this chance to float an idea Iâve been thinking about recently. Iâve been calling this âepistolary debatesâ in my head. The idea is inspired by legal briefs in courts, where the parties submit sequences of written statements that respond to each other.
I think this format, where the âdebatersâ write longer form content over an extended period of time would be an improvement in a lot of ways. I imagine this as follows:
Partipants message each other privately to align on a topic and definitions, agreeing in advance on the general parameters of what they would like to discuss, who will write first, and timelines/âlength goals.
First person writes an essay/ââopening statementâ laying out there position.
Second person starts writing their response, aiming for a write within a certain time frame (e.g. a week, a month).
First person writes their response to the second personâs response.
Repeat as desired.
I think a benefit of this format is that extending the time over which the discussion occurs cuts down on stress and helps people set aside snarkier bits that feel right in the moment but arenât a good idea on further reflection. It also lets people work a little more on explaining their views more fully and clearly, and potentially cuts down on the conversation wondering off from the main topic.
ETA: I also agree with your last paragraph that for the specific case of people interested in AI safety/ârelated issue, it is very important to have openness to discussing the topic in a way that isnât dismissive and takes seriously engages with the arguments, even if you sometimes feel frustrated with how these conversations play out.
Love this! Thank you! I love the term âepistolary debatesâ. I have floated using this format with a few people, like David Mathers (who I find fun to talk to, respectful, curious, and full of intellectually stimulating ideas). The EA Forum has the Dialogues feature which is purpose-built for this, but you donât need anything fancy. Substack or any blog or website will allow you to just copy and paste a bunch of emails or Slack/âDiscord messages or whatever.
This format seems to have fallen out of favour, but there was a time on the Internet back in the 2000s when I enjoyed reading email debates like the Edge.org debate on the Anthropic Principle between physicists Leonard Susskind and Lee Smolin. Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan also did an email debate on religion. To me, this format is 100x more interesting than live, verbal debates. I donât really care if someone is good at thinking on the spot and coming up with a clever rejoinder right away. I would much rather they take a day or two to think about it and then respond. Letâs bring back this forgotten format!
I totally agree users also have a responsibility for the culture they create, and not everything can be pinned on the moderators. I think itâs pretty rare, but Iâve experienced at least once an online community where the moderators were trying their best and doing a good job, but the usersâ behaviour became so acrimonious it overwhelmed the moderatorsâ capacity to moderate the community.
Why I think moderators play such a key role is that: on a site like the EA Forum, if there were zero moderation, literally just one person could ruin the whole site for everyone by posting spam, malware links, porn gifs, etc. across the site. The site would become unusable and the users would have to leave. More subtly, 1% or 5% or 10% of users can ruin a site for everyone else if they habitually insult other peopleâs intelligence, or shame or mock or belittle them, or relentlessly make passive-aggressive insults. I think weâre so numb on the Internet, where if someone doesnât use a racial slur or make a threat of violence, we mentally give that a pass. Even though in real life situations, people engaging in that kind of behaviour would often get removed from groups because they ruined it for everyone else.
I wholeheartedly agree on your points about clarity, proportionality, and sticking to the topic/ânot going meta. All this is really well-said. I especially like what you said about staying calm. I like what you said about if one person underreacts to another personâs unfriendliness and stays polite, that can be a form of grace, and a form of grace you can also later show to other people. Per the above, I think where this gets into choppy waters is if one person always acts unfriendly and the other person is always underreacting and staying polite. Thatâs definitely been my experience on the EA Forum, and itâs led to instances where my frustration with someone mounts and mounts and mounts over months and months and months, and I really risk losing my cool and exploding, and potentially even saying something ethically wrong (like a personal insult) that I would painfully regret.
For this reason, I honestly think the ability to just block someone on any platform is so important. You canât always build some kind of neutral, objective case to convince moderators to step in â often these things are personal and really subtle. Itâs not even always about someone doing something objectively wrong. Online, on sites like this, people can corner you and try to talk to you in a way they usually canât in real life. Sometimes you just donât want to talk to someone because they rub you the wrong way for whatever reason. (Maybe youâre always polite and theyâre always rude. Or maybe they just remind you of your ex.) If we force these interactions to happen, thatâs where friction grows and grows and grows until kaboom.
What you said about the feeling of being trapped is tough. On one hand, I definitely feel that sense of being trapped and like I have to respond, even though I can intellectually tell myself that this feeling isnât real and I can just let it go. On the other hand, I would hate to ever make someone else feel like that, and I usually donât feel like other people have to respond to me. If both people feel trapped and like they have to respond, and neither really wants to, well, what a horrible situation. I agree with encouraging a cultural norm where thereâs no obligation to respond and people can just stop replying at any time. (I think I remember adding that disclaimer on the EA Forum least once: feel free to stop responding whenever you like.)
I think an overall atmosphere of warmth, kindness, respect, friendliness, empathy, civility, etc. can help with the trapped feeling. If someone says Iâm stupid (as has happened on the EA Forum), or what I said is stupid (as very recently happened on the EA Forum), I find it a lot harder to let go of, and I want to defend myself. If I get the sense that someone harbours no ill will toward me, then I donât feel that way.
Thereâs a lot of discourse around the EA Forum on epistemic standards, intellectual standards, standards of argument, standards of evidence, etc. I have my own ideas around this, e.g., I wish that would people would cite more peer-reviewed academic research and fewer forum and blog posts, or I wish people would appeal to private, internal intuition less and try more to present a public, external case that could be persuasive to someone with a different intuition. This is all important. But it isnât enough.
The biggest barrier to good thinking and good discussion is a lack of psychological safety. If you take peopleâs prefrontal cortex offline and put them in their limbic system, their thinking suffers. Their conversation suffers. Itâs sometimes about being calm in the moment and letting anger settle down before replying. But itâs also about other emotions like shame, humiliation, and resentment. These are not about just being calm in the moment but are about bigger cultural issues in any environment. They can only be addressed through systemic change, moderation, probably site design, and, honestly, a lot of it is about work that individuals have to do offline in therapy.
I always feel like Iâm writing too much on the EA Forum, so Iâm sorry if thatâs the case. I could edit this comment down, but then that would take me 2-3x as long as writing it without editing. Thank you for your very helpful, gentle, thoughtful contributions to this thread. I appreciate them a hell of a lot. Iâm very grateful to you.
P.S. I just read your post on the definition of good faith and, oh my god, what a breath of fresh air. Thank you for writing that. At least 3 people have accused me of bad faith on the EA Forum, and in each case itâs felt really hurtful and rude. I thought they were acccusing me of lying about my actual views and pretending to believe something else. Because thatâs the canonical definition of bad faith. It softens the sting a little bit (but not fully) to learn they probably just meant, basically, âI disagree with your argument really hardâ. But I think itâs a terrible idea to take a term that canonically means lying, which 99% of people will interpret as meaning lying, and then just use it as an extra bit of spice to attack someone with when you really disagree with what theyâre saying. (I also think the never clearly defined or explained term âtruthseekingâ is annoying in a similar way. What does it mean? Who can say? In practice, itâs just a bit of spice to really dunk on someone hard.)
On the bad faith/ââtruth seekingâ point, Iâve also noted some issues in the way âtruth seekingâ is used in a previous post, and thinking about this case gave me an idea. It seems like there is a general phenomenon in EA/ârationalist discourse where intent gets obscured or ignored somehow. Perhaps not surprising for intellectual communities that are very into consequentialism?
I think the effect of using the âtruth seekingâ terminology is to confuse multiple possibilities around intent:
Lying: intentional
Insufficient rigor/âevidence/âetc.: can be an unintentional mistake
Callousness about the truth: I think people often feel like even if someone isnât lying, they can demonstrate a disregard for truth that feels like its intentionally misleading
Being âinsufficiently truth seekingâ could refer to any of these, and thus using the phrase fails my principle of clarity. It also becomes strongly subject to motivate reasoning or motte/âbailey dynamics because the meaning can shift among these different meanings.
I feel like something similar has happened here with the whole âhard to dispell misunderstandingsâ thing. Tskeen laterally, it doesnât make a whole lot of sense to soft ban someone for this. Is the implicict message that only easy to dispell misunderstandings are allowed? Surely not. But it makes more sense if you imagine its implicitly standing in for a spectrum of actions based on intention:
Bad faith: intentionally obscuring your real views, often with the goal of making them harder to respond to.
