despite the efforts of a very valiant man, people have still not realized that autogynephilic men with repressed femininity and a crossdressing fetish pretending to be women aren’t actually women
Being only on the periphery of the community, I’m extremely curious who said valiant man is (full disclosure: this is so I can avoid them and/or assess why the community has not yet shunned them, as I would hope they’d shun you).
Being only on the periphery of the community, I’m extremely curious why your instinctual reaction to a very politically incorrect idea is to shun the people supporting it, and why your model of the world bizarrely concludes that (1) people who live 20+ years as men and then decide, because of their autogynephilic fetish and repressed femininity, that they’re better off as women and therefore are women, and (2) people who have severe mental illnesses that cause them to become suicidal upon contemplation of their own bodies are somehow Actually the Opposite Sex in some timeless, eternal manner which becomes true as soon as they realize it’s true.
Being only on the periphery of the community, I’m extremely curious why you imagine people who are objectively a bunch of losers who can’t seem to accomplish anything of value would be the ones shunning me rather than the other way around. If I were a member of the cultlike “community”, sure, social ostracization would be possible. (Thankfully, I’m not.)
I’ve had some thoughts and feelings in this vein; skepticism of trans and so forth. I hold that skepticism with skepticism, though, and I do not reach the point of telling the several extremely smart, perceptive, capable, and empathetic trans humans I know that they’re e.g. dumb or wrong or sick or confused, when I have no inside view, and I think it’s somewhat abhorrent and damaging to the social fabric to start these conversations in any but the most careful and respectful way. That being said, I’d be curious to hear more of the thoughts on the other side of the zeitgeist. If you feel like naming this valiant man in private, I commit to not sharing their name any farther than they themselves say is okay.
If you feel like naming this valiant man in private, I commit to
Hi! 18239018038528017428 is almost certainly referring to me! (I would have predicted that you’d already have known this from Facebook, but apparently that prediction was wrong.)
somewhat abhorrent and damaging to the social fabric to start these conversations in any but the most careful and respectful way.
I tried that first. It turns out that it doesn’t work: any substantive, clearly-worded claims just get adversarially defined as insufficiently respectful. I still had something incredibly important to protect (there is a word for the beautiful feeling at the center of my life, and the word is not woman; I want the right to use my word, and I want the right to do psychology in public and get the right answer), so I started trying other things.
Zack, I think the problem (from my perspective) is that you tried being respectful in private, and by the time you started talking about this publicly, you were already being really harsh and difficult to talk to. I never got to interact with careful/respectful you on this topic.
(I understand this may have been emotionally necessary/unavoidable for you. But still, from my perspective there was a missing step in your escalation process. Though I should acknowledge that you spurred me to do some reading & writing I would not otherwise have done, and it’s not impossible that your harshness jolted me into feeling the need to do that.)
Thanks. I don’t think that would be good for me, at least right now, but thanks for the offer.
My thoughts on the matter are mostly in my ITT entry on Ozy’s blog and then also in the most recent thread on this topic on their blog. I guess I’d be somewhat curious about your responses to those thoughts.
any substantive, clearly-worded claims just get adversarially defined as insufficiently respectful
I agree. E.g. Scott Alexander has said he will ban people from his blog is they do not speak as if the trans theories were true, even if they believe them to be false. But that doesn’t mean it is a good option to be as rude as possible, like 18239018038528017428 above. (Obviously I am not saying that you have adopted this approach either.)
I do not reach the point of telling the...humans I know that they’re e.g. dumb or wrong or sick or confused
If you’ll allow me, I would like to raise a red-flag alert at this sentence. It seems poorly worded at best, and in worse scenarios indicative of some potentially-bad patterns of thought.
Presumably, as a member of a community of aspiring rationalists, not to mention the staff of CFAR, telling the people you know when (you think) they’re wrong or confused is, or should be...your daily bread. (It goes without saying that this extends to noticing your own confusion or wrongness, and encouraging others to notice it for you when you don’t; the norm, as I understand it, is a cooperative one).
Telling people when they might be sick is (if you’ll forgive me) hardly something to sneeze at, either. They might want to visit a doctor. Health is, for understandable reasons, generally considered important. (This includes mental health.)
As for dumb, well, I simply doubt that comes up often enough to make the statement meaningful. Whatever may be said about the rationalist community, it does not appear to draw its membership disproportionately from those of specifically low intelligence. Your acquaintances—whatever their other characteristics—probably aren’t “dumb”, so to tell them they are would simply be to assert a falsehood.
