a) this post is certainly pointing at a useful and relevant quality
b) this post may be useful for Conor specifically referring people to for how his brain works
c) this post (or something like it) could also be useful as a general “here are qualities that we should aspire to and think about” thing, which’d be handy to build off of. But using the word human means that, at the very least, every time some new people talk about the concept there’s going to be a chunk of time spent rehashing the argument of “you’re saying people aren’t human!?” (Or, people understanding the post… but still being uncomfortable with it and doing a song-and-dance around distancing themselves from the variations on this idea that feed directly into things like moral worth).
Even if, after every one of the iterations, people talk things through and end up on the same page, I just anticipate a lot of wasted time. Human is just such a loaded term.
I very much want to pump against “here on Less Wrong, we shouldn’t just state exactly what we mean because then people will waste a lot of time wrestling with connotation.”
I don’t know what to do with my prediction that you strongly disagree. It’s sort of a question of how best to move the culture toward an ideal style of discourse, which is (I suspect) a goal that is shared equally strongly by you and I and gjm. I have a desire for a Less Wrong community where your above prediction of wasted time is absolutely not a risk in the case of a post worded exactly as mine is above, and I agree that this is not that, yet, and I don’t know how to trade off act-as-if-it-is-and-be-the-culture-you-want-to-see-in-the-world against scaffold-for-people-and-censor-yourself-for-PR-reasons.
I don’t have a clear sense of a good choice here, but for frame of reference (note: this is me using the current site rules as examples of how some human tendencies work and what tradeoffs we’ve currently made, not speaking as developer of the site and not speaking for what sorts of conversation are “Good™”. Just thinking out loud)
Humans are demonstratably bad at talking about politics. If you allow them to do so on your website, it’ll quickly attract the sort of person who turns it into bad facebook comments unless you have a lot of effortful moderation and careful karma policies.
At the same time, it’s very good for seasoned Less Wrong folk to be able to have nuanced conversations about politics that make useful headway on things. And should be able to do so without contorting themselves in circles.
This is a case where an explicit call was made: mainstream politics is banned from Less Wrong main page. You can talk about it on the personal page but it’s somewhat hidden away from people that aren’t going looking for it.
For similar reasons, the Front Page of Less Wrong is now declared “not a place for calls to action”, because Calls To Action end up impacting social reality and social reality is Hard Mode.
I think the set of people I’d trust to talk about being more-or-less human is roughly the same set of people I’d trust to talk about politics productively (for approximately the same reason). I think no matter how much we level up at rational-discourse, the most public-facing areas in the site are going to have newcomers who haven’t leveled up at discussing nuanced things carefully.
None of that is meant to output a particular policy suggestion—the point is that this sort of consideration is the type of thing we’ve already run into and made some tradeoffs on.
My take on this is something like:
a) this post is certainly pointing at a useful and relevant quality
b) this post may be useful for Conor specifically referring people to for how his brain works
c) this post (or something like it) could also be useful as a general “here are qualities that we should aspire to and think about” thing, which’d be handy to build off of. But using the word human means that, at the very least, every time some new people talk about the concept there’s going to be a chunk of time spent rehashing the argument of “you’re saying people aren’t human!?” (Or, people understanding the post… but still being uncomfortable with it and doing a song-and-dance around distancing themselves from the variations on this idea that feed directly into things like moral worth).
Even if, after every one of the iterations, people talk things through and end up on the same page, I just anticipate a lot of wasted time. Human is just such a loaded term.
I very much want to pump against “here on Less Wrong, we shouldn’t just state exactly what we mean because then people will waste a lot of time wrestling with connotation.”
I don’t know what to do with my prediction that you strongly disagree. It’s sort of a question of how best to move the culture toward an ideal style of discourse, which is (I suspect) a goal that is shared equally strongly by you and I and gjm. I have a desire for a Less Wrong community where your above prediction of wasted time is absolutely not a risk in the case of a post worded exactly as mine is above, and I agree that this is not that, yet, and I don’t know how to trade off act-as-if-it-is-and-be-the-culture-you-want-to-see-in-the-world against scaffold-for-people-and-censor-yourself-for-PR-reasons.
I don’t have a clear sense of a good choice here, but for frame of reference (note: this is me using the current site rules as examples of how some human tendencies work and what tradeoffs we’ve currently made, not speaking as developer of the site and not speaking for what sorts of conversation are “Good™”. Just thinking out loud)
Humans are demonstratably bad at talking about politics. If you allow them to do so on your website, it’ll quickly attract the sort of person who turns it into bad facebook comments unless you have a lot of effortful moderation and careful karma policies.
At the same time, it’s very good for seasoned Less Wrong folk to be able to have nuanced conversations about politics that make useful headway on things. And should be able to do so without contorting themselves in circles.
This is a case where an explicit call was made: mainstream politics is banned from Less Wrong main page. You can talk about it on the personal page but it’s somewhat hidden away from people that aren’t going looking for it.
For similar reasons, the Front Page of Less Wrong is now declared “not a place for calls to action”, because Calls To Action end up impacting social reality and social reality is Hard Mode.
I think the set of people I’d trust to talk about being more-or-less human is roughly the same set of people I’d trust to talk about politics productively (for approximately the same reason). I think no matter how much we level up at rational-discourse, the most public-facing areas in the site are going to have newcomers who haven’t leveled up at discussing nuanced things carefully.
None of that is meant to output a particular policy suggestion—the point is that this sort of consideration is the type of thing we’ve already run into and made some tradeoffs on.