I think most people can do well by joining the kinds of relationships that are time-tested (marriage, friendship, work, school, gym, army, church...) From how much trouble it took society to get these halfway working and find decent boundaries, you should be skeptical of inventing new ones that will work in your lifetime. Especially if they look suspiciously similar to cults which we already know don’t work.
And I’m not even sure why you need to invent new relationships! You might feel like you have huge problems that require one huge hammer to solve, but that feeling is deceptive. Mitigating the problems one by one, with boring well-known fixes, is easier and works better. If you want to get fit, join a gym. If you want to learn something, go to school. These will give you the right amount of structure and your daily dose of socialization, without regimenting your life like a boot camp, and you’ll be guided by competent people instead of fumbling your way as a crowd of amateurs.
I think there are a fair number of wrong (or at least underjustified/unfounded) claims in the above. e.g. “cults don’t work.”
This is largely not a new invention, and is instead largely a return to structures and values that have been known to work in the past, and have been loosened/undermined in the past few decades.
I think there are a fair number of wrong (or at least underjustified/unfounded) claims in the above. e.g. “cults don’t work.”
My opinion of CFAR just fell from “neutral” to “mildly harmful” because they hired someone who’s willing to say the above. On old LW (where Eliezer wrote a sequence on avoiding cults and I was contributing decision theory math) this would’ve been unbelievable. Or maybe I’ve been missing the signs, not being in the Bay Area.
You’re not thinking or arguing clearly, and are instead leaping to conclusions and pulling from stereotypes.
If you lose respect for CFAR over that, it’s the result of your own confusion, and the loss of your endorsement is not one I’d lose sleep over.
One can say “guns are indeed effective” and not be advocating for wanton gun violence. It’s a statement about objective reality—guns do things—not a statement about normative values. Similarly, I can argue with your claim “cults don’t work” (which is clearly,demonstrably false on at least some axes; cults were in fact successful enough to cause large damage to a lot of people’s lives at the very least) without saying “HECK YEAH, GO CULTS.”
I’ll continue to engage, or not, based on whether or not you respond reasonably to the above. Sorry for the impatience, but I’ve written thousands upon thousands of words in this thread by now, and I’m not at all in the mood to let people strawman me at this point (even if they want to try to pull a sneaky status move by claiming seniority-on-the-forum and trying to shame a certain kind of statement without any model behind the shaming).
(I also note that you didn’t bother to respond AT ALL to my claim that you’re making unfounded leaps, nor to my claim that this is in fact a return to previous proven systems rather than an attempt to invent a new one, which makes me think that in addition to smushing together unrelated things in your arguments, you’re not actually here to discuss, i.e. swap statements back and forth on a topic and in fact interact with what the other person is saying, and are instead here to just score points or confirm (rather than falsify) your own models.)
If you took my original comment to mean that cults are harmless, that’s a bit bizarre.
As for previous proven systems, I’m not sure which ones you mean. The closest analogue is religious or socialist communes, which turn bad too often for my taste. The happiest exception is kibbutzim which weren’t nearly as authoritarian as your idea. Then you have the army, which exists today just fine and we know what it’s good for, not sure why we need another one. Then there are boarding schools, sport camps etc. but these are based on learning from professionals which you don’t have.
I took your original comment to be saying “cults don’t work.”
Then, when I said “they do, though,” I took your second comment to be pearl-clutching and saying “well, now I think CFAR must be (slightly) evil or stupid for hiring someone who is willing to say out loud that cults work (gasp).”
You cannot possibly have drawn out of my statements above “Duncan thinks cousin_it thinks cults are harmless.”
I’m going to disengage because it’s not easy to have discourse with you (say things clearly, stick to a topic, expose reasoning, actually make progress toward truth or convergence). I don’t understand how your reasoning process works. I’m finding this subthread frustrating and low-value, and thus far the specific points I have been able to tease out of what you’re saying, I generally disagree with (and trust my domain knowledge and expertise more than I trust your skepticism-without-any-concrete-evidence-backing-it-up-from-someone-who’s-already-demonstrated-willingness-to-make-unfounded-leaps).
The militaries have a pretty big stick. You can go to prison for insubordination or disobeying orders; in wartime you might well just be shot for that. The Dragon Army… will give you a stern talking to?
The only person I heard of go to the brig was one who broke into barracks and stole personal property. Falsifying official records or running off to run a side job as a real estate broker was more of a ’30 days restriction, 30 days extra duty, reduction in rate to the next inferior rate, forfeiture of 1⁄2 month’s base pay for 2 months’ thing.
Actually I agree. It feels weird to see that one person upvoted my comment without knowing how many would have downvoted it. The same might apply to Duncan’s post, from the comments it seems like it was really polarizing, but the score only shows the 28 upvotes. If I may be allowed another reference to old LW, Eliezer used to advocate that people downvote more, ideally without replying. I think he saw it as a defense against noise and then left when the noise became too much.
You can get a clearer-if-still-imperfect sense from contrasting upvotes on parallel, opposing comments, e.g. it has 28 upvotes and 1029823904812309481320948blargltroll has 10. I highly doubt this would have ever received sufficient mass of downvotes to become invisible.
You can get a clearer-if-still-imperfect sense from contrasting upvotes on parallel,
I’m fairly certain that P(disagrees with blargtroll | disagrees with your proposal) >> P(agrees with blargtroll | disagrees with your proposal), simply because blargtroll’s counterargument is weak and its followups reveal some anger management issues.
For example, I would downvote both your proposal and blargtroll’s counterargument if I could—and by the Typical Mind heuristic so would everyone else :)
That said, I think you’re right in that this would not have received sufficiently many downvotes to become invisible.
It’s an appeal to authority and someone shitting on an organization based on one line of a lesswrong comment by one member of that organization, with no request for clarification or depth.
I don’t think there a good argument that a Western Church works that much better than a Yoga Ashram and the setup of the Dragon Army is relatively similar to a Yoga Ashram.
If you want to learn something, go to school. These will give you the right amount of structure and your daily dose of socialization, without regimenting your life like a boot camp, and you’ll be guided by competent people instead of fumbling your way as a crowd of amateurs.
When comparing kids with decent parents schooled children don’t do much better than unschooled children.
When I was at university learning computer programming I quite often used the not-time-tested StackOverflow over the time-tested method of asking the tutor.
Churches don’t have cohabitation, they’re more like clubs, so the risk is lower. And in an ashram you hopefully get taught by a yoga professional, not just bossed around. I don’t see the value of OP’s proposal compared to either.
I thought homeschooled kids were usually taught by parents? Though I agree that you can learn stuff on your own. The problem is learning a broad range of ideas in a manageable time, not just picking a narrow path through topics that catch your interest, and for that many adults find universities useful. Not to mention you meet many smart people and pick up good memes without realizing it. Somewhere on Tumblr I saw a proposal for improving MIRI’s research that said simply “everyone gets a PhD”, I thought there was a lot of truth to that.
I note that you continue to assume/argue as if there will be zero relevant professional expertise, despite the fact that the professional expertise CITED IN THE MAIN POST is far from the only professional expertise that will be brought to bear during the experiment. In our very first dry run outing, we hired professional instruction to learn a new skill—you are factually incorrect in your assertions.
You are doing your level best to make sure to interpret everything here in the strawest, most negative possible light. “just bossed around.” I’m starting to assume you literally haven’t read the post, because it’s rapidly becoming the only possible explanation for your conclusions.
You’re not setting up a school with yourself as teacher, though. You’re setting up a commune with yourself as boss, with rules above and beyond what schools usually require, and which would lead to student rebellion if they were imposed in a university. So if learning is the point, I’d like to understand how your thing is better than a school.
Also, you miiiiiiiiiight try not leaning so hard on the typical mind fallacy. West Point is a university that people self-select into with far, far, far stricter rules than this, and they don’t rebel. Ditto many sorts of monasteries and temples and martial arts dojos and retreat centers (including many that are non-religious), ditto all sorts of invasive practices by organizations attempting to turn around lives-gone-astray or turbocharge the already-successful (e.g. regimens put into place by life coaches or intensive business training groups).
You’re confusing “I don’t like this” with “this is objectively bad” (or “I would rebel against this” with “no sane people would not rebel against this”) which—to quote you—on Old LW would have been unbelievable.
