Don’t respond, and the-audience-as-a-whole, i.e. the-culture-of-LessWrong, will largely metabolize this as tacit admission that you were right, and I was unable to muster a defense because I don’t have one that’s grounded in truth
Respond in brief, and the very culture that I’m saying currently isn’t trying to be careful with its thinking and reasoning will round-off and strawman and project onto whatever I say. This seems even likelier than usual here in this subthread, given that your first comment does this all over the place and is getting pretty highly upvoted at this point.
Respond at length, here but not elsewhere, and try to put more data and models out there to bridge the inferential gaps (this feels doomy/useless, though, because this is a site already full of essays detailing all of the things wrong with your comments)
Respond at length to all such comments, even though it’s easier to produce bullshit than to refute bullshit, meaning that I’m basically committing to put forth two hours of effort for every one that other people can throw at me, which is a recipe for exhaustion and demoralization and failure, and which is precisely why the OP was written. “People not doing the thing are outgunning people doing the thing, and this causes people doing the thing to give up and LessWrong becomes just a slightly less poisonous corner of a poisonous internet.”
I am less confident than you are in your points, and I am also of the opinion that both of Jennifer’s comments were posted in good faith. I wanted to say, however, that I strongly appreciate your highlighting of this dynamic, which I myself have observed play out too many times to count. I want to reinforce the norm of pointing out fucky dynamics when they occur, since I think the failure to do this is one of the primary routes through which “not enough concentration of force” can corrode discussion; that alone would have been enough to merit a strong upvote of the parent comment.
(Separately I would also like to offer commiseration, since I perceive that you are Feeling Bad at the moment. It’s not clear to me what the best way is to do this, so I settled for adding this parenthetical note.)
I’d contend that a post can be “in good faith” in the sense of being a sincere attempt to communicate your actual beliefs and your actual reasons for them, while nonetheless containing harmful patterns such as logical fallacies, misleading rhetorical tricks, excessive verbosity, and low effort to understand your conversational partner. Accusing someone of perpetuating harmful dynamics doesn’t necessarily imply bad faith.
In fact, I see this distinction as being central to the OP. Duncan talks about how his brain does bad things on autopilot when his focus slips, and he wants to be called on them so that he can get better at avoiding them.
I want to reinforce the norm of pointing out fucky dynamics when they occur...
Calling this subthread part of a fucky dynamic is begging the question a bit, I think.
If I post something that’s wrong, I’ll get a lot of replies pushing back. It’ll be hard for me to write persuasive responses, since I’ll have to work around the holes in my post and won’t be able to engage the strongest counterarguments directly. I’ll face the exact quadrilemma you quoted, and if I don’t admit my mistake, it’ll be unpleasant for me! But, there’s nothing fucky happening: that’s just how it goes when you’re wrong in a place where lots of bored people can see.
When the replies are arrant, bad faith nonsense, it becomes fucky. But the structure is the same either way: if you were reading a thread you knew nothing about on an object level, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether you were looking at a good dynamic or a bad one.
So, calling this “fucky” is calling JenniferRM’s post “bullshit”. Maybe that’s your model of JenniferRM’s post, in which case I guess I just wasted your time, sorry about that. If not, I hope this was a helpful refinement.
(My sense is that dxu is not referring to JenniferRM’s post, so much as the broader dynamic of how disagreement and engagement unfold, and what incentives that creates.)
Fair enough! My claim is that you zoomed out too far: the quadrilemma you quoted is neither good nor evil, and it occurs in both healthy threads and unhealthy ones.
(Which means that, if you want to have a norm about calling out fucky dynamics, you also need a norm in which people can call each others’ posts “bullshit” without getting too worked up or disrupting the overall social order. I’ve been in communities that worked that way but it seemed to just be a founder effect, I’m not sure how you’d create that norm in a group with a strong existing culture).
It’s often useful to have possibly false things pointed out to keep them in mind as hypotheses or even raw material for new hypotheses. When these things are confidently asserted as obviously correct, or given irredeemably faulty justifications, that doesn’t diminish their value in this respect, it just creates a separate problem.