Genuine mistake: unintentional, even of hard to dispell
Game playing: being coy or cagey about what your views really are or in some way deliberately making your position confusing or hard to respond to.
The last one I think is kind of what Said was being accused of in the post referenced above? But IMO its extremely clear that you havenât been doing anything intentionally misleading. I think this is an instance of concerns about âepistemicsâ being used in an unproductive way that creates a lack of clarity around intent.
Oh, you wrote that post on âtruthseekingâ too!! I forgot that!! Another helpful post.
âTruthseekingâ as a term drives me bananas because itâs so vague and ambiguous â I looked really hard and couldnât find any real attempts to define it clearly, if even to define it at all â and pretty much the only way I see the term get used is when someone wants to slam someone else they disagree with. And itâs definitely never clear to me that the person whoâs accused of ânot truthseekingâ is doing anything wrong, or making bad points, or that their views are wrong. It just seems like an argument got heated.
If people say ânot truthseekingâ and they just mean âbad evidence/âbad arguments/âill-informed pointsâ, they should just say that. Ditto for âbad faithâ if thatâs what itâs supposed to mean.
Thank you for seeing me clearly. Itâs a huge relief. I found it super confusing and hurtful when Toby said Iâm not engaging in good faith, that I was snarky when I was really being heartfelt and sincere, and that I was âmotivatedâ to find examples of uncivil behaviour on the EA Forum (?). These all feel like such foreign understandings of my intent. And the throughline between them feels like Toby is telling himself a story about me where Iâm out to cause trouble or something. I donât know. I really canât understand whatâs happening here.
I do feel like Iâm transparent. I donât know why someone would think Iâm sneaking around.
Do you think this is a LessWrong subculture thing? I notice in the LessWrong-o-sphere, thereâs all this emphasis on secrets, game theory, strategizing, signalling, counter-signalling, yada yada. Does that make people feel especially suspicious of each other? Or of âoutsidersâ?
This line from a post by a pseudonymous person involved in the LessWrong community always sticks out in my mind:
I donât really feel like many people in the rationalist community communicate very openly or honestly, even though non-deception is often thought to be one of their core tenets.
Somehow this rings true to me, although I donât know if I can put my finger on why. Maybe itâs because there is such a lack of psychological safety in the LessWrong community, people become cagey and withdraw into themselves in order to self-protect. Just a hunch.
I also wonder about the snarkiness thing. In the LessWrong community, my impression is that like 90%+ of the time (NB: not a rigorously obtained number) people are just faking being nice or polite, or just not even faking it. The âgameâ (as it were) is to say the rudest thing possible in the least polite phrasing you can get away with. Does this make people mistake â outside of that context â genuine niceness or politeness for secret snark?
For what itâs worth, whilst I find arguing with Yarrow quite stressful, and I definitely donât always agree with her, and sometimes think sheâs a bit reluctant to concede, I donât think a ban was a good idea. Her comments are usually substantive, people who donât want to engage with them can just ignore, critical perspectives are always valuable etc. In some cases, sheâs actually spotted pretty important stuff that people had missed, i.e. that Waymoâs still have humans in the loop, or a problem in a Forecasting Research Institute study that I cited during one our arguments.
Thank you, David, thatâs very generous of you. I just want to say that you were, to me, definitely the best commenter I talked to on the EA Forum. Although it can also kinda be fun to spar a bit over intellectual topics, thinking back now, I worry whether I was too harsh with you at times. Maybe sparring can sometimes get too heated, and if I ever fail to treat someone with kindness and empathy and respect, thatâs wrong and my fault.
I feel a bit guilty and regretful to hear you say youâve found arguing with me stressful. I definitely donât want to make someone feel stressed, and now Iâm wondering what I could do differently to help people feel less stressed in the future. Now that I think about it, I also feel stressed during a lot of intellectual arguments, and I wonder why. It seems like it shouldnât be be like that, and like something is going wrong.
What Iâve appreciated most about talking to you is your level of sincere curiosity. The topics weâve discussed seem like live issues to you, where youâre genuinely trying to make up your mind and get the best information and argumentation, and not just argue to win. Conversely, youâve often made me pause, get curious, and give things a second thought. Thereâs a comment you left a while ago on Reflective Altruism related to deep uncertainty that I still think about. You have a knack for raise fascinating points, the sort that I have to think about and chew over for a long time. Which I love.
I feel like, if youâre interested, thereâs a lot we could still have fun talking about â probably not on the EA Forum, at this point. But Iâm really thinking about what you said about how itâs stressful for you to argue with me, and I would want to be really conscious of that and try to make that not happen in the future.
I can see both general guidance and specific examples about how to improve comments being useful. I believe they are often more effective together.
I appreciate being able to send someone a more casual message for butting up against guidelines rather than having to call them out publicly (which is a far more embarassing result of what can be a fairly minor infraction).
I feel like it should often be possible to give guidance to someone in public without embarassing them. One could explicitly say the infraction is minor, and use a casual tone. Public moderation may help reinforce good discussion norms in addition to increasing transparency.
One section from that post raises the concept of âAsymmetric effort ratiosâ. This is definitely part of our moderation decision. At one point, if I remember correctly, you wrote almost a fifth of the words on the Forum in a week. You are very productive of long comments, which are often packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings. This is part of why a rate-limit was the solution we arrived at. In small doses, you can be a valuable contributor, but without limit, it becomes unfairly taxing on your interlocutors.
I do not think the number of comments people can write should be greatly limited due to them having written long comments (supposedly) packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings (I am not saying this applies to Yarrow or not; I do not know which comments you have in mind). Readers can lightly or strongly downvote comments they do not find useful, disagree with them, and point out clear mistake. What is a difficult to dispel misunderstanding is quite subjective. So effective moderation here seems difficult to me.
When writing a lot is the problem (I personally do not think this can by itself be a problem), it would be better for the rate limit to be defined in terms of words per week instead of number of comments per week? Alternatively, there could be a limit for the number of words, and a less strict limit for the number of comments.
I can see both general guidance and specific examples about how to improve comments being useful. I believe they are often more effective together.
I do agree Vasco, but I donât endorse me spending much more time on this right now.
I feel like it should often be possible to give guidance to someone in public without embarassing them. One could explicitly say the infraction is minor, and use a casual tone.
Maybe? I personally would be much more discouraged from posting by a public comment than a private message. However itâd be nice if we could have a live log somewhere where forum users could see that we dmâd an anonymous user.
When writing a lot is the problem (I personally do not think this can by itself be a problem)
Writing a lot in itself isnât the problem. Itâs that the writing contains difficult-to-dispel misunderstandings, and therefore creates an asymmetric effort ratio.
This is the first time Iâm hearing about your or the other modsâ reasoning about why I was soft banned/ârate limited. I was never told this before. (Edit: Sorry, this was confusing. I meant all this reasoning that Toby is presenting now is new to me, and stuff I hadnât heard before. Toby did give me a short, very general explanation that I found confusing, which heâs quoted both above and below.)
How does one determine whether comments are âpacked with difficult to dispel misunderstandingsâ? Does this mean you read comments and decide whether theyâre correct or incorrect, or whether you agree or disagree?
Can you think of a good example of a misunderstanding on my part thatâs representative of the overall problem, as you see it?
âThere is a clear pattern in your comments â you seem to have particularly unproductive disagreements with other users, generally due to an overly literal interpretation on your part, or excess defensiveness. This is no great sin of yours, but it isnât great for the quality of Forum discussion, especially when you are naturally so prolific.
Itâs not the first time in the sense that it is part of what I meant by this paragraph. Iâm sorry, but I really cannot invest further in this right now.
I can say that many of your negative karma comments are negative karma for ~ this reason. I have no doubt that you will disagree at length with any particular example.
Sorry, I should clarify. Yes, you definitely sent me that short explanation before. But all the reasoning youâre presenting now is brand new to me.
I can believe that you intended âparticularly unproductive disagreements with other users, generally due to an overly literal interpretation on your part, or excess defensivenessâ to include âpacked with difficult to dispel misunderstandingsâ, but of course there was no way for me to know that.
Iâm not sure how this doesnât just come down to moderating based on the content of someoneâs views as at least one major factor under consideration â whether you decide someoneâs understanding of some topic is correct or incorrect. Itâs just that I thought you were disagreeing with me above when I said it seemed like an editorial decision to me. But this really makes it sound like, at least in significant part, an editorial decision.
