I actually do think it is the crux, because you seem to be rearticulating the point of view that I was ascribing to you.
You think that:
Your comments don’t usually provoke feelings of insult in the target.
Or if they are, it’s the other person’s fault for being thin-skinned or writing a bad post
And anyway, there’s a lot of value in calling out flaws with brief remarks, enough to overcome any downsides with being insulting you might want to impute
And I am saying:
Your comments routinely provoke feelings of insult in the target.
Authors are typically not blameworthy for feeling insulted, and their response to you is not very indicative of their correctness or depth of thought
And the value of calling out flaws with brief remarks is small, and not nearly worth it relative to the damage you do by being insulting while you go about it
“What are some examples?” does not constitute “calling out a flaw”—unless there should be examples but aren’t. Otherwise, it’s an innocuous question, and a helpful prompt.
“What are some examples?” therefore will not be perceived as insulting—except in precisely those cases where any perceived insult is the author’s fault.
Of course, I also totally disagree with this:
the value of calling out flaws with brief remarks is small
Calling out flaws with brief remarks is not only good (because calling out flaws is good), but (insofar as it’s correct, precise, etc.), it’s much better than calling out flaws with long comments. It is not always possible, mind you! Condensing a cogent criticism into a brief remark is no small feat. But where possible, it ought to be praised and rewarded.
And I want to note a key disagreement with your construal of this part:
Or if they are, it’s the other person’s fault for being thin-skinned
being insulting while you go about it
Things would be different if what I were advocating was something like “if a post is bad, in your view, then it’s ok to say ‘as would be obvious to anyone with half a brain, your post is wrong in such-and-such ways; and saying so-and-so is just dumb; and only a dunderhead like you would fail to see it, you absolute moron. you idiot.’”.
Then it would be totally fair to rebuke me in the way similar to what you suggest—to say “however bad a post may actually be, however right you may be in your criticisms, it’s wrong of you to resort to insults and belittlement”.
But of course I neither advocate, nor do, any such thing.
Being able to tolerate “insults” that are nothing more than calm criticisms of one’s ideas should be no more than the price of admission to Less Wrong—regardless of the entirely uncontroversial fact that most people, in most situations, do indeed tend to find criticisms of their ideas insulting.
This is especially true because there is no way of not being “insulting”, in this sense, while still criticizing someone’s ideas. If someone finds criticism of their ideas insulting, that is irreduceable. You either offer such criticism or you do not. There’s no way of offering it while also not offering it.
Mm, I still think my original articulation of our crux is fine.
Here, you’re mostly making semantic quibbles or just disagreeing with my POV, rather than saying I identified the wrong crux.
However, we established the distinction between an insulting comment (i.e. a comment the target is likely to feel insulted by) from a deliberate insult (i.e. a comment primarily intended to provoke feelings of insult) in a whole separate thread, which most people won’t see here. It is “insulting comment” that I meant in the above, and I will update the articulation to make that more clear.
A meta point that is outside of the scope of the object level disagreement/is a tangent:
Once again you miss a (the?) key point.
“What are some examples?” does not constitute “calling out a flaw”—unless there should be examples but aren’t. Otherwise, it’s an innocuous question, and a helpful prompt.
Said: [multiple links to him just saying “Examples?”]
Me: [in a style I would not usually use but with content that is not far from my actual belief] I’m sorry, how do any of those (except possibly 4) satisfy any reasonable definition of the word “criticism?”
Said: Well, I think that “criticism”, in a context like this topic of discussion, certainly includes something like “pointing to a flaw or lacuna, or suggesting an important or even necessary avenue for improvement”.
So we have Said a couple of days ago defending “What are some examples?” as definitely being under the umbrella of criticism, further defined as the subset of criticism which is pointing to a flaw or suggesting an important or even necessary avenue for improvement.
Then we have Said here saying that it is a key point that “What are some examples?” does not constitute calling out a flaw.
