Open & Welcome Thread - September 2020

Today we have banned two users, curi and Periergo from LessWrong for two years each.

I wanted to reply to this because I don't think it's right to judge curi the way you have. Periergo I don't have an issue w/. (it's a sockpuppet acct anyway)

I think your decision should not go unquestioned/uncriticized, which is why I'm posting. I also think you should reconsider curi's ban under a sort of appeals process.

Also, the LW moderation process is evidently transparent enough for me to make this criticism, and that is notable and good. I am grateful for that.

On his blog, he and others maintain a long list of people who engaged with him and others in the Critical Rationalist community, but then stopped, in a way that is very hard to read as anything but a public attack.

You are judging curi and FI (Fallible Ideas) via your standards (LW standards), not FI's standards. I think this is problematic.

I'd like to note I am on that list. (like 1/2 way down) I am also a public figure in Australia, having founded a federal political party based on epistemic principles with nearly 9k members. I am okay with being on that list. Arguably, if there is something truly wrong with the list, I should have an issue with it. I knew about being on that list earlier this year, before I returned to FI. Being on the list was not a factor in my decision.

There is nothing immoral or malicious about curi.us/2215. I can understand why you would find it distasteful, but that's not a decisive reason to ban someone or condemn their actions.

A few hours ago, curi and I discussed elements about the ban and curi.us/2215 on his stream. I recommend watching a few minutes starting at 5:50 and at 19:00, for transparency you might also be interested in 23:40 -> 24:00. (you can watch on 2x speed, should be fine)

Particularly, I discuss my presence on curi.us/2215 at 5:50

You say:

a long list of people who engaged with him and others in the Critical Rationalist community

There are 33 by my count (including me). The list spans a decade, and is there for a particular purpose, and it is not to publicly shame people in to returning, or to be mean for the sake of it. I'd like to point out some quotes from the first paragraph of curi.us/2215:

This is a list of ppl who had discussion contact with FI and then quit/evaded/lied/etc. It would be good to find patterns about what goes wrong. People who left are welcome to come back and try again.

Notably, you don't end up on the list if you are active. Also, although it's not explicitly mentioned in the top paragraph; a crucial thing is that those on the list have left and avoided discussion about it. Discussion is much more important in FI than most philosophy forums - it's how we learn from each other, make sure we understand, offer criticism and assist with error correction. You're not under any obligation to discuss something, but if you have criticisms and refuse to share them: you're preventing error correction; and if you leave to evade criticism then you're not living by your values and philosophy.

The people listed on curi.us/2215 have participated in a public philosophy forum for which there are established norms that are not typical and are different from LW. FI views the act of truth-seeking differently. While our (LW/FI) schools of thought disagree on epistemology, both schools have norms that are related to their epistemic ideas. Ours look different.

It is unfair to punish someone for an act done outside of your jurisdiction under different established norms. If curi were putting LW people on his list, or publishing off-topic stuff at LW, sure, take moderation action. None of those things happened. In fact, the main reason you've provided for even knowing about that list is via the sockpuppet you banned.

Sockpuppet accounts are not used to make the lives of their victims easier. By banning curi along with Periergo you have facilitated a (minor) victory for Periergo. This is not right.

a history of threats against people who engage with him

THIS IS A SERIOUS ALLEGATION! PLEASE PROVIDE QUOTES

curi prefers to discuss in public so they should be easy to find and verify. I have never known curi to threaten people. He may criticise them, but he does not threaten them.

Notably, curi has consistently and loudly opposed violence and the initiation of force, if people ask him to leave them alone (provided they haven't e.g. committed a crime against him), he respects that.

being the historically most downvoted account in LessWrong history

This is not a reason to ban him, or anyone. Being disliked is not a reason for punishment.

Those three things in combination, a propensity for long unproductive discussions, a history of threats against people who engage with him, and being the historically most downvoted account in LessWrong history, make me overall think it's better for curi to find other places as potential discussion venues.

