“socially punishing them by making claims in a certain way, when those claims could easily be made without having that effect
Putting communication through a filter imposes a cost, which will inevitably tend to discourage communication in the long term. Moreover, the cost is not the same for everyone: for some people “diplomatic” communication comes much more naturally than for others; as I indicate in another comment, this often has to do with their status, which, the higher it is, the less necessary directness is, because the more people are already preoccupied with mentally modeling them.
I’m frustrated by your comment, komponisto
If we’re engaging in disclosures of this sort, I have felt similarly about many a comment of yours, not least the one to which I am replying. In your second paragraph, for example, you engage in passive aggression by deceptively failing to acknowledge that the people you are criticizing would accuse you of the exact same sin you accuse them of (namely, equating “trans people disproportionately have certain traits” and “boo trans people”). That’s not a debate I consider myself to be involved in, but I do, increasingly, feel myself to be involved in a meta-dispute about the relative importance of communicative clarity and so-called “niceness”, and in that dispute, come down firmly on the side of communicative clarity—at least as it pertains to this sort of social context.
I read your comment as a tribal cheer for the other, “niceness”, side, disingenuously phrased as if I were expected to agree with your underlying assumptions, despite the fact that my comments have strongly implied (and now explicitly state) that I don’t.
Putting communication through a filter imposes a cost, which will inevitably tend to discourage communication in the long term.
As does allowing people to be unduly abrasive. But on top of that, communities where conversations are abrasive attract a lower caliber of person than one where they aren’t. Look at what happened to LW.
Moreover, the cost is not the same for everyone
It’s fairly common for this cost to go down with practice. Moreover, it seems like there’s an incentive gradient at work here; the only way to gauge how costly it is for someone to act decently is to ask them how costly it is to them, and the more costly they claim it to be, the more the balance of discussion will reward them by letting them impose costs on others via nastiness while reaping the rewards of getting to achieve their political and interpersonal goals with that nastiness.
I’m not necessarily claiming that you or any specific person is acting this way; I’m just saying that this incentive gradient exists in this community, and economically rational actors would be expected to follow it.
communicative clarity and so-called “niceness”
That’s a horrible framing. Niceness is sometimes important, but what really matters is establishing a set of social norms that incentivize behaviors in a way that leads to the largest positive impact. Sometimes that involves prioritizing communicative clarity (when suggesting that some EA organizations are less effective than previously thought), and sometimes that involves, say, penalizing people for acting on claims they’ve made to other’s emotional resources (reprimanding someone for being rude when that rudeness could have reasonably been expected to hurt someone and was entirely uncalled for). Note that the set of social norms used by normal folks would have gotten both of these cases mostly right, and we tend to get them both mostly wrong.
communities where conversations are abrasive attract a lower caliber of person than one where they aren’t. Look at what happened to LW.
To whatever extent this is accurate and not just a correlation-causation conversion, this very dynamic is the kind of thing that LW exists (existed) to correct. To yield to it is essentially to give up the entire game.
What it looks like to me is that LW and its associated “institutions” and subcultures are in the process of dissolving and being absorbed into various parts of general society. You are basically endorsing this process, specifically the aspect wherein unique subcultural norms are being overwritten by general societal norms.
The way this comes about is that the high-status members of the subculture eventually become tempted by the prospect of high status in general society, and so in effect “sell out”. Unless previously-lower-status members “step up” to take their place (by becoming as interesting as the original leaders were), the subculture dies, either collapsing due to a power vacuum, or simply by being memetically eaten by the general culture as members continue to follow the old leaders into (what looks like) the promised land.
Moreover, it seems like there’s an incentive gradient at work here; the only way to gauge how costly it is for someone to act decently is to ask them how costly it is to them, and the more costly they claim it to be, the more the balance of discussion will reward them by letting them impose costs on others via nastiness while reaping the rewards of getting to achieve their political and interpersonal goals with that nastiness.
I agree that the incentives you describe exist, but the analysis cuts both ways: the more someone claims to have been harmed by allegedly-nasty speech, the more the balance of discussion will reward them by letting them restrict speech while reaping the rewards of getting to achieve their political and interpersonal goals with those speech restrictions.