(The difference between the two situations being (apparently) the entirely subjective/mysterious/unstated property of “whether there should be examples but aren’t,” noting that Said thinking there exists a skipped step or a confusing leap is not particularly predictive of the median high-karma LWer thinking there exists a skipped step or a confusing leap.)
I am reminded again of Said saying that I A’d people due to their B, and I said no, I had not A’d anyone for B’ing, and Said replied ~”I never said you A’d anyone for B’ing; you can go check; I said you’d A’d them due to B’ing.”
i.e. splitting hairs and swirling words around to create a perpetual motte-and-bailey fog that lets him endlessly nitpick and retreat and say contradictory things at different times using the same words, and pretending to a sort of principle/coherence/consistency that he does not actually evince.
i.e. splitting hairs and swirling words around to create a perpetual motte-and-bailey fog that lets him endlessly nitpick and retreat and say contradictory things at different times using the same words, and pretending to a sort of principle/coherence/consistency that he does not actually evince.
Yeah, almost like splitting hairs around whether making the public statement “I now categorize Said as a liar” is meaningfully different than “Said is a liar”.
Or admonishing someone for taking a potshot at you when they said
However, I suspect that Duncan won’t like this idea, because he wants to maintain a motte-and-bailey where his posts are half-baked when someone criticizes them but fully-baked when it’s time to apportion status.
...while acting as though somehow that would have been less offensive if they had only added “I suspect” to the latter half of that sentence as well. Raise your hand if you think that “I suspect that you won’t like this idea, because I suspect that you have the emotional maturity of a child” is less offensive because it now represents an unambiguously true statement of an opinion rather than being misconstrued as a fact. A reasonable person would say “No, that’s obviously intended to be an insult”—almost as though there can be meaning beyond just the words as written.
The problem is that if we believe in your philosophy of constantly looking for the utmost literal interpretation of the written word, you’re tricking us into playing a meta-gamed, rules-lawyered, “Sovereign citizen”-esque debate instead of, what’s the word—oh, right, Steelmanning. Assuming charity from the other side. Seeking to find common ground.
For example, I can point out that Said clearly used the word “or” in their statement. Since reading comprehension seems to be an issue for a “median high-karma LWer” like yourself, I’ll bold it for you.
Said: Well, I think that “criticism”, in a context like this topic of discussion, certainly includes something like “pointing to a flaw or lacuna, or suggesting an important or even necessary avenue for improvement”.
Is it therefore consistent for “asking for examples” to be contained by that set, while likewise not being pointing to a flaw? Yes, because if we say that a thing is contained by a set of “A or B”, it could be “A”, or it could be “B”.
Now that we’ve done your useless exercise of playing with words, what have we achieved? Absolutely nothing, which is why games like these aren’t tolerated in real workplaces, since this is a waste of everyone’s time.
You are behaving in a seriously insufferable way right now.
Sorry, I meant—“I think that you are behaving in what feels like to me a seriously insufferable way right now, where by insufferable I mean having or showing unbearable arrogance or conceit”.
On reflection, I do think both Duncan and Said are demonstrating a significant amount of hair-splitting and less consistent, clear communication than they seem to think. That’s not necessarily bad in and of itself—LW can be a place for making fine distinctions and working out unclear thoughts, when there’s something important there.
It’s really just using them as the basis for a callout and fuel for an endless escalation-spiral when they become problematic.
When I think about this situation from both Duncan and Said’s point of views to the best of my ability, I understand why they’d be angry/frustrated/whatever, and how the search for reasons and rebuttals has escalated to the point where the very human and ordinary flaws of inconsistency and hair-splitting can seem like huge failings.
At this point, I really have lost the ability and interest to track the rounds and rounds of prosecutorial hair-splitting across multiple comment threads. It was never fun, it’s not enlightening, and I don’t think it’s really the central issue at stake. It’s more of a bitch eating crackers scenario at this point.
