This is an unusually difficult post to review. In an ideal world, we’d like to be able to review things as they are, without reference to who the author is. In many settings, reviews are done anonymously (with the author’s name stricken off), for just this reason. This post puts that to the test: the author is a pariah. And ordinarily I would say, that’s irrelevant, we can just read the post and evaluate it on its own merits.
Other comments have mentioned that there could be PR concerns, ie, that making the author’s existence and participation on LessWrong salient is embarrassing. I don’t think this is an appropriate basis for judging the post, and would prefer to judge it based on its content.
The problem is, I think this post may contain a subtle trap, and that understanding its author, and what he was trying to do with this post, might actually be key to understanding what the trap is.
Ialdabaoth had a metaproblem, which was this: he had conspicuous problems, in a community full of people who would try start conversations where they help analyze his problems for him; but if those people truly understood him, they might turn on him. So he created narratives to explain why those conversations were so confusing, why he wouldn’t follow the advice, and why the people trying to help him were actually wronging him, and therefore indebted. This post is one such narrative. Here’s another.
The core idea of this post is that spectrum-direction advice is structured as a pair of failure modes, which may have either a variably-sized gap or a variably-sized overlap, depending on the post. This is straightforwardly true. But I think that the next inferential step the post takes after that, about how people do and should respond to that, is wrong. Charles, David, and Edgar should all be rejecting the frame in which they’re tuning {B}, and instead be looking for third options which make {B} irrelevant. This is easy to overlook when {B} is a generic placeholder rather than a specific behavior, but becomes clear when applied to specific examples. Edgar, in particular, is described as doing a probably-catastrophically-wrong thing, presented as though it were the obvious reaction to circumstances.
I suspect that, if this concept were widespread and salient, especially presented in its current form, the main effect would be to help people rationalize their way out of doing the obvious things to solve their problems, and to explain their confusion when other people seem to not be doing the obviously things. I think there’s a next-inferential-step post that I would be happy with, but this one isn’t it.
Charles, David, and Edgar should all be rejecting the frame in which they’re tuning {B}, and instead be looking for third options which make {B} irrelevant. This is easy to overlook when {B} is a generic placeholder rather than a specific behavior, but becomes clear when applied to specific examples. Edgar, in particular, is described as doing a probably-catastrophically-wrong thing, presented as though it were the obvious reaction to circumstances.
Do you have examples of what this (“looking for third options which make {B} irrelevant”) might look like? I confess to skepticism, otherwise; this seems very much like the sort of advice that sounds deeply wise, but in practice is impossible to apply. I would be happy to be convinced otherwise; a world where what you say is valid and sensible advice, would be a better and more fair world than one where it is not!
EDIT:
Edgar, in particular, is described as doing a probably-catastrophically-wrong thing, presented as though it were the obvious reaction to circumstances.
Edgar is described as doing a probably-catastrophically-bad thing, but whether it is a wrong thing is contingent on what you say in the bit I quoted being true and applicable. If, instead, what you say is false or inapplicable, then Edgar’s response does seem to be the obvious one after all.
I seem not to have noticed this post at the time, but now the review process has brought it to my attention, I have strong-downvoted it and would disrecommend it for any “Best Of” list.
There is an unpleasant genre of posting in which someone says, “Suppose someone did X, Y, and Z, which are really bad! Don’t you agree that would be really bad?” and it is obvious that this is a thinly disguised self-justifying whine about some real incident. It is also clear that no-one else involved would recognise it as an account of the matter.
This posting fits squarely into that genre.
ialdabaoth is Edgar. Charles and David only exist to interpolate between Edgar and all the (in ialdabaoth’s view) horrid, nasty, happy Adams and Bobs hating on Edgar and unjustly excluding him. This post is of no more epistemic worth than a political cartoon. It is not even an argument, but a picture — literally — constructed in a medium that will put up with whatever you draw on it.
And if Edgar asked me for advice, what I would say, which I never would unless asked, would be “Sucks to be Edgar. Tough shit, Edgar.”
What behavior of Edgar’s is it that draws your ire? You acknowledge that Edgar’s position is poor, he believes he has no good options, yet you feel it necessary to blame him for choosing a bad option.
it is obvious that this is a thinly disguised self-justifying whine about some real incident.