A healthy framing for this activity is to explain theories without claiming their truth or relevance. Here, judging what’s true acts as a “solution” for the problem, while understanding available theories of what might plausibly be true is the phase of discussing the problem. So when others do propose solutions, do claim what’s true, a useful process is to ignore that aspect at first.
Only once there is saturation, and more claims don’t help new hypotheses to become thinkable, only then this becomes counterproductive and possibly mostly manipulation of popular opinion.
This word “fucky” is not native to my idiolect, but I’ve heard it from Berkeley folks in the last year or two. Some of the “fuckiness” of the dynamic might be reduced if tapping out as a respectable move in a conversation.
I’m trying not to tap out of this conversation, but I have limited minutes and so my responses are likely to be delayed by hours or days.
I see Duncan as suffering, and confused, and I fear that in his confusion (to try to reduce his suffering), he might damage virtues of lesswrong that I appreciate, but he might not.
If I get voted down, or not upvoted, I don’t care. My goal is to somehow help Duncan and maybe be less confused and not suffer, and also not be interested in “damaging lesswrong”.
I think Duncan is strongly attached to his attempt to normatively move LW, and I admire the energy he is willing to bring to these efforts. He cares, and he gives because he cares, I think? Probably?
Maybe he’s trying to respond to every response as a potential “cost of doing the great work” which he is willing to shoulder? But… I would expect him to get a sore shoulder though, eventually :-(
If “the general audience” is the causal locus through which a person’s speech act might accomplish something (rather than really actually wanting primarily to change your direct interlocutor’s mind (who you are speaking to “in front of the audience”)) then tapping out of a conversation might “make the original thesis seem to the audience to have less justification” and then, if the audience’s brains were the thing truly of value to you, you might refuse to tap out?
This is a real stress. It can take lots and lots of minutes to respond to everything.
Sometimes problems are so constrained that the solution set is empty, and in this case it might be that “the minutes being too few” is the ultimate constraint? This is one of the reasons that I like high bandwidth stuff, like “being in the same room with a whiteboard nearby”. It is hard for me to math very well in the absence of shared scratchspace for diagrams.
Other options (that sometimes work) including PMs, or phone calls, or IRC-then-post-the-logs as a mutually endorsed summary. I’m coming in 6 days late here, and skipped breakfast to compose this (and several other responses), and my next ping might not be for another couple days. C’est la vie <3
I am less confident than you are in your points, and I am also of the opinion that both of Jennifer’s comments were posted in good faith. I wanted to say, however, that I strongly appreciate your highlighting of this dynamic, which I myself have observed play out too many times to count. I want to reinforce the norm of pointing out fucky dynamics when they occur, since I think the failure to do this is one of the primary routes through which “not enough concentration of force” can corrode discussion; that alone would have been enough to merit a strong upvote of the parent comment.
(Separately I would also like to offer commiseration, since I perceive that you are Feeling Bad at the moment. It’s not clear to me what the best way is to do this, so I settled for adding this parenthetical note.)
I’d contend that a post can be “in good faith” in the sense of being a sincere attempt to communicate your actual beliefs and your actual reasons for them, while nonetheless containing harmful patterns such as logical fallacies, misleading rhetorical tricks, excessive verbosity, and low effort to understand your conversational partner. Accusing someone of perpetuating harmful dynamics doesn’t necessarily imply bad faith.
In fact, I see this distinction as being central to the OP. Duncan talks about how his brain does bad things on autopilot when his focus slips, and he wants to be called on them so that he can get better at avoiding them.
Calling this subthread part of a fucky dynamic is begging the question a bit, I think.
If I post something that’s wrong, I’ll get a lot of replies pushing back. It’ll be hard for me to write persuasive responses, since I’ll have to work around the holes in my post and won’t be able to engage the strongest counterarguments directly. I’ll face the exact quadrilemma you quoted, and if I don’t admit my mistake, it’ll be unpleasant for me! But, there’s nothing fucky happening: that’s just how it goes when you’re wrong in a place where lots of bored people can see.