I made an effort to understand Said’s point of view, and whatever his qualms with how I’ve expressed the crux of our disagreement, I feel satisfied with my level of understanding. From previous interactions and readings, I also think I understand what Duncan is frustrated about.
In my opinion, we need to disaggregate:
The interpersonal behavior of Duncan and Said
Their ideas
Their ways of expressing those ideas
My feeling right now is that Duncan and Said both have contributed valuable things in the past, and hopefully will in the future. Their ideas, and ways of expressing them, are not always perfect, and that is OK. But their approach to interpersonal behavior on this website, especially toward each other but also, to a lesser extent, toward other people, is not OK. We’re really in the middle of a classic feud where “who started it” and “who’s worse” and the litany of who-did-what-to-whom just goes on forever and ever, and I think the traditional solution in these cases is for some higher authority to come in and say “THIS FEUD IS DECLARED ENDED BY THE AUTHORITY OF THE CROWN.”
If they can both recognize that about themselves, I would be satisfied if they just agreed to not speak to each other for a long time and to drop the argument. I would also like it if they both worked on figuring out how to cut their rate of becoming involved in angry escalation-spirals in half. Now would be an excellent time to begin that journey. I would also be open to that being mod-enforced in some sense.
On reflection, I do think both Duncan and Said are demonstrating a significant amount of hair-splitting and less consistent, clear communication than they seem to think.
Communication is difficult; communication when subtleties must be conveyed, while there is interpersonal conflict taking place, much more difficult.
I don’t imagine that I have, in every comment I’ve written over the past day, or the past week (or month, or year, or decade), succeeded perfectly in getting my point across to all readers. I’ve tried to be clear and precise, as I always do; sometimes I succeed excellently, sometimes less so. If you say “Said, in that there comment you did not make your meaning very clear”, I think that’s a plausible criticism a priori, and certainly a fair one in some actual cases.
This is, to a greater or lesser degree, true of everyone. I think it is true of me less so than is the average—that is, I think that my writing tends to be more clear than most people’s. (Of course anyone is free to disagree; this sort of holistic judgment isn’t easy to operationalize!)
What I think I can’t be accused of, in general, is:
failing to provide (at least attempted) clarifications upon request
failing to cooperate with efforts aimed at achieving mutual understanding
failing to acknowledge the difficulties of communication, and to make reasonable attempts to overcome them
failing to maintain a civil and polite demeanor in the process
(Do you disagree?)
It also seems to me that there has been no “escalation” on my part, at any point in this process. (In general, I would say that as far as interpersonal behavior goes, mine has been close to exemplary given the circumstances.)
I am perfectly content to be ignored by Duncan. He is perfectly welcome to pretend that I don’t exist, as far as I’m concerned. I won’t even take it as an insult; I take the freedom of association quite seriously, and I believe that if some person simply doesn’t want to associate with another person, that is (barring various exceptional circumstances—having to do with, e.g., offices of public responsibility, etc.—none of which, as far as I can tell, apply here) their absolute right.
(Of course, that choice, while it is wholly Duncan’s, cannot possibly impose on me any obligation to act in any way I would not normally be obligated to act—to avoid referring to Duncan, to avoid replying to his comments, to avoid criticizing his ideas, etc. That’s just how the world is: you can control your own actions, but not the actions of others. Most people learn that lesson fairly early in life.)
What I think I can’t be accused of, in general, is:
failing to provide (at least attempted) clarifications upon request
failing to cooperate with efforts aimed at achieving mutual understanding
failing to acknowledge the difficulties of communication, and to make reasonable attempts to overcome them
failing to maintain a civil and polite demeanor in the process
(Do you disagree?)
Speaking to our interactions in this post, I do agree with you on all counts. Elsewhere, I think you fall short of my minimum definition of ‘cooperative,’ but I also understand that you have very different standards for what constitutes cooperative and I see this as a normative crux, one that is unlikely to be resolved through debate.
It also seems to me that there has been no “escalation” on my part, at any point in this process. (In general, I would say that as far as interpersonal behavior goes, mine has been close to exemplary given the circumstances.)