Plenty of rational thought in a social sphere comes from analyzing striking personal events using our repositories of stored information. Plenty of valuable rational thought stems from self-justification. Do you want Edgar to self-reflect on his behaviors and devise a scheme in which he is a bad person? Edgar’s not going to view himself as a moral mutant no matter how evil you think he is.
We rarely get the opportunity to delve into the thought patterns of evil people. We will likely never know what the 9/11 hijackers were thinking because they are all dead. We rarely hear rational justifications from murderers and rapists (we just hear their lawyer’s best arguments) because the large majority of murderers and rapists don’t care to express themselves rationally.
This means that if Edgar is evil (as you seem to believe) then his insights are more valuable than the insights of a non-evil person. Rational, evil people are in short supply and even moreso are rational, evil people willing to expound on their evil nature.
If Edgar provides faulty reasoning, refute it! Or if you want to, disregard it and allow others to do so. The absolute worst thing to do is to blind yourself to rational discussion from evil people and to force others to do the same. That will just make it so that when a potential victim hears faulty, evil reasoning straight from the source it will be their first time and they might be convinced!
Edgar is an imaginary person, for whom you can invent whatever background story you like. Edgar is not making an argument and has nothing to say, because he does not exist. ialdabaoth is making an argument through the picture of Edgar, but I have seen enough of his writings here and elsewhere to stand by my characterisation of his vignette.
This is not about “blaming” Edgar or Edgar being “evil”. If I met an Edgar (I have never met ialdabaoth) I would merely not care to know him. It is up to him to learn, but not up to me to teach. Perhaps he never will. Sucks to be Edgar, tough shit, Edgar.
As you can see, the milk of human kindness flows thinly in my veins, especially towards the Edgars of this world. Let those who think Edgar worth taking on as a project do so, and the best of luck to them.
We will likely never know what the 9/11 hijackers were thinking because they are all dead.
We know what they were thinking well enough from the accounts of similar people who have been taken alive, or announced their intentions before their deeds, and the propaganda of their supporters. Allahu akbar etc. There is no mystery about what they think. They want you to know and will tell you, so clearly and unambiguously that there is no scope for wondering about it.
ETA: Re this other comment of yours, I note that I had formed a negative opinion of ialdabaoth/Brent long before seeing the allegations of sexual harassment.
This is an unusually difficult post to review. In an ideal world, we’d like to be able to review things as they are, without reference to who the author is. In many settings, reviews are done anonymously (with the author’s name stricken off), for just this reason. This post puts that to the test: the author is a pariah. And ordinarily I would say, that’s irrelevant, we can just read the post and evaluate it on its own merits.
Other comments have mentioned that there could be PR concerns, ie, that making the author’s existence and participation on LessWrong salient is embarrassing. I don’t think this is an appropriate basis for judging the post, and would prefer to judge it based on its content.
The problem is, I think this post may contain a subtle trap, and that understanding its author, and what he was trying to do with this post, might actually be key to understanding what the trap is.
Ialdabaoth had a metaproblem, which was this: he had conspicuous problems, in a community full of people who would try start conversations where they help analyze his problems for him; but if those people truly understood him, they might turn on him. So he created narratives to explain why those conversations were so confusing, why he wouldn’t follow the advice, and why the people trying to help him were actually wronging him, and therefore indebted. This post is one such narrative. Here’s another.
The core idea of this post is that spectrum-direction advice is structured as a pair of failure modes, which may have either a variably-sized gap or a variably-sized overlap, depending on the post. This is straightforwardly true. But I think that the next inferential step the post takes after that, about how people do and should respond to that, is wrong. Charles, David, and Edgar should all be rejecting the frame in which they’re tuning {B}, and instead be looking for third options which make {B} irrelevant. This is easy to overlook when {B} is a generic placeholder rather than a specific behavior, but becomes clear when applied to specific examples. Edgar, in particular, is described as doing a probably-catastrophically-wrong thing, presented as though it were the obvious reaction to circumstances.