So: may I be so bold as to suggest either a reformulation of the thought you were trying to express, or even a reconsideration of the impulse behind it, in the event that the impulse in question wasn’t actually a good one?
This is a fair point. I absolutely do hold as my “daily bread” letting people know when my sense is that they’re wrong or confused, but it becomes trickier when you’re talking about very LARGE topics that represent a large portion of someone’s identity, and I proceed more carefully because of both a) politeness/kindness and b) a greater sense that the other person has probably thought things through.
I don’t have the spoons to reformulate the thought right now, but I think your call-out was correct, and if you take it on yourself to moderately steelman the thing I might have been saying, that’ll be closer to what I was struggling to express. The impulse behind making the statement in the first place was to try to highlight a valuable distinction between pumping against the zeitgeist/having idiosyncratic thoughts, and just being a total jerk. You can and should try to do the former, and you can and should try to avoid the latter. That was my main point.
Here’s what it looks like to me, after a bit of reflection: you’re in a state where you think a certain proposition P has a chance of being true, which it is considered a violation of social norms to assert (a situation that comes up more often than we would like).
In this sort of situation, I don’t think it’s necessarily correct to go around loudly asserting, or even mentioning, P. However, I do think it’s probably correct to avoid taking it upon oneself to enforce the (epistemically-deleterious) social norm upon those weird contrarians who, for whatever reason, do go around proclaiming P. At least leave that to the people who are confident that P is false. Otherwise, you are doing epistemic anti-work, by systematically un-correlating normative group beliefs from reality.
My sense was that you were sort of doing that above: you were seeking to reproach someone for being loudly contrarian in a direction that, from your perspective (according to what you say), may well be the right one. This is against your and your friends’ epistemic interests.
(A friendly reminder, finally, that talk of “being a total jerk” and similar is simply talk about social norms and their enforcement.)
I was not aiming to do “that above.” To the extent that I was/came across that way, I disendorse, and appreciate you providing me the chance to clarify. Your models here sound correct to me in general.
Your comment was perfectly fine, and you don’t need to apologize; see my response to komponisto above for my reasons for saying that. Apologies on my part as there’s a strong chance I’ll be without internet for several days and likely won’t be able to further engage with this topic.
Duncan’s original wording here was fine. The phrase “telling the humans I know that they’re dumb or wrong or sick or confused” is meant in the sense of “socially punishing them by making claims in a certain way, when those claims could easily be made without having that effect”.
To put it another way, my view is that Duncan is trying to refrain from adopting behavior that lumps in values (boo trans people) with claims (trans people disproportionately have certain traits). I think that’s a good thing to do for a number of reasons, and have been trying to push the debate in that direction by calling people out (with varying amounts of force) when they have been quick to slip in propositions about values into their claims.
I’m frustrated by your comment, komponisto, since raising a red-flag alert, saying that something is poorly worded at best, and making a large number of more subtle negative implications about what they’ve written are all ways of socially discouraging someone from doing something. I think that Duncan’s comment was fine, I certainly think that he didn’t need to apologize for it, and I’m fucking appalled that this conversation as a whole has managed to simultaneously promote slipping value propositions into factual claims, and promote indirectly encouraging social rudeness, and then successfully assert in social reality that a certain type of overtly abrasive value-loaded proposition making is more cooperative and epistemically useful than a more naturally kind style of non-value-loaded proposition making, all without anyone actually saying something about this.
“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.”
If you don’t have any specific tools, I would advocate a mix of asking questions to help the other person clarify their thinking and providing information.
“Did you symptoms X and Y are signs of clinical mental illness Z?” is likely more effective than telling the person “You have mental illness Z.”
If the other person doesn’t feel judged but can explore the issue in a safe space where they are comfortable of working through an ugh-field, it’s more likely that they will end up doing what’s right afterwards.
I don’t think “Did you know symptoms X and Y are signs of clinical mental illness Z?” is appreciably different from “You very possibly have mental illness Z”, which is the practical way that “You have mental illness Z” would actually be phrased in most contexts where this would be likely to come up.
Nevertheless, your first and third paragraphs seem right.
In a conversation, you get another reaction if you ask a question that indirectly implies that the other person has a mental illness than if you are direct about it.
The phrasing of information matters.
I have not disputed “autogynephilic men with repressed femininity and a crossdressing fetish pretending to be women aren’t actually women”, though neither have I affirmed it.
