My personal thoughts, as I was the mod who most pushed to move this to personal blog[1]. I haven’t checked this with other mods:
My main actionable general takeaway from this incident is that we should try to write longer and more detailed notes when taking any moderation action. We should treat moderation notes as low context communication, and we should try to expand more on things like “violates norms” or “is not clearly related to doing more good”. I’m very guilty of this, e.g. I think this was a core mistake here and here. In particular, we should always try to make it clear that criticism is welcome on the forum.
My less actionable and less general thoughts on this specific case:
I strongly believe that this decision was not a blunder, even if it probably was a mistake:
As many people agreed than disagreed with the moderation comment (It was 21 agreed to 18 disagreed as of 3 days ago. After the post edits and recent discussion it’s 22 to 23. People might be biased to agree, but I don’t think more than to disagree in this specific case.)
The author agreed with the decision
People who agree have no reason to comment and are less likely to see the moderation comment in the first place
In this case, there were several considerations, which made things messy. From my perspective, this post as posted was somewhat borderline on these axes, and I can see reasonable and contradicting perspectives on:
The post relevance to doing more good
The post breaking forum norms (i.e. the insults that have since been edited)
Yudkowsky relationship with EA and if that raises or lowers the bar for acceptable criticism. As an influential voice, we should allow more criticism; as a critic of large parts of EA, like AI labs and animal welfare, we should make sure criticism is kind and doesn’t discourage people from criticizing EA.
I think, in retrospect, the ideal action might have been to take mod action in the form of writing a comment asking the author to edit the post (as they did) to keep the good parts and reduce the insults (and maybe clarify the practical relevance to doing more good).
I think the main reasons why we didn’t reply earlier to comments are that:
The poster agreed with the decision, so there wasn’t much to change
Moving the post to personal blog for whatever reason didn’t remove it from the frontpage, even for logged out users (idk if this is a bug, but it just showed a little icon next to the post, which didn’t seem important to fix)
I weakly wanted to reach more of a consensus in the mod team, and hear the perspectives of all moderators
I was wrong in not seeing any relevance to EA. EY is much more relevant to EA for many more users than I would have thought, and social reality is much more important than I thought, and arguably is a core reason for the community section.[2]
I feel that the “silent majority” that reads but doesn’t write on the forum wants relatively more moderation than people who write lots of comments, so we should weakly keep that in mind when getting feedback in terms of “how much to moderate” (but the feedback in terms of “how to moderate” is very useful)
We should probably have replied earlier, even if we didn’t reach a consensus on whether it was the right call or not, potentially just to surface that we were not sure it was.
Mostly unrelated to the above, but I really liked some of the comments in this thread. I am grateful for the standards that many commenters hold themselves to when posting, and the time they invest in sharing their expertise and thoughtful perspectives even in threads that would naturally have a tendency to devolve into fights.
Apologies for writing this quickly[3], and again I want to emphasize that this is just my personal perspective, and I haven’t asked for feedback from other mods or advisors.
I might have overreacted because I have seen people loving to hate on Yudkowsky for >10 years. There used to be a subreddit dedicated to it. I haven’t found comments on either side of those discussions to be particularly true, necessary or kind. I would want this forum to have less of that, but this is my personal view and shouldn’t have influenced mod action
My personal thoughts, as I was the mod who most pushed to move this to personal blog[1]. I haven’t checked this with other mods:
My main actionable general takeaway from this incident is that we should try to write longer and more detailed notes when taking any moderation action. We should treat moderation notes as low context communication, and we should try to expand more on things like “violates norms” or “is not clearly related to doing more good”. I’m very guilty of this, e.g. I think this was a core mistake here and here. In particular, we should always try to make it clear that criticism is welcome on the forum.
My less actionable and less general thoughts on this specific case:
I strongly believe that this decision was not a blunder, even if it probably was a mistake:
As many people agreed than disagreed with the moderation comment (It was 21 agreed to 18 disagreed as of 3 days ago. After the post edits and recent discussion it’s 22 to 23. People might be biased to agree, but I don’t think more than to disagree in this specific case.)
The author agreed with the decision
People who agree have no reason to comment and are less likely to see the moderation comment in the first place
In this case, there were several considerations, which made things messy. From my perspective, this post as posted was somewhat borderline on these axes, and I can see reasonable and contradicting perspectives on:
The post relevance to doing more good
The post breaking forum norms (i.e. the insults that have since been edited)
Yudkowsky relationship with EA and if that raises or lowers the bar for acceptable criticism. As an influential voice, we should allow more criticism; as a critic of large parts of EA, like AI labs and animal welfare, we should make sure criticism is kind and doesn’t discourage people from criticizing EA.
I think, in retrospect, the ideal action might have been to take mod action in the form of writing a comment asking the author to edit the post (as they did) to keep the good parts and reduce the insults (and maybe clarify the practical relevance to doing more good).
I think the main reasons why we didn’t reply earlier to comments are that:
The poster agreed with the decision, so there wasn’t much to change
Moving the post to personal blog for whatever reason didn’t remove it from the frontpage, even for logged out users (idk if this is a bug, but it just showed a little icon next to the post, which didn’t seem important to fix)
It’s obvious to moderators that criticizing anyone is ok (while following norms) so we didn’t feel the need to spell it out
I weakly wanted to reach more of a consensus in the mod team, and hear the perspectives of all moderators
I was wrong in not seeing any relevance to EA. EY is much more relevant to EA for many more users than I would have thought, and social reality is much more important than I thought, and arguably is a core reason for the community section.[2]
I feel that the “silent majority” that reads but doesn’t write on the forum wants relatively more moderation than people who write lots of comments, so we should weakly keep that in mind when getting feedback in terms of “how much to moderate” (but the feedback in terms of “how to moderate” is very useful)
We should probably have replied earlier, even if we didn’t reach a consensus on whether it was the right call or not, potentially just to surface that we were not sure it was.
Mostly unrelated to the above, but I really liked some of the comments in this thread. I am grateful for the standards that many commenters hold themselves to when posting, and the time they invest in sharing their expertise and thoughtful perspectives even in threads that would naturally have a tendency to devolve into fights.
Apologies for writing this quickly[3], and again I want to emphasize that this is just my personal perspective, and I haven’t asked for feedback from other mods or advisors.
As I (wrongly) didn’t see a strong connection between this post and doing good better
I might have overreacted because I have seen people loving to hate on Yudkowsky for >10 years. There used to be a subreddit dedicated to it. I haven’t found comments on either side of those discussions to be particularly true, necessary or kind. I would want this forum to have less of that, but this is my personal view and shouldn’t have influenced mod action
I’m writing this from EAGxBerlin