Just to be clear, Iâm not saying editorial decisions are bad. If I moderated a forum like this, I would also make editorial decisions.
Maybe? I personally would be much more discouraged from posting by a public comment than a private message. However itâd be nice if we could have a live log somewhere where forum users could see that we dmâd an anonymous user.
Yes, I can see many people preferring a private message. One could ask people whether they would be fine with the private message being made public.
I also think public messages are more valuable when the moderation is more contentious, and this makes them less embarrassing because it will be less clear that people did something wrong.
I donât know if it really matters if the message from a mod is public or private as long as comments that break the rules get removed.
If someone writes a comment that says âyouâre stupider than a potted plantâ, that can just turn into [comment removed by moderator] or whatever. Or if someone writes an otherwise fine comment and ends it with âyouâre stupider than a potted plantâ, a moderator could edit out just the last part that breaks the rules.
What is problematic is when the comments are never removed or edited, reports to the mods get no response, and there is no observable moderator action. None of the uncivil comments Iâve ever reported have gotten removed, and only one (among many, many, many) got a public comment from a moderator. I just checked and some mean laugh reacts (intended for mockery) are still up. Those were never removed.
Thereâs so many different options. Instead of taking the comment down, mods could leave a brief public comment saying âPlease stay civilâ or whatever and then engage more deeply with the person in a private message.
I havenât noticed the incivility problem improving at any point that Iâve been active on the forum, and Iâve noticed some repeat offenders. I feel like whatever is being done isnât working. And maybe part of the reason is that people understand whatâs okay from what they see on the forum, and a lot of whatâs on the forum is uncivil.
I also get the impression that the mods just have a much more lax view than I do about what counts as incivility. There are cases where mods seemingly just disagreed there was any reason for them to take action. I also think Toby, a moderator, using phrases like âpacked with hard to dispel misunderstandingsâ, etc., is sort of a sign of how normalized harsh language is on the EA Forum. I think this sort of language is just⊠I donât know, itâs so unpleasant that I just donât want to be around it.
I donât want to say definitively that Iâll never participate on the EA Forum at all ever again, but I feel like the tone here is just so nasty, it seems like Iâm always regretting when I dip a toe back in.
Civility enforcement is a major part of what we do as moderators. Itâs inevitable that some borderline cases will remain on the site such that someone motivated to find themâas you wereâwill be able to.
Iâm not sure what this is supposed to mean. What do you mean I was motivated to find examples of incivility? I would have preferred not to see them. I made posts or comments, and people wrote mean replies, or did the mean laugh react thing. I didnât intentionally look for them.
To my recollection, I never saw a single comment or mean laugh react get removed in the entire time Iâve been active on the forum.
Itâs hard to respond to snark like this without snark, but itâd be pretty ironic if I did. What Iâll say is, firstly, itâs gone pretty well the other times Iâve done it.
I find this a bit hurtful and confusing. I was not trying to be snarky at all, Iâm trying to give earnest feedback. I am now rethinking what you said about how Iâm repeatedly snarky and itâs an overall pattern. Because Iâm trying to be earnest and diplomatic and polite, and youâre saying itâs snark. Huh? Is this how youâve been reading everything Iâve been saying all along? That I say something genuine and you think itâs mean-spirited or sarcastic?
At one point, if I remember correctly, you wrote almost a fifth of the words on the Forum in a week.
I mean, that is buck wild. I was not aware of that. I can see how that could be a problem, but why not say that from the beginning? Why am I only just hearing about this now? I feel like this is something I would have been responsive to if you had brought it up to me whenever this was happening.
Iâm curious on why you canât (as opposed to donât want to or will not) discuss these on the EA Forum.
In my view, there are many points in the articles that could be interesting for discussion.
Canât because Iâve received an indefinite, possibly permanent soft ban (severe rate limit of 2 comments per week) since January from the EA Forum mods with a warning that it may escalate to a full ban.
Itâs not really about something I can change â or at least that Iâm willing to change â because itâs ultimately an editorial decision by the mods about what kind of conversations, content, and disagreement they want on the EA Forum. In my understanding (which could be wrong), they want the EA Forum to be more of a collaborative space where contributors are uplifted, and not have too much emphasis on debate or criticism. And/âor they just fundamentally disagree with what I think and the way I think (e.g., they think that what I take to be the cruxes of disagreements in many cases is not whatâs really the crux), to such an extent they donât think itâs productive to discuss on the EA Forum. So, an editorial decision.[1]
Anyway, for people who do want to engage in these sorts of discussions, Substack is a great place for it. And if not Substack, where else do people have these sort of discussions these days? Uhh, Reddit?
(Really long footnote for people who want a longer explanation.) Also, in many cases the users agree with the mods on this, and thatâs part of why the mods made this decision. A lot of users donât want to engage with too much criticism or debate, and tend to downvote posts or comments that are negative or critical rather than collaborative and uplifting. Which is a perspective I can certainly understand and empathize with. (Although, in my opinion, it also contributes to a filter bubble/âecho chamber-type effect.)
This is all in my understanding and partially me reading between the lines, since I did not fully understand the explanation the mods gave me and found parts of it really confusing. This is me trying my best to reconstruct what they meant by what they said. I could be getting it wrong. I donât really know.
The mods also mentioned civility as one concern, but I never really got to the bottom of that with them. I got the impression this was a much less important consideration than the other things described above. The mods seem pretty reluctant to moderate for civility on the EA Forum in general, and mostly just let things slide. So, that seemed like a minor concern to them relative to the other stuff. (Again, this is all in my understanding and my attempt to make sense of an explanation I found difficult to follow. So, I could be wrong.)
Although I think you and I would have several disagreements on the AI topic, I will put my vote in, to the extent anyone cares, that a ban was not justified in this case. There are things youâve written that annoy me or that Iâd have said differently, but in general I donât think these are anywhere close to warranting a ban (or frankly the level of downvotes some of your comments have gotten). I also think in several discussions youâve been involved in that went unproductively, the people you were responding to or who responded to you are at least equally to blame and sometimes have behaved worse, including clearly uncivil behave (e.g. clearly intentionally insulting phrasing, unreasonable accusations of bad faith etc.).
Thanks for sharing, Yarrow. @Toby Tremlettđč, have you considered being transparent about the reasons for soft and hard bans? I think the EA Forum used to have a thread where they were announced. I believe transparency is important to keep the moderation team accountable.
I have limited context. However, based on the above, I get the impression a soft ban is not justified. I do not think people should be banned due to disagreements with their thinking.
Hey Vasco:
Itâs likely we should invest in public mod comments again, as this case underlines, itâs pretty unfair to Yarrow to have to explain it to their interlocutors.
As you might guess I strongly disagree with pretty much every aspect of Yarrowâs framing of the rate-limit we applied to their account. Iâll talk to other mods about whether we want to reinstate the public comments, and if so Iâll share more detail on the Yarrow decision in said public comment.
A quick version is that we made this decision because of the way that Yarrow disagrees with people, not the fact that they do. Primarily because of repeatedly sneer-y and snarky comments[1], but also because of generally unproductive and attritional disagreements, for example, see this description I sent to Yarrow at the time of the rate-limit:
âThere is a clear pattern in your comments â you seem to have particularly unproductive disagreements with other users, generally due to an overly literal interpretation on your part, or excess defensiveness. This is no great sin of yours, but it isnât great for the quality of Forum discussion, especially when you are naturally so prolific.â
This wasnât a decision taken lightly (many gdocs involved), as I also said in the message: âI still think you could be a particularly valuable Forum user if you changed how you engaged a bitâ.
If readers take anything away from this commentâI want to underline that we really donât want to discourage disagreement on this platform. Itâs a key part of our theory of why this forum is valuable. But valuable disagreement requires good faith and mutual understanding. Another line I sent to Yarrow:
âCritical voices like yours are a crucial part of a functioning epistemic (or epistemological if you prefer) community, but if we arenât careful about how we integrate more spirited voices, we could end up with a breakdown of trust and understanding on our platform.â
PS- I havenât spoken to the mod team about this so these are my takes.
And incidentally I disagree with the line: âThe mods seem pretty reluctant to moderate for civility on the EA Forum in general, and mostly just let things slideâ. If you see someone breaking our civility norms, please report the comment or post in the three dot menu.
Weighing in as a comment I made has been cited below: thank you for your moderation efforts.
