My reaction was similar to Akash's. 

I wished that the initial comment had been more specific given the user's status and the tone of the criticism (when I put myself in the author's shoes, I could imagine being baffled, since the tone of "my" post was relatively tame by the standards of most online discussion spaces). 

I downvoted that comment, because I didn't see the explanation as helpful to the author and I want to discourage comments that attack an author's motivations without evidence ("you are clearly deciding against both of these" -- I wouldn't call the post "kind", but it seemed reasonably curious to me in that it closely engaged with Tristan's work and acknowledged that he had achieved some of his aims, with plausibly good results). 

I thought the third comment was really helpful, and is exactly what I hoped to see from the first comment. I upvoted it. Highlighting specific passages is great; it was also nice to see language like "I read X as the author intending Y" rather than "by X, the author intended Y".

As for the post itself, I chose not to vote, as I was caught between upvoting and downvoting. I also objected to elements of the author's tone, but I thought the content was a useful counterpoint to a widely-experienced piece of EA content and provided enough specific arguments for commentators to engage productively.

I expect that people interpreted the "You are clearly deciding against both of these" as an unkind/uncharitable phrase, since it reads like an accusation of deliberate wrongdoing. I expect that, if you'd instead said something like "Parts of your post seem unnecessarily inflammatory", then it wouldn't have received such a negative response.

I also personally tend to interpret the kindness guidelines as being primarily about how to engage with people who are on the forum, or who are likely to read forum posts. Of course we shouldn't be rude in general, but it seems significantly less bad to critique external literature harshly than to directly critique people harshly.

I also really appreciate your comments. I didn‘t downvote your initial comment, but my first reaction upon seeing it was something like „Hey, I felt really positive about a researcher coming to the forum and explaining why he disagrees with Tristan. I don’t want someone to discourage this from happening!“ I’ve initially read the parts you cited partly as tongue in cheek and maybe as a little unnecessary, but far from wanting to signal that the overall contribution was not welcome.

I appreciate that you explained your negative reaction a lot, especially given how rarely people do it. I did read over the parts you cited not even wondering much how Tristan would react to it and I think it’s great someone brought it up as I now think that new users of our forum should strive to communicate disagreements less confrontationally than is common on other platforms. So I think it’d be unfortunate if you feel discouraged from this experience.

Thank you all for your responses, I really appreciated them. Your perspectives make more sense to me now, though I have to say I still feel really confused.

[Following comment not exhaustively responding to everything you said.]

I hadn't intended to communicate in my first comment that Mark deliberately intended to violate the forum guidelines, but that he deliberately decided against being kind and curious. (Thank you for pointing that out, I did not think of the alternative reading.) I didn't provide any evidence for this because I thought Mark said this very explicitly at the start of his post:

To play by gentlemans rules is to their advantage - curtailing the tools in at my disposal to makes bullshit as costly as possible.

I acknowledge there are some negative costs to this (e.g. polluting the information commons with avoidable conflict), and good people can disagree about if the tradeoff is worth it. But I believe it is.

Gentleman's rules usually include things like being kind and curious I would guess, and Mark says explicitly that he ignores them because the tradeoff is worth it to him. I don't understand how these lines can be interpreted in any other way, this seems like the literal reading to me.

I have to admit that even after all your kind elaborate explanations I struggle to understand how anything in the section 'Conflict can be an effective tactic for good' could be read as tongue-in-cheek, as it reads very openly hostile to me (...it's right there in the title?) .

I don't think it is that unlikely that interviewees on the 80k podcast would respond to a kind thoughtful critique on the EA Forum. That said, this is not just about Tristan, but everyone who might disagree with Mark, as the 'Conflict can be an effective tactic for good' section made me doubt they would be treated with curiosity and kindness.

I will take from this that people can have very different interpretations of the same content, even if I think the content is is very explicit and straightforward.

In general I agree, but the forum guidelines do state "Polish: We'd rather see an idea presented imperfectly than not see it at all.", and this is a post explicitly billed as "response" that were invited by Rob. So if this is all the time Mark wants to spend on it, I feel it is perfectly fine to have a post that is only for people who have listened to the podcast/are aware of the debate.

Thankyou 🙏 Fixed.

I agree you can still criticize YouTube, even if they are recommending conspiracy content less than "view-neural". My main disagreement is with the facts - Tristan us representing YouTube is as a radicalization pipeline caused be the influence of recommendations. Let's say that YouTube is more radicalizing than a no-recommendation system all-things-considered because users were sure to click on radical content whenever it appeared. In this case you would describe radicalization as a demand from users, rather than a radialization rabbit hole caused by a manipulative algorithm. I'm open to this possibility, I wouldn't give this much pushback if this is what is being described.

The algorithmic "Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube" paper is clever in the way they use comments to get at real-world movement. But that paper doesn't tell us much given that a) they didn't analyse movement form right to left (one way movement tell you churn, but nothing directional) and b) thy didn't share their data.

The best I have seen is this study, which uses real-world web usage forma representative sample of users to get the real behaviour of users who are clicking on recommendations. They are currently re-doing analysis with better classifications so we will see what happens.

Still doesn't fully answer your question tho. To get at the real influence of recommendation you will need to do actual experiments, something only YouTube can really do right now. Or if a third party was allowed to provide a youtube recsys somehow.

My suspicions about radicalization that leads to real word violence is mainly to do with things outside influence of analythims. Disillusionment, Experience of malevolence,  Grooming by terrorist ideologically violent religious/political groups.

I wasn't aware of the writing guidelines. But also, I think this was kind and curious given the context, so I downvoted your comment.