I also think this is true for our interactions here. Elsewhere, I disagree—you frequently are one of two main players in escalation spirals. I understand that, for you, that is typically the other person’s fault. The most charitable way I can put my point of view is that, even if it is the other person’s fault, I think that you should prioritize figuring out how to cut your rate of being involved in escalation spirals in half. That might involve a choice to reconsider certain comments, to comment differently, or to redirect your attention to people who have demonstrated a higher level of appreciation for your comments in the past.
(Of course, that choice, while it is wholly Duncan’s, cannot possibly impose on me any obligation to act in any way I would not normally be obligated to act—to avoid referring to Duncan, to avoid replying to his comments, to avoid criticizing his ideas, etc. That’s just how the world is: you can control your own actions, but not the actions of others. Most people learn that lesson fairly early in life.)
I think another lesson people learn early in life is that you can do whatever you want, but often, you shouldn’t, because it has negative effects on others, and they learn to empathically care about other people’s wellbeing. Our previous exchanges have convinced me that in important ways, you reject the idea that you ought to care about how your words and actions affect other people as long as they’re within the bounds of the law. Again, I think this just brings us back to the crux of our disagreement, over whether and to what extent the feelings of insult you provoke in others is a moral consideration in deciding how to interact.
As I have grown quite confident in the nature of our disagreement, as well as its intractability, I am going to commit to signing off of LessWrong entirely for two weeks, because I think it will distract me. I will revisit further comments of yours (or PMs if you prefer) at that time.
The most charitable way I can put my point of view is that, even if it is the other person’s fault, I think that you should prioritize figuring out how to cut your rate of being involved in escalation spirals in half.
If we’re referring to my participation in Less Wrong specifically (and I must assume that you are), then I have to point out that it would be very easy for me to cut my rate of being involved in what you call “escalation spirals” (regardless of whether I agree with your characterization of the situations in question) not only in half or even tenfold, but to zero. To do this, I would simply stop posting and commenting here.
The question then becomes whether there’s any unilateral action I can take, any unilateral change I can make, whose result would be that I could continue spending time on participation in Less Wrong discussions in such a way that there’s any point or utility in my doing so, while also to any non-trivial degree reducing the incidence of people being insulted (or “insulted”), escalating, etc.
It seems to me that there is not.
Certainly there are actions that other people (such as, say, the moderators of the site) could take, that would have that sort of outcome! Likewise, there are all sorts of trends, cultural shifts, organic changes in norms, etc., which would have a similarly fortuitous result.
But is there anything that I could do, alone, to “solve” this “problem”, other than just not posting or commenting here? I certainly can’t imagine anything like that.
(EDIT: And this is, of course, to say nothing of the question of whether it even should be “my problem to solve”! I think you can guess where I stand on that issue…)
Our previous exchanges have convinced me that in important ways, you reject the idea that you ought to care about how your words and actions affect other people as long as they’re within the bounds of the law.
I do not think that this is an accurate characterization of any views that I hold.
...while acting as though somehow that would have been less offensive if they had only added “I suspect” to the latter half of that sentence as well. Raise your hand if you think that “I suspect that you won’t like this idea, because I suspect that you have the emotional maturity of a child” is less offensive because it now represents an unambiguously true statement of an opinion rather than being misconstrued as a fact.
✋
The thing that makes LW meaningfully different from the rest of the internet is people bothering to pay attention to meaningful distinctions even a little bit.
The distance between “I categorize Said as a liar” and “Said is a liar” is easily 10x and quite plausibly 100-1000x the distance between “You blocked people due to criticizingyou” and “you blocked people for criticizing you.” The latter is two synonymous phrases; the former is not.
(I also explicitly acknowledged that Ray’s rounding was the right rounding to make, whereas Said was doing the opposite and pretending that swapping “due to” and “for” had somehow changed the meaning in a way that made the paraphrase invalid.)