Once you make even a single good faith attempt to pass my ideological Turing test (my attempt to pass yours is the multithousand word post above), I’ll start taking your criticisms as seriously as I’ve taken everyone else’s.
“Life coaches”, bullshido dojos and religious brainwashing houses aren’t a good group to be in. It seems to me that such places are fine at teaching authority, but not the best way to teach anything else. I wouldn’t go to West Point to learn math or even history, I’d go somewhere that focuses on math or history instead. And even for fitness, dojos lose to compartmentalized workouts like lifting or BJJ.
Maybe my mistake is misunderstanding the rationalist community. I know that they are a slightly weird bunch, but it’d take a lot to convince me that a boot camp environment would suit them. In the Russian Army such folks tended to be miserable, whereas in relaxed civilian jobs they thrived. That’s part of why I’m replying to you, I feel that nerdy types are vulnerable to proposals like yours but ultimately don’t benefit from them. They already have a lot of tension and random windmills going in their minds, putting them in a pressure container makes it worse, compared to doing casual normal stuff.
Your mistake isn’t misunderstanding the rationalist community, it’s strawmanning and stereotyping and typical minding. If you stopped for one second to think, huh, maybe somebody who’s clearly not an idiot and whose models so strongly disagree with mine might see something I don’t, and approached this thing with curiosity instead of blunt assertions about how it’s terrible and you know better, you could’ve, I dunno, asked questions about places where you’re confused, and I would have answered them, and like many, many other places in this thread, there would’ve been a process of mutual updating and convergence as I showed you cool conclusions from thinking I’d already done, and you helped me find holes and flaws and make fixes, and both of us came out of the interaction with a clearer view of reality and a stronger ability to do good in the world.
Even now, like a dozen comments in, you refuse to stop it—putting scare quotes around life coaches and attaching the word bullshit to the word dojos and adding brainwashing to the phrase “religious houses.” You are not here in good faith; you’ve got a negative model you’re in love with and you’re confirmation biasing all over the place. You’re every bit as much a troll as the anonymous person was—you’re just more subtle about it.
Besides being pure ad hominem, you seem to understand “good faith” as trying to help you. Let me point out that no one has any obligations to help you or to cooperate with you—refusal to do so is not bad faith. Pointing out that your endeavour is misguided and doomed to failure (assuming that’s a point of view honestly held) is not in bad faith either, even if you do not accept the arguments made.
You are perfectly free to not cooperate with people who won’t cooperate with you, but that lack of cooperation on their part is neither malice nor trolling.
You got a lot more defensive over the past few days.
I disagree that the summary is ad hominem—I think it is a concrete description of my highest-probability model explanation of cousin_it.
I don’t interpret good faith as trying to help me. I do interpret it as trying to help us, where I define “us” as “all of the people on LW and in the rationalist community” specifically, and more broadly as “all humans.”
I don’t see cousin_it as doing any kind of truth-seeking or curious investigation, nor do I see them as taking a principled stance against something that is actively dangerous (the way the troll did). Instead, they’re just throwing out straw criticisms without actually bothering to put in the work to engage with the actual topic at hand. It smacks of either careless antagonism or an attempt to score cheap points, whereas many of the people who are openly and unrepentantly opposed to this project still seem, to me, to be acting in good faith.
I disagree that the summary is ad hominem—I think it is a concrete description of my highest-probability model explanation of cousin_it.
Buzzword compliance aside, this is precisely what ad hominem is: “a … description of … ”. The subject is your proposal for a commune—not your beliefs about cousin_it.
I don’t interpret good faith as trying to help me. I do interpret it as trying to help us, where I define “us” as “all of the people on LW and in the rationalist community” specifically, and more broadly as “all humans.”
That sounds to me like pious crap. I don’t see you as different from the 99.9+% of people who are not qualified to judge who is trying to help “all humans” and who is not—and that’s even besides the oft-made observation that road to hell is never in need of repair.
Let me remind you again—we are discussing your proposal for a commune, not whose intentions are pure.
As I said, you are free to cooperate or not, but focusing on what you see as personal shortcomings of people who disagree with you seems like a road that leads to bad places. Especially given that you put forward yourself as the Dear Leader of this potential commune.
Right. The problem is, only some of us are actually discussing.
In point of fact, most of us are actually discussing, but threeish people have just dropped in to lecture with no even hypothetical willingness to change their minds (or at least none credibly demonstrated, as I claim I’ve credibly demonstrated mine).
EDIT: Also, on reflection, I still think you’re either misusing the term ad hominem or mischaracterizing the critique I’m making of cousin_it. I’m not trying to make claims about them as a whole person (e.g. they’re bad in general or they lack the ability to engage in good faith in general), which is I think what is required for it to be ad hominem—I have to be making some fundamental attribution, and I’m not. I’m saying that the words they’ve typed in this thread are inconsistent with someone acting in good faith, which is a claim about observations and causality, and not about character.
I assume you have noted, because you’re perceptive, but just to say here—I have repeatedly expressed credible gratitude for the presence of countervailing models and criticisms and so forth, and done at least some significant updating in plain sight. I don’t think it would be fair for people to round me off to “was looking for a hive mind.”
The point here is merely to what degree LW is special and what can you expect from it. I neither said nor implied that you went looking for a hive mind.
Yeah, I want to similarly underscore/perhaps redundantly state that you have demonstrated extremely high and consistent credibility when it comes to productively engaging in discourse. With the comment above, I was underscoring a thing that plausibly could’ve just gone unstated.
I agree I got a lot more defensive over the past 36 hours, but you’ll note it’s confined almost entirely to two specific cases where I feel people are approaching with unjustified confidence in extremely uncharitable models, after all of the other discussion that’s gone on (which I feel should’ve earned me some credibility).
unjustified confidence in extremely uncharitable models
From your point of view, maybe—but it’s not the only one.
You seem to be welcoming comments about which parts of your plan to slightly bend, adjust, and repaint, but you are visibly hostile to the idea that your proposal is flawed at its core and cannot be saved regardless of tinkering with its details.
Yes—that’s because the proposal is not flawed at its core, and I’m not going to pretend that it is to satisfy pearl-clutchers and lecturers. (More accurately: I have greater than 95% confidence that this experiment, conditioned on it meeting existing criteria for launch, does not cause great harm to people on the scale of six months.)
I note that I am willing to engage with my real, extant uncertainty with people who don’t approach from a holier-than-thou know-it-all condescending lecturing position. For instance, it’s not even clear that the house will actually happen, because it’s not clear that there will be enough people who think that it’s a good idea. I’m not trying to convince any of the potential members—instead, I’m simply revealing revealing revealing the models, shining as much light on them as possible, so people can neutrally evaluate, and I still have ~33% credence on “there won’t be enough justified faith to do it.”
If someone were to say “Hmmm. I’m reasonably confident that this proposal is flawed at its core and can’t work; here are my objections and here are my questions,” I’d engage with them (and this is a credible claim if you look back through this thread). What I won’t engage with is people who don’t even know me who are trying to pull status moves to put themselves above me (and therefore in a position to judge) from the get-go.
As another way to state my point, I’m credibly offering good faith and charity to the vast majority of critics (all but the bottom 3%). But the people who are coming in with deontologically hostile models are not offering me any good faith and charity in return. And you’re right that no one owes me that, but similarly I don’t owe them any response other than “yeah, screw you, too.”
that’s because the proposal is not flawed at its core
And how do you know that?
Or, let’s put it this way: which evidence short of actually attempting to implement this would persuade you that the proposal is flawed?
who are trying to pull status moves
So, how much do you care about status? Why is it a big deal?
similarly I don’t owe them any response
True. But you are offering them a response. This response illustrates how you react to what you believe is unjustified criticism—and it is not “I disagree. Tap.”
The confidence regarding it not being flawed at its core comes from related past experience, confidence in the individuals involved, the direct evidence of the positive value of norms stolen from Dreamship and Event Horizon, faith in the safety valves of Circling, pair debugging, internal and external check-ins, and commitment to iteration, and the results of having run a trial version that went quite well.
