There’s something that’s been bugging me lately about the rationalist discourse on moral mazes, political power structures, the NYT/SSC kerfuffle, etc. People are making unusually strong non-consequentialist moral claims without providing concomitantly strong arguments, or acknowledging the ways in which this is a judgement-warping move.
I don’t think that being non-consequentialist is always wrong. But I do think that we have lots of examples of people being blinded by non-consequentialist moral intuitions, and it seems like rationalists around me are deliberately invoking risk factors. Some of the risk factors: strong language, tribalism, deontological rules, judgements about the virtue of people or organisations, and not even trying to tell a story about specific harms.
Your post isn’t a central example of this, but it seems like your argument is closely related to this phenomenon, and there are also a few quotes from your post which directly showcase the thing I’m criticising:
they would be notably more disgusted with the parts of that system they interacted with
And:
They’d rather believe the things around them are pretty good rather than kinda evil. Evil means accounting, and accounting is boooring.
And:
The first time was with Facebook, where he was way in advance of me coming to realize what was evil about it.
“Evil” is one of the most emotionally loaded words in the english language. Disgust is one of the most visceral and powerful emotions. Neither you nor I nor other readers are immune to having our judgement impaired by these types of triggers, especially when they’re used regularly. (Edit: to clarify, I’m not primarily worried about worst-case interpretations; I’m worried about basically everyone involved.)
Now, I’m aware of major downsides of being too critical of strong language and bold claims. But being careful of gratuitously using words like “evil” and “insane” and “Stalinist” isn’t an usually high bar; even most people on Twitter manage it.
Other closely-related examples: people invoking anti-media tribalism in defence of SSC; various criticisms of EA for not meeting highly scrupulous standards of honesty (using words like “lying” and “scam”); talking about “attacks” and “wars”; taking hard-line views on privacy and the right not to be doxxed; etc.
Oh, and I should also acknowledge that my calls for higher epistemic standards are driven to a significant extent by epistemically-deontological intuitions. And I do think this has warped my judgement somewhat, because those intuitions lead to strong reactions to people breaking the “rules”. I think the effect is likely to be much stronger when driven by moral (not just epistemic) intuitions, as in the cases discussed above.
I’ve noticed a thing happening (more? lately? just in my reading sample?) similar to what you describe, where the emphasis goes more onto the social/community side of rationality as opposed to… the rest of rationality.
At some point, a person’s energy and resources are finite. They can try to win at anything, but maybe the lesson from recent writings is “winning at social anything is hard enough (for a LW-frequenting personality) to be a notable problem”.
Some thoughts on this issue:
Codify, codify, codify. Most people in the LW community are lacking in some social skills (relative to both non-members and the professional-politician standard). Those who have those skills: please make long detailed checklists and email-extensions of what works. That way, the less-socially-skilled among us can avoid losing-at-social without turning into Mad-Eye Moody and losing our energy.
Is there a trend where communities beat around the bush more over time?
Many posts do what I’ve heard called “subtweeting”. “Imagine a person X, having to do thing Y, and problem Z happens...”. Yes, social game theory exists and reputation exists, but at least consider just telling people the details.
Common/game-theory/vague/bad: “Let’s say somebody goes to $ORG, but they do something bad. We should consider $ORG and everyone there to be infected with The Stinky.”
Better/precise/detailed/good: “Hey, Nicholas Kross went to MIRI and schemed to build a robot that outputs anti-utils. How do we prevent this in the future, and can we make a preventative checklist?” [1]
If you are totally financially/legally dependent on an abusive organization or person, obviously writing a call-out post with details is game-theoretically bad for you. In that case, don’t leave in those details. For everyone else: either write a postmortem or say “I’m under NDA, but...”.
We get it, we need Slack, and society doesn’t give enough of it for our purposes. Can somebody with higher dopamine coordinate or promote any method so we can setup livingarrangements to escape mainstream social pressures?
(If your AGI-will-give-us-Slack timeline is shorter than a community-Slack-project, how much should you really worry about long-term politics-style social/reputational-game-theoretic threats to the community’s Slack?)
There are many forces and causes that lead use of deontology and virtue ethics to be misunderstood and punished on Twitter, and this is part of the reason that I have not participated in Twitter these past 3-5 years. But don’t confuse these with the standards for longer form discussions and essays. Trying to hold your discussions to Twitter standards is a recipe for great damage to one’s ability to talk, and ability to think.
I’m saying we should strive to do better than Twitter on the metric of “being careful with strongly valenced terminology”, i.e. being more careful. I’m not quite sure what point you’re making—it seems like you think it’d be better to be less careful?
In any case, the reference to Twitter was just a throwaway example; my main argument is that our standards for longer form discussions on Lesswrong should involve being more careful with strongly valenced terminology than people currently are.
