My story is that the OP is a guide to successful communication, and the OB is arguing that it should not be required or expected, as that imparts unfair mandatory costs on communicators.
To the extent that story is accurate, I largely agree; you can read [In Defense of Punch Bug] and [Invalidating Imaginary Injury] and similar as strongly motivated by a desire to cut back on unfair mandatory costs.
But also I smell a fabricated option in “what if we just didn’t?” I think that the OB essay points at a good thing that would be good, but doesn’t really do anything to say how. Indeed, at the end, the OB essay seems to be turning toward locating the problem in the listener? Advocating not projecting a bunch of assumptions into what you read and hear?
I see. I mean, all interactions have virtues on both sides. If someone insults me needlessly, the virtue for them to practice is avoiding unnecessary cruelty, and my virtue to practice is not letting others’ words affect me too much (e.g. avoiding grudges or making a big deal of feeling attacked).
Similarly, if someone communicates with me and I read into it nearby meanings they didn’t intend, their virtue is to empathize more with other minds in their writing, and my virtue is to hold as a live hypothesis that I may not have fully understood what they intended to say (rather than assuming I did with 100% certainty and responding based on that, and then being sorry later when I discover I got them wrong).
...there’s a strong “fallacy of the grey” vibe in the above, in cultures where the fallacy of the grey isn’t something that everyone is aware of, sufficiently so that it need no longer be mentioned or guarded against.
“All interactions have virtues on both sides” is just true, denotatively.
Connotatively, it implies that all interactions have roughly equivalent magnitudes of virtues on both sides, especially when you post that here in response to me making a critique of someone else’s method of engagement.
I posit that, humans being what they are and LW being what it currently is, the net effect of the above comment is to convey mild disapproval, but without being explicit about it.
Which may not have been your intention, which is why I’m writing this out (to give you a chance to say one way or the other if you feel like it).
It’s sufficiently close to always-true that “both sides could have done better” or “both sides were defending something important” that the act of taking the time to say so is usually conveying something beyond the mere fact. Similar to how if I say “the sky is blue,” you would probably do more than just nod and say “Indeed!” You would likely wonder why I chose that particular utterance at this particular moment.
The fact that each person always has an available challenge-of-virtue does not mean that the challenge presented to each is anything remotely like “equally fair” or that both are equally distant from some lofty ideal.
Mostly this is a muse, but it’s a relevant muse as I’m thinking a bunch about how things go sideways on LW. I’m not sure that you’re aware that “all interactions have virtues on both sides” could be read as a rebuke of “I think CronoDAS’s interaction with me was sub-par.” And if I wanted to engage with you in world-modeling and norm-building, it would be a very different conversation if you were vs. if you weren’t (though both could be productive).
I’ll execute my go-to move when someone potentially-critizes what I did, and try to describe the cognitive process that I executed:
I read your second paragraph from “But also” to “read and hear.”
It sounded to me like you said Hanson was saying “It would be good if this unhelpful behavior just went away”, and that to you this seemed empty of gears or helpful advice.
[This is what I read you as saying, which might not be identical to what you said, nor what you meant. Neither of us are perfect at explaining ourselves nor at understanding each other in our comments, but I generally like to try having more conversation anyway :) ]
In response to this thing I read you as saying I noticed I had something to say which met my bar for “interesting thing to say”, which was a counterpoint along the lines of: “Actually I think describing the virtues of being a good reader/listener is a helpful thing to do, even if you can’t teach them to do it. Often virtues are just shown by behavior to emulate (e.g. ‘Bob is a great person because he was the only one who said the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes’), and ‘don’t tell people off for not writing disclaimers’ is a behavior I nominally see how to emulate”.
So I wrote that down and hit ‘submit’.
More broadly, the conversation I thought of us as having was “what is the relationship between the against disclaimers post and the ruling out everything else post?”, to which I was making a contribution, and to which the above cognition was a standard step in the convo.
I’ll follow up with some more reactions in a second comment.
Just up top I’ll share my opinion re CronoDAS’s comment: my opinion is that it’s way more helpful to provide literally any context on a URL than to post it bare, and it’s within the range of reasonable behavior to downvote it in response to no-context. (I wouldn’t myself on a post of mine, I’d probably just be like “yeah whatever” and ignore it.)
I posit that, humans being what they are and LW being what it currently is, the net effect of the above comment is to convey mild disapproval, but without being explicit about it.
I was surprised by you writing this!
My response to writing for such readers is “sod them”, or something more like “that’s not what I said, it’s not what I meant, and I’m pro a policy of ignoring people who read me as doing more status things with my comments than I am when I’m what actually doing is trying to have good conversation”.
This is motivated by something like “write for the readers you want, not the readers you have, and bit by bit you’ll teach them to be the readers you want (slash selection effects will take care of it)”.
This is some combination of thinking this norm is real for lots of LW readers, and also thinking it should be real for LW readers, such that the exact values of either I don’t feel super confident about, just that I’m in an equilibrium where I can unilaterally act on this policy and expect people to follow along with me / nominally punish them for not following along, and get the future I want.
