I strongly disagree with this comment—I think that motivations matter and that betting with an appropriate respect for the people who have died is completely possible—but I am glad you stated your position explicitly. Comments like this make the Forum better.
I would similarly be curious to understand the level of downvoting of my comment offering to remove my comments in light of concerns raised and encouragement to consider doing so. This is by far the most downvoted comment I’ve ever had. This may just be an artefact of how my call for objections to removing my comments has manifested (I was anticipating posts stating an objection like Ben’s and Habryka’s, and for those to be upvoted if popular, but people may have simply expressed objection by downvoting the original offer). In that case that’s fine.
Another possible explanation is an objection to me even making the offer in the first place. My steelman for this is that even the offer of self-censorship of certain practices in certain situations could be seen as coming at a very heavy cost to group epistemics. However from an individual-posting-to-forum perspective, this feels like an uncomfortable thing to be punished for. Posting possibly-controversial posts to a public forum has some unilateralist’s curse elements to it: risk is distributed to the overall forum, and the person who posts the possibly-controversial thing is likely to be someone who deems the risk lower than others. And we are not always the best at impartially judging our own actions. So when arguments are made in good faith that an action may respond in group harm, it seems like a reasonable step to make the offer to withdraw the action, and to signal a willingness to cooperate in whatever the group (or moderators, I guess) deemed to be in the group’s interest. And I built in a time delay to allow for objections and more views to be raised, before taking action. I would anticipate a more negative response if I were calling for deletion of others’ comments, but this was my own comment.
I would also note that offering to delete one’s comments comes at a personal cost, as does acknowledging possible fault of judgement; having an avalanche of negative karma on top of it adds to the discomfort.
If there’s something else going on—e.g. a sense that I was being dishonest about following through on the offer to delete; or something else—it would be good to know. I guess there could be a negative reaction to expressing the view that Chi’s perspective is valid. In my view, a point can be valid without being action-deciding. Here there are multiple considerations which I would all see as valid (value of betting to calibrate beliefs; value of doing so in public to reinforce a norm the group sees as beneficial and promote that norm to others; value of avoiding making insensitive-seeming posts that could possibly cause reputational damage to the group). The question is one of weighting of considerations—I have my own views, but it was very helpful to get a broader set of views in order to calibrate my actions.
Ah, I definitely interpreted your comment as “leave a reply or downvote if you think that’s a bad idea”. So I downvoted it and left a reply. My guess is many others have done the same for similar reasons.
I do also think editing for tone was a bad idea (mostly because I think the norm of having to be careful around tone is a pretty straightforward tax on betting, and because it contributed to the shaming of people who do want to bet for what Chi expressed as “inappropriate“ motivations), so doing that was a concrete thing that I think was bad on a norm level.
I strongly disagree with this comment—I think that motivations matter and that betting with an appropriate respect for the people who have died is completely possible—but I am glad you stated your position explicitly. Comments like this make the Forum better.
I would similarly be curious to understand the level of downvoting of my comment offering to remove my comments in light of concerns raised and encouragement to consider doing so. This is by far the most downvoted comment I’ve ever had. This may just be an artefact of how my call for objections to removing my comments has manifested (I was anticipating posts stating an objection like Ben’s and Habryka’s, and for those to be upvoted if popular, but people may have simply expressed objection by downvoting the original offer). In that case that’s fine.
Another possible explanation is an objection to me even making the offer in the first place. My steelman for this is that even the offer of self-censorship of certain practices in certain situations could be seen as coming at a very heavy cost to group epistemics. However from an individual-posting-to-forum perspective, this feels like an uncomfortable thing to be punished for. Posting possibly-controversial posts to a public forum has some unilateralist’s curse elements to it: risk is distributed to the overall forum, and the person who posts the possibly-controversial thing is likely to be someone who deems the risk lower than others. And we are not always the best at impartially judging our own actions. So when arguments are made in good faith that an action may respond in group harm, it seems like a reasonable step to make the offer to withdraw the action, and to signal a willingness to cooperate in whatever the group (or moderators, I guess) deemed to be in the group’s interest. And I built in a time delay to allow for objections and more views to be raised, before taking action. I would anticipate a more negative response if I were calling for deletion of others’ comments, but this was my own comment.
I would also note that offering to delete one’s comments comes at a personal cost, as does acknowledging possible fault of judgement; having an avalanche of negative karma on top of it adds to the discomfort.
If there’s something else going on—e.g. a sense that I was being dishonest about following through on the offer to delete; or something else—it would be good to know. I guess there could be a negative reaction to expressing the view that Chi’s perspective is valid. In my view, a point can be valid without being action-deciding. Here there are multiple considerations which I would all see as valid (value of betting to calibrate beliefs; value of doing so in public to reinforce a norm the group sees as beneficial and promote that norm to others; value of avoiding making insensitive-seeming posts that could possibly cause reputational damage to the group). The question is one of weighting of considerations—I have my own views, but it was very helpful to get a broader set of views in order to calibrate my actions.
Ah, I definitely interpreted your comment as “leave a reply or downvote if you think that’s a bad idea”. So I downvoted it and left a reply. My guess is many others have done the same for similar reasons.
I do also think editing for tone was a bad idea (mostly because I think the norm of having to be careful around tone is a pretty straightforward tax on betting, and because it contributed to the shaming of people who do want to bet for what Chi expressed as “inappropriate“ motivations), so doing that was a concrete thing that I think was bad on a norm level.
Thanks, good to know on both, appreciate the feedback.
(+1 to Oli’s reasoning—I have since removed my downvote on that comment.)