Iâm an admittedly infrequent poster/âcommenter on the Forum, in no small part because I donât have a lot of time on my hands. As such Iâm often discouraged from engaging with certain topics or (potentially) productive disagreements because I simply cannot afford to engage with the kind of [charitable ? detailed : gish galloping] posts and comments exemplified in this thread.
Just wanted to provide something to counterbalance any adverse selection in responses.
Thanks for the clarifications, Toby. They made sense to me.
Hey, just stepping into this thread to say that Tobyâs out with a family emergency. I know many of you put a lot of time and care into the Forum, and Iâm sorry the rest of moderation team doesnât have capacity to engage in this comment section in his stead.
I feel that there could be greater transparency in how these moderation decisions are done. In my opinion, although Yarrow has been quite confrontational at times, they havenât really done anything that would necessitate such a punishment. While the forum is allowed to moderate its users in any way it likes, one shouldnât be rate-limited just because they have disagreements, especially if their opinions go against the mainstream opinion on the forum. This puts the neutrality of the forum moderation at question.
Personally, I have pretty bad experiences writing on this forum. I get highly-upvoted comments from people who seemingly havenât even read what I wrote and instead throw in bad-faith arguments, which I find borderline insulting and certainly unwelcoming. See, for example, this comment that was given as a reply to my text, where I pointed out that many sources use narrative arguments (stories, parables, etc.) instead of technical evidence. The commenter accused me of writing a narrative argument⊠which is simply not true, as my text was not written in a form of a story. Either they didnât read at all what I wrote or intentionally misunderstood it. And that is the most upvoted comment!
In general, the quality of discussion on this forum is very low. I feel it is pretty harsh to say this, but it is my experience and it strongly discourages me from participating at all. In this atmosphere, rate-limiting Yarrow appears not as an impartial decision, since many other, much more problematic comments appear in the forum all the time.
I think it reflects poorly on you that a âhighly-upvotedâ comment was a stronger update towards âthe Forum at large is wrongâ more than âyou were wrongâ or even âyou should change how you communicateâ.
On the object level: I read your post, and like ~half of people who reacted to it, disagreed with it; specifically I think it has narrative-like qualities, and regardless of how much we quibble over the precise point at which text can be reasonably called ânarrativeâ, I thought it was non-evidence-based argumentation, which you were arguing against.
I think in general it is bad forum etiquette to âsnitch tagâ like this. I think youâre misrepresenting my comment and raising it in an irrelevant context.
In the context of my post, the term ânarrative argumentâ was really clearly used to refer to fictional stories embedded in a text as part of its argument, such as AI2027âČs short story or the parables in Y&Sâs book. My text simply does not have that.
By completely misunderstanding even basic concepts such as ânarrative argumentâ, your comment was just a snarky jab and had little value. It didnât comment the actual content of my text, instead, and largely unjustified by any real analysis, it tried to âget back at meâ by blaming me for things I blame others for, like non-evidence based argumentation and narrative arguments.
Since I find it difficult to believe that you really donât understand what a narrative argument is, I reasonably count a high probability for you simply acting in bad faith.
I donât know if âsnitchingâ you is allowed or not, and I apologize for the moderators if itâs not, but I think using examples of bad behavior is relevant in discussions of what is allowed on the forum.
I empathize with your experience on the EA Forum. The top comment on this post is a clear example where someone just fundamentally misunderstood the point you were trying to make, and responded in an unhelpful and kinda snarky way. Then when you clarified your point to them, they just repeated their original point again. Really frustrating. Sometimes it seems like people donât have the patience to deeply engage, yet they do have the patience to comment (often rudely). Which is not a good headspace for discussion.
It could potentially be nice to have alternatives to the EA Forum where stronger discussion norms around civility and generosity are upheld. I donât know if there is a critical mass of people to support that, though. I can potentially send a group chat invite to anyone who wants to message me privately here or on Substack, or email me.
The biggest thing for the mods to understand is when you let people act abusively, it pisses people off so much, and itâs so hurtful and feels so yucky, people donât want to engage anymore. There are people on the EA Forum who effectively have a hecklerâs veto because they just make the experience of using the forum too unpleasant to tolerate for anyone they disagree with. And the end result is you get an insular culture, where even pointing out objective, uncontroversial flaws in research or analysis gets strongly discouraged.
I had a horrible time pointing out errors in a survey. I got a brusque, dismissive response. And a lot of downvotes. The errors were later corrected, but I didnât get any apology or even acknowledgement. What a thankless job!
You have to be able to tolerate the discomfort of disagreement and intellectual criticism, to have the patience to deeply engage, to have curiosity about other peopleâs perspectives and humility about your own, in order to think well and do good analysis. Using personal insults and hostility to shut down disagreement and criticism is not intellectually healthy.
Hi Toby. Me and Toby had a back in forth about this back via private messages in December and January, and this public exchange of comments now is pretty much recreating the conversation we had privately. I didnât know then and still donât know now to what extent I just donât understand Tobyâs perspective but could understand it better with more investment, versus to what extent Toby and I just have an editorial, intellectual, or moral disagreement.
For instance, I noticed that some people were using the âMade me laughâ reaction not for its intended purpose but to express ridicule and mockery on comments they disagreed with. I reported this, and I think I may have even separately messaged the mods about this, and I also sent screenshots to Toby when we were talking privately about civility. I never got to the bottom of whether Toby (or the other mods) thinks this is within the bounds of acceptable civility on the EA Forum, or what.
To me, I feel like openly laughing at someone, expressing ridicule or mockery, is, like, paradigmatically uncivil. Right? Or maybe not everyone sees it that way. I donât know if Toby or the other mods agree with me on that or not. I never heard anything back about that other than Toby just saying he disagreed that some of the examples of behaviours I thought broke civility norms actually broke civility norms. Does this include laugh reacting in order to mock people? I really donât know. Toby, any thoughts on that? Maybe would be good to clarify to people if itâs open season on doing this or if they might get punished for it. I feel like it would be a good thing to discourage...
If you find yourself in a position in the future where you want to encourage someone to engage differently on the EA Forum, it would be helpful to be more specific in what youâre asking them to do. For instance, phrases like âunproductive disagreementsâ, âoverly literal interpretationâ, âexcess defensivenessâ are very general. What do you specifically mean? These are also subjective evaluations that are not self-explanatory. Thereâs no real way to intuit what someone means by this. I think a more effective approach would be something like:
Point to 1-2 examples of problematic comments
Explain in at least 1-2 sentences what you think the problem with the comment is (ideally in plain English)
(Optional) Possibly give a hypothetical example of the sort of thing you would have liked them to say instead
I found your explanations really hard to follow, as in, I didnât and still donât understand what youâre trying to say. At one point, I asked you to give me examples of comments you thought were problematic, and I didnât get an answer on that. So⊠whatâs the goal there? Whatâs the outcome supposed to be? I donât know how someone could adjust their behaviour without being given specific information. (The explanation you quoted also came after the soft ban or rate limit, not before. Before the soft ban, there was even less information.) In the future, you should explain what you want someone to change. If you just say things like âunproductiveâ, âoverly literalâ, âexcess defensivenessâ, etc., thatâs not particularly more helpful than just saying âwrite better commentsâ. I think everyone should try to have productive disagreements rather than unproductive ones, not interpret things too literally, and not be excessively defensive. I try to do these things. But saying that without any specifics is not really actionable input. What do you mean by that? What would you specifically like to change?
I definitely agree that if I had a pattern of repeatedly making sneering and snarky comments, that would 100% be a justification to fully ban me from the forum forever â not just a rate limit or a soft ban. If I were moderating a forum like this one, I would certainly ban people who did that with very little lenience. But, I dunno, sneering and snarking just seems like par for the course for the EA Forum â including using laugh emojis to mock people you disagree with. (I donât think that justifies engaging in it, and I donât intentionally engage in it, Iâm just saying sneering and snark are part of the forumâs de facto norms. And reporting it seems to do nothing, so tolerating it seems to be de facto moderation policy.)
My experience of using the EA Forum was enduring people insulting me, making fun of me, or making accusations (e.g., of bad faith), and then not retaliating in response but remaining polite. (I never used the laugh emoji mockingly, I never insinuated that someone was stupid, I never accused someone of bad faith.) In retrospect, I think that was a very unwise and deeply unhealthy, masochistic decision. After like the third time this happened (and especially after seeing that moderators did not respond to reports), I should have just stopped posting on the EA Forum. I shouldnât have bothered. Continuing to engage was a mistake.