You being like “Stop using phrases that meticulously track uncommon distinctions you’ve made; we already have perfectly good phrases that ignore those distinctions!” is not the flex you seem to think it is; color blindness is not a virtue.
The thing that makes LW meaningfully different from the rest of the internet is people bothering to pay attention to meaningful distinctions even a little bit.
In my opinion, the internet has fine-grained distinctions aplenty. In fact, where to split hairs and where to twist braids is sort of basic to each political subculture. What I think makes LessWrong different is that we take a somewhat, maybe not agnostic but more like a liberal/pluralistic view of the categories. We understand them as constructs, “made for man,” as Scott put it once, and as largely open to critical investigation and not just enforcement. We try and create the social basis for a critical investigation to happen productively.
When anonymousaisafety complains of hair-splitting, I think they are saying that, while the distinction between “I categorize Said as a liar” and “Said is a liar” is probably actually 100-1000x as important a distinction between “due to” and “for” in your mind, other people also get to weigh in on that question and may not agree with you, at least not in context.
If you really think the difference between these two very similar phrasings is so huge, and you want that to land with other people, then you need to make that difference apparent in your word choice. You also need to accept that other factors beyond word choice play into how your words will be perceived: claiming this distinction is of tremendous importance lands differently in the context of this giant adversarial escalation-spiral than it would in an alternate reality where you were writing a calm and collected post and had never gotten into a big argument with Said. This is part of why it’s so important to figure out how to avoid these conflict spirals. They make it very difficult to avoid reading immediate personal motivations into your choice of words and where you lay the emphasis, and thus it becomes very hard to consider your preferred categorization scheme as a general principle. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be good—just that the context in which you’re advocating for it gets in the way.
That said, I continue to think anonymousaisafety is clearly taking sides here, and continuing to use an escalatory/inflammatory tone that only contributes further to the dynamic. While I acknowledge that I am disagreeing with Duncan here, and that might be very frustrating for him, I hope that I come across not as blaming but more as explaining my point of view on what the problem is here, and registering my personal reaction to what Duncan is arguing for in context.
You also need to accept that other factors beyond word choice play into how your words will be perceived: claiming this distinction is of tremendous importance lands differently in the context of this giant adversarial escalation-spiral than it would in an alternate reality where you were writing a calm and collected post and had never gotten into a big argument with Said
Er. I very explicitly did not claim that it was a distinction of tremendous importance. I was just objecting to the anonymous person’s putting them in the same bucket.
In my opinion, the internet has fine-grained distinctions aplenty. In fact, where to split hairs and where to twist braids is sort of basic to each political subculture. What I think makes LessWrong different is that we take a somewhat, maybe not agnostic but more like a liberal/pluralistic view of the categories.
Endorsed/updated; this is a better summary than the one I gave.
So are you saying that although the distinction between the two versions of the “liar” phrase is 100-1000x bigger than between the due to/for distinction, it is still not tremendously important?
As a single point of evidence: it’s immediately obvious to me what the difference is between “X is true” and “I think X” (for starters, note that these two sentences have different subjects, with the former’s subject being “X” and the latter’s being “I”). On the other hand, “you A’d someone due to their B’ing” and “you A’d someone for B’ing” do, actually, sound synonymous to me—and although I’m open to the idea that there’s a distinction I’m missing here (just as there might be people to whom the first distinction is invisible), from where I currently stand, the difference between the first pair of sentences looks, not just 10x or 1000x bigger, but infinitely bigger than the difference between the second, because the difference between the second is zero.
(And if you accept that [the difference between the second pair of phrases is zero], then yes, it’s quite possible for some other difference to be massively larger than that, and yet not be tremendously important.)
Here, I do think that Duncan is doing something different from even the typical LWer, in that he—so far as I can tell—spends much more time and effort talking about these fine-grained distinctions than do others, in a way that I think largely drags the conversation in unproductive directions; but I also think that in this context, where the accusation is that he “splits hairs” too much, it is acceptable for him to double down on the hair-splitting and point that, actually, no, he only splits those hairs that are actually splittable.
