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!
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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