You should totally be less careful. On Twitter, if you say something that can be misinterpreted, sometimes over a million people see it and someone famous tells them you’re an awful person. I say sometimes, I more mean “this is the constant state and is happening thousands of times per day”. Yes, if you’re not with your friends and allies and community, if you’re in a system designed to take the worst interpretation of what you say and amplify it in the broader culture with all morality set aside, be careful.
Here on LW, I don’t exercise that care to anything like the same degree. I try to be honest and truthful, and worry less about the worst interpreration of what I write. In hiring, there’s a maxim: hire for strengths, don’t hire for lack-of-weaknesses. It’s to push against the failure modes of hiring-by-committee (typically the board) where everyone can agree on obvious weaknesses, but reward standout strengths less. Similarly in writing, I aim more to say valuable truths that aren’t said elsewhere or can be succinctly arrived at alongside other LWers, rather than for lack of mistakes or lack of things-that-can-be-misinterpreted by anyone.
I think we’re talking past each other a little, because we’re using “careful” in two different senses. Let’s say careful1 is being careful to avoid reputational damage or harassment. Careful2 is being careful not to phrase claims in ways that make it harder for you or your readers to be rational about the topic (even assuming a smart, good-faith audience).
It seems like you’re mainly talking about careful1. In the current context, I am not worried about backlash or other consequences from failure to be careful1. I’m talking about careful2. When you “aim to say valuable truths that aren’t said elsewhere”, you can either do so in a way that is careful2 to be nuanced and precise, or you can do so in a way that is tribalist and emotionally provocative and mindkilling. From my perspective, the ability to do the former is one of the core skills of rationality.
In other words, it’s not just a question of the “worst” interpretation of what you write; rather, I think that very few people (even here) are able to dispassionately evaluate arguments which call things “evil” and “disgusting”, or which invoke tribal loyalties. Moreover, such arguments are often vague because they appeal to personal standards of “evil” or “insane” without forcing people to be precise about what they mean by it (e.g. I really don’t know what you actually mean when you say facebook is evil). So even if your only goal is to improve your personal understanding of what you’re writing about, I would recommend being more careful2.
I don’t know why you want ‘disspassion’, emotions are central to how I think and act and reason, and this is true for most rationalists I know. I mean, you say it’s mindkilling, and of course there’s that risk, but you can’t just cut off the domain of emotion, and I will not pander to readers who cannot deal with their own basic emotions.
When I say Facebook is evil, I straightforwardly mean that it is trying to hurt people. It is intentionally aiming to give millions of people an addiction that makes their lives worse and their communities worse. Zuckerberg’s early pitch decks described Facebook’s users as addicted and made this a selling point of the company, analogous to how a drug dealer would pitch that their product got users addicted and this being a selling point for investing in the company. The newsfeed is an explicitly designed sparse reward loop that teaches you to constantly spend your time on it, reading through content you do not find interesting, to find the sparks of valuable content once in a while, instead of giving you the content it knows you want up front, all in order to keep you addicted. They are explicitly trying to take up as much of your free time as they can with an unhelpful addiction and they do not care about the harm it will cause for the people they hurt. This is what I am calling evil. I give a link in the OP to where Zvi explains a lot of the basic reasoning, the interested reader can learn all this from there. You might disagree about whether Facebook is evil, but I am using the word centrally, and I do not accept your implied recommendation to stop talking about evil things.
You’re saying things like ‘provocative’ and ‘mindkilling’ and ‘invoking tribal loyalties’, but you’ve not made any arguments relating that to my writing. My sense is you‘re arguing that all of my posts should kind of meet the analytic philosophy level of dryness where we can say that something is disgusting only in sentences like
Let us call an act that is morally wrong but not causing direct harm ”morally-disgusting-1”. Let us call an act that is not morally wrong but causes humans to feel disgust anyway “morally-discussing-2”. Let us explore the space between these two with a logical argument in three steps.
Whereas I want to be able to write posts with sentences like
I had been studying psychology for several years and built my worldview around it, and then after I discovered the replication crisis I felt betrayed. The scientists whose work I revered made me angry, and the fake principles I cherished now fill me disgust. I feel I was lied to and tricked for 8 years.
With little argument it seems (?) like you’ve decided the latter is ‘mindkilling’ and off-limits and shouldn’t be talked about.