Interpersonal utility aggregation might not be the right way to think of these kinds of situations. If Alice says a thing even though Bob has told her that the thing is nasty and that Alice is causing immense harm by saying it, Alice’s true rejection of Bob’s complaint probably isn’t, “Yes, I’m inflicting _c_ units of objective emotional harm on others, but modifying my speech at all would entail _c_+1 units of objective emotional harm to me, therefore the global utilitarian calculus favors my speech.” It’s probably: “I’m not a utilitarian and I reject your standard of decency.”
Your principal mistake lies here:
Putting communication through a filter imposes a cost, which will inevitably tend to discourage communication in the long term. Moreover, the cost is not the same for everyone: for some people “diplomatic” communication comes much more naturally than for others; as I indicate in another comment, this often has to do with their status, which, the higher it is, the less necessary directness is, because the more people are already preoccupied with mentally modeling them.
If we’re engaging in disclosures of this sort, I have felt similarly about many a comment of yours, not least the one to which I am replying. In your second paragraph, for example, you engage in passive aggression by deceptively failing to acknowledge that the people you are criticizing would accuse you of the exact same sin you accuse them of (namely, equating “trans people disproportionately have certain traits” and “boo trans people”). That’s not a debate I consider myself to be involved in, but I do, increasingly, feel myself to be involved in a meta-dispute about the relative importance of communicative clarity and so-called “niceness”, and in that dispute, come down firmly on the side of communicative clarity—at least as it pertains to this sort of social context.
I read your comment as a tribal cheer for the other, “niceness”, side, disingenuously phrased as if I were expected to agree with your underlying assumptions, despite the fact that my comments have strongly implied (and now explicitly state) that I don’t.
As does allowing people to be unduly abrasive. But on top of that, communities where conversations are abrasive attract a lower caliber of person than one where they aren’t. Look at what happened to LW.
It’s fairly common for this cost to go down with practice. Moreover, it seems like there’s an incentive gradient at work here; the only way to gauge how costly it is for someone to act decently is to ask them how costly it is to them, and the more costly they claim it to be, the more the balance of discussion will reward them by letting them impose costs on others via nastiness while reaping the rewards of getting to achieve their political and interpersonal goals with that nastiness.
I’m not necessarily claiming that you or any specific person is acting this way; I’m just saying that this incentive gradient exists in this community, and economically rational actors would be expected to follow it.
That’s a horrible framing. Niceness is sometimes important, but what really matters is establishing a set of social norms that incentivize behaviors in a way that leads to the largest positive impact. Sometimes that involves prioritizing communicative clarity (when suggesting that some EA organizations are less effective than previously thought), and sometimes that involves, say, penalizing people for acting on claims they’ve made to other’s emotional resources (reprimanding someone for being rude when that rudeness could have reasonably been expected to hurt someone and was entirely uncalled for). Note that the set of social norms used by normal folks would have gotten both of these cases mostly right, and we tend to get them both mostly wrong.
To whatever extent this is accurate and not just a correlation-causation conversion, this very dynamic is the kind of thing that LW exists (existed) to correct. To yield to it is essentially to give up the entire game.
What it looks like to me is that LW and its associated “institutions” and subcultures are in the process of dissolving and being absorbed into various parts of general society. You are basically endorsing this process, specifically the aspect wherein unique subcultural norms are being overwritten by general societal norms.
The way this comes about is that the high-status members of the subculture eventually become tempted by the prospect of high status in general society, and so in effect “sell out”. Unless previously-lower-status members “step up” to take their place (by becoming as interesting as the original leaders were), the subculture dies, either collapsing due to a power vacuum, or simply by being memetically eaten by the general culture as members continue to follow the old leaders into (what looks like) the promised land.
I agree that the incentives you describe exist, but the analysis cuts both ways: the more someone claims to have been harmed by allegedly-nasty speech, the more the balance of discussion will reward them by letting them restrict speech while reaping the rewards of getting to achieve their political and interpersonal goals with those speech restrictions.
Interpersonal utility aggregation might not be the right way to think of these kinds of situations. If Alice says a thing even though Bob has told her that the thing is nasty and that Alice is causing immense harm by saying it, Alice’s true rejection of Bob’s complaint probably isn’t, “Yes, I’m inflicting _c_ units of objective emotional harm on others, but modifying my speech at all would entail _c_+1 units of objective emotional harm to me, therefore the global utilitarian calculus favors my speech.” It’s probably: “I’m not a utilitarian and I reject your standard of decency.”