Regardless, I still would not want you, personally, in any community I’m part of, because your behavior is bad. I’m not interested in debating this this; obviously we disagree on what acceptable behavior looks like. Whatever; different strokes for different folks—clearly this community is not for you, but also you seem to still be here, for some reason.
And I would still want to know who’s going around trying to convince people of that statement, so that I could avoid them (for their proselytizing, not for their beliefs) and/or assess why the community has not yet shunned them. (Obviously you can shun the community while it simultaneously shuns you. These are not mutually exclusive.)
So, again, I still want to know who you’re talking about. Who are you talking about?
Hi! 18239018038528017428 is almost certainly talking about me! My detailed views are probably more nuanced and less objectionable than you might infer from the discussion in this thread? But to help you assess for yourself why “the community” (whatever that is) has not yet shunned me, maybe start with this comment (which also contains links to my new gender blog).
Ah, thanks. Turns out I do know who you are and have already thought about the question of why (and to what extent) the community continues to interact with you to my satisfaction. (And yes, the throwaway’s description of you is somewhat misleading, though mostly that’s because, from their behavior, I would expect anyone they praise to be terrible without redeeming features).
have already thought about the question of why (and to what extent) the community continues to interact with you to my satisfaction.
For obvious reasons, I’m extremely curious to hear your analysis if you’re willing to share. (Feel free to PM me.)
from their behavior, I would expect anyone they praise to be terrible without redeeming features
I don’t think that’s a good inference! (See the anti-halo effect and “Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?”) Even if you think the throwaway’s rudeness and hostility makes them terrible, does it really make sense for guilt-by-association to propagate to anyone the throwaway approves of for any reason?
(from the great-grandparent)
This is about behavior, not belief. [...] (for their proselytizing, not for their beliefs)
I think it would be less cruel and more honest to just advocate for punishing people who believe a claim, rather than to advocate for punishing people who argue for the claim while simultaneously insisting that this isn’t a punishment for the belief. What would be the point of restricting speech if the goal isn’t to restrict thought?
For obvious reasons, I’m extremely curious to hear your analysis if you’re willing to share. (Feel free to PM me.)
Probably this is going to be too blunt, but it’s honest, and I’m assuming you’d prefer that:
Basically, because you are psychotic, not an asshole (or at least, afaict, only an asshole as a consequence). And dealing with people who are behaving poorly because of mental issues is a hard problem, especially in a community where so many people have mental issues of one sort or another.
Again, this doesn’t mean I disagree with you (and again neither have I claimed to agree). The fact of your psychosis is not obviously prior to your beliefs. But it is very obviously prior to how you have acted on those beliefs. Or at least it is obvious to me, having spent a great deal of time with friends who behave like you’ve behaved (in public, at any rate; of course you should discount this evidence given that I haven’t interacted with you in person, or at least not much).
Even if you think the throwaway’s rudeness and hostility makes them terrible, does it really make sense for guilt-by-association to propagate to anyone the throwaway approves of for any reason?
It’s evidence, yes.
I think it would be less cruel and more honest to just advocate for punishing people who believe a claim, rather than to advocate for punishing people who argue for the claim while simultaneously insisting that this isn’t a punishment for the belief. What would be the point of restricting speech if the goal isn’t to restrict thought?
… This is a much larger conversation for another time. If you have not already internalized “just because I believe something is true does not make it socially acceptable for me to go around trying to convince everyone else that it’s true”, I don’t know that I will be able to briefly explain to you why that is the case.
but it’s honest, and I’m assuming you’d prefer that
Yes, thank you!
Basically, because you are psychotic
I definitely went through some psychosis states back in February and April, but I seem to be pretty stably back to my old self now. (For whatever that might be worth!) I have a lot of regrets about this period, but I don’t regret most of my public comments.
If you have not already internalized “just because I believe something is true does not make it socially acceptable for me to go around trying to convince everyone else that it’s true”, I don’t know that I will be able to briefly explain to you why that is the case.
Oh, I think I understand why; I’m not that socially retarded. Even so—if there’s going to be one goddamned place in the entire goddamned world where people put relatively more emphasis on “arguing for true propositions about human psychology because they’re true” and relatively less emphasis on social acceptability, shouldn’t it be _us_? I could believe that there are such things as information hazards—I wouldn’t publicize instructions on how to cheaply build a suitcase nuke—but this isn’t one of them.
if there’s going to be one goddamned place in the entire goddamned world where people put relatively more emphasis on “arguing for true propositions about human psychology because they’re true” and relatively less emphasis on social acceptability, shouldn’t it be us?