There was evidence I could have gathered from the experimental weekend that would have persuaded me the proposal was flawed, and there were similarly potentially unknown arguments that people here on LW might have offered up that would have been persuasive, too, but at this point, I can’t outline concrete predictable evidence that would cause me to not run this (not actually all that ambitious) experiment. It’s like the pants ending up in Washington DC—there probably exists evidence that would convince me, but I can’t reasonably guess what it might be.
In response to both the status question and the owed-response question, I do believe that people need to adopt a policy of loudly objecting to moves they want to be considered outside the Overton window, especially if those people have some social capital to spend (because they’re doing it not only for themselves but also on behalf of the disenfranchised who can’t afford to push back). In other words, in part, I’m fighting the two people I think are Doing It Wrong because I want to be publicly seen fighting on behalf of not that. I think that it overall increases rather than decreases my credibility on axes that I think are relevant.
I do believe that people need to adopt a policy of loudly objecting to moves they want to be considered outside the Overton window
You are either grandstanding or misusing terms. People’s objections to your proposal (including both form and content) are firmly within the Overton Window and are nowhere near its boundaries. I have trouble believing that you actually want as tiny an Overton Window as you imply.
If I may make a suggestion? Stop digging. The narrower you make the range of acceptable thought/speech, the less adequate you look. The more you attack and denigrate people who fundamentally disagree with you, the less credibility you have as a leader.
Note again that we are on Less Wrong and within the rationalist community, both of which are very much built around norms of reasoning and discourse; I’m not suggesting a tiny Overton window for the world at large or even one that’s this constricted on all axes.
But yes—I think both Less Wrong and the rationalist community would be far, far closer to the ideal versions of themselves if they doubled or tripled their callouts-of and refusal-to-engage-with sloppy and biased and inappropriate discourse. Overton window being “things a politician can say on TV”—I want “styles of discourse that a high-status rationality community member can publicly endorse” to not include the stuff cousinit and handoflixue were doing. My concerns are almost entirely about form, because I think correct form leads to improved content. I could take any of the objections that cousin_it or handoflixue or 128bargl had and recast them into (e.g.) “the sort of sentences Julia Galef or Rob Bensigner would say,” and they’d be worth fully engaging with, but in their current form, I claim there’s more long-term civilizational value to rejecting them.
I’m entirely okay with losing credibility with people who don’t value the above. Those people shouldn’t hold me in high esteem—we have at least partially opposing goalsets, and will at least occasionally be actual antagonists relative to one another; I’m actually taking some mild encouragement from how violently people I fundamentally disagree with are disagreeing with this project, because it’s weak circumstantial evidence that I’m moving in the correct direction. (i.e. the less adequate I look to you is not necessarily an appropriate measure; Sanders and Clinton both frequently made moves that made them look less adequate to some people.)
And I again disagree with your characterization that I’m attacking and denigrating people who fundamentally disagree with me, and I’m surprised that you’re rounding things off that carelessly. If you want to see personal attacks and denigration, look at (e.g.) the blog post that cousin_it cited to Kaj. Nothing I’ve done here comes anywhere close to that—I’m attacking and denigrating specific forms of argument, and specific modes of reasoning. For example, if you look at the time where handoflixue asked a clear and cogent question without any unfounded critical leaps, I gave a multiparagraph answer with lots of concrete detail. I grumbled at them a bit for their other interactions with me, but I didn’t treat their point or question any differently because they’d bugged me elsewhere. I have no problem with specific people; it’s just that at some point my prior on the VOI of engaging with them drops too low. It’s Bayes—one of my fundamental moral principles is that you should trust in revealed preferences, and barring credible reasons to believe someone’s made a major personality shift, you should evaluate them as the sum of their actions.
(Also, I think it’s not grandstanding if I’m literally practicing what I’m preaching in real time? Like, I’m doing exactly what I claim a person ought to do, not just moralizing with no action behind it.)
would be far, far closer to the ideal versions of themselves if they doubled or tripled their callouts-of and refusal-to-engage-with sloppy and biased and inappropriate discourse
I don’t think so. I think they would be dead or sufficiently engrossed in navel-gazing to be functionally dead.
I claim there’s more long-term civilizational value
So, grandstanding.
Those people shouldn’t hold me in high esteem—we … will at least occasionally be actual antagonists
It’s perfectly reasonable to hold one’s enemies in high esteem and in fact one of the traditional measures of success is the caliber of enemies you’ve acquired along the way. For non-fatal competitions you actually want the best, highest-esteem enemies you could find—they will push you to become better (as opposed to nuisance pests who will only encourage you to stay irritated and smug).
I’m actually taking some mild encouragement
That’s the classic “reverse stupidity” argument.
Nothing I’ve done here comes anywhere close to that
As Alicorn pointed out, the situation is not symmetric. Writing a Tumblr rant is a very different thing from asking multiple people to surrender not insignificant amounts of autonomy to you, as well as become emotionally and financially entangled in a project of yours.
I’m attacking and denigrating specific forms of argument, and specific modes of reasoning
No, you don’t. You actually tend to oscillate between ad hominem attacks and replying to specific criticisms.
Or maybe you don’t think of the “you think wrong thoughts expressed in the wrong way and you should be ashamed of yourself” as an attack? Let me assure you that it is.
at some point my prior on the VOI of engaging with them drops too low
If that were so, you would stop engaging with them. But you don’t.
ETA
I think it’s not grandstanding if I’m literally practicing what I’m preaching in real time?
That’s not how it works. If you loudly proclaim that, say, the use of mis-gendered pronouns is a major human rights violation akin to torture (or that letting trans people use the bathrooms they want is the end of Western civilization), you are grandstanding even if you literally throw a temper tantrum in real life.
I’m now feeling deliberately misunderstood, and if you’re doing that on purpose, I ask you to stop.
We disagree about Overton windows; that’s good, and cruxy.
According to the definition of grandstanding that Google throws up when you type in the word, you’re misusing it (particularly, the word requires you to make claims about my internal state and purpose, i.e. what I’m doing X for, and your best source of data there is my self-report). It’s not grandstanding, and I note it’s far easier for you to name-call than to actually make a specific critique stick.
It’s perfectly reasonable to hold some of your enemies in high esteem—for instance, I note we’re disagreeing pretty heavily here, and I have a great deal of respect for you. But it’s unfounded to jump from some to all. Many of the people opposed to this idea are not high-caliber thinkers and reasoners, whatever other value they have as human beings.
reversed stupidity
I was extremely careful to say what I actually meant, and then you were extremely careful to strawman me by quoting only part of my words, as if I didn’t say “weak circumstantial” right in the same sentence.
Operationalize your claims that I’m making ad hominem attacks, and I’ll address them one by one. I predict you’ll definitely be able to find 1-3 examples of me sticking a foot across the line, and that they’ll be outweighed by a factor of at least five by me doing the thing I claimed I was doing. I predict you will find no examples that are anywhere near as gross as the ones put forth by cousin_it and handoflixue. I’d be willing to monetize this as a bet.
I’ve stopped engaging with them for their own sake. I have previously explained to you that I think it’s important to be seen openly defending good norms, and thus continue to engage with them for myself and everyone else. I think it was pretty lame of you to just … pretend I hadn’t said that, and again strawman by criticizing me for the thing I’m not really doing.
I am losing respect for you in this subthread, but right now it’s something like “I had you at 957 points, and I’m worried you’re going to drop to 949.” Hopefully this is just some combination of a little bit of triggering and the fact that both of us care about getting this right, and not that you endorse overall the tack you’re taking anymore than I’d endorse the worst 10% of my own reactions on this post.
My working definition of grandstanding is basically “declaring that one’s words or actions have outstanding significance or impact”. Case in point: you being concerned with “long-term civilizational value”. I strongly suspect that your cluefulness about long-term civilizational values is… limited.
as if I didn’t say “weak circumstantial”
It doesn’t help you. Weak circumstantial evidence is still evidence and under reverse stupidity you just don’t have any.
Operationalize your claims that I’m making ad hominem attacks, and I’ll address them one by one.
I have no interest in fisking your comments. I offered you an outside view—if you think it’s wrong, there is no reason for me to try to convince you.
I’ve stopped engaging with them … and thus continue to engage with them
Pick one, will ya? X-)
I think it’s important to be seen openly defending good norms
Maybe, but when you say stuff like “I deny your right to judge and interrogate me” you sound like an idiot. The fact that you were capable of typing that sentence and pressing “Send” is not a good sign.