I suspect that, if this concept were widespread and salient, especially presented in its current form, the main effect would be to help people rationalize their way out of doing the obvious things to solve their problems, and to explain their confusion when other people seem to not be doing the obviously things. I think there’s a next-inferential-step post that I would be happy with, but this one isn’t it.
Do you have examples of what this (“looking for third options which make {B} irrelevant”) might look like? I confess to skepticism, otherwise; this seems very much like the sort of advice that sounds deeply wise, but in practice is impossible to apply. I would be happy to be convinced otherwise; a world where what you say is valid and sensible advice, would be a better and more fair world than one where it is not!
EDIT:
Edgar is described as doing a probably-catastrophically-bad thing, but whether it is a wrong thing is contingent on what you say in the bit I quoted being true and applicable. If, instead, what you say is false or inapplicable, then Edgar’s response does seem to be the obvious one after all.
I seem not to have noticed this post at the time, but now the review process has brought it to my attention, I have strong-downvoted it and would disrecommend it for any “Best Of” list.
There is an unpleasant genre of posting in which someone says, “Suppose someone did X, Y, and Z, which are really bad! Don’t you agree that would be really bad?” and it is obvious that this is a thinly disguised self-justifying whine about some real incident. It is also clear that no-one else involved would recognise it as an account of the matter.
This posting fits squarely into that genre.
ialdabaoth is Edgar. Charles and David only exist to interpolate between Edgar and all the (in ialdabaoth’s view) horrid, nasty, happy Adams and Bobs hating on Edgar and unjustly excluding him. This post is of no more epistemic worth than a political cartoon. It is not even an argument, but a picture — literally — constructed in a medium that will put up with whatever you draw on it.
And if Edgar asked me for advice, what I would say, which I never would unless asked, would be “Sucks to be Edgar. Tough shit, Edgar.”
What behavior of Edgar’s is it that draws your ire? You acknowledge that Edgar’s position is poor, he believes he has no good options, yet you feel it necessary to blame him for choosing a bad option.
Plenty of rational thought in a social sphere comes from analyzing striking personal events using our repositories of stored information. Plenty of valuable rational thought stems from self-justification. Do you want Edgar to self-reflect on his behaviors and devise a scheme in which he is a bad person? Edgar’s not going to view himself as a moral mutant no matter how evil you think he is.
We rarely get the opportunity to delve into the thought patterns of evil people. We will likely never know what the 9/11 hijackers were thinking because they are all dead. We rarely hear rational justifications from murderers and rapists (we just hear their lawyer’s best arguments) because the large majority of murderers and rapists don’t care to express themselves rationally.
This means that if Edgar is evil (as you seem to believe) then his insights are more valuable than the insights of a non-evil person. Rational, evil people are in short supply and even moreso are rational, evil people willing to expound on their evil nature.
If Edgar provides faulty reasoning, refute it! Or if you want to, disregard it and allow others to do so. The absolute worst thing to do is to blind yourself to rational discussion from evil people and to force others to do the same. That will just make it so that when a potential victim hears faulty, evil reasoning straight from the source it will be their first time and they might be convinced!
Edgar is an imaginary person, for whom you can invent whatever background story you like. Edgar is not making an argument and has nothing to say, because he does not exist. ialdabaoth is making an argument through the picture of Edgar, but I have seen enough of his writings here and elsewhere to stand by my characterisation of his vignette.
This is not about “blaming” Edgar or Edgar being “evil”. If I met an Edgar (I have never met ialdabaoth) I would merely not care to know him. It is up to him to learn, but not up to me to teach. Perhaps he never will. Sucks to be Edgar, tough shit, Edgar.
As you can see, the milk of human kindness flows thinly in my veins, especially towards the Edgars of this world. Let those who think Edgar worth taking on as a project do so, and the best of luck to them.
We know what they were thinking well enough from the accounts of similar people who have been taken alive, or announced their intentions before their deeds, and the propaganda of their supporters. Allahu akbar etc. There is no mystery about what they think. They want you to know and will tell you, so clearly and unambiguously that there is no scope for wondering about it.
ETA: Re this other comment of yours, I note that I had formed a negative opinion of ialdabaoth/Brent long before seeing the allegations of sexual harassment.