I think if you want high-quality disagreement or critical engagement on the EA Forum, you have to count on a person falling within the very thin segment of the Venn diagram where they have enough critical awareness to see some of the weaknesses in some popular EA ideas, yet also not enough critical awareness to realize that they should not make themselves suffer by arguing about those things on the EA Forum. And I guess Iâm glad that there are very few people like that, lol.
I think the EA Forum and the EA community represses disagreement and criticism pretty hard, and pretty much just doesnât want to hear it. At least when it comes to certain ideas like imminent AGI. On one hand, I would want to encourage people who disagree with ideas like imminent AGI to engage with the EA Forum to improve the discourse. On the other hand, I would probably warn them that itâs more pain than itâs worth, and ultimately is unlikely to go anywhere. So, honestly, I think Iâd just advise them not to do it.
I think intellectually maybe a lot of people in the EA community believe they want to hear disagreement and criticism, but then when they actually encounter it, they hate it, and they hate the person doing it. If this truly isnât the case and itâs something the EA Forum/âEA community wants to change, then donât look at intentions, look at outcomes. Is high-quality disagreement and criticism of popular ideas happening? If not, why not? If not, how could it be better encouraged and incentivized? A huge one would just to be nicer (e.g., not call people stupid), and to moderate the forum to disallow incivility (e.g., remove comments that call people stupid).
I think this discussion is all sort of a moot point, ultimately, because this disagreement about moderation of the EA Forum is just a microcosm of broader intellectual and moral disagreements between me and some of the most highly engaged EA Forum users that has been the focus of the conversation all along. That conversation sort of reached its natural conclusion anyway, and I summed up my concluding thoughts here. Moderation is just one more topic we disagree on, and we disagree on moderation mostly because of all our other intellectual and moral disagreements â like whatâs civility vs. incivility, what are good epistemic standards vs. bad ones, what are the real substantive cruxes of certain disagreements vs. what are semantic distractions or unimportant technicalities, what arguments are compelling vs. uncompelling, whatâs the appropriate role of scientific racism in effective altruism (i.e., none vs. some), etc. At this point, whatâs the point of talking about it further? Itâs been done to death.
Iâve about 99% given up on EA Forum, yet there is some nagging doubt in the back of my mind that thereâs some thread of something in here that Iâm not done with yet. Somehow I still have hope that there is some glimpse of possibility of constructive conversations still, continuing off of what was started here, but not on this platform (which I feel is hopeless at this point, particularly the level of incivility). Iâm not really sure if thereâs any point to it or not⊠I donât know. But I feel like maybe there is some potential for some constructive discussion on another platform like Substack. There would maybe even be some potential for someone to set up a platform focused on facilitating productive disagreement around EA-related ideas, where civility is enforced. But I have to imagine the interest in that is so tiny, there would be no point. Leaving this door open for anyone who wants to contact me here or by email, who feels curious or has a good idea...
Again, this is another issue with the current lack of moderation transparency on the Forum. Misuse of the laugh react is seen as breaking forum norms, and (AFAIK) in almost every case has led to at least a moderator message.
Civility enforcement is a major part of what we do as moderators. Itâs inevitable that some borderline cases will remain on the site such that someone motivated to find themâas you wereâwill be able to.
Bit of a side-point but the amount of civility enforcement we do has been one of the reasons Iâve been reluctant to publicise mod actions. I appreciate being able to send someone a more casual message for butting up against guidelines rather than having to call them out publicly (which is a far more embarassing result of what can be a fairly minor infraction).
Itâs hard to respond to snark like this without snark, but itâd be pretty ironic if I did. What Iâll say is, firstly, itâs gone pretty well the other times Iâve done it.
Secondly, I have tried to be specific, but it has been easier to explain the snarkiness than the broader problem with how youâve interacted with people on the Forum.
Unfortunately, I donât have the time to write a post like Habrykaâs here, which might be required to explain the kind of impact that I think you were having on Forum discourse.
One section from that post raises the concept of âAsymmetric effort ratiosâ. This is definitely part of our moderation decision. At one point, if I remember correctly, you wrote almost a fifth of the words on the Forum in a week. You are very productive of long comments, which are often packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings. This is part of why a rate-limit was the solution we arrived at. In small doses, you can be a valuable contributor, but without limit, it becomes unfairly taxing on your interlocutors.
Apologies that I wonât be able to explain this to you to a degree you will find satisfying. Like I said, none of this was an easy decision, but I do think that it is whatâs best for the Forum.
Again, I havenât spoken with other mods about this comment, they are free to disagree.
I feel like the issue addressed in the Said Saga is somewhat the opposite of what it seems like Yarrow does. A paradigmatic example of the bad bahavior attributed to Said was posting extremely short comments, such as just saying âexamples?â. Its obviously extremely easy to type a one word comment, and the possibility of adding additional examples of something a poster describes isnât exactly a deep insight. The asymetry is that it is very easy for Said to post a comment like that but would take a lot of effort for the original poster to respond providing examples, giving rise to the complaint that Said wasnât willing to put in equal effort.
This doesnât seem to be true at all of Yarrow, and producing a large quantity of words on the forum seems like it is actually contrary to the type of behavior that Said was alleged to have engaged in. Part of the issue is that lots of Saidâs comments were super brief! Yarrow also seems to write plenty of top level posts and many of their comments are on their own posts, again this is the exact opposite of part of the issue identified with Said, where a critical part of thbe asymetry is about the dynamic of commenting vs posting.
Yarrow also doesnât seem to do the âjust asking questionsâ style that Habryka claims to identify in Saidâs comments, which I think is also a big part of why karma might not be sufficient. People may be hesitant to downvote comments on a post that are just a question, thus creating a possibility of negative behavior that systematically evades the karma system. But Yarrow seems to be pretty open in their criticism and often writes extended comments (not just one or two sentence questions), and you identify that the issue seems to be present in many of their downvoted comments. Why is the karma system not sufficient in that case? If the concern is posters feeling the need to respond to comments, I think that is mitigated strongly when those comments are downvoted.
In general, it seems like Yarrow actually does many of the things that supposedly would have improved Saidâs commenting, and the issues is essentially the opposite (writing too much rather than too little).
In both cases it seems like lots of moderator effort was devoted towards a specific user, which I definitely think is a reasonable thing for moderators to react too. At a certain point moderators canât just be expending infinite time and effort just devoted to stuff that is going on with one user.
At the same time, it does seem to me that there is another asymetry present here, where the voting/âmoderator attention/âbanning etc. is being deployed more harshly towards someone who is a critic/âdisagrees with popular ideas in the community vs people who express popular ideas or arenât critical. I think reviewing the context of Yarrowâs posts/âcomments and the reactions/âresponses to them on the forum strongly suggests this. There are definitely times when Yarrow reacts in ways that I donât see as ideal and which I can understand people having issues with, but many times this is in response to other forum users also behaving questionably, often in a more egregiously than Yarrow. It seems likely to me that Yarrow being critical of popular ideas in the community is an important factor in the different responses.
Why I care
I feel like I semi-frequently find myself defending people who I probably have significant disagreements with (such as in this case with Yarrow) on here/âlesswrong because it seems like there is a tendency within the EA/ârationality community to make convoluted meta-arguments for why critics are doing something bad/ââinsuffciently truthseekingâ/ââburning the commonsâ-y and I think this is bad and not productive. These communities are indeed much more open to criticism than a lot of online communities (where disagreeing with popular ideas with just get you instantly insulted and/âor banned), but I still think a more sophisticated defense mechanism against critics is alive and well.
Iâm particularly interested/âconcerned about this because I believe that we will need pretty substantial policy actions on AI, and that this will likely require convincing people who have very different worldviews of certain things about AI. I view conversations on places like the EA forum or lesswrong as good testing grounds for how this might go, but in a place where it should be substanially easier than it would be in the policy arena. In my mind, if people are struggling to have conversations about AI with Yarrow (who is likely going to be more pleasant to discuss this issue with than 90% of people who donât already agree), I donât think that is a good sign for how this community is approaching that challenge of getting a diverse coalition on-side on the AI issue.
Thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it. Iâm grateful for how kind and thoughtful this comment is.