I am losing respect for you in this subthread
I appreciate your concern, but I think I’ll be fine. Really, I will :-P
I’m glad, because you just lost a lot more. I do, indeed, think your outside view is deeply flawed, and I’ve just lost an illusion about how you in particular are likely to go about engaging in discourse. As an example, you just pulled a fifth-grader-bully trick in the quote
I’ve stopped engaging with them … and thus continue to engage with them
that was purposefully thickheaded in ignoring the whole point of that paragraph.
I didn’t think you would troll/deliberately mischaracterize, endorsedly, when not triggered-in-the-moment. That was firmly outside of my model of you. Now I know something new about you, and it will be useful to me in the future.
A funny thing about you: the more you talk, the worse you look. You started by presenting a very reasonable image—you listened and you expressed willingness to take into account people’s concerns. A bit more than a week passed and you’re already screaming at people IN ALL CAPS, calling them “a jerk” and dropping dark hints about knowledge that “will be useful to [you] in the future”. How is your stress tolerance? You are not performing well when people disagree with you.
You also try to be manipulative—not very successfully, mind you—by dispensing praise and criticism in order to gain the results you want. Since we’re are being all frank’n’all, my opinion of your adequacy as a leader went down a lot during this week—mostly because you wouldn’t shut up. I sincerely reiterate my advice to stop digging.
I don’t mind this whole “the more you talk, the worse you look” thing, because a) it’s symmetrical, and b) I’m entirely comfortable being seen for having exactly the preferences and principles I do have.
I’ve responded sharply, at this point, to exactly four people: a universally acknowledged troll, two people who started out clearly strawmanning me and being heavily anchored on negative opinions without justification, and now you, as you abandon standards in pursuit of scoring points.
I have not willfully misrepresented people, or immediately leapt to unfounded conclusions about their deep character, or engaged in cheap-trick point-scoring tactics against people who didn’t shoot first (with one exception that Alicorn called me out on, and I edited), or any of the other behaviors that I don’t reflectively endorse. I have certainly pulled none of the subpar junk that you’ve pulled in this subthread, and I’m proud to have opposed you as you’ve done it.
As I’ve noted elsewhere—I don’t much care about irrelevant opinions, and as people have demonstrated themselves to be below the bar of what I expect from a LWer and a rationalist, I correspondingly cease to mind what their overall judgment of me is. I generally try to judge how likely a person’s opinion is to closely correlate with truth and useful perspective, and while I hold my disregard with skepticism on the meta level, so as to not unfairly write people off, ultimately evidence is evidence. There are some people who simply demonstrate, fairly conclusively, that they aren’t going to play fair, think straight, update on evidence, etc., and are literally not worth listening to, in a VOI sense (though they may still be worth opposing in public).
I state again that something like 97% of the participants in this thread do seem like their opinions are likely to closely correlate with truth and provide useful perspective, and I’m grateful for the hours that total strangers have poured into helping me dodge mistakes. This project is something like 50% less likely to fail and 30% more likely to be really successful (relative to where it was a week ago) thanks to those contributions.
And sure—probably most of the neutral parties are shaking their heads somewhat—thinking things like “Duncan’s being too aggressive here” or “Duncan’s fighting fights not worth fighting” or “I wish he hadn’t posted X.” But that’s coin I’m spending deliberately, in open defense of things I think are worth defending. There’s no point in social capital if all you do is hoard it—at some point, people who’ve accrued ought to take risks holding lines that others can’t afford to defend. If I lose 5% of the respect that I’ve gained, but also meaningfully embolden others who were too hesitant to defend themselves against bullies by giving them the sense they’re not the only ones bothered by poor discourse, that’s a purchase I endorse. Freedom from trolls isn’t free—turns out even Lumifer will occasionally use Trump-style tactics, if they dislike you enough.
LOL. You smell SJW-ish. A white knight selflessly spending his social capital to defend the weak against the bullies. Against “Trump-style tactics” even! And, of course, you will not be denied for your cause is just.
You are clearly incapable of shutting up so this will be amusing.
So tell me more about things you think are worth defending—especially from the likes of me. Are we still talking about the mere forms of expression which you disapprove of or there’s some deeper ideology involved? Do you see me as lacking honor, or empathy, or proper morals, or the desire to remake the world, or something else?
I note for others reading this comment and wondering why it hasn’t been addressed that I’ve at least temporarily ceased replying to Lumifer and a couple of other posters on a policy level, for reasons surrounding norms of discourse, strawmanning, epistemic humility, presence or absence of good faith, etc. It’s possible that the above contains good questions or insights; if someone else chooses to repost/re-ask/rephrase sections of this, I’ll likely respond to them.
I note for others reading this comment and wondering why it hasn’t been addressed that I’ve at least temporarily ceased replying to Lumifer and a couple of other posters on a policy level, for reasons surrounding norms of discourse, strawmanning, epistemic humility, presence or absence of good faith, etc. It’s possible that the above contains good questions or insights; if someone else chooses to repost/re-ask/rephrase sections of this, I’ll likely respond to them.
It’s been a while since the last time I was officially added to the list of the Enemies of the People and… ritually cast out, I guess? This time there even a list of high crimes I’m guilty of—“reasons surrounding norms”. Woe is me!
I was hoping you’d show how your community will be better than current authoritarian communities, which I deeply dislike. Instead you insist that current authoritarian communities are fine and we need more of them. Hopefully you see why that’s unlikely to change my mind, imperfect as it is. Heck, my dislike for cults was clear from the first comment, which makes your jumping onto it even more weird. A master of soft skills would’ve chosen literally anything else as an opening. Even now in the middlegame you can still turn it around, though I can understand if you’re frustrated and don’t want to. My own goal in this conversation is mostly achieved, I can go on or not, up to you.
I’ve read your post, it’s nothing but red flags. You’re literally proposing that DA members greet each other with a salute and trust you more than themselves. The few upsides you mention (participants are smart, time is limited, etc) come across as excuses why you should get power now. Check out nostalgebraist’s tumblr for more folks who got the same vibe. Your comments make things worse, you clearly like authoritarian communities in your heart rather than consider them a necessary evil.
I thought homeschooled kids were usually taught by parents?
I use the phrase unschooling and not homeschooling but even if a child gets taught by their parents that still suggests that the average teacher is not skilled enough to provide value to his student that allows them to outperform students taught by lay-people.
The problem is learning a broad range of ideas in a manageable time, not just picking a narrow path through topics that catch your interest, and for that many adults find universities useful. Not to mention you meet many smart people and pick up good memes without realizing it.
The same arguments could be made for why the Dragon Army is a good idea.
Let’s take a random skill from the proposed curriculum, like welding. You could try externally motivated self-study at OP’s group house, or you could go to a community college and ask how long they’ll take to make you a certified welder. It seems to me that even without the authoritarian LARPing, the first option is a weird hybrid, like a flying submarine. It’s more costly than either full self-study (if you can do it) or fully spoon-fed learning at a traditional place for a set term.
The OP’s proposal is to dial motivation to 11 and hope that it leads to effective learning. Even if that doesn’t backfire, at most it lets you see the next bottleneck, and you don’t know how many there are. Traditional schools have solved all of them, and can teach people predictably without requiring much motivation (except for showing up). For well understood skills, I think they are better than rationalist groups in every way.
Traditional schools have solved all of them, and can teach people predictably without requiring much motivation
Traditional schools know how to teach welding but when it comes to teaching introspection or teaching teaching and tutoring skill it’s less clear.
Teachers who have a master degree aren’t better than their colleges. As far as we know those two years of being in the university to learn to teach better is worthless for teaching skills.
I would also doubt that it’s easier to learn programming via a community college course than by living together with people who can program well and who are willing to tutor you a bit.
I’m sorry to say but teaching introspection, rationality or other skills we don’t have reliable tests for is a scam. The fact that more than half of the OP’s curriculum consists of such skills is a big red flag. And learning programming doesn’t require any measures described in the OP, I know it, you know it.
And learning programming doesn’t require any measures described in the OP, I know it, you know it.
Yes, but you make the argument that traditional institutions of learning are superior. For programming, I don’t think that’s the case.