Sure. And we do put relatively more emphasis. But we have not completely and totally thrown away all social convention. Nor should we: much of it exists for good reason.
That seems so obviously true the idea of shunning someone for fighting against people arguing the opposite seems crazy to me. I thought we just called used “she” to be polite, not thought we believed them to be women in any meaningful sense.
I cannot imagine participating in this community for any length of time and sincerely concluding that the mental state you’ve described is actually universal.
Hi! I believe I’m the only person to try shunning them, which happened on Facebook a month ago (since Zack named himself in the comments, see here, and here). The effort more or less blew up in my face and got a few people to publicly say they were going to excluded me, or try to get others to exclude me from future community events, and was also a large (but not the only) factor in getting me to step down from a leadership position in a project I’m spending about half of my time on. To be fair, there are a couple of places where Zack is less welcome now also, (I don’t think either of us have been successfully excluded from anything other than privately hosted events we weren’t likely to go to anyways), and someone with the viewpoint that shunning him was the wrong thing for me to do also stepped down from an equivalent leadership position in order to maintain a balance. So, I guess we’re in a stalemate-like de facto ceasefire, though I’d be happy to pick up the issue again.
I still stand by my response to Zack. It would have been better if I’d been skilled enough to convince him to use a less aggressive tone throughout his writing by being gentler myself; that’s an area where I’m still trying to grow. I think that collaborative truthseeking is aided rather than hindered by shunning people who call others “delusional perverts” because of their gender. This is, at least in part, because keeping discussions focused on truthseeking, impact, etc. is easier when there are social incentives (i.e. small social nudges that can later escalate to shunning) in place that disincentivize people from acting in ways that predictably push others into a state where they’re hurt enough that they’re unable to collaborate with you, such as by calling them delusional perverts. I know that the process of applying said social incentives (i.e. shunning) doesn’t look like truthseeking, but it’s instrumental to truthseeking (when done with specificity and sensitivity/by people with a well-calibrated set of certain common social skills).
a large (but not the only) factor in getting me to step down from a leadership position in a project I’m spending about half of my time on. [...] and someone with the viewpoint that shunning him was the wrong thing for me to do also stepped down from an equivalent leadership position in order to maintain a balance.
I wasn’t aware of this, but it seems unfortunate. If successfully ostracizing me isn’t going to happen anyway, “both of you step down from something that you previously wanted to do” seems like a worse outcome than “neither of you step down.”
(For my own part, while I wouldn’t invite you to any parties I host at my house, I have no interest in trying to get other people to exclude you from their events. I consider my goal in this whole affair as simply to make it clear that I don’t intend to let social pressure influence my writing—a goal at which I think I’ve succeeded.)
shunning people who call others “delusional perverts” because of their gender
I hadn’t bothered addressing this earlier, because I wanted to emphasize that my true rejection was “I don’t negotiate with emotional blackmailers; I’m happy to listen and update on substantive criticism of my writing, but appeal to consequences is not a substantive criticism”, but since it is relevant, I really think you’ve misunderstood the point of that post: try reading the second and third paragraphs again.
What I’m trying to do there is highlight my disapproval of the phenomenon where the perceived emotional valence of language overshadows its literal content. I understand very well that the phrase “delusional pervert” constitutes fighting words in a way that “paraphilic with mistaken views” doesn’t, but I’m interested in developing the skill of being able to simultaneously contemplate framings with different ideological/emotional charges, especially including framings that make me and my friends look bad (precisely because those are the ones it’s most emotionally tempting to overlook). People who aren’t interested in this skill probably shouldn’t read my blog, as the trigger warning page explains.
(Seriously, why isn’t the trigger warning page good enough for you? It’s one thing to say my writing to should have a label to protect the sensitive, but it’s another thing to say that you don’t want my thoughts to exist!)
It would have been better if I’d been skilled enough to convince him to use a less aggressive tone throughout his writing by being gentler myself
Not all goals are achievable by sufficiently-skilled gentle social manipulation. If you can show me an argument that can persuade me to change my behavior given _my_ values, then I’ll do so. If no such argument exists, then your skill and gentleness don’t matter. (At least, I hope I’m not that hackable!)
I appreciate your offer to talk things out together! To the extent that I’m feeling bad and would feel better after talking things out, I’m inclined to say that my current feelings are serving a purpose, i.e. to encourage me to keep pressing on this issue whenever doing so is impactful. So I prefer to not be consoled until the root issue has been addressed, though that wouldn’t have been at all true of the old version of myself. This algorithm is a bit new to me, and I’m not sure if it’ll stick.
Overall, I’m not aware that I’ve caused the balance of the discussion (i.e. pro immediate abrasive truthseeking vs. pro incentives that encourage later collaborative truthseeking & prosociality) to shift noticeably in either way, though I might have made it sound like I made less progress than I did, since I was sort of ranting/acting like I was looking for support above.
encourage me to keep pressing on this issue whenever doing so is impactful. So I prefer to not be consoled until the root issue has been addressed
Is this really a winning move for you? I’m not budging. It doesn’t look like you have a coalition that can deny me anything I care about. From my perspective, any activity spreading the message “Zack M. Davis should be shunned because of his writing at http://unremediatedgender.space/″ is just free marketing.
Being only on the periphery of the community, I’m extremely curious who said valiant man is (full disclosure: this is so I can avoid them and/or assess why the community has not yet shunned them, as I would hope they’d shun you).
Being only on the periphery of the community, I’m extremely curious why your instinctual reaction to a very politically incorrect idea is to shun the people supporting it, and why your model of the world bizarrely concludes that (1) people who live 20+ years as men and then decide, because of their autogynephilic fetish and repressed femininity, that they’re better off as women and therefore are women, and (2) people who have severe mental illnesses that cause them to become suicidal upon contemplation of their own bodies are somehow Actually the Opposite Sex in some timeless, eternal manner which becomes true as soon as they realize it’s true.
Being only on the periphery of the community, I’m extremely curious why you imagine people who are objectively a bunch of losers who can’t seem to accomplish anything of value would be the ones shunning me rather than the other way around. If I were a member of the cultlike “community”, sure, social ostracization would be possible. (Thankfully, I’m not.)
For someone who thinks that they are immune to being shunned, you sure do use an anononym.
I’ve had some thoughts and feelings in this vein; skepticism of trans and so forth. I hold that skepticism with skepticism, though, and I do not reach the point of telling the several extremely smart, perceptive, capable, and empathetic trans humans I know that they’re e.g. dumb or wrong or sick or confused, when I have no inside view, and I think it’s somewhat abhorrent and damaging to the social fabric to start these conversations in any but the most careful and respectful way. That being said, I’d be curious to hear more of the thoughts on the other side of the zeitgeist. If you feel like naming this valiant man in private, I commit to not sharing their name any farther than they themselves say is okay.
Hi! 18239018038528017428 is almost certainly referring to me! (I would have predicted that you’d already have known this from Facebook, but apparently that prediction was wrong.)
I tried that first. It turns out that it doesn’t work: any substantive, clearly-worded claims just get adversarially defined as insufficiently respectful. I still had something incredibly important to protect (there is a word for the beautiful feeling at the center of my life, and the word is not woman; I want the right to use my word, and I want the right to do psychology in public and get the right answer), so I started trying other things.
Zack, I think the problem (from my perspective) is that you tried being respectful in private, and by the time you started talking about this publicly, you were already being really harsh and difficult to talk to. I never got to interact with careful/respectful you on this topic.
(I understand this may have been emotionally necessary/unavoidable for you. But still, from my perspective there was a missing step in your escalation process. Though I should acknowledge that you spurred me to do some reading & writing I would not otherwise have done, and it’s not impossible that your harshness jolted me into feeling the need to do that.)
Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry. Feel free to say more or PM me if you want to try to have a careful-and-respectful discussion now (if you trust me).
Thanks. I don’t think that would be good for me, at least right now, but thanks for the offer.
My thoughts on the matter are mostly in my ITT entry on Ozy’s blog and then also in the most recent thread on this topic on their blog. I guess I’d be somewhat curious about your responses to those thoughts.
I agree. E.g. Scott Alexander has said he will ban people from his blog is they do not speak as if the trans theories were true, even if they believe them to be false. But that doesn’t mean it is a good option to be as rude as possible, like 18239018038528017428 above. (Obviously I am not saying that you have adopted this approach either.)
If you’ll allow me, I would like to raise a red-flag alert at this sentence. It seems poorly worded at best, and in worse scenarios indicative of some potentially-bad patterns of thought.
Presumably, as a member of a community of aspiring rationalists, not to mention the staff of CFAR, telling the people you know when (you think) they’re wrong or confused is, or should be...your daily bread. (It goes without saying that this extends to noticing your own confusion or wrongness, and encouraging others to notice it for you when you don’t; the norm, as I understand it, is a cooperative one).
Telling people when they might be sick is (if you’ll forgive me) hardly something to sneeze at, either. They might want to visit a doctor. Health is, for understandable reasons, generally considered important. (This includes mental health.)
As for dumb, well, I simply doubt that comes up often enough to make the statement meaningful. Whatever may be said about the rationalist community, it does not appear to draw its membership disproportionately from those of specifically low intelligence. Your acquaintances—whatever their other characteristics—probably aren’t “dumb”, so to tell them they are would simply be to assert a falsehood.
So: may I be so bold as to suggest either a reformulation of the thought you were trying to express, or even a reconsideration of the impulse behind it, in the event that the impulse in question wasn’t actually a good one?
This is a fair point. I absolutely do hold as my “daily bread” letting people know when my sense is that they’re wrong or confused, but it becomes trickier when you’re talking about very LARGE topics that represent a large portion of someone’s identity, and I proceed more carefully because of both a) politeness/kindness and b) a greater sense that the other person has probably thought things through.
I don’t have the spoons to reformulate the thought right now, but I think your call-out was correct, and if you take it on yourself to moderately steelman the thing I might have been saying, that’ll be closer to what I was struggling to express. The impulse behind making the statement in the first place was to try to highlight a valuable distinction between pumping against the zeitgeist/having idiosyncratic thoughts, and just being a total jerk. You can and should try to do the former, and you can and should try to avoid the latter. That was my main point.
Here’s what it looks like to me, after a bit of reflection: you’re in a state where you think a certain proposition P has a chance of being true, which it is considered a violation of social norms to assert (a situation that comes up more often than we would like).
In this sort of situation, I don’t think it’s necessarily correct to go around loudly asserting, or even mentioning, P. However, I do think it’s probably correct to avoid taking it upon oneself to enforce the (epistemically-deleterious) social norm upon those weird contrarians who, for whatever reason, do go around proclaiming P. At least leave that to the people who are confident that P is false. Otherwise, you are doing epistemic anti-work, by systematically un-correlating normative group beliefs from reality.
My sense was that you were sort of doing that above: you were seeking to reproach someone for being loudly contrarian in a direction that, from your perspective (according to what you say), may well be the right one. This is against your and your friends’ epistemic interests.
(A friendly reminder, finally, that talk of “being a total jerk” and similar is simply talk about social norms and their enforcement.)
I was not aiming to do “that above.” To the extent that I was/came across that way, I disendorse, and appreciate you providing me the chance to clarify. Your models here sound correct to me in general.
Your comment was perfectly fine, and you don’t need to apologize; see my response to komponisto above for my reasons for saying that. Apologies on my part as there’s a strong chance I’ll be without internet for several days and likely won’t be able to further engage with this topic.
Duncan’s original wording here was fine. The phrase “telling the humans I know that they’re dumb or wrong or sick or confused” is meant in the sense of “socially punishing them by making claims in a certain way, when those claims could easily be made without having that effect”.
To put it another way, my view is that Duncan is trying to refrain from adopting behavior that lumps in values (boo trans people) with claims (trans people disproportionately have certain traits). I think that’s a good thing to do for a number of reasons, and have been trying to push the debate in that direction by calling people out (with varying amounts of force) when they have been quick to slip in propositions about values into their claims.
I’m frustrated by your comment, komponisto, since raising a red-flag alert, saying that something is poorly worded at best, and making a large number of more subtle negative implications about what they’ve written are all ways of socially discouraging someone from doing something. I think that Duncan’s comment was fine, I certainly think that he didn’t need to apologize for it, and I’m fucking appalled that this conversation as a whole has managed to simultaneously promote slipping value propositions into factual claims, and promote indirectly encouraging social rudeness, and then successfully assert in social reality that a certain type of overtly abrasive value-loaded proposition making is more cooperative and epistemically useful than a more naturally kind style of non-value-loaded proposition making, all without anyone actually saying something about this.
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.”
In most cases calling someone sick when the person suffers from a mental issue isn’t the best way to get them to seek professional help for it.
What is the best way? It’s not like you can trick them into it.
A more serious issue, I would have thought, would be that the “professional help” won’t actually be effective.
If you don’t have any specific tools, I would advocate a mix of asking questions to help the other person clarify their thinking and providing information.
“Did you symptoms X and Y are signs of clinical mental illness Z?” is likely more effective than telling the person “You have mental illness Z.”
If the other person doesn’t feel judged but can explore the issue in a safe space where they are comfortable of working through an ugh-field, it’s more likely that they will end up doing what’s right afterwards.
I don’t think “Did you know symptoms X and Y are signs of clinical mental illness Z?” is appreciably different from “You very possibly have mental illness Z”, which is the practical way that “You have mental illness Z” would actually be phrased in most contexts where this would be likely to come up.
Nevertheless, your first and third paragraphs seem right.
In a conversation, you get another reaction if you ask a question that indirectly implies that the other person has a mental illness than if you are direct about it. The phrasing of information matters.
This is about behavior, not belief.
I have not disputed “autogynephilic men with repressed femininity and a crossdressing fetish pretending to be women aren’t actually women”, though neither have I affirmed it.
Regardless, I still would not want you, personally, in any community I’m part of, because your behavior is bad. I’m not interested in debating this this; obviously we disagree on what acceptable behavior looks like. Whatever; different strokes for different folks—clearly this community is not for you, but also you seem to still be here, for some reason.
And I would still want to know who’s going around trying to convince people of that statement, so that I could avoid them (for their proselytizing, not for their beliefs) and/or assess why the community has not yet shunned them. (Obviously you can shun the community while it simultaneously shuns you. These are not mutually exclusive.)
So, again, I still want to know who you’re talking about. Who are you talking about?
Hi! 18239018038528017428 is almost certainly talking about me! My detailed views are probably more nuanced and less objectionable than you might infer from the discussion in this thread? But to help you assess for yourself why “the community” (whatever that is) has not yet shunned me, maybe start with this comment (which also contains links to my new gender blog).
Ah, thanks. Turns out I do know who you are and have already thought about the question of why (and to what extent) the community continues to interact with you to my satisfaction. (And yes, the throwaway’s description of you is somewhat misleading, though mostly that’s because, from their behavior, I would expect anyone they praise to be terrible without redeeming features).
For obvious reasons, I’m extremely curious to hear your analysis if you’re willing to share. (Feel free to PM me.)
I don’t think that’s a good inference! (See the anti-halo effect and “Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?”) Even if you think the throwaway’s rudeness and hostility makes them terrible, does it really make sense for guilt-by-association to propagate to anyone the throwaway approves of for any reason?
(from the great-grandparent)
I think it would be less cruel and more honest to just advocate for punishing people who believe a claim, rather than to advocate for punishing people who argue for the claim while simultaneously insisting that this isn’t a punishment for the belief. What would be the point of restricting speech if the goal isn’t to restrict thought?
Probably this is going to be too blunt, but it’s honest, and I’m assuming you’d prefer that:
Basically, because you are psychotic, not an asshole (or at least, afaict, only an asshole as a consequence). And dealing with people who are behaving poorly because of mental issues is a hard problem, especially in a community where so many people have mental issues of one sort or another.
Again, this doesn’t mean I disagree with you (and again neither have I claimed to agree). The fact of your psychosis is not obviously prior to your beliefs. But it is very obviously prior to how you have acted on those beliefs. Or at least it is obvious to me, having spent a great deal of time with friends who behave like you’ve behaved (in public, at any rate; of course you should discount this evidence given that I haven’t interacted with you in person, or at least not much).
It’s evidence, yes.
… This is a much larger conversation for another time. If you have not already internalized “just because I believe something is true does not make it socially acceptable for me to go around trying to convince everyone else that it’s true”, I don’t know that I will be able to briefly explain to you why that is the case.
Yes, thank you!
I definitely went through some psychosis states back in February and April, but I seem to be pretty stably back to my old self now. (For whatever that might be worth!) I have a lot of regrets about this period, but I don’t regret most of my public comments.
Oh, I think I understand why; I’m not that socially retarded. Even so—if there’s going to be one goddamned place in the entire goddamned world where people put relatively more emphasis on “arguing for true propositions about human psychology because they’re true” and relatively less emphasis on social acceptability, shouldn’t it be _us_? I could believe that there are such things as information hazards—I wouldn’t publicize instructions on how to cheaply build a suitcase nuke—but this isn’t one of them.
Sure. And we do put relatively more emphasis. But we have not completely and totally thrown away all social convention. Nor should we: much of it exists for good reason.
That seems so obviously true the idea of shunning someone for fighting against people arguing the opposite seems crazy to me. I thought we just called used “she” to be polite, not thought we believed them to be women in any meaningful sense.
I cannot imagine participating in this community for any length of time and sincerely concluding that the mental state you’ve described is actually universal.
Hi! I believe I’m the only person to try shunning them, which happened on Facebook a month ago (since Zack named himself in the comments, see here, and here). The effort more or less blew up in my face and got a few people to publicly say they were going to excluded me, or try to get others to exclude me from future community events, and was also a large (but not the only) factor in getting me to step down from a leadership position in a project I’m spending about half of my time on. To be fair, there are a couple of places where Zack is less welcome now also, (I don’t think either of us have been successfully excluded from anything other than privately hosted events we weren’t likely to go to anyways), and someone with the viewpoint that shunning him was the wrong thing for me to do also stepped down from an equivalent leadership position in order to maintain a balance. So, I guess we’re in a stalemate-like de facto ceasefire, though I’d be happy to pick up the issue again.
I still stand by my response to Zack. It would have been better if I’d been skilled enough to convince him to use a less aggressive tone throughout his writing by being gentler myself; that’s an area where I’m still trying to grow. I think that collaborative truthseeking is aided rather than hindered by shunning people who call others “delusional perverts” because of their gender. This is, at least in part, because keeping discussions focused on truthseeking, impact, etc. is easier when there are social incentives (i.e. small social nudges that can later escalate to shunning) in place that disincentivize people from acting in ways that predictably push others into a state where they’re hurt enough that they’re unable to collaborate with you, such as by calling them delusional perverts. I know that the process of applying said social incentives (i.e. shunning) doesn’t look like truthseeking, but it’s instrumental to truthseeking (when done with specificity and sensitivity/by people with a well-calibrated set of certain common social skills).
(Just noticed this.)
I wasn’t aware of this, but it seems unfortunate. If successfully ostracizing me isn’t going to happen anyway, “both of you step down from something that you previously wanted to do” seems like a worse outcome than “neither of you step down.”
(For my own part, while I wouldn’t invite you to any parties I host at my house, I have no interest in trying to get other people to exclude you from their events. I consider my goal in this whole affair as simply to make it clear that I don’t intend to let social pressure influence my writing—a goal at which I think I’ve succeeded.)
I hadn’t bothered addressing this earlier, because I wanted to emphasize that my true rejection was “I don’t negotiate with emotional blackmailers; I’m happy to listen and update on substantive criticism of my writing, but appeal to consequences is not a substantive criticism”, but since it is relevant, I really think you’ve misunderstood the point of that post: try reading the second and third paragraphs again.
What I’m trying to do there is highlight my disapproval of the phenomenon where the perceived emotional valence of language overshadows its literal content. I understand very well that the phrase “delusional pervert” constitutes fighting words in a way that “paraphilic with mistaken views” doesn’t, but I’m interested in developing the skill of being able to simultaneously contemplate framings with different ideological/emotional charges, especially including framings that make me and my friends look bad (precisely because those are the ones it’s most emotionally tempting to overlook). People who aren’t interested in this skill probably shouldn’t read my blog, as the trigger warning page explains.
(Seriously, why isn’t the trigger warning page good enough for you? It’s one thing to say my writing to should have a label to protect the sensitive, but it’s another thing to say that you don’t want my thoughts to exist!)
Not all goals are achievable by sufficiently-skilled gentle social manipulation. If you can show me an argument that can persuade me to change my behavior given _my_ values, then I’ll do so. If no such argument exists, then your skill and gentleness don’t matter. (At least, I hope I’m not that hackable!)
it sounds like something happened and there was some miscommunication and things are not fully healed. Would you like help with that?
I appreciate your offer to talk things out together! To the extent that I’m feeling bad and would feel better after talking things out, I’m inclined to say that my current feelings are serving a purpose, i.e. to encourage me to keep pressing on this issue whenever doing so is impactful. So I prefer to not be consoled until the root issue has been addressed, though that wouldn’t have been at all true of the old version of myself. This algorithm is a bit new to me, and I’m not sure if it’ll stick.
Overall, I’m not aware that I’ve caused the balance of the discussion (i.e. pro immediate abrasive truthseeking vs. pro incentives that encourage later collaborative truthseeking & prosociality) to shift noticeably in either way, though I might have made it sound like I made less progress than I did, since I was sort of ranting/acting like I was looking for support above.
Is this really a winning move for you? I’m not budging. It doesn’t look like you have a coalition that can deny me anything I care about. From my perspective, any activity spreading the message “Zack M. Davis should be shunned because of his writing at http://unremediatedgender.space/″ is just free marketing.