I wasn’t in a flaming asshole mood, it was a deliberate choice. I think being mean is necessary to accurately communicate vibes & feelings here, I could serialize stuff as “I’m feeling XYZ and think this makes people feel ABC” but this level of serialization won’t activate people’s mirror neurons & have them actually internalize anything.
Unsure if this worked, it definitely increased controversy & engagement but that wasn’t my goal. The goal was to shock one or two people out of bad patterns.
I think there’s probably something to the theory driving this, but 2 problems:
It seems half-baked, or half-operationalized. Like, “If I get them angry at my comment, then they’ll really feel the anger that [person] feels when hearing about IQ!”. No, that makes most people ignore you or dig in their heels. If I were using “mirror neurons, empathy, something...” to write a comment, it’d be like a POV story of being told “you’re inherently inferior!” for the 100th time today. It’d probably be about as memetically-fit, more helpful, and even more fun to write!
Related story, not as central: I used to, and still sometimes do, have some kind of mental bias of “the angrier someone is while saying something, it must have more of The Truth” in it. The object-level problems with that should be pretty obvious, but the meta-level problem is that different angry people still disagree with each other. I think there is a sort of person on LessWrong who might try steelmanning your view. But… you don’t give them much to go off of, not even linking to relevant posts against the idea that innate intelligence is real and important.
LessWrong as-a-whole is place where we ought to have, IMHO, norms of this place is okay to be honest in. You shouldn’t start a LessWrong comment by putting on your social-engineer hat and saying “Hmmm, what levers should I pull to get the sheep to feel me?”. And, as noted in (1), this precise example probably didn’t work, and shouldn’t be the kind of thing that works on LessWrong.
[Less central: In general, I think that paying attention to vibes is considerate and good for lots of circumstances, but that truth-seeking requires decoupling, and that LessWrong should at-its-core be about truth-seeking. If I changed my mind on this within about a week, I would probably change the latter belief, but not the former.]
I admire your honesty (plain intention-stating in these contexts is rare!), and hope this feedback helps you and/or others persuade better.
(I also have angrier vibes I could shout at you, but they’re pretty predictable given what I’m arguing for, and basically boil down to ”
I wasn’t in a flaming asshole mood, it was a deliberate choice. I think being mean is necessary to accurately communicate vibes & feelings here, I could serialize stuff as “I’m feeling XYZ and think this makes people feel ABC” but this level of serialization won’t activate people’s mirror neurons & have them actually internalize anything.
Unsure if this worked, it definitely increased controversy & engagement but that wasn’t my goal. The goal was to shock one or two people out of bad patterns.
I think there’s probably something to the theory driving this, but 2 problems:
It seems half-baked, or half-operationalized. Like, “If I get them angry at my comment, then they’ll really feel the anger that [person] feels when hearing about IQ!”. No, that makes most people ignore you or dig in their heels. If I were using “mirror neurons, empathy, something...” to write a comment, it’d be like a POV story of being told “you’re inherently inferior!” for the 100th time today. It’d probably be about as memetically-fit, more helpful, and even more fun to write!
Related story, not as central: I used to, and still sometimes do, have some kind of mental bias of “the angrier someone is while saying something, it must have more of The Truth” in it. The object-level problems with that should be pretty obvious, but the meta-level problem is that different angry people still disagree with each other. I think there is a sort of person on LessWrong who might try steelmanning your view. But… you don’t give them much to go off of, not even linking to relevant posts against the idea that innate intelligence is real and important.
LessWrong as-a-whole is place where we ought to have, IMHO, norms of this place is okay to be honest in. You shouldn’t start a LessWrong comment by putting on your social-engineer hat and saying “Hmmm, what levers should I pull to get the sheep to feel me?”. And, as noted in (1), this precise example probably didn’t work, and shouldn’t be the kind of thing that works on LessWrong.
[Less central: In general, I think that paying attention to vibes is considerate and good for lots of circumstances, but that truth-seeking requires decoupling, and that LessWrong should at-its-core be about truth-seeking. If I changed my mind on this within about a week, I would probably change the latter belief, but not the former.]
I admire your honesty (plain intention-stating in these contexts is rare!), and hope this feedback helps you and/or others persuade better.
(I also have angrier vibes I could shout at you, but they’re pretty predictable given what I’m arguing for, and basically boil down to ”