On the other hand, “you A’d someone due to their B’ing” and “you A’d someone for B’ing” do, actually, sound synonymous to me—and although I’m open to the idea that there’s a distinction I’m missing here
With the caveat that I think this sort of “litigation of minutiae of nuance” is of very limited utility[1], I am curious: would you consider “you A’d someone as a consequence of their B’ing” different from both the other two forms? Synonymous with them both? Synonymous with one but not the other?
With the caveat that I think this sort of “litigation of minutiae of nuance” is of very limited utility
Yeah, I think I probably agree.
would you consider “you A’d someone as a consequence of their B’ing” different from both the other two forms? Synonymous with them both? Synonymous with one but not the other?
Synonymous as far as I can tell. (If there’s an actual distinction in your view, which you’re currently trying to lead me to via some kind of roundabout, Socratic pathway, I’d appreciate skipping to the part where you just tell me what you think the distinction is.)
(If there’s an actual distinction in your view, which you’re currently trying to lead me to via some kind of roundabout, Socratic pathway, I’d appreciate skipping to the part where you just tell me what you think the distinction is.)
I had no such intention. It’s just that we already know that I think that X and Y seem like different things, and you think X and Y seem like the same thing, and since X and Y are the two forms which actually appeared in the referenced argument, there’s not much further to discuss, except to satisfy curiosity about the difference in our perceptions (which inquiry may involve positing some third thing Z). That’s really all that my question was about.
In case you are curious in turn—personally, I’d say that “you A’d someone as a consequence of their B’ing” seems to me to be the same as “you A’d someone due to their B’ing”, but different from “you A’d someone for their B’ing”. As far as characterizing the distinction, I can tell you only that the meaning I, personally, was trying to convey was the difference in what sort of rule or principle was being applied. (See, for instance, the difference between “I shot him for breaking into my house” and “I shot him because he broke into my house”. The former implies a punishment imposed as a judgment for a transgression, while the latter can easily include actions taken in self-defense or defense of property, or even unintentional actions.)
But, as I said, there is probably little point in pursuing this inquiry further.
Yeah. One is small, and the other is tiny. The actual comment that the anonymous person is mocking/castigating said:
I note (while acknowledging that this is a small and subtle distinction, but claiming that it is an important one nonetheless) that I said that I now categorize Said as a liar, which is an importantly and intentionally weaker claim than Said is a liar, i.e. “everyone should be able to see that he’s a liar” or “if you don’t think he’s a liar you are definitely wrong.”
(This is me in the past behaving in line with the points I just made under Said’s comment, about not confusing [how things seem to me] with [how they are] or [how they do or should seem to others].)
This is much much closer to saying “Liar!” than it is to not saying “Liar!” … if one is to round me off, that’s the correct place to round me off to. But it is still a rounding.
I see that reading comprehension was an issue for you, since it seems that you stopped reading my post halfway through. Funny how a similar thing occurred on my last post too. It’s almost like you think that the rules don’t apply to you, since everyone else is required to read every single word in your posts with meticulous accuracy, whereas you’re free to pick & choose at your whim.
I’m deeply uncertain about how often it’s worth litigating the implied meta-level concerns; I’m not at all uncertain that this way of expressing them was inappropriate. I don’t want see sniping like this on LessWrong, and especially not in comment threads like this.
I expect to perceive a bare “what are some examples?” as mildly insulting even if the author is like “yes absolutely, here you go”. And I expect to percieve a bare “examples?” as slightly more insulting.
I don’t think it’s mildly insulting, I think it’s ambiguously insulting, in that a person wanting to insult you might do it. But in general I think it’s a totally reasonable question in truth-seeking and I’d be sad if people required disclaimers to clarify that it isn’t meant insultingly, just to ask for examples of what the person is talking about.
Seconding Ben Pace’