(Where ‘punish’ here just means exert some cost on them, like their experience of the comments being more confusing, or their comments being slightly more downvoted than they expect, or some other relatively innocuous way of providing a negative incentive.)
I don’t think you get to do it all the time, but I do try to do it on LW a fair amount, and I’d defend writers-who-are-not-site-admins doing it with even more blind abandon than I.
I posit that, humans being what they are and LW being what it currently is, the net effect of the above comment is to convey mild disapproval, but without being explicit about it.
Which may not have been your intention, which is why I’m writing this out (to give you a chance to say one way or the other if you feel like it).
It was not my intention, thank you for writing it out for me to deconfirm :)
The fact that each person always has an available challenge-of-virtue does not mean that the challenge presented to each is anything remotely like “equally fair” or that both are equally distant from some lofty ideal.
This paragraph is pretty interesting and the point is not something I was thinking about. In my internal convo locus you get points for adding a true and interesting point I wasn’t consciously tracking :)
Okay well this isn’t very specific or concrete feedback but the gist of my response here is “I love ya, Ben Pace.”
I also feel “sod them,” and wish something like … like I felt more like I could afford to disregard “them” in this case? Except it feels like my attempts to pretend that I could are what have gotten me in trouble on LW specifically, so despite very much being in line with the spirit I hear you putting forward, I nevertheless feel like I have to do some bending-over-backward.
Aww thanks Duncan :) I am v happy that I wrote my comments :)
I had noticed in the past that you seemed to have a different empirical belief here (or something), leading you to seem to have arguments in the comments that I myself wouldn’t care enough to follow through on (even while you made good and helpful arguments).
Maybe it’s just an empirical disagreement. But I can imagine doing some empirical test here where you convince me the majority of readers didn’t understand the norms as much as I thought, but where I still had a feeling like “As long as your posts score high in the annual review it doesn’t matter” or “As long as you get substantive responses from John Wentworth or Scott Alexander or Anna Salamon it doesn’t matter” or “As long as all the people are reading your ideas are picking them up and then suddenly everyone is talking about ‘cruxes’ all the time it doesn’t matter” (or “As long as I think your content is awesome and want to build offices and grant infrastructure and so on to support you and writers-like-you it doesn’t matter”).
I’d be interested to know if there are any things that you can think of that would change how you feel about this conversational norm on the margin? My random babble (of ideas that I am not saying are even net positive) would include suggesting a change to the commenting guidelines, or me doing a little survey of users about how they read comments, or me somehow writing a top level post where I flagrantly write true and valuable stuff that can be interpreted badly yet I don’t care and also there’s great discussion in the comments ;)
I happen to be writing exactly this essay (things that would change stuff on the margin). It’s … not easy.
As for exploring the empirical question, I’m interested/intrigued and cannot rule out that you’re just right about the line of “mattering” being somewhere other than where I guess it is.
My story is that the OP is a guide to successful communication, and the OB is arguing that it should not be required or expected, as that imparts unfair mandatory costs on communicators.
To the extent that story is accurate, I largely agree; you can read [In Defense of Punch Bug] and [Invalidating Imaginary Injury] and similar as strongly motivated by a desire to cut back on unfair mandatory costs.
But also I smell a fabricated option in “what if we just didn’t?” I think that the OB essay points at a good thing that would be good, but doesn’t really do anything to say how. Indeed, at the end, the OB essay seems to be turning toward locating the problem in the listener? Advocating not projecting a bunch of assumptions into what you read and hear?
I see. I mean, all interactions have virtues on both sides. If someone insults me needlessly, the virtue for them to practice is avoiding unnecessary cruelty, and my virtue to practice is not letting others’ words affect me too much (e.g. avoiding grudges or making a big deal of feeling attacked).
Similarly, if someone communicates with me and I read into it nearby meanings they didn’t intend, their virtue is to empathize more with other minds in their writing, and my virtue is to hold as a live hypothesis that I may not have fully understood what they intended to say (rather than assuming I did with 100% certainty and responding based on that, and then being sorry later when I discover I got them wrong).
I agree with all of the above, and also...
...there’s a strong “fallacy of the grey” vibe in the above, in cultures where the fallacy of the grey isn’t something that everyone is aware of, sufficiently so that it need no longer be mentioned or guarded against.
“All interactions have virtues on both sides” is just true, denotatively.
Connotatively, it implies that all interactions have roughly equivalent magnitudes of virtues on both sides, especially when you post that here in response to me making a critique of someone else’s method of engagement.
I posit that, humans being what they are and LW being what it currently is, the net effect of the above comment is to convey mild disapproval, but without being explicit about it.
Which may not have been your intention, which is why I’m writing this out (to give you a chance to say one way or the other if you feel like it).
It’s sufficiently close to always-true that “both sides could have done better” or “both sides were defending something important” that the act of taking the time to say so is usually conveying something beyond the mere fact. Similar to how if I say “the sky is blue,” you would probably do more than just nod and say “Indeed!” You would likely wonder why I chose that particular utterance at this particular moment.
The fact that each person always has an available challenge-of-virtue does not mean that the challenge presented to each is anything remotely like “equally fair” or that both are equally distant from some lofty ideal.