On the moderator time thing, I just want to say that Toby only ever sent me 3 messages regarding moderation on the EA Forum. There was an initial message (452 words) informing me of a temporary rate limit/âsoft ban. This was my first communication from any of the moderators. After I replied, there was a shorter follow-up message (200 words) where Toby mentioned he didnât have time to provide examples of problematic comments. Then there was a third and final message (319 words) informing me the temporary rate limit/âsoft ban had been made permanent. That was the full extent of the communication.
That third and final comment was the first and only time Toby explained this reason for the ban, which heâs quoted in this thread a few times:
Prior to that, the reason he had cited was snarkiness. But by the time I was banned, that explanation had changed to the above. As mentioned, I asked for examples of snarky comments and Toby said he didnât have time to provide them.
At some point between messages, I explained to Toby how I was taking the feedback to heart. I described writing three drafts of the same comment to soften the tone, and linked to the end result.
By the time the soft ban was made permanent, the explanation for the ban had changed from snarkiness to âunproductive disagreements, overly literal interpretation, excess defensivenessâ which Toby had not mentioned previously, and didnât explain in any more specificity than whatâs quoted above.
Toby sent me 971 words by private message and wrote 863 words in this thread (not including quotes). So, the amount of writing he did on this thread is about the same as he did with me via private message.
For comparison, your comment â the one above Iâm replying to now â is 820 words (excluding quotes). So, that comment is about the total length of the correspondence I received regarding my soft ban.
Tobyâs comments on this thread are way more candid than the private messages, and present entirely new reasoning for the soft ban that he had never explained previously. For example, the idea of writing comments that are too long, or writing too many comments, or writing comments âpacked with hard to dispel misunderstandingsâ was never brought up to me before now. (I also find this to be pretty harsh language.)
If this took up a lot of Tobyâs time behind the scenes, or other moderatorsâ time, I guess I wouldnât know. Iâm just reporting what I was able to see on my end. If a lot of time was spent on moderation behind the scenes, I guess I would wonder on what, exactly?
Yeah, Iâm trying to maintain openness to different possibilities on the time issue to an extent since I donât really know what happened. If I had to venture a guess (which could obviously be wrong), Iâd say something like this:
Other forum users who got frustrated with your posts/âcomments reach out to the mod team privately, mod team has extended discussions amongst themselves, decides on the soft ban, and then reaches out to you to tell you. If this is what happened, I can imagine that it did take a reasonable amount of time and also its understandable that the mod team would want to incorporate feedback from users, but I would say this is a mistake on the part of the mod team if thatâs what happened. If youâre talking here about the value of being able to reach out privately, wouldnât this be the time to do that, before going to the soft ban? If youâre not making the decision lightly and discussing a lot and writing google docs, couldnât you copy some examples of problematic comments or posts from these documents fairly easily?
I think a prcess where there is a lot of back channelling has a siginificant risk of filter bubble/âecho chamber issues as you mention, similar to what Habryka calls the âlinkedin attractorâ in the post linked above.
Iâm generally of the belief that people should work on hashing out their own disagreements more rather than escalating to meta/âmoderation issues. Taking moderation actions because someone writes a lot of âhard to dispel misunderstandingsâ seems like it is extremely likely to be filtered through the lens of what a mod already agrees/âdisagrees with, and so is likely to be unevenly applied against critics.
Hi TFD. Great points.
Thanks!
Yeah, totally, I wondered the same thing. Am I seeing the tip of the iceberg and the other 90% of the time spent is all behind the scenes? Could totally be possible, but is that really the best way to do things?
I really want to see stricter moderation of online spaces to maintain respect, kindness, and psychological safety, as much as possible. I think this would mean mods often intervening in cases they donât normally now (not just on the EA Forum, elsewhere too). I want mods to be less hands-off in that way. I think the end result is online spaces would bring more enjoyment, less suffering, and would facilitate more open-minded, curious, creative, stimulating discussions, rather than the amount of arguing to win we see.
But mods making editorial decisions about content from the perspective of what they think is incorrect vs. correct or unreasonable vs. reasonable is dicey territory. Obviously, you just have to ban people posting ChatGPT rants about homeopathy or whatever. But if youâre getting into really subtle and contested ideas about which there is widespread disagreement, then do the users of a site like the EA Forum actually want moderators to make the call about whatâs correct and acceptable vs. incorrect and ban-worthy?
Itâs particularly relevant to the EA Forum for the reasons you said. Some popular ideas on the EA Forum, most of all that there will soon be an existentially dangerous AGI, are things that, I donât know, something like 95% or 99% or 99.9% of people disagree with. If you want to convince the skeptics, who are the overwhelming majority, then how is this approach going to work? You say skepticsâ ideas are stupid and then ban them. Okay⊠is that⊠scalable?
Here are some random thoughts on the topic.
Moderators have a hard job, I think it canât be entirely on moderation to drive the culture of a website. A lot of the work has to be on the users. Starting with moderation issues though, I have a couple ideas:
Clarity: I think moderation benefits from simplicity and clarity. It isnât a good sign when you are taking mod action against someone but canât really explain why because its too difficult or would take too long. I feel like that indicates that the underlying rules/âprinciples arenât really clear or simple enough. It is hard for people to adapt to comply with complicated and unclear rules and the road to motivated reasoning is also paved in vague principles that are easily applied differently to different stituations.
Proportionality: This one goes in both directions. I think sometimes it would be better for mods to step in early but with a lighter touch, something like âthis seems to be getting a bit heated/âunproductive, friendly reminder to everyone to keep it civilâ. An ounce of prevention and all that.
For what users can do:
Stick to the topic/âdonât go meta: Stay grounded in the discussion, try not to import assumptions based on previous arguments with people vaguely on the same âsideâ as who you are talking to, focus on their arguments. Try to make the discussion more specific rather than more general. Try not to take your argument in a meta direction, donât talk about what arguments are good in the abstract or focus too much on claiming that the other personâs arguments are an example of a general phenonemon, try to respond to their claims specifically.
Try to stay calm: It is common that people feel a bit uncomfortable when faced with strong disagreements, including that the person they are talking to is being unfair or mean in some way. The problem is that if both people go along with this feeling it often leads to a bad place. If one person temporarily lapses into a less friendly tonw but the other person stays calm, sometimes the conversation is salvagable. Try to be that calm person sometimes in hopes that when you are the one who isnât calm, the person who you are talking to can cover for you a little.
You never have an obligation to respond: I think some of the stress in arguing online comes from a feeling of being trapped, like you will be judged if the person you are talking to gets the last word. We should try to cultivate a culture where it is okay to respond within your own time limitations. If you get the sense the person you are talking to is feeling tapped out, you can openly raise this issue or try to take the peddle off the gas a little.
An idea
I will also take this chance to float an idea Iâve been thinking about recently. Iâve been calling this âepistolary debatesâ in my head. The idea is inspired by legal briefs in courts, where the parties submit sequences of written statements that respond to each other.
I think this format, where the âdebatersâ write longer form content over an extended period of time would be an improvement in a lot of ways. I imagine this as follows:
Partipants message each other privately to align on a topic and definitions, agreeing in advance on the general parameters of what they would like to discuss, who will write first, and timelines/âlength goals.
First person writes an essay/ââopening statementâ laying out there position.
Second person starts writing their response, aiming for a write within a certain time frame (e.g. a week, a month).
First person writes their response to the second personâs response.
Repeat as desired.
I think a benefit of this format is that extending the time over which the discussion occurs cuts down on stress and helps people set aside snarkier bits that feel right in the moment but arenât a good idea on further reflection. It also lets people work a little more on explaining their views more fully and clearly, and potentially cuts down on the conversation wondering off from the main topic.
ETA: I also agree with your last paragraph that for the specific case of people interested in AI safety/ârelated issue, it is very important to have openness to discussing the topic in a way that isnât dismissive and takes seriously engages with the arguments, even if you sometimes feel frustrated with how these conversations play out.
Love this! Thank you! I love the term âepistolary debatesâ. I have floated using this format with a few people, like David Mathers (who I find fun to talk to, respectful, curious, and full of intellectually stimulating ideas). The EA Forum has the Dialogues feature which is purpose-built for this, but you donât need anything fancy. Substack or any blog or website will allow you to just copy and paste a bunch of emails or Slack/âDiscord messages or whatever.
This format seems to have fallen out of favour, but there was a time on the Internet back in the 2000s when I enjoyed reading email debates like the Edge.org debate on the Anthropic Principle between physicists Leonard Susskind and Lee Smolin. Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan also did an email debate on religion. To me, this format is 100x more interesting than live, verbal debates. I donât really care if someone is good at thinking on the spot and coming up with a clever rejoinder right away. I would much rather they take a day or two to think about it and then respond. Letâs bring back this forgotten format!