"a history of threats against people who engage with him" has not been established or substantiated.

he seems well-intentioned

I believe he is. As far as I can tell he's gone to great personal expense and trouble to keep FI alive for no other reason than that his sense of morality demands it. (That might be over simplifying things, but I think the essence is the same. I think he believes it is the right thing to do, and it is a necessary thing to do)

I do also think his most recent series of posts and comments is overall much less bad than the posts and comments he posted a few years ago (where most of his negative karma comes from)

He has gained karma since returning to LW briefly. I think you should retract the part about him having negative karma b/c it misrepresents the situation. He could have made a new account and he would have positive karma now. That means your judgement is based on past behaviour that was already punished. This is double jeopardy. (Edit: after some discussion on FI it looks like this isn't double jeopardy, just double punishment. Double jeopardy specifically refers to being on trial for the same offense twice, not being punished twice.)

Moreover, curi is being punished for being honest and transparent. If he had registered a new account and hidden his identity, would you have banned him only based on his actions this past 1-2 months? If you can say yes, then fine, but I don't think your argument holds in this case the only part that is verifiable is based on your disapproval of his discussion methods. Disagreeing with him is fine. I think a proportionate response would be a warning.

As it stands no warning was given, and no attempt to learn his plans was made. I think doing that would be proportionate and appropriate. A ban is not.

It is significant that curi is not able to discuss this ban himself. I am voluntarily doing this, of my own accord. He was not able to defend himself or provide explanation.

This is especially problematic as you specifically say you think he was improving compared with his conduct several years ago.

I do also think his most recent series of posts and comments is overall much less bad than the posts and comments he posted a few years ago (where most of his negative karma comes from), but they still don't strike me as great contributions to the LessWrong canon

This alone is not enough. A warning is proportionate.

are all low-karma

Unpopularity is no reason for a ban

and I assign too high of a probability that old patterns will repeat themselves.

How is this different to pre-crime?

I think, given he had deliberately changed his modus operandi weeks ago and has not posted in 13 days, this is unfair and overly judgmental.

You go on to say:

and I do think that was the right move, but I don't think it's enough to tip the scales on this issue.

What could curi have done differently which would have tipped the scales? If there is no acceptable thing he could have done, why was action not taken weeks ago when he was active?

I believe it is fundamentally unjust to delay action in this fashion without talking with him first. curi has an incredibly long track record of discussion, he is very open to it. He is not someone who avoids taking responsibility for things; quite the opposite. If you had engaged him, I am confident he would have discussed things with you.

and to generally err on the side of curating our userbase pretty heavily and maintaining high standards.

It makes sense that you want to cultivate the best rational forums you can. I think that is a good goal. However, again, there were other, less extreme and more proportionate actions that could have been taken first, especially seeing as curi had changed his LW discussion policy and was inactive at the time of the ban.

We presumably disagree on the meaning of 'high standards', but I don't think that's particularly relevant here.

This means making difficult moderation decision long before it is proven "beyond a reasonable doubt" that someone is not a net-positive contributor to the site.

There were many alternative actions you could have taken. For example, a 1-month ban. Restricting curi to only posting on his own shortform. Warning him of the circumstances and consequences under conditions, etc.

In this case, I think it is definitely not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that curi is overall net-negative for the site

I'm glad you've mentioned this, but LW is not a court of law and you are not bound to those standards (and no punishment here is comparable to the punishment a court might distribute). I think there are other good reasons for reconsidering curi's ban.

banning him might well be a mistake, but I think the probabilities weigh heavily enough in favor of the net-negative, and the worst-case outcomes are bad-enough, that on-net I think this is the right choice.