I’m sorry to say but teaching introspection, rationality or other skills we don’t have reliable tests for is a scam.
Do you believe that liberal arts college who claim to teach critical thinking are also scams? From my perspective, they are a lot more scammy because they actually have the money and time to research whether their claims are true.
I think a person who tries a new project where they have a goal that they can’t measure well is a lot scammy than big institutions like a liberal art college.
I don’t think the goal of OPs proposal is to learn any particular skill. To me it mostly looks like trying to build a tightly-knit group so that each member can use the others as external motivators and close friends to discuss life plans and ideas in detail not really possible between modern colleagues and friends. I.e. the goal is not learning a skill, it’s building a mutual support group that actually works.
I think most people can do well by joining the kinds of relationships that are time-tested (marriage, friendship, work, school, gym, army, church...) From how much trouble it took society to get these halfway working and find decent boundaries, you should be skeptical of inventing new ones that will work in your lifetime. Especially if they look suspiciously similar to cults which we already know don’t work.
And I’m not even sure why you need to invent new relationships! You might feel like you have huge problems that require one huge hammer to solve, but that feeling is deceptive. Mitigating the problems one by one, with boring well-known fixes, is easier and works better. If you want to get fit, join a gym. If you want to learn something, go to school. These will give you the right amount of structure and your daily dose of socialization, without regimenting your life like a boot camp, and you’ll be guided by competent people instead of fumbling your way as a crowd of amateurs.
I think there are a fair number of wrong (or at least underjustified/unfounded) claims in the above. e.g. “cults don’t work.”
This is largely not a new invention, and is instead largely a return to structures and values that have been known to work in the past, and have been loosened/undermined in the past few decades.
My opinion of CFAR just fell from “neutral” to “mildly harmful” because they hired someone who’s willing to say the above. On old LW (where Eliezer wrote a sequence on avoiding cults and I was contributing decision theory math) this would’ve been unbelievable. Or maybe I’ve been missing the signs, not being in the Bay Area.
You’re not thinking or arguing clearly, and are instead leaping to conclusions and pulling from stereotypes.
If you lose respect for CFAR over that, it’s the result of your own confusion, and the loss of your endorsement is not one I’d lose sleep over.
One can say “guns are indeed effective” and not be advocating for wanton gun violence. It’s a statement about objective reality—guns do things—not a statement about normative values. Similarly, I can argue with your claim “cults don’t work” (which is clearly, demonstrably false on at least some axes; cults were in fact successful enough to cause large damage to a lot of people’s lives at the very least) without saying “HECK YEAH, GO CULTS.”
I’ll continue to engage, or not, based on whether or not you respond reasonably to the above. Sorry for the impatience, but I’ve written thousands upon thousands of words in this thread by now, and I’m not at all in the mood to let people strawman me at this point (even if they want to try to pull a sneaky status move by claiming seniority-on-the-forum and trying to shame a certain kind of statement without any model behind the shaming).
(I also note that you didn’t bother to respond AT ALL to my claim that you’re making unfounded leaps, nor to my claim that this is in fact a return to previous proven systems rather than an attempt to invent a new one, which makes me think that in addition to smushing together unrelated things in your arguments, you’re not actually here to discuss, i.e. swap statements back and forth on a topic and in fact interact with what the other person is saying, and are instead here to just score points or confirm (rather than falsify) your own models.)
If you took my original comment to mean that cults are harmless, that’s a bit bizarre.
As for previous proven systems, I’m not sure which ones you mean. The closest analogue is religious or socialist communes, which turn bad too often for my taste. The happiest exception is kibbutzim which weren’t nearly as authoritarian as your idea. Then you have the army, which exists today just fine and we know what it’s good for, not sure why we need another one. Then there are boarding schools, sport camps etc. but these are based on learning from professionals which you don’t have.
sigh.
I took your original comment to be saying “cults don’t work.”
Then, when I said “they do, though,” I took your second comment to be pearl-clutching and saying “well, now I think CFAR must be (slightly) evil or stupid for hiring someone who is willing to say out loud that cults work (gasp).”
You cannot possibly have drawn out of my statements above “Duncan thinks cousin_it thinks cults are harmless.”
I’m going to disengage because it’s not easy to have discourse with you (say things clearly, stick to a topic, expose reasoning, actually make progress toward truth or convergence). I don’t understand how your reasoning process works. I’m finding this subthread frustrating and low-value, and thus far the specific points I have been able to tease out of what you’re saying, I generally disagree with (and trust my domain knowledge and expertise more than I trust your skepticism-without-any-concrete-evidence-backing-it-up-from-someone-who’s-already-demonstrated-willingness-to-make-unfounded-leaps).
The Army works just fine, and has goals that aren’t ours. Why not steal much of their model /which works and has been proven to work/?
Especially if the problematic aspects of Army culture can be avoided by seeing the skulls on the ground.
The militaries have a pretty big stick. You can go to prison for insubordination or disobeying orders; in wartime you might well just be shot for that. The Dragon Army… will give you a stern talking to?
.… will banish you from the tribe.
The only person I heard of go to the brig was one who broke into barracks and stole personal property. Falsifying official records or running off to run a side job as a real estate broker was more of a ’30 days restriction, 30 days extra duty, reduction in rate to the next inferior rate, forfeiture of 1⁄2 month’s base pay for 2 months’ thing.
This is why we need downvotes.
Actually I agree. It feels weird to see that one person upvoted my comment without knowing how many would have downvoted it. The same might apply to Duncan’s post, from the comments it seems like it was really polarizing, but the score only shows the 28 upvotes. If I may be allowed another reference to old LW, Eliezer used to advocate that people downvote more, ideally without replying. I think he saw it as a defense against noise and then left when the noise became too much.
You can get a clearer-if-still-imperfect sense from contrasting upvotes on parallel, opposing comments, e.g. it has 28 upvotes and 1029823904812309481320948blargltroll has 10. I highly doubt this would have ever received sufficient mass of downvotes to become invisible.
I’m fairly certain that P(disagrees with blargtroll | disagrees with your proposal) >> P(agrees with blargtroll | disagrees with your proposal), simply because blargtroll’s counterargument is weak and its followups reveal some anger management issues.
For example, I would downvote both your proposal and blargtroll’s counterargument if I could—and by the Typical Mind heuristic so would everyone else :)
That said, I think you’re right in that this would not have received sufficiently many downvotes to become invisible.
First time I’ve heard it referred to as a heuristic. +1 =P
This is a little ambiguous, and it would be more helpful to be concrete.
It’s an appeal to authority and someone shitting on an organization based on one line of a lesswrong comment by one member of that organization, with no request for clarification or depth.
I don’t think there a good argument that a Western Church works that much better than a Yoga Ashram and the setup of the Dragon Army is relatively similar to a Yoga Ashram.
When comparing kids with decent parents schooled children don’t do much better than unschooled children.
When I was at university learning computer programming I quite often used the not-time-tested StackOverflow over the time-tested method of asking the tutor.
Churches don’t have cohabitation, they’re more like clubs, so the risk is lower. And in an ashram you hopefully get taught by a yoga professional, not just bossed around. I don’t see the value of OP’s proposal compared to either.
I thought homeschooled kids were usually taught by parents? Though I agree that you can learn stuff on your own. The problem is learning a broad range of ideas in a manageable time, not just picking a narrow path through topics that catch your interest, and for that many adults find universities useful. Not to mention you meet many smart people and pick up good memes without realizing it. Somewhere on Tumblr I saw a proposal for improving MIRI’s research that said simply “everyone gets a PhD”, I thought there was a lot of truth to that.
I note that you continue to assume/argue as if there will be zero relevant professional expertise, despite the fact that the professional expertise CITED IN THE MAIN POST is far from the only professional expertise that will be brought to bear during the experiment. In our very first dry run outing, we hired professional instruction to learn a new skill—you are factually incorrect in your assertions.
You are doing your level best to make sure to interpret everything here in the strawest, most negative possible light. “just bossed around.” I’m starting to assume you literally haven’t read the post, because it’s rapidly becoming the only possible explanation for your conclusions.
You’re not setting up a school with yourself as teacher, though. You’re setting up a commune with yourself as boss, with rules above and beyond what schools usually require, and which would lead to student rebellion if they were imposed in a university. So if learning is the point, I’d like to understand how your thing is better than a school.