When the replies are arrant, bad faith nonsense, it becomes fucky. But the structure is the same either way: if you were reading a thread you knew nothing about on an object level, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether you were looking at a good dynamic or a bad one.
So, calling this “fucky” is calling JenniferRM’s post “bullshit”. Maybe that’s your model of JenniferRM’s post, in which case I guess I just wasted your time, sorry about that. If not, I hope this was a helpful refinement.
(My sense is that dxu is not referring to JenniferRM’s post, so much as the broader dynamic of how disagreement and engagement unfold, and what incentives that creates.)
Endorsed.
Fair enough! My claim is that you zoomed out too far: the quadrilemma you quoted is neither good nor evil, and it occurs in both healthy threads and unhealthy ones.
(Which means that, if you want to have a norm about calling out fucky dynamics, you also need a norm in which people can call each others’ posts “bullshit” without getting too worked up or disrupting the overall social order. I’ve been in communities that worked that way but it seemed to just be a founder effect, I’m not sure how you’d create that norm in a group with a strong existing culture).
It’s often useful to have possibly false things pointed out to keep them in mind as hypotheses or even raw material for new hypotheses. When these things are confidently asserted as obviously correct, or given irredeemably faulty justifications, that doesn’t diminish their value in this respect, it just creates a separate problem.
A healthy framing for this activity is to explain theories without claiming their truth or relevance. Here, judging what’s true acts as a “solution” for the problem, while understanding available theories of what might plausibly be true is the phase of discussing the problem. So when others do propose solutions, do claim what’s true, a useful process is to ignore that aspect at first.
Only once there is saturation, and more claims don’t help new hypotheses to become thinkable, only then this becomes counterproductive and possibly mostly manipulation of popular opinion.
This word “fucky” is not native to my idiolect, but I’ve heard it from Berkeley folks in the last year or two. Some of the “fuckiness” of the dynamic might be reduced if tapping out as a respectable move in a conversation.
I’m trying not to tap out of this conversation, but I have limited minutes and so my responses are likely to be delayed by hours or days.
I see Duncan as suffering, and confused, and I fear that in his confusion (to try to reduce his suffering), he might damage virtues of lesswrong that I appreciate, but he might not.
If I get voted down, or not upvoted, I don’t care. My goal is to somehow help Duncan and maybe be less confused and not suffer, and also not be interested in “damaging lesswrong”.
I think Duncan is strongly attached to his attempt to normatively move LW, and I admire the energy he is willing to bring to these efforts. He cares, and he gives because he cares, I think? Probably?
Maybe he’s trying to respond to every response as a potential “cost of doing the great work” which he is willing to shoulder? But… I would expect him to get a sore shoulder though, eventually :-(
If “the general audience” is the causal locus through which a person’s speech act might accomplish something (rather than really actually wanting primarily to change your direct interlocutor’s mind (who you are speaking to “in front of the audience”)) then tapping out of a conversation might “make the original thesis seem to the audience to have less justification” and then, if the audience’s brains were the thing truly of value to you, you might refuse to tap out?
This is a real stress. It can take lots and lots of minutes to respond to everything.
Sometimes problems are so constrained that the solution set is empty, and in this case it might be that “the minutes being too few” is the ultimate constraint? This is one of the reasons that I like high bandwidth stuff, like “being in the same room with a whiteboard nearby”. It is hard for me to math very well in the absence of shared scratchspace for diagrams.
Other options (that sometimes work) including PMs, or phone calls, or IRC-then-post-the-logs as a mutually endorsed summary. I’m coming in 6 days late here, and skipped breakfast to compose this (and several other responses), and my next ping might not be for another couple days. C’est la vie <3
If your goal is to somehow help Duncan, you could start by ceasing to relentlessly and overconfidently proceed with wrong models of me.