Oh, you wrote that post on “truthseeking” too!! I forgot that!! Another helpful post.

“Truthseeking” as a term drives me bananas because it’s so vague and ambiguous — I looked really hard and couldn’t find any real attempts to define it clearly, if even to define it at all — and pretty much the only way I see the term get used is when someone wants to slam someone else they disagree with. And it’s definitely never clear to me that the person who’s accused of “not truthseeking” 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 “not truthseeking” and they just mean “bad evidence/bad arguments/ill-informed points”, they should just say that. Ditto for “bad faith” if that’s what it’s supposed to mean.

Thank you for seeing me clearly. It’s a huge relief. I found it super confusing and hurtful when Toby said I’m not engaging in good faith, that I was snarky when I was really being heartfelt and sincere, and that I was “motivated” 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 I’m out to cause trouble or something. I don’t know. I really can’t understand what’s happening here.

I do feel like I’m transparent. I don’t know why someone would think I’m sneaking around.

Do you think this is a LessWrong subculture thing? I notice in the LessWrong-o-sphere, there’s 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 “outsiders”?

This line from a post by a pseudonymous person involved in the LessWrong community always sticks out in my mind:

I don’t 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 don’t know if I can put my finger on why. Maybe it’s 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 “game” (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 — outside of that context — genuine niceness or politeness for secret snark?

Love this! Thank you! I love the term “epistolary debates”. 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 don’t need anything fancy. Substack or any blog or website will allow you to just copy and paste a bunch of emails or Slack/Discord 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 don’t 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. Let’s 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 it’s pretty rare, but I’ve experienced at least once an online community where the moderators were trying their best and doing a good job, but the users’ behaviour became so acrimonious it overwhelmed the moderators’ 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 people’s intelligence, or shame or mock or belittle them, or relentlessly make passive-aggressive insults. I think we’re so numb on the Internet, where if someone doesn’t 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/not 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 person’s 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. That’s definitely been my experience on the EA Forum, and it’s 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 can’t always build some kind of neutral, objective case to convince moderators to step in — often these things are personal and really subtle. It’s 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 can’t in real life. Sometimes you just don’t want to talk to someone because they rub you the wrong way for whatever reason. (Maybe you’re always polite and they’re always rude. Or maybe they just remind you of your ex.) If we force these interactions to happen, that’s 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 isn’t 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 don’t 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 there’s 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 I’m 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 don’t feel that way. 

There’s 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 isn’t enough.

The biggest barrier to good thinking and good discussion is a lack of psychological safety. If you take people’s prefrontal cortex offline and put them in their limbic system, their thinking suffers. Their conversation suffers. It’s sometimes about being calm in the moment and letting anger settle down before replying. But it’s 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 I’m writing too much on the EA Forum, so I’m sorry if that’s 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. I’m 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 it’s felt really hurtful and rude. I thought they were acccusing me of lying about my actual views and pretending to believe something else. Because that’s the canonical definition of bad faith. It softens the sting a little bit (but not fully) to learn they probably just meant, basically, “I disagree with your argument really hard”. But I think it’s 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 they’re saying. (I also think the never clearly defined or explained term “truthseeking” is annoying in a similar way. What does it mean? Who can say? In practice, it’s just a bit of spice to really dunk on someone hard.)

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 don’t 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 you’re 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 what’s correct and acceptable vs. incorrect and ban-worthy?

It’s 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 don’t 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 skeptics’ ideas are stupid and then ban them. Okay… is that… scalable?

Thank you, David, that’s 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, that’s wrong and my fault.

I feel a bit guilty and regretful to hear you say you’ve found arguing with me stressful. I definitely don’t want to make someone feel stressed, and now I’m 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 shouldn’t be be like that, and like something is going wrong.

What I’ve appreciated most about talking to you is your level of sincere curiosity. The topics we’ve discussed seem like live issues to you, where you’re genuinely trying to make up your mind and get the best information and argumentation, and not just argue to win. Conversely, you’ve often made me pause, get curious, and give things a second thought. There’s 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 you’re interested, there’s a lot we could still have fun talking about — probably not on the EA Forum, at this point. But I’m really thinking about what you said about how it’s 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.

Thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it. I’m 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/soft 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 didn’t have time to provide examples of problematic comments. Then there was a third and final message (319 words) informing me the temporary rate limit/soft 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 he’s quoted in this thread a few times:

However there is a clear pattern in your comments — 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 isn’t 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 didn’t 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 “unproductive disagreements, overly literal interpretation, excess defensiveness” which Toby had not mentioned previously, and didn’t explain in any more specificity than what’s 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 — the one above I’m replying to now — is 820 words (excluding quotes). So, that comment is about the total length of the correspondence I received regarding my soft ban.

Toby’s 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 “packed with hard to dispel misunderstandings” was never brought up to me before now. (I also find this to be pretty harsh language.)

If this took up a lot of Toby’s time behind the scenes, or other moderators’ time, I guess I wouldn’t know. I’m 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?

I don't 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 "you're stupider than a potted plant", that can just turn into [comment removed by moderator] or whatever. Or if someone writes an otherwise fine comment and ends it with "you're stupider than a potted plant", 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 I've 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.

There's so many different options. Instead of taking the comment down, mods could leave a brief public comment saying "Please stay civil" or whatever and then engage more deeply with the person in a private message.

I haven't noticed the incivility problem improving at any point that I've been active on the forum, and I've noticed some repeat offenders. I feel like whatever is being done isn't working. And maybe part of the reason is that people understand what's okay from what they see on the forum, and a lot of what's 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 "packed with hard to dispel misunderstandings", 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 don't know, it's so unpleasant that I just don't want to be around it.

I don't want to say definitively that I'll never participate on the EA Forum at all ever again, but I feel like the tone here is just so nasty, it seems like I'm always regretting when I dip a toe back in.

Sorry, I should clarify. Yes, you definitely sent me that short explanation before. But all the reasoning you're presenting now is brand new to me.

I can believe that you intended "particularly unproductive disagreements with other users, generally due to an overly literal interpretation on your part, or excess defensiveness" to include "packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings", but of course there was no way for me to know that.

I'm not sure how this doesn't just come down to moderating based on the content of someone's views as at least one major factor under consideration — whether you decide someone's understanding of some topic is correct or incorrect. It's 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, I'm not saying editorial decisions are bad. If I moderated a forum like this, I would also make editorial decisions.

Civility enforcement is a major part of what we do as moderators. It's inevitable that some borderline cases will remain on the site such that someone motivated to find them - as you were - will be able to.

I'm 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 didn't intentionally look for them.

To my recollection, I never saw a single comment or mean laugh react get removed in the entire time I've been active on the forum.

It's hard to respond to snark like this without snark, but it'd be pretty ironic if I did. What I'll say is, firstly, it's gone pretty well the other times I've done it.

I find this a bit hurtful and confusing. I was not trying to be snarky at all, I'm trying to give earnest feedback. I am now rethinking what you said about how I'm repeatedly snarky and it's an overall pattern. Because I'm trying to be earnest and diplomatic and polite, and you're saying it's snark. Huh? Is this how you've been reading everything I've been saying all along? That I say something genuine and you think it's 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.

This is the first time I'm hearing about your or the other mods' reasoning about why I was soft banned/rate 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 hadn't heard before. Toby did give me a short, very general explanation that I found confusing, which he's quoted both above and below.)

How does one determine whether comments are "packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings"? Does this mean you read comments and decide whether they're correct or incorrect, or whether you agree or disagree?

Can you think of a good example of a misunderstanding on my part that's representative of the overall problem, as you see it?