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)
There’s something that’s been bugging me lately about the rationalist discourse on moral mazes, political power structures, the NYT/SSC kerfuffle, etc. People are making unusually strong non-consequentialist moral claims without providing concomitantly strong arguments, or acknowledging the ways in which this is a judgement-warping move.
I don’t think that being non-consequentialist is always wrong. But I do think that we have lots of examples of people being blinded by non-consequentialist moral intuitions, and it seems like rationalists around me are deliberately invoking risk factors. Some of the risk factors: strong language, tribalism, deontological rules, judgements about the virtue of people or organisations, and not even trying to tell a story about specific harms.
Your post isn’t a central example of this, but it seems like your argument is closely related to this phenomenon, and there are also a few quotes from your post which directly showcase the thing I’m criticising:
And:
And:
“Evil” is one of the most emotionally loaded words in the english language. Disgust is one of the most visceral and powerful emotions. Neither you nor I nor other readers are immune to having our judgement impaired by these types of triggers, especially when they’re used regularly. (Edit: to clarify, I’m not primarily worried about worst-case interpretations; I’m worried about basically everyone involved.)
Now, I’m aware of major downsides of being too critical of strong language and bold claims. But being careful of gratuitously using words like “evil” and “insane” and “Stalinist” isn’t an usually high bar; even most people on Twitter manage it.
Other closely-related examples: people invoking anti-media tribalism in defence of SSC; various criticisms of EA for not meeting highly scrupulous standards of honesty (using words like “lying” and “scam”); talking about “attacks” and “wars”; taking hard-line views on privacy and the right not to be doxxed; etc.
Oh, and I should also acknowledge that my calls for higher epistemic standards are driven to a significant extent by epistemically-deontological intuitions. And I do think this has warped my judgement somewhat, because those intuitions lead to strong reactions to people breaking the “rules”. I think the effect is likely to be much stronger when driven by moral (not just epistemic) intuitions, as in the cases discussed above.
I’ve noticed a thing happening (more? lately? just in my reading sample?) similar to what you describe, where the emphasis goes more onto the social/community side of rationality as opposed to… the rest of rationality.
The Moral Mazes examples are related to that. Also topics like reputation, and virtues ‘n’ norms, and what other people think of you.
At some point, a person’s energy and resources are finite. They can try to win at anything, but maybe the lesson from recent writings is “winning at social anything is hard enough (for a LW-frequenting personality) to be a notable problem”.
Some thoughts on this issue:
Codify, codify, codify. Most people in the LW community are lacking in some social skills (relative to both non-members and the professional-politician standard). Those who have those skills: please make long detailed checklists and email-extensions of what works. That way, the less-socially-skilled among us can avoid losing-at-social without turning into Mad-Eye Moody and losing our energy.
Is there a trend where communities beat around the bush more over time? Many posts do what I’ve heard called “subtweeting”. “Imagine a person X, having to do thing Y, and problem Z happens...”. Yes, social game theory exists and reputation exists, but at least consider just telling people the details.
Common/game-theory/vague/bad: “Let’s say somebody goes to $ORG, but they do something bad. We should consider $ORG and everyone there to be infected with The Stinky.”
Better/precise/detailed/good: “Hey, Nicholas Kross went to MIRI and schemed to build a robot that outputs anti-utils. How do we prevent this in the future, and can we make a preventative checklist?” [1]
If you are totally financially/legally dependent on an abusive organization or person, obviously writing a call-out post with details is game-theoretically bad for you. In that case, don’t leave in those details. For everyone else: either write a postmortem or say “I’m under NDA, but...”.
We get it, we need Slack, and society doesn’t give enough of it for our purposes. Can somebody with higher dopamine coordinate or promote any method so we can setup living arrangements to escape mainstream social pressures?
(If your AGI-will-give-us-Slack timeline is shorter than a community-Slack-project, how much should you really worry about long-term politics-style social/reputational-game-theoretic threats to the community’s Slack?)
Interested in more thoughts on this.
This is a fictional example. Plus, it’s not even slyly alluding to any situations! (Well, as far as I know.)
I unironically think this a great example of doing the thing the OP is pointing at correctly.
Indeed. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
There are many forces and causes that lead use of deontology and virtue ethics to be misunderstood and punished on Twitter, and this is part of the reason that I have not participated in Twitter these past 3-5 years. But don’t confuse these with the standards for longer form discussions and essays. Trying to hold your discussions to Twitter standards is a recipe for great damage to one’s ability to talk, and ability to think.
I’m saying we should strive to do better than Twitter on the metric of “being careful with strongly valenced terminology”, i.e. being more careful. I’m not quite sure what point you’re making—it seems like you think it’d be better to be less careful?
In any case, the reference to Twitter was just a throwaway example; my main argument is that our standards for longer form discussions on Lesswrong should involve being more careful with strongly valenced terminology than people currently are.
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