There are absolutely more mature and healthy and rational ways of communicating about emotions and dealing with them, and I spend a massive amount of my time reflecting on my feelings and how I communicate with the people I talk to. If I think I might miscommunicate, I sometimes explicit acknowledge things like “This is how I’m feeling as I say this, but I don’t mean this is my reflectively endorsed position” or “I’m angry at you about this and I’m being clear about that, but it’s not a big deal to me on an absolute scale and we can move on if it’s also not a big deal to you“ or “I want to be clear that while I love <x> this doesn’t mean I think it’s obvious that you should love <x>” or “I want to be clear that you and I do not have the sort of relationship where I get to demand time from you about this, and if you leave I won’t think that reflects poorly on you”. Most emotional skills aren’t at all explicit, like having an emotion rise in me, reflecting on it, and realizing it just isn’t actually something I want to bring up. Perhaps I’m being too reactionary and should try to be more charitable (or I’m being too charitable and should try to be more reactionary). There’s lots of tools and skills here. But you’re not talking about these skills (perhaps you’d like to?), you’re mostly saying (from where I’m sitting) that using emotive or deontological language at all is to-be-frowned-on, which I can’t agree with.
I think that very few people (even here) are able to dispassionately evaluate arguments which call things “evil” and “disgusting”,
I disagree. I think they have fairly straightforward meanings, and people can understand my claims without breaking their minds, though I am quite happy to answer requests for clarification. I agree it involves engaging with your own emotions, but we’re not Spock and I’m not writing for him.
You’re saying things like ‘provocative’ and ‘mindkilling’ and ‘invoking tribal loyalties’, but you’ve not made any arguments relating that to my writing
I should be clear here that I’m talking about a broader phenomenon, not specifically your writing. As I noted above, your post isn’t actually a central example of the phenomenon. The “tribal loyalties” thing was primarily referring to people’s reactions to the SSC/NYT thing. Apologies if it seemed like I was accusing you personally of all of these things. (The bits that were specific to your post were mentions of “evil” and “disgust”.)
Nor am I saying that we should never talk about emotions; I do think that’s important. But we should try to also provide argumentative content which isn’t reliant on the emotional content. If we make strong claims driven by emotions, then we should make sure to also defend them in less emotionally loaded ways, in a way which makes them compelling to someone who doesn’t share these particular emotions. For example, in the quotation you gave, what makes science’s principles “fake” just because they failed in psychology? Is that person applying an isolated demand for rigour because they used to revere science? I can only evaluate this if they defend their claims more extensively elsewhere.
On the specific example of facebook, I disagree that you’re using evil in a central way. I think the central examples of evil are probably mass-murdering dictators. My guess is that opinions would be pretty divided about whether to call drug dealers evil (versus, say, amoral); and the same for soldiers, even when they end up causing a lot of collateral damage.
Your conclusion that facebook is evil seems particularly and unusually strong because your arguments are also applicable to many TV shows, game producers, fast food companies, and so on. Which doesn’t make those arguments wrong, but it means that they need to meet a pretty high bar, since either facebook is significantly more evil than all these other groups, or else we’ll need to expand the scope of words like “evil” until they refer to a significant chunk of society (which would be quite different from how most people use it).
(This is not to over-focus on the specific word “evil”, it’s just the one you happened to use here. I have similar complaints about other people using the word “insane” gratuitously; to people casually comparing current society to Stalinist Russia or the Cultural Revolution; and so on.)
If we make strong claims driven by emotions, then we should make sure to also defend them in less emotionally loaded ways, in a way which makes them compelling to someone who doesn’t share these particular emotions.
Restating this in the first person, this reads to me as ”On the topics where we strongly disagree, you’re not supposed to say how you feel emotionally about the topic if it’s not compelling to me.” This is a bid you get to make and it will be accepted/denied based on the local social contract and social norms, but it’s not a “core skill of rationality”.
You don’t understand what all my words mean. I’m not writing for everyone, so it’s mostly fine from where I’m sitting, and as I said I’m happy to give clarifications to the interested reader. This thread hasn’t been very productive right now though so I’ll drop it. Except I’ll add, which perhaps you’ll appreciate, I did indeed link to an IMO pretty extensive explanation of the reasons behind the ways I think Facebook is evil, and I don’t expect I would have written it that way had I not know there was an extensive explanation written up. The inferential gap would’ve been too big, but I can say it casually because I know that the interested reader can cross the gap using the link.