I totally agree users also have a responsibility for the culture they create, and not everything can be pinned on the moderators. I think itâs pretty rare, but Iâve experienced at least once an online community where the moderators were trying their best and doing a good job, but the usersâ behaviour became so acrimonious it overwhelmed the moderatorsâ capacity to moderate the community.
Why I think moderators play such a key role is that: on a site like the EA Forum, if there were zero moderation, literally just one person could ruin the whole site for everyone by posting spam, malware links, porn gifs, etc. across the site. The site would become unusable and the users would have to leave. More subtly, 1% or 5% or 10% of users can ruin a site for everyone else if they habitually insult other peopleâs intelligence, or shame or mock or belittle them, or relentlessly make passive-aggressive insults. I think weâre so numb on the Internet, where if someone doesnât use a racial slur or make a threat of violence, we mentally give that a pass. Even though in real life situations, people engaging in that kind of behaviour would often get removed from groups because they ruined it for everyone else.
I wholeheartedly agree on your points about clarity, proportionality, and sticking to the topic/ânot going meta. All this is really well-said. I especially like what you said about staying calm. I like what you said about if one person underreacts to another personâs unfriendliness and stays polite, that can be a form of grace, and a form of grace you can also later show to other people. Per the above, I think where this gets into choppy waters is if one person always acts unfriendly and the other person is always underreacting and staying polite. Thatâs definitely been my experience on the EA Forum, and itâs led to instances where my frustration with someone mounts and mounts and mounts over months and months and months, and I really risk losing my cool and exploding, and potentially even saying something ethically wrong (like a personal insult) that I would painfully regret.
For this reason, I honestly think the ability to just block someone on any platform is so important. You canât always build some kind of neutral, objective case to convince moderators to step in â often these things are personal and really subtle. Itâs not even always about someone doing something objectively wrong. Online, on sites like this, people can corner you and try to talk to you in a way they usually canât in real life. Sometimes you just donât want to talk to someone because they rub you the wrong way for whatever reason. (Maybe youâre always polite and theyâre always rude. Or maybe they just remind you of your ex.) If we force these interactions to happen, thatâs where friction grows and grows and grows until kaboom.
What you said about the feeling of being trapped is tough. On one hand, I definitely feel that sense of being trapped and like I have to respond, even though I can intellectually tell myself that this feeling isnât real and I can just let it go. On the other hand, I would hate to ever make someone else feel like that, and I usually donât feel like other people have to respond to me. If both people feel trapped and like they have to respond, and neither really wants to, well, what a horrible situation. I agree with encouraging a cultural norm where thereâs no obligation to respond and people can just stop replying at any time. (I think I remember adding that disclaimer on the EA Forum least once: feel free to stop responding whenever you like.)
I think an overall atmosphere of warmth, kindness, respect, friendliness, empathy, civility, etc. can help with the trapped feeling. If someone says Iâm stupid (as has happened on the EA Forum), or what I said is stupid (as very recently happened on the EA Forum), I find it a lot harder to let go of, and I want to defend myself. If I get the sense that someone harbours no ill will toward me, then I donât feel that way.
Thereâs a lot of discourse around the EA Forum on epistemic standards, intellectual standards, standards of argument, standards of evidence, etc. I have my own ideas around this, e.g., I wish that would people would cite more peer-reviewed academic research and fewer forum and blog posts, or I wish people would appeal to private, internal intuition less and try more to present a public, external case that could be persuasive to someone with a different intuition. This is all important. But it isnât enough.
The biggest barrier to good thinking and good discussion is a lack of psychological safety. If you take peopleâs prefrontal cortex offline and put them in their limbic system, their thinking suffers. Their conversation suffers. Itâs sometimes about being calm in the moment and letting anger settle down before replying. But itâs also about other emotions like shame, humiliation, and resentment. These are not about just being calm in the moment but are about bigger cultural issues in any environment. They can only be addressed through systemic change, moderation, probably site design, and, honestly, a lot of it is about work that individuals have to do offline in therapy.
I always feel like Iâm writing too much on the EA Forum, so Iâm sorry if thatâs the case. I could edit this comment down, but then that would take me 2-3x as long as writing it without editing. Thank you for your very helpful, gentle, thoughtful contributions to this thread. I appreciate them a hell of a lot. Iâm very grateful to you.
P.S. I just read your post on the definition of good faith and, oh my god, what a breath of fresh air. Thank you for writing that. At least 3 people have accused me of bad faith on the EA Forum, and in each case itâs felt really hurtful and rude. I thought they were acccusing me of lying about my actual views and pretending to believe something else. Because thatâs the canonical definition of bad faith. It softens the sting a little bit (but not fully) to learn they probably just meant, basically, âI disagree with your argument really hardâ. But I think itâs a terrible idea to take a term that canonically means lying, which 99% of people will interpret as meaning lying, and then just use it as an extra bit of spice to attack someone with when you really disagree with what theyâre saying. (I also think the never clearly defined or explained term âtruthseekingâ is annoying in a similar way. What does it mean? Who can say? In practice, itâs just a bit of spice to really dunk on someone hard.)
Thanks for your kind words.
On the bad faith/ââtruth seekingâ point, Iâve also noted some issues in the way âtruth seekingâ is used in a previous post, and thinking about this case gave me an idea. It seems like there is a general phenomenon in EA/ârationalist discourse where intent gets obscured or ignored somehow. Perhaps not surprising for intellectual communities that are very into consequentialism?
I think the effect of using the âtruth seekingâ terminology is to confuse multiple possibilities around intent:
Lying: intentional
Insufficient rigor/âevidence/âetc.: can be an unintentional mistake
Callousness about the truth: I think people often feel like even if someone isnât lying, they can demonstrate a disregard for truth that feels like its intentionally misleading
Being âinsufficiently truth seekingâ could refer to any of these, and thus using the phrase fails my principle of clarity. It also becomes strongly subject to motivate reasoning or motte/âbailey dynamics because the meaning can shift among these different meanings.
I feel like something similar has happened here with the whole âhard to dispell misunderstandingsâ thing. Tskeen laterally, it doesnât make a whole lot of sense to soft ban someone for this. Is the implicict message that only easy to dispell misunderstandings are allowed? Surely not. But it makes more sense if you imagine its implicitly standing in for a spectrum of actions based on intention:
Bad faith: intentionally obscuring your real views, often with the goal of making them harder to respond to.
Genuine mistake: unintentional, even of hard to dispell
Game playing: being coy or cagey about what your views really are or in some way deliberately making your position confusing or hard to respond to.
The last one I think is kind of what Said was being accused of in the post referenced above? But IMO its extremely clear that you havenât been doing anything intentionally misleading. I think this is an instance of concerns about âepistemicsâ being used in an unproductive way that creates a lack of clarity around intent.
Oh, you wrote that post on âtruthseekingâ too!! I forgot that!! Another helpful post.
âTruthseekingâ as a term drives me bananas because itâs so vague and ambiguous â I looked really hard and couldnât find any real attempts to define it clearly, if even to define it at all â and pretty much the only way I see the term get used is when someone wants to slam someone else they disagree with. And itâs definitely never clear to me that the person whoâs accused of ânot truthseekingâ is doing anything wrong, or making bad points, or that their views are wrong. It just seems like an argument got heated.
If people say ânot truthseekingâ and they just mean âbad evidence/âbad arguments/âill-informed pointsâ, they should just say that. Ditto for âbad faithâ if thatâs what itâs supposed to mean.
Thank you for seeing me clearly. Itâs a huge relief. I found it super confusing and hurtful when Toby said Iâm not engaging in good faith, that I was snarky when I was really being heartfelt and sincere, and that I was âmotivatedâ to find examples of uncivil behaviour on the EA Forum (?). These all feel like such foreign understandings of my intent. And the throughline between them feels like Toby is telling himself a story about me where Iâm out to cause trouble or something. I donât know. I really canât understand whatâs happening here.
I do feel like Iâm transparent. I donât know why someone would think Iâm sneaking around.
Do you think this is a LessWrong subculture thing? I notice in the LessWrong-o-sphere, thereâs all this emphasis on secrets, game theory, strategizing, signalling, counter-signalling, yada yada. Does that make people feel especially suspicious of each other? Or of âoutsidersâ?