To which I reply, if you’d actually like to understand, a good place to start would be “read the post.” At least the troll did that much.
Also, you miiiiiiiiiight try not leaning so hard on the typical mind fallacy. West Point is a university that people self-select into with far, far, far stricter rules than this, and they don’t rebel. Ditto many sorts of monasteries and temples and martial arts dojos and retreat centers (including many that are non-religious), ditto all sorts of invasive practices by organizations attempting to turn around lives-gone-astray or turbocharge the already-successful (e.g. regimens put into place by life coaches or intensive business training groups).
You’re confusing “I don’t like this” with “this is objectively bad” (or “I would rebel against this” with “no sane people would not rebel against this”) which—to quote you—on Old LW would have been unbelievable.
Once you make even a single good faith attempt to pass my ideological Turing test (my attempt to pass yours is the multithousand word post above), I’ll start taking your criticisms as seriously as I’ve taken everyone else’s.
“Life coaches”, bullshido dojos and religious brainwashing houses aren’t a good group to be in. It seems to me that such places are fine at teaching authority, but not the best way to teach anything else. I wouldn’t go to West Point to learn math or even history, I’d go somewhere that focuses on math or history instead. And even for fitness, dojos lose to compartmentalized workouts like lifting or BJJ.
Maybe my mistake is misunderstanding the rationalist community. I know that they are a slightly weird bunch, but it’d take a lot to convince me that a boot camp environment would suit them. In the Russian Army such folks tended to be miserable, whereas in relaxed civilian jobs they thrived. That’s part of why I’m replying to you, I feel that nerdy types are vulnerable to proposals like yours but ultimately don’t benefit from them. They already have a lot of tension and random windmills going in their minds, putting them in a pressure container makes it worse, compared to doing casual normal stuff.
Your mistake isn’t misunderstanding the rationalist community, it’s strawmanning and stereotyping and typical minding. If you stopped for one second to think, huh, maybe somebody who’s clearly not an idiot and whose models so strongly disagree with mine might see something I don’t, and approached this thing with curiosity instead of blunt assertions about how it’s terrible and you know better, you could’ve, I dunno, asked questions about places where you’re confused, and I would have answered them, and like many, many other places in this thread, there would’ve been a process of mutual updating and convergence as I showed you cool conclusions from thinking I’d already done, and you helped me find holes and flaws and make fixes, and both of us came out of the interaction with a clearer view of reality and a stronger ability to do good in the world.
Even now, like a dozen comments in, you refuse to stop it—putting scare quotes around life coaches and attaching the word bullshit to the word dojos and adding brainwashing to the phrase “religious houses.” You are not here in good faith; you’ve got a negative model you’re in love with and you’re confirmation biasing all over the place. You’re every bit as much a troll as the anonymous person was—you’re just more subtle about it.
Oh, well.
Besides being pure ad hominem, you seem to understand “good faith” as trying to help you. Let me point out that no one has any obligations to help you or to cooperate with you—refusal to do so is not bad faith. Pointing out that your endeavour is misguided and doomed to failure (assuming that’s a point of view honestly held) is not in bad faith either, even if you do not accept the arguments made.
You are perfectly free to not cooperate with people who won’t cooperate with you, but that lack of cooperation on their part is neither malice nor trolling.
You got a lot more defensive over the past few days.
I disagree that the summary is ad hominem—I think it is a concrete description of my highest-probability model explanation of cousin_it.
I don’t interpret good faith as trying to help me. I do interpret it as trying to help us, where I define “us” as “all of the people on LW and in the rationalist community” specifically, and more broadly as “all humans.”
I don’t see cousin_it as doing any kind of truth-seeking or curious investigation, nor do I see them as taking a principled stance against something that is actively dangerous (the way the troll did). Instead, they’re just throwing out straw criticisms without actually bothering to put in the work to engage with the actual topic at hand. It smacks of either careless antagonism or an attempt to score cheap points, whereas many of the people who are openly and unrepentantly opposed to this project still seem, to me, to be acting in good faith.
Buzzword compliance aside, this is precisely what ad hominem is: “a … description of … ”. The subject is your proposal for a commune—not your beliefs about cousin_it.
That sounds to me like pious crap. I don’t see you as different from the 99.9+% of people who are not qualified to judge who is trying to help “all humans” and who is not—and that’s even besides the oft-made observation that road to hell is never in need of repair.
Let me remind you again—we are discussing your proposal for a commune, not whose intentions are pure.
As I said, you are free to cooperate or not, but focusing on what you see as personal shortcomings of people who disagree with you seems like a road that leads to bad places. Especially given that you put forward yourself as the Dear Leader of this potential commune.
Right. The problem is, only some of us are actually discussing.
In point of fact, most of us are actually discussing, but threeish people have just dropped in to lecture with no even hypothetical willingness to change their minds (or at least none credibly demonstrated, as I claim I’ve credibly demonstrated mine).
EDIT: Also, on reflection, I still think you’re either misusing the term ad hominem or mischaracterizing the critique I’m making of cousin_it. I’m not trying to make claims about them as a whole person (e.g. they’re bad in general or they lack the ability to engage in good faith in general), which is I think what is required for it to be ad hominem—I have to be making some fundamental attribution, and I’m not. I’m saying that the words they’ve typed in this thread are inconsistent with someone acting in good faith, which is a claim about observations and causality, and not about character.
You have unreasonable expectations for an internet discussion :-P
I thought Less Wrong was special. I actually did.
It is. Imagine what would happen if you were to put your proposal onto, say, Reddit. However LW, thankfully, is not a hive mind.
I assume you have noted, because you’re perceptive, but just to say here—I have repeatedly expressed credible gratitude for the presence of countervailing models and criticisms and so forth, and done at least some significant updating in plain sight. I don’t think it would be fair for people to round me off to “was looking for a hive mind.”
The point here is merely to what degree LW is special and what can you expect from it. I neither said nor implied that you went looking for a hive mind.
Yeah, I want to similarly underscore/perhaps redundantly state that you have demonstrated extremely high and consistent credibility when it comes to productively engaging in discourse. With the comment above, I was underscoring a thing that plausibly could’ve just gone unstated.
I agree I got a lot more defensive over the past 36 hours, but you’ll note it’s confined almost entirely to two specific cases where I feel people are approaching with unjustified confidence in extremely uncharitable models, after all of the other discussion that’s gone on (which I feel should’ve earned me some credibility).
From your point of view, maybe—but it’s not the only one.
You seem to be welcoming comments about which parts of your plan to slightly bend, adjust, and repaint, but you are visibly hostile to the idea that your proposal is flawed at its core and cannot be saved regardless of tinkering with its details.
Yes—that’s because the proposal is not flawed at its core, and I’m not going to pretend that it is to satisfy pearl-clutchers and lecturers. (More accurately: I have greater than 95% confidence that this experiment, conditioned on it meeting existing criteria for launch, does not cause great harm to people on the scale of six months.)
I note that I am willing to engage with my real, extant uncertainty with people who don’t approach from a holier-than-thou know-it-all condescending lecturing position. For instance, it’s not even clear that the house will actually happen, because it’s not clear that there will be enough people who think that it’s a good idea. I’m not trying to convince any of the potential members—instead, I’m simply revealing revealing revealing the models, shining as much light on them as possible, so people can neutrally evaluate, and I still have ~33% credence on “there won’t be enough justified faith to do it.”
If someone were to say “Hmmm. I’m reasonably confident that this proposal is flawed at its core and can’t work; here are my objections and here are my questions,” I’d engage with them (and this is a credible claim if you look back through this thread). What I won’t engage with is people who don’t even know me who are trying to pull status moves to put themselves above me (and therefore in a position to judge) from the get-go.
As another way to state my point, I’m credibly offering good faith and charity to the vast majority of critics (all but the bottom 3%). But the people who are coming in with deontologically hostile models are not offering me any good faith and charity in return. And you’re right that no one owes me that, but similarly I don’t owe them any response other than “yeah, screw you, too.”
And how do you know that?
Or, let’s put it this way: which evidence short of actually attempting to implement this would persuade you that the proposal is flawed?
So, how much do you care about status? Why is it a big deal?