(I have some disagreements with this. I think there’s a virtue Ben is pointing at (and which Zvi and others are pointing at), which is important, but I don’t think we have the luxury of living in the world where you get to execute that virtue without also worrying about the failure modes Richard is worried about)
Whether I agree with this point or not depends on whether you’re using Ben’s framing of the costs and benefits, or the framing I intended; I can’t tell.
I think I mostly have a deep disagreement with Ben here, which is important but not urgent to resolve and would take a bunch of time. (I think I might separately have different deep disagreements with you, but I haven’t evaluated that)
You should totally be less careful. On Twitter, if you say something that can be misinterpreted, sometimes over a million people see it and someone famous tells them you’re an awful person. I say sometimes, I more mean “this is the constant state and is happening thousands of times per day”. Yes, if you’re not with your friends and allies and community, if you’re in a system designed to take the worst interpretation of what you say and amplify it in the broader culture with all morality set aside, be careful.
Here on LW, I don’t exercise that care to anything like the same degree. I try to be honest and truthful, and worry less about the worst interpreration of what I write. In hiring, there’s a maxim: hire for strengths, don’t hire for lack-of-weaknesses. It’s to push against the failure modes of hiring-by-committee (typically the board) where everyone can agree on obvious weaknesses, but reward standout strengths less. Similarly in writing, I aim more to say valuable truths that aren’t said elsewhere or can be succinctly arrived at alongside other LWers, rather than for lack of mistakes or lack of things-that-can-be-misinterpreted by anyone.
I think we’re talking past each other a little, because we’re using “careful” in two different senses. Let’s say careful1 is being careful to avoid reputational damage or harassment. Careful2 is being careful not to phrase claims in ways that make it harder for you or your readers to be rational about the topic (even assuming a smart, good-faith audience).
It seems like you’re mainly talking about careful1. In the current context, I am not worried about backlash or other consequences from failure to be careful1. I’m talking about careful2. When you “aim to say valuable truths that aren’t said elsewhere”, you can either do so in a way that is careful2 to be nuanced and precise, or you can do so in a way that is tribalist and emotionally provocative and mindkilling. From my perspective, the ability to do the former is one of the core skills of rationality.
In other words, it’s not just a question of the “worst” interpretation of what you write; rather, I think that very few people (even here) are able to dispassionately evaluate arguments which call things “evil” and “disgusting”, or which invoke tribal loyalties. Moreover, such arguments are often vague because they appeal to personal standards of “evil” or “insane” without forcing people to be precise about what they mean by it (e.g. I really don’t know what you actually mean when you say facebook is evil). So even if your only goal is to improve your personal understanding of what you’re writing about, I would recommend being more careful2.
I don’t know why you want ‘disspassion’, emotions are central to how I think and act and reason, and this is true for most rationalists I know. I mean, you say it’s mindkilling, and of course there’s that risk, but you can’t just cut off the domain of emotion, and I will not pander to readers who cannot deal with their own basic emotions.
When I say Facebook is evil, I straightforwardly mean that it is trying to hurt people. It is intentionally aiming to give millions of people an addiction that makes their lives worse and their communities worse. Zuckerberg’s early pitch decks described Facebook’s users as addicted and made this a selling point of the company, analogous to how a drug dealer would pitch that their product got users addicted and this being a selling point for investing in the company. The newsfeed is an explicitly designed sparse reward loop that teaches you to constantly spend your time on it, reading through content you do not find interesting, to find the sparks of valuable content once in a while, instead of giving you the content it knows you want up front, all in order to keep you addicted. They are explicitly trying to take up as much of your free time as they can with an unhelpful addiction and they do not care about the harm it will cause for the people they hurt. This is what I am calling evil. I give a link in the OP to where Zvi explains a lot of the basic reasoning, the interested reader can learn all this from there. You might disagree about whether Facebook is evil, but I am using the word centrally, and I do not accept your implied recommendation to stop talking about evil things.
You’re saying things like ‘provocative’ and ‘mindkilling’ and ‘invoking tribal loyalties’, but you’ve not made any arguments relating that to my writing. My sense is you‘re arguing that all of my posts should kind of meet the analytic philosophy level of dryness where we can say that something is disgusting only in sentences like
Whereas I want to be able to write posts with sentences like
With little argument it seems (?) like you’ve decided the latter is ‘mindkilling’ and off-limits and shouldn’t be talked about.
