This is also a change I'd noticed and been a little confused by. I really appreciate Michelle raising it, and the comments so far have been great. I'm curating this post. 

I find this a bit hurtful and confusing. I was not trying to be snarky at all, I'm trying to give earnest feedback.

Apologies, I didn't want to confuse or hurt you. I found the comment somewhat patronising, but that may well not have been your intention. 

Yeah, thanks Lorenzo. I've messaged the author. 

"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.

It's not the first time in the sense that it is part of what I meant by this paragraph. I'm sorry, but I really cannot invest further in this right now. 

I can say that many of your negative karma comments are negative karma for ~ this reason. I have no doubt that you will disagree at length with any particular example. 

I can see both general guidance and specific examples about how to improve comments being useful. I believe they are often more effective together.

I do agree Vasco, but I don't endorse me spending much more time on this right now. 

I feel like it should often be possible to give guidance to someone in public without embarassing them. One could explicitly say the infraction is minor, and use a casual tone.

Maybe? I personally would be much more discouraged from posting by a public comment than a private message. However it'd be nice if we could have a live log somewhere where forum users could see that we dm'd an anonymous user. 

When writing a lot is the problem (I personally do not think this can by itself be a problem)

Writing a lot in itself isn't the problem. It's that the writing contains difficult-to-dispel misunderstandings, and therefore creates an asymmetric effort ratio.

But, I dunno, sneering and snarking just seems like par for the course for the EA Forum — including using laugh emojis to mock people you disagree with.

Again, this is another issue with the current lack of moderation transparency on the Forum. Misuse of the laugh react is seen as breaking forum norms, and (AFAIK) in almost every case has led to at least a moderator message. 

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. 

Bit of a side-point but the amount of civility enforcement we do has been one of the reasons I've been reluctant to publicise mod actions. I appreciate being able to send someone a more casual message for butting up against guidelines rather than having to call them out publicly (which is a far more embarassing result of what can be a fairly minor infraction). 

If you find yourself in a position in the future where you want to encourage someone to engage differently on the EA Forum, it would be helpful to be more specific in what you're asking them to do.

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. 

Secondly, I have tried to be specific, but it has been easier to explain the snarkiness than the broader problem with how you've interacted with people on the Forum.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to write a post like Habryka's here, which might be required to explain the kind of impact that I think you were having on Forum discourse.

 One section from that post raises the concept of 'Asymmetric effort ratios'. This is definitely part of our moderation decision. At one point, if I remember correctly, you wrote almost a fifth of the words on the Forum in a week. You are very productive of long comments, which are often packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings. This is part of why a rate-limit was the solution we arrived at. In small doses, you can be a valuable contributor, but without limit, it becomes unfairly taxing on your interlocutors. 

Apologies that I won't be able to explain this to you to a degree you will find satisfying. Like I said, none of this was an easy decision, but I do think that it is what's best for the Forum. 

Again, I haven't spoken with other mods about this comment, they are free to disagree. 

Exciting! Are you eligible for gift-aid in the UK? Seems like it is based around US donors so far (reasonable triage). 

Hey Vasco:

It's likely we should invest in public mod comments again, as this case underlines, it's pretty unfair to Yarrow to have to explain it to their interlocutors. 

As you might guess I strongly disagree with pretty much every aspect of Yarrow's framing of the rate-limit we applied to their account. I'll talk to other mods about whether we want to reinstate the public comments, and if so I'll share more detail on the Yarrow decision in said public comment. 

A quick version is that we made this decision because of the way that Yarrow disagrees with people, not the fact that they do. Primarily because of repeatedly sneer-y and snarky comments^[1], but also because of generally unproductive and attritional disagreements, for example, see this description I sent to Yarrow at the time of the rate-limit:

"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."

This wasn't a decision taken lightly (many gdocs involved), as I also said in the message: "I still think you could be a particularly valuable Forum user if you changed how you engaged a bit". 

If readers take anything away from this comment - I want to underline that we really don't want to discourage disagreement on this platform. It's a key part of our theory of why this forum is valuable. But valuable disagreement requires good faith and mutual understanding. Another line I sent to Yarrow:   

"Critical voices like yours are a crucial part of a functioning epistemic (or epistemological if you prefer) community, but if we aren't careful about how we integrate more spirited voices, we could end up with a breakdown of trust and understanding on our platform."

PS- I haven't spoken to the mod team about this so these are my takes. 

 

1. ^{^}

   And incidentally I disagree with the line: "The mods seem pretty reluctant to moderate for civility on the EA Forum in general, and mostly just let things slide". If you see someone breaking our civility norms, please report the comment or post in the three dot menu. 

Would Granola separate the speakers in the transcript?

I've been recording using Mac's native voice recorder, and asking Claude to clean up or summarise the transcript. Downside is that it doesn't recognise different voices. 

For that you'd probably need a specialist app (podcast apps work, but I'm sure there's a simpler solution). I'd also love a solution here - I'm so crap at taking notes so I love a transcript.