True. But you are offering them a response. This response illustrates how you react to what you believe is unjustified criticism—and it is not “I disagree. Tap.”
The confidence regarding it not being flawed at its core comes from related past experience, confidence in the individuals involved, the direct evidence of the positive value of norms stolen from Dreamship and Event Horizon, faith in the safety valves of Circling, pair debugging, internal and external check-ins, and commitment to iteration, and the results of having run a trial version that went quite well.
There was evidence I could have gathered from the experimental weekend that would have persuaded me the proposal was flawed, and there were similarly potentially unknown arguments that people here on LW might have offered up that would have been persuasive, too, but at this point, I can’t outline concrete predictable evidence that would cause me to not run this (not actually all that ambitious) experiment. It’s like the pants ending up in Washington DC—there probably exists evidence that would convince me, but I can’t reasonably guess what it might be.
In response to both the status question and the owed-response question, I do believe that people need to adopt a policy of loudly objecting to moves they want to be considered outside the Overton window, especially if those people have some social capital to spend (because they’re doing it not only for themselves but also on behalf of the disenfranchised who can’t afford to push back). In other words, in part, I’m fighting the two people I think are Doing It Wrong because I want to be publicly seen fighting on behalf of not that. I think that it overall increases rather than decreases my credibility on axes that I think are relevant.
You are either grandstanding or misusing terms. People’s objections to your proposal (including both form and content) are firmly within the Overton Window and are nowhere near its boundaries. I have trouble believing that you actually want as tiny an Overton Window as you imply.
If I may make a suggestion? Stop digging. The narrower you make the range of acceptable thought/speech, the less adequate you look. The more you attack and denigrate people who fundamentally disagree with you, the less credibility you have as a leader.
Note again that we are on Less Wrong and within the rationalist community, both of which are very much built around norms of reasoning and discourse; I’m not suggesting a tiny Overton window for the world at large or even one that’s this constricted on all axes.
But yes—I think both Less Wrong and the rationalist community would be far, far closer to the ideal versions of themselves if they doubled or tripled their callouts-of and refusal-to-engage-with sloppy and biased and inappropriate discourse. Overton window being “things a politician can say on TV”—I want “styles of discourse that a high-status rationality community member can publicly endorse” to not include the stuff cousinit and handoflixue were doing. My concerns are almost entirely about form, because I think correct form leads to improved content. I could take any of the objections that cousin_it or handoflixue or 128bargl had and recast them into (e.g.) “the sort of sentences Julia Galef or Rob Bensigner would say,” and they’d be worth fully engaging with, but in their current form, I claim there’s more long-term civilizational value to rejecting them.
I’m entirely okay with losing credibility with people who don’t value the above. Those people shouldn’t hold me in high esteem—we have at least partially opposing goalsets, and will at least occasionally be actual antagonists relative to one another; I’m actually taking some mild encouragement from how violently people I fundamentally disagree with are disagreeing with this project, because it’s weak circumstantial evidence that I’m moving in the correct direction. (i.e. the less adequate I look to you is not necessarily an appropriate measure; Sanders and Clinton both frequently made moves that made them look less adequate to some people.)
And I again disagree with your characterization that I’m attacking and denigrating people who fundamentally disagree with me, and I’m surprised that you’re rounding things off that carelessly. If you want to see personal attacks and denigration, look at (e.g.) the blog post that cousin_it cited to Kaj. Nothing I’ve done here comes anywhere close to that—I’m attacking and denigrating specific forms of argument, and specific modes of reasoning. For example, if you look at the time where handoflixue asked a clear and cogent question without any unfounded critical leaps, I gave a multiparagraph answer with lots of concrete detail. I grumbled at them a bit for their other interactions with me, but I didn’t treat their point or question any differently because they’d bugged me elsewhere. I have no problem with specific people; it’s just that at some point my prior on the VOI of engaging with them drops too low. It’s Bayes—one of my fundamental moral principles is that you should trust in revealed preferences, and barring credible reasons to believe someone’s made a major personality shift, you should evaluate them as the sum of their actions.
(Also, I think it’s not grandstanding if I’m literally practicing what I’m preaching in real time? Like, I’m doing exactly what I claim a person ought to do, not just moralizing with no action behind it.)
I don’t think so. I think they would be dead or sufficiently engrossed in navel-gazing to be functionally dead.
So, grandstanding.
It’s perfectly reasonable to hold one’s enemies in high esteem and in fact one of the traditional measures of success is the caliber of enemies you’ve acquired along the way. For non-fatal competitions you actually want the best, highest-esteem enemies you could find—they will push you to become better (as opposed to nuisance pests who will only encourage you to stay irritated and smug).
That’s the classic “reverse stupidity” argument.
As Alicorn pointed out, the situation is not symmetric. Writing a Tumblr rant is a very different thing from asking multiple people to surrender not insignificant amounts of autonomy to you, as well as become emotionally and financially entangled in a project of yours.
No, you don’t. You actually tend to oscillate between ad hominem attacks and replying to specific criticisms.
Or maybe you don’t think of the “you think wrong thoughts expressed in the wrong way and you should be ashamed of yourself” as an attack? Let me assure you that it is.
If that were so, you would stop engaging with them. But you don’t.
ETA
That’s not how it works. If you loudly proclaim that, say, the use of mis-gendered pronouns is a major human rights violation akin to torture (or that letting trans people use the bathrooms they want is the end of Western civilization), you are grandstanding even if you literally throw a temper tantrum in real life.
I’m now feeling deliberately misunderstood, and if you’re doing that on purpose, I ask you to stop.
We disagree about Overton windows; that’s good, and cruxy.
According to the definition of grandstanding that Google throws up when you type in the word, you’re misusing it (particularly, the word requires you to make claims about my internal state and purpose, i.e. what I’m doing X for, and your best source of data there is my self-report). It’s not grandstanding, and I note it’s far easier for you to name-call than to actually make a specific critique stick.
It’s perfectly reasonable to hold some of your enemies in high esteem—for instance, I note we’re disagreeing pretty heavily here, and I have a great deal of respect for you. But it’s unfounded to jump from some to all. Many of the people opposed to this idea are not high-caliber thinkers and reasoners, whatever other value they have as human beings.
I was extremely careful to say what I actually meant, and then you were extremely careful to strawman me by quoting only part of my words, as if I didn’t say “weak circumstantial” right in the same sentence.
Operationalize your claims that I’m making ad hominem attacks, and I’ll address them one by one. I predict you’ll definitely be able to find 1-3 examples of me sticking a foot across the line, and that they’ll be outweighed by a factor of at least five by me doing the thing I claimed I was doing. I predict you will find no examples that are anywhere near as gross as the ones put forth by cousin_it and handoflixue. I’d be willing to monetize this as a bet.
I’ve stopped engaging with them for their own sake. I have previously explained to you that I think it’s important to be seen openly defending good norms, and thus continue to engage with them for myself and everyone else. I think it was pretty lame of you to just … pretend I hadn’t said that, and again strawman by criticizing me for the thing I’m not really doing.
I am losing respect for you in this subthread, but right now it’s something like “I had you at 957 points, and I’m worried you’re going to drop to 949.” Hopefully this is just some combination of a little bit of triggering and the fact that both of us care about getting this right, and not that you endorse overall the tack you’re taking anymore than I’d endorse the worst 10% of my own reactions on this post.
My working definition of grandstanding is basically “declaring that one’s words or actions have outstanding significance or impact”. Case in point: you being concerned with “long-term civilizational value”. I strongly suspect that your cluefulness about long-term civilizational values is… limited.
It doesn’t help you. Weak circumstantial evidence is still evidence and under reverse stupidity you just don’t have any.
I have no interest in fisking your comments. I offered you an outside view—if you think it’s wrong, there is no reason for me to try to convince you.
Pick one, will ya? X-)
Maybe, but when you say stuff like “I deny your right to judge and interrogate me” you sound like an idiot. The fact that you were capable of typing that sentence and pressing “Send” is not a good sign.
I appreciate your concern, but I think I’ll be fine. Really, I will :-P
I’m glad, because you just lost a lot more. I do, indeed, think your outside view is deeply flawed, and I’ve just lost an illusion about how you in particular are likely to go about engaging in discourse. As an example, you just pulled a fifth-grader-bully trick in the quote
that was purposefully thickheaded in ignoring the whole point of that paragraph.