Mostly this is a muse, but it’s a relevant muse as I’m thinking a bunch about how things go sideways on LW. I’m not sure that you’re aware that “all interactions have virtues on both sides” could be read as a rebuke of “I think CronoDAS’s interaction with me was sub-par.” And if I wanted to engage with you in world-modeling and norm-building, it would be a very different conversation if you were vs. if you weren’t (though both could be productive).
Oh! Right.
I’ll execute my go-to move when someone potentially-critizes what I did, and try to describe the cognitive process that I executed:
I read your second paragraph from “But also” to “read and hear.”
It sounded to me like you said Hanson was saying “It would be good if this unhelpful behavior just went away”, and that to you this seemed empty of gears or helpful advice.
[This is what I read you as saying, which might not be identical to what you said, nor what you meant. Neither of us are perfect at explaining ourselves nor at understanding each other in our comments, but I generally like to try having more conversation anyway :) ]
In response to this thing I read you as saying I noticed I had something to say which met my bar for “interesting thing to say”, which was a counterpoint along the lines of: “Actually I think describing the virtues of being a good reader/listener is a helpful thing to do, even if you can’t teach them to do it. Often virtues are just shown by behavior to emulate (e.g. ‘Bob is a great person because he was the only one who said the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes’), and ‘don’t tell people off for not writing disclaimers’ is a behavior I nominally see how to emulate”.
So I wrote that down and hit ‘submit’.
More broadly, the conversation I thought of us as having was “what is the relationship between the against disclaimers post and the ruling out everything else post?”, to which I was making a contribution, and to which the above cognition was a standard step in the convo.
I’ll follow up with some more reactions in a second comment.
Just up top I’ll share my opinion re CronoDAS’s comment: my opinion is that it’s way more helpful to provide literally any context on a URL than to post it bare, and it’s within the range of reasonable behavior to downvote it in response to no-context. (I wouldn’t myself on a post of mine, I’d probably just be like “yeah whatever” and ignore it.)
I was surprised by you writing this!
My response to writing for such readers is “sod them”, or something more like “that’s not what I said, it’s not what I meant, and I’m pro a policy of ignoring people who read me as doing more status things with my comments than I am when I’m what actually doing is trying to have good conversation”.
This is motivated by something like “write for the readers you want, not the readers you have, and bit by bit you’ll teach them to be the readers you want (slash selection effects will take care of it)”.
This is some combination of thinking this norm is real for lots of LW readers, and also thinking it should be real for LW readers, such that the exact values of either I don’t feel super confident about, just that I’m in an equilibrium where I can unilaterally act on this policy and expect people to follow along with me / nominally punish them for not following along, and get the future I want.
(Where ‘punish’ here just means exert some cost on them, like their experience of the comments being more confusing, or their comments being slightly more downvoted than they expect, or some other relatively innocuous way of providing a negative incentive.)
I don’t think you get to do it all the time, but I do try to do it on LW a fair amount, and I’d defend writers-who-are-not-site-admins doing it with even more blind abandon than I.
It was not my intention, thank you for writing it out for me to deconfirm :)
This paragraph is pretty interesting and the point is not something I was thinking about. In my internal convo locus you get points for adding a true and interesting point I wasn’t consciously tracking :)
Okay well this isn’t very specific or concrete feedback but the gist of my response here is “I love ya, Ben Pace.”
I also feel “sod them,” and wish something like … like I felt more like I could afford to disregard “them” in this case? Except it feels like my attempts to pretend that I could are what have gotten me in trouble on LW specifically, so despite very much being in line with the spirit I hear you putting forward, I nevertheless feel like I have to do some bending-over-backward.
Aww thanks Duncan :) I am v happy that I wrote my comments :)
I had noticed in the past that you seemed to have a different empirical belief here (or something), leading you to seem to have arguments in the comments that I myself wouldn’t care enough to follow through on (even while you made good and helpful arguments).
Maybe it’s just an empirical disagreement. But I can imagine doing some empirical test here where you convince me the majority of readers didn’t understand the norms as much as I thought, but where I still had a feeling like “As long as your posts score high in the annual review it doesn’t matter” or “As long as you get substantive responses from John Wentworth or Scott Alexander or Anna Salamon it doesn’t matter” or “As long as all the people are reading your ideas are picking them up and then suddenly everyone is talking about ‘cruxes’ all the time it doesn’t matter” (or “As long as I think your content is awesome and want to build offices and grant infrastructure and so on to support you and writers-like-you it doesn’t matter”).
I’d be interested to know if there are any things that you can think of that would change how you feel about this conversational norm on the margin? My random babble (of ideas that I am not saying are even net positive) would include suggesting a change to the commenting guidelines, or me doing a little survey of users about how they read comments, or me somehow writing a top level post where I flagrantly write true and valuable stuff that can be interpreted badly yet I don’t care and also there’s great discussion in the comments ;)
I happen to be writing exactly this essay (things that would change stuff on the margin). It’s … not easy.
As for exploring the empirical question, I’m interested/intrigued and cannot rule out that you’re just right about the line of “mattering” being somewhere other than where I guess it is.