This line from a post by a pseudonymous person involved in the LessWrong community always sticks out in my mind:
Somehow this rings true to me, although I donât know if I can put my finger on why. Maybe itâs because there is such a lack of psychological safety in the LessWrong community, people become cagey and withdraw into themselves in order to self-protect. Just a hunch.
I also wonder about the snarkiness thing. In the LessWrong community, my impression is that like 90%+ of the time (NB: not a rigorously obtained number) people are just faking being nice or polite, or just not even faking it. The âgameâ (as it were) is to say the rudest thing possible in the least polite phrasing you can get away with. Does this make people mistake â outside of that context â genuine niceness or politeness for secret snark?
For what itâs worth, whilst I find arguing with Yarrow quite stressful, and I definitely donât always agree with her, and sometimes think sheâs a bit reluctant to concede, I donât think a ban was a good idea. Her comments are usually substantive, people who donât want to engage with them can just ignore, critical perspectives are always valuable etc. In some cases, sheâs actually spotted pretty important stuff that people had missed, i.e. that Waymoâs still have humans in the loop, or a problem in a Forecasting Research Institute study that I cited during one our arguments.
Thank you, David, thatâs very generous of you. I just want to say that you were, to me, definitely the best commenter I talked to on the EA Forum. Although it can also kinda be fun to spar a bit over intellectual topics, thinking back now, I worry whether I was too harsh with you at times. Maybe sparring can sometimes get too heated, and if I ever fail to treat someone with kindness and empathy and respect, thatâs wrong and my fault.
I feel a bit guilty and regretful to hear you say youâve found arguing with me stressful. I definitely donât want to make someone feel stressed, and now Iâm wondering what I could do differently to help people feel less stressed in the future. Now that I think about it, I also feel stressed during a lot of intellectual arguments, and I wonder why. It seems like it shouldnât be be like that, and like something is going wrong.
What Iâve appreciated most about talking to you is your level of sincere curiosity. The topics weâve discussed seem like live issues to you, where youâre genuinely trying to make up your mind and get the best information and argumentation, and not just argue to win. Conversely, youâve often made me pause, get curious, and give things a second thought. Thereâs a comment you left a while ago on Reflective Altruism related to deep uncertainty that I still think about. You have a knack for raise fascinating points, the sort that I have to think about and chew over for a long time. Which I love.
I feel like, if youâre interested, thereâs a lot we could still have fun talking about â probably not on the EA Forum, at this point. But Iâm really thinking about what you said about how itâs stressful for you to argue with me, and I would want to be really conscious of that and try to make that not happen in the future.
I can see both general guidance and specific examples about how to improve comments being useful. I believe they are often more effective together.
I feel like it should often be possible to give guidance to someone in public without embarassing them. One could explicitly say the infraction is minor, and use a casual tone. Public moderation may help reinforce good discussion norms in addition to increasing transparency.
I do not think the number of comments people can write should be greatly limited due to them having written long comments (supposedly) packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings (I am not saying this applies to Yarrow or not; I do not know which comments you have in mind). Readers can lightly or strongly downvote comments they do not find useful, disagree with them, and point out clear mistake. What is a difficult to dispel misunderstanding is quite subjective. So effective moderation here seems difficult to me.
When writing a lot is the problem (I personally do not think this can by itself be a problem), it would be better for the rate limit to be defined in terms of words per week instead of number of comments per week? Alternatively, there could be a limit for the number of words, and a less strict limit for the number of comments.
I do agree Vasco, but I donât endorse me spending much more time on this right now.
Maybe? I personally would be much more discouraged from posting by a public comment than a private message. However itâd be nice if we could have a live log somewhere where forum users could see that we dmâd an anonymous user.
Writing a lot in itself isnât the problem. Itâs that the writing contains difficult-to-dispel misunderstandings, and therefore creates an asymmetric effort ratio.
This is the first time Iâm hearing about your or the other modsâ reasoning about why I was soft banned/ârate limited. I was never told this before. (Edit: Sorry, this was confusing. I meant all this reasoning that Toby is presenting now is new to me, and stuff I hadnât heard before. Toby did give me a short, very general explanation that I found confusing, which heâs quoted both above and below.)
How does one determine whether comments are âpacked with difficult to dispel misunderstandingsâ? Does this mean you read comments and decide whether theyâre correct or incorrect, or whether you agree or disagree?
Can you think of a good example of a misunderstanding on my part thatâs representative of the overall problem, as you see it?
Itâs not the first time in the sense that it is part of what I meant by this paragraph. Iâm sorry, but I really cannot invest further in this right now.
I can say that many of your negative karma comments are negative karma for ~ this reason. I have no doubt that you will disagree at length with any particular example.
Sorry, I should clarify. Yes, you definitely sent me that short explanation before. But all the reasoning youâre presenting now is brand new to me.
I can believe that you intended âparticularly unproductive disagreements with other users, generally due to an overly literal interpretation on your part, or excess defensivenessâ to include âpacked with difficult to dispel misunderstandingsâ, but of course there was no way for me to know that.
Iâm not sure how this doesnât just come down to moderating based on the content of someoneâs views as at least one major factor under consideration â whether you decide someoneâs understanding of some topic is correct or incorrect. Itâs just that I thought you were disagreeing with me above when I said it seemed like an editorial decision to me. But this really makes it sound like, at least in significant part, an editorial decision.
Just to be clear, Iâm not saying editorial decisions are bad. If I moderated a forum like this, I would also make editorial decisions.
Yes, I can see many people preferring a private message. One could ask people whether they would be fine with the private message being made public.
I also think public messages are more valuable when the moderation is more contentious, and this makes them less embarrassing because it will be less clear that people did something wrong.
I donât know if it really matters if the message from a mod is public or private as long as comments that break the rules get removed.
If someone writes a comment that says âyouâre stupider than a potted plantâ, that can just turn into [comment removed by moderator] or whatever. Or if someone writes an otherwise fine comment and ends it with âyouâre stupider than a potted plantâ, a moderator could edit out just the last part that breaks the rules.
What is problematic is when the comments are never removed or edited, reports to the mods get no response, and there is no observable moderator action. None of the uncivil comments Iâve ever reported have gotten removed, and only one (among many, many, many) got a public comment from a moderator. I just checked and some mean laugh reacts (intended for mockery) are still up. Those were never removed.
Thereâs so many different options. Instead of taking the comment down, mods could leave a brief public comment saying âPlease stay civilâ or whatever and then engage more deeply with the person in a private message.
I havenât noticed the incivility problem improving at any point that Iâve been active on the forum, and Iâve noticed some repeat offenders. I feel like whatever is being done isnât working. And maybe part of the reason is that people understand whatâs okay from what they see on the forum, and a lot of whatâs on the forum is uncivil.
I also get the impression that the mods just have a much more lax view than I do about what counts as incivility. There are cases where mods seemingly just disagreed there was any reason for them to take action. I also think Toby, a moderator, using phrases like âpacked with hard to dispel misunderstandingsâ, etc., is sort of a sign of how normalized harsh language is on the EA Forum. I think this sort of language is just⊠I donât know, itâs so unpleasant that I just donât want to be around it.
I donât want to say definitively that Iâll never participate on the EA Forum at all ever again, but I feel like the tone here is just so nasty, it seems like Iâm always regretting when I dip a toe back in.
Iâm not sure what this is supposed to mean. What do you mean I was motivated to find examples of incivility? I would have preferred not to see them. I made posts or comments, and people wrote mean replies, or did the mean laugh react thing. I didnât intentionally look for them.
To my recollection, I never saw a single comment or mean laugh react get removed in the entire time Iâve been active on the forum.
I find this a bit hurtful and confusing. I was not trying to be snarky at all, Iâm trying to give earnest feedback. I am now rethinking what you said about how Iâm repeatedly snarky and itâs an overall pattern. Because Iâm trying to be earnest and diplomatic and polite, and youâre saying itâs snark. Huh? Is this how youâve been reading everything Iâve been saying all along? That I say something genuine and you think itâs mean-spirited or sarcastic?
I mean, that is buck wild. I was not aware of that. I can see how that could be a problem, but why not say that from the beginning? Why am I only just hearing about this now? I feel like this is something I would have been responsive to if you had brought it up to me whenever this was happening.
Apologies, I didnât want to confuse or hurt you. I found the comment somewhat patronising, but that may well not have been your intention.