I didn’t think you would troll/deliberately mischaracterize, endorsedly, when not triggered-in-the-moment. That was firmly outside of my model of you. Now I know something new about you, and it will be useful to me in the future.
A funny thing about you: the more you talk, the worse you look. You started by presenting a very reasonable image—you listened and you expressed willingness to take into account people’s concerns. A bit more than a week passed and you’re already screaming at people IN ALL CAPS, calling them “a jerk” and dropping dark hints about knowledge that “will be useful to [you] in the future”. How is your stress tolerance? You are not performing well when people disagree with you.
You also try to be manipulative—not very successfully, mind you—by dispensing praise and criticism in order to gain the results you want. Since we’re are being all frank’n’all, my opinion of your adequacy as a leader went down a lot during this week—mostly because you wouldn’t shut up. I sincerely reiterate my advice to stop digging.
I don’t mind this whole “the more you talk, the worse you look” thing, because a) it’s symmetrical, and b) I’m entirely comfortable being seen for having exactly the preferences and principles I do have.
I’ve responded sharply, at this point, to exactly four people: a universally acknowledged troll, two people who started out clearly strawmanning me and being heavily anchored on negative opinions without justification, and now you, as you abandon standards in pursuit of scoring points.
I have not willfully misrepresented people, or immediately leapt to unfounded conclusions about their deep character, or engaged in cheap-trick point-scoring tactics against people who didn’t shoot first (with one exception that Alicorn called me out on, and I edited), or any of the other behaviors that I don’t reflectively endorse. I have certainly pulled none of the subpar junk that you’ve pulled in this subthread, and I’m proud to have opposed you as you’ve done it.
As I’ve noted elsewhere—I don’t much care about irrelevant opinions, and as people have demonstrated themselves to be below the bar of what I expect from a LWer and a rationalist, I correspondingly cease to mind what their overall judgment of me is. I generally try to judge how likely a person’s opinion is to closely correlate with truth and useful perspective, and while I hold my disregard with skepticism on the meta level, so as to not unfairly write people off, ultimately evidence is evidence. There are some people who simply demonstrate, fairly conclusively, that they aren’t going to play fair, think straight, update on evidence, etc., and are literally not worth listening to, in a VOI sense (though they may still be worth opposing in public).
I state again that something like 97% of the participants in this thread do seem like their opinions are likely to closely correlate with truth and provide useful perspective, and I’m grateful for the hours that total strangers have poured into helping me dodge mistakes. This project is something like 50% less likely to fail and 30% more likely to be really successful (relative to where it was a week ago) thanks to those contributions.
And sure—probably most of the neutral parties are shaking their heads somewhat—thinking things like “Duncan’s being too aggressive here” or “Duncan’s fighting fights not worth fighting” or “I wish he hadn’t posted X.” But that’s coin I’m spending deliberately, in open defense of things I think are worth defending. There’s no point in social capital if all you do is hoard it—at some point, people who’ve accrued ought to take risks holding lines that others can’t afford to defend. If I lose 5% of the respect that I’ve gained, but also meaningfully embolden others who were too hesitant to defend themselves against bullies by giving them the sense they’re not the only ones bothered by poor discourse, that’s a purchase I endorse. Freedom from trolls isn’t free—turns out even Lumifer will occasionally use Trump-style tactics, if they dislike you enough.
LOL. You smell SJW-ish. A white knight selflessly spending his social capital to defend the weak against the bullies. Against “Trump-style tactics” even! And, of course, you will not be denied for your cause is just.
You are clearly incapable of shutting up so this will be amusing.
So tell me more about things you think are worth defending—especially from the likes of me. Are we still talking about the mere forms of expression which you disapprove of or there’s some deeper ideology involved? Do you see me as lacking honor, or empathy, or proper morals, or the desire to remake the world, or something else?
I note for others reading this comment and wondering why it hasn’t been addressed that I’ve at least temporarily ceased replying to Lumifer and a couple of other posters on a policy level, for reasons surrounding norms of discourse, strawmanning, epistemic humility, presence or absence of good faith, etc. It’s possible that the above contains good questions or insights; if someone else chooses to repost/re-ask/rephrase sections of this, I’ll likely respond to them.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
Oh, good! So I can point out things to you and you won’t be able to talk back? :-D
I note for others reading this comment and wondering why it hasn’t been addressed that I’ve at least temporarily ceased replying to Lumifer and a couple of other posters on a policy level, for reasons surrounding norms of discourse, strawmanning, epistemic humility, presence or absence of good faith, etc. It’s possible that the above contains good questions or insights; if someone else chooses to repost/re-ask/rephrase sections of this, I’ll likely respond to them.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
Once more, please :-)
It’s been a while since the last time I was officially added to the list of the Enemies of the People and… ritually cast out, I guess? This time there even a list of high crimes I’m guilty of—“reasons surrounding norms”. Woe is me!
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I was hoping you’d show how your community will be better than current authoritarian communities, which I deeply dislike. Instead you insist that current authoritarian communities are fine and we need more of them. Hopefully you see why that’s unlikely to change my mind, imperfect as it is. Heck, my dislike for cults was clear from the first comment, which makes your jumping onto it even more weird. A master of soft skills would’ve chosen literally anything else as an opening. Even now in the middlegame you can still turn it around, though I can understand if you’re frustrated and don’t want to. My own goal in this conversation is mostly achieved, I can go on or not, up to you.
Please. Actually. Read. The. Available. Information. Above.
I’ve read your post, it’s nothing but red flags. You’re literally proposing that DA members greet each other with a salute and trust you more than themselves. The few upsides you mention (participants are smart, time is limited, etc) come across as excuses why you should get power now. Check out nostalgebraist’s tumblr for more folks who got the same vibe. Your comments make things worse, you clearly like authoritarian communities in your heart rather than consider them a necessary evil.
I use the phrase unschooling and not homeschooling but even if a child gets taught by their parents that still suggests that the average teacher is not skilled enough to provide value to his student that allows them to outperform students taught by lay-people.
The same arguments could be made for why the Dragon Army is a good idea.
Let’s take a random skill from the proposed curriculum, like welding. You could try externally motivated self-study at OP’s group house, or you could go to a community college and ask how long they’ll take to make you a certified welder. It seems to me that even without the authoritarian LARPing, the first option is a weird hybrid, like a flying submarine. It’s more costly than either full self-study (if you can do it) or fully spoon-fed learning at a traditional place for a set term.
The OP’s proposal is to dial motivation to 11 and hope that it leads to effective learning. Even if that doesn’t backfire, at most it lets you see the next bottleneck, and you don’t know how many there are. Traditional schools have solved all of them, and can teach people predictably without requiring much motivation (except for showing up). For well understood skills, I think they are better than rationalist groups in every way.
Traditional schools know how to teach welding but when it comes to teaching introspection or teaching teaching and tutoring skill it’s less clear.
Teachers who have a master degree aren’t better than their colleges. As far as we know those two years of being in the university to learn to teach better is worthless for teaching skills.
I would also doubt that it’s easier to learn programming via a community college course than by living together with people who can program well and who are willing to tutor you a bit.
I’m sorry to say but teaching introspection, rationality or other skills we don’t have reliable tests for is a scam. The fact that more than half of the OP’s curriculum consists of such skills is a big red flag. And learning programming doesn’t require any measures described in the OP, I know it, you know it.
Yes, but you make the argument that traditional institutions of learning are superior. For programming, I don’t think that’s the case.
Do you believe that liberal arts college who claim to teach critical thinking are also scams? From my perspective, they are a lot more scammy because they actually have the money and time to research whether their claims are true.
I think a person who tries a new project where they have a goal that they can’t measure well is a lot scammy than big institutions like a liberal art college.
100% agree that formal education for programming sucks today.
Yeah, pretty much. They take your money and then you can get a job doing something else if you’re good at that thing.
I think we’re mostly in agreement?
I don’t think the goal of OPs proposal is to learn any particular skill. To me it mostly looks like trying to build a tightly-knit group so that each member can use the others as external motivators and close friends to discuss life plans and ideas in detail not really possible between modern colleagues and friends. I.e. the goal is not learning a skill, it’s building a mutual support group that actually works.