Eliezer Yudkowsky replied to me:
I wasn’t trying to be mean. I didn’t expect Yudkowsky to respond to me. If he did respond, I expected an on-topic response. I thought the most likely response from Yudkowsky or others would be to deny the importance of correct grammar (including punctuation, spelling and related issues). But none of the response comments said that, so I never got a chance to argue with it (aiming for brevity, and not knowing if I’d get any replies at all, I didn’t cover it in detail preemptively).
I thought that Yudkowsky deals with hostile comments frequently on Twitter, that my critical comment was better than those, and that he’d be able to ignore it if he disliked it (or he could debate or listen, but I didn’t think those were likely). I didn’t know it would be this easy to get his attention. I didn’t expect to quickly provoke such a strong, negative response that didn’t engage with the substance of the issue but instead used his authority against me. I don’t think I pushed very hard. I also thought Yudkowsky’s writing about rationality would restrain his behavior a bit more than it did.
If I wrote a similar criticism of Sam Harris’ writing, I would be shocked for Harris to personally respond like this. I wouldn’t expect him to see it, and if he did see it, I would expect him to silently dismiss me. I expected Yudkowsky to be too busy, with too many people seeking his attention, to respond to my comment. I thought he’d be so used to ignoring most comments that it would be easy for him to ignore me. I was wrong.
I think it’s implausible that the over 25 errors in the post were all deliberate, but now he’s prevented me from posting a list or discussing that further. When asked about plural errors, he responded that a singular error was intentional (without giving any reasoning or argument), which dodges the issue. And he basically told me not to list the other errors or otherwise point out the problems with his response. I didn’t list the errors initially because I was trying not to be too aggressive. I didn’t think my soft approach would get my criticism suppressed almost immediately before I explained much. I planned to list the errors if anyone actually denied that there were a lot, thus making the list more relevant, but no one did. Since the errors are findable by Claude (and presumably Grammarly, but I didn’t check that myself), anyone who cared could easily get a list.
I don’t know of any style guides or experts who advocate the errors Yudkowsky made. No one on his side has brought any up, either. If all the style guides and experts are wrong, and Yudkowsky is a genius who knows more about English than them, he ought to share a little of his special knowledge so his fans can learn from him and write more like he does. Or if he knows of an expert who disagrees with most other experts, but is actually right, he ought to share a cite so we can learn from that expert.
Ironically, I think my high effort and good behavior made it harder for him to dismiss and ignore me, thus leading to suppressing my speech. I admitted to having made the same mistake in the past myself and I was the only person in the discussion to quote and cite sources. And I was talking about a topic I’ve studied a lot.
This is the second time Yudkowsky directly responded to me. Fifteen years ago:
Contrary to what he said, my post later stopped being accessible at all. Years later, at my request, it was made accessible again (by someone else, not by Yudkowsky), but then someone made it inaccessible again.
It seems irrational to suppress ideas on the basis of unpopularity (downvotes). This time, he used his authority less explicitly, but still used it without giving any reason, explicit order or explicit warning. Saying I can stop does not literally tell me to stop; it leaves deniability about whether my speech was suppressed. If I don’t stop, I can be banned with the claim that I was warned, but if I do stop he doesn’t have to admit that he used his authority to stop me.
Yudkowsky is a public intellectual who wants his policy proposal (banning all LLM training data centers and enforcing the ban with violence including airstrikes) implemented by all governments worldwide and enforced across international borders. E.g., if North Korea trains LLMs, he wants the U.S. and China to work together to bomb their data centers, despite North Korea having nuclear weapons. Given this, I would not back off from debating him just to spare his feelings, even if he said he was upset. It’s only the ambiguous threat of using admin powers that is preventing me from arguing my case further on LessWrong (for context, they’ve previously banned me for years without a warning or a claim that I broke a specific rule). I fear that many people reading his post won’t recognize that Yudkowsky abused his power, and he’s prevented me from explaining it for them. I also doubt many people will take into account the context that military policy proposals should be more open to criticism than typical blog posts, which I’m no longer free to point out.
Also, Yudkowsky is in a leadership position for a quest to save the world. In that context, he really shouldn’t stop people from brainstorming and discussing or debating potential ways to be more effective at preventing humanity’s extinction. He’s been very clear that he thinks those are the stakes.