I think there is a critical point to be made here: you could have taken no action at this time and put a mod-notification for activity on his account. If he were to return and do something you deemed unacceptable, you could swiftly warn him. If he did it again, then a short-term ban. Instead, this is a sledge-sized banhammer used when other options were available. It is a decision that is now publicly on LW and indicates that LW is possibly intolerant of things other than irrationality. I don't think this is reflective of LW, and I think it reflects poorly on the moderation policies here. I don't think it needs to be that way, though.

I think a conditional unbanning (i.e. 1 warning, with the next action being a swift short ban) is an appropriate action for the moderation team to make, and I implore you to reconsider your decision.

If you think this is not appropriate, then I request you explain why 2 years is an appropriate length of time, and why Periergo and curi should have identical ban lengths.

The alternative to pacificity does not need to be so heavy handed.

I’d also like to note that curi has published a post on his blog regarding this ban; I read it after drafting this reply: http://curi.us/2381-less-wrong-banned-me

I welcome the transparency, but this "I don't want others to update on this as being much evidence about whether it makes sense to have curi in their communities" seems a bit weird to me. "a propensity for long unproductive discussions, a history of threats against people who engage with him" and "I assign too high of a probability that old patterns will repeat themselves" seem like quite a judgement and why would someone else not update on this? Additionally, I think that while a ban is sometimes necessary (e.g. harassment), a 2-year ban seems like quite a jump. I could think of a number of different sanctions, e.g. blocking someone from commenting in general; giving users the option to block someone from commenting; blocking someone from writing anything; limiting someone's authority to her own shortform; all of these things for some time.

FYI I am on that list and fine with it - curi and I discussed this post a bit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxVzxS8uMto

I think you're wrong on multiple counts. Will reply more in a few hours.

FYI and FWIW curi has updated the post to remove emails and reword the opening paragraph.

http://curi.us/2215-fallible-ideas-post-mortems and http://curi.us/2215-fallible-ideas-post-mortems#18059

I wonder if anyone has ever written a manifesto for moral uncertainty, maybe something along the lines of:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that we are very confused about morality. That these confusions should be properly reflected as high degrees of uncertainty in our moral epistemic states. That our moral uncertainties should inform our individual and collective actions, plans, and policies. ... That we are also very confused about normativity and meta-ethics and don't really know what we mean by "should", including in this document...

Yeah, I realize this would be a hard sell in today's environment, but what if [LW · GW] building Friendly AI requires a civilization sane enough to consider this common sense? I mean, for example, how can it be a good idea to gift a super-powerful "corrigible" or "obedient" AI to a civilization full of people with crazy amounts of moral certainty?

So why hasn't civilization figured that out already?

States evolve to perpetuate themselves. Civilization has figured it out (in the blind idiot god [LW · GW] sense of "figured it out") that moral uncertainty is teachable and decreases trust in the state ideology. You have it backward. The states in existence today promote moral certainty in children for exactly the same reason the Communist and Nazi states did.

Or is not teaching moral uncertainty some kind of Chesterton's Fence, and teaching it widely would make the world even worse off on expectation?

I expect it is this. General moral uncertainty has all kinds of problems in expectation, like:

• It ruins morality as a coordination mechanism among the group.
• It weakens moral conviction in the individual, which is super bad from the perspective of people who believe there are direct consequences for a lack of conviction (like Hell).
• It creates space for different and possibly weird moralities to arise; I don't know of any moral systems that think it is a good thing to be a member of a different moral system, so I expect all the current moral systems to agree on this one.

I feel like the first bullet point is the real driving force behind the problems it would prevent, anyhow. Moral uncertainty doesn't cause people to do good things; it keeps them from doing good things (that are different from other groups' definitions of good things).

So why hasn't civilization figured that out already? Or is not teaching moral uncertainty some kind of Chesterton's Fence, and teaching it widely would make the world even worse off on expectation?

This is sort of a rehash of sibling comments, but I think there are two factors to consider here.

The first is the rules. It is very important that people drive on the correct side of the road, and not have uncertainty about which side of the road is correct, and not very important whether they have a distinction between "correct for <country> in <year>" and "correct everywhere and for all time."

The second is something like the goal. At one point, people thought it was very important that society have a shared goal, and worked hard to make it expansive; things like "freedom of religion" are the things civilization figured out to both have narrow shared goals (like "keep the peace") and not expansive shared goals (like "as many get to Catholic Heaven as possible"). It is unclear to me whether we're better off with moral uncertainty as generator for "narrow shared goals", whether narrow shared goals is what we should be going for.

It seems like teaching that fact, and instilling moral uncertainty in general into children

I would guess that teaching that fact is not enough to instill moral uncertainty. And that instilling moral uncertainty would be very hard.

Often expressing any understanding towards the motives of a "bad guy" is taken as signaling acceptance for their actions. There was e.g. controversy around the movie Downfall for this:

Downfall was the subject of dispute by critics and audiences in Germany before and after its release, with many concerned of Hitler's role in the film as a human being with emotions in spite of his actions and ideologies.[40][30][49] The portrayal sparked debate in Germany due to publicity from commentators, film magazines, and newspapers,[25][50] leading the German tabloid Bild to ask the question, "Are we allowed to show the monster as a human being?".[25]

It was criticized for its scenes involving the members of the Nazi party,[23] with author Giles MacDonogh criticizing the portrayals as being sympathetic towards SS officers Wilhelm Mohnke and Ernst-Günther Schenck,[51] the former of whom was accused of murdering a group of British prisoners of war in the Wormhoudt massacre.[N 1]

Wouldn't more moral uncertainty make people less certain that Communism or Nazism were wrong?

That's definitely how it was taught in my high school, so it's not unknown.

We want to teach children to accept the norms of our society and the narrative we tell about it. A lot of what we teach is essential pro-system propaganda. 

Teaching moral uncertainty doesn't help with that and it also doesn't help with getting students to score better on standardized tests which was the main goal of educational reforms of the last decades. 

I guess it's because high-conviction ideologies outperform low-conviction ones, including nationalistic and political ideologies, and religions. Dennett's Gold Army/Silver Army analogy explains how conviction can build loyatly and strength, but a similar thing is probably true for movement-builders. Also, conviction might make adherents feel better, and therefore simply be more attractive.

If I had to guess, I'd guess the answer is some combination of "most people haven't realized this" and "of those who have realized it, they don't want to be seen as sympathetic to the bad guys". 

Alas, not. The reason is a bit silly. I can enable text-colors in our editor, but this has the unintended side-effect of now copying over the text-color from wherever you are copying your text from, even the shade of black that that other program uses, which is hard to spot, but ends up looking kind of unsettling on LessWrong. Since the vast majority of posts are just written in normal "black-or-grey on white" text colors, the cost of that seemed larger than the ability to allow people to use colored text. 

Eventually we could probably do something clever, like filtering out grey shades of text when you copy-paste it into the editor, but I haven't gotten around to that, though PRs are always welcome.

Is there visible reporting on this?

Two existing suggestions for how to avoid existential risk naturally fall out of this framing.

1. Go all the way to the left (even further than the picture implies) by giving the AI no output channels whatsoever. This is Microscope AI [LW · GW].

2. Go all the way to the bottom and avoid all agent-like systems, but allow autonomous systems like self-driving cars. This is (as I understand it) Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS).

Over, and over... the pheromones... the overwhelming harmony...

I do, at least. I don't think "What if trump loses and wont' leave" is the best summary of my concern; the best summary is "What if the election is heavily disputed."

Have you read https://www.benkuhn.net/hard/ ? Curious what you think. (Disclosure: I started the company that Ben works for, which does not have hard eng problems but does have a high potential for social impact)

• Quantitative finance has use for people who know advanced math and algorithms. (Though they are not known for doing great good for society.)
• You can also get around this problem by starting your own ML startup. (I did this.) The startup route takes work and risk tolerance but provides high positive externalities for society.