There are absolutely more mature and healthy and rational ways of communicating about emotions and dealing with them, and I spend a massive amount of my time reflecting on my feelings and how I communicate with the people I talk to. If I think I might miscommunicate, I sometimes explicit acknowledge things like “This is how I’m feeling as I say this, but I don’t mean this is my reflectively endorsed position” or “I’m angry at you about this and I’m being clear about that, but it’s not a big deal to me on an absolute scale and we can move on if it’s also not a big deal to you“ or “I want to be clear that while I love <x> this doesn’t mean I think it’s obvious that you should love <x>” or “I want to be clear that you and I do not have the sort of relationship where I get to demand time from you about this, and if you leave I won’t think that reflects poorly on you”. Most emotional skills aren’t at all explicit, like having an emotion rise in me, reflecting on it, and realizing it just isn’t actually something I want to bring up. Perhaps I’m being too reactionary and should try to be more charitable (or I’m being too charitable and should try to be more reactionary). There’s lots of tools and skills here. But you’re not talking about these skills (perhaps you’d like to?), you’re mostly saying (from where I’m sitting) that using emotive or deontological language at all is to-be-frowned-on, which I can’t agree with.
I disagree. I think they have fairly straightforward meanings, and people can understand my claims without breaking their minds, though I am quite happy to answer requests for clarification. I agree it involves engaging with your own emotions, but we’re not Spock and I’m not writing for him.
I should be clear here that I’m talking about a broader phenomenon, not specifically your writing. As I noted above, your post isn’t actually a central example of the phenomenon. The “tribal loyalties” thing was primarily referring to people’s reactions to the SSC/NYT thing. Apologies if it seemed like I was accusing you personally of all of these things. (The bits that were specific to your post were mentions of “evil” and “disgust”.)
Nor am I saying that we should never talk about emotions; I do think that’s important. But we should try to also provide argumentative content which isn’t reliant on the emotional content. If we make strong claims driven by emotions, then we should make sure to also defend them in less emotionally loaded ways, in a way which makes them compelling to someone who doesn’t share these particular emotions. For example, in the quotation you gave, what makes science’s principles “fake” just because they failed in psychology? Is that person applying an isolated demand for rigour because they used to revere science? I can only evaluate this if they defend their claims more extensively elsewhere.
On the specific example of facebook, I disagree that you’re using evil in a central way. I think the central examples of evil are probably mass-murdering dictators. My guess is that opinions would be pretty divided about whether to call drug dealers evil (versus, say, amoral); and the same for soldiers, even when they end up causing a lot of collateral damage.
Your conclusion that facebook is evil seems particularly and unusually strong because your arguments are also applicable to many TV shows, game producers, fast food companies, and so on. Which doesn’t make those arguments wrong, but it means that they need to meet a pretty high bar, since either facebook is significantly more evil than all these other groups, or else we’ll need to expand the scope of words like “evil” until they refer to a significant chunk of society (which would be quite different from how most people use it).
(This is not to over-focus on the specific word “evil”, it’s just the one you happened to use here. I have similar complaints about other people using the word “insane” gratuitously; to people casually comparing current society to Stalinist Russia or the Cultural Revolution; and so on.)
Restating this in the first person, this reads to me as ”On the topics where we strongly disagree, you’re not supposed to say how you feel emotionally about the topic if it’s not compelling to me.” This is a bid you get to make and it will be accepted/denied based on the local social contract and social norms, but it’s not a “core skill of rationality”.
You don’t understand what all my words mean. I’m not writing for everyone, so it’s mostly fine from where I’m sitting, and as I said I’m happy to give clarifications to the interested reader. This thread hasn’t been very productive right now though so I’ll drop it. Except I’ll add, which perhaps you’ll appreciate, I did indeed link to an IMO pretty extensive explanation of the reasons behind the ways I think Facebook is evil, and I don’t expect I would have written it that way had I not know there was an extensive explanation written up. The inferential gap would’ve been too big, but I can say it casually because I know that the interested reader can cross the gap using the link.
(I have some disagreements with this. I think there’s a virtue Ben is pointing at (and which Zvi and others are pointing at), which is important, but I don’t think we have the luxury of living in the world where you get to execute that virtue without also worrying about the failure modes Richard is worried about)
Whether I agree with this point or not depends on whether you’re using Ben’s framing of the costs and benefits, or the framing I intended; I can’t tell.
I think I mostly have a deep disagreement with Ben here, which is important but not urgent to resolve and would take a bunch of time. (I think I might separately have different deep disagreements with you, but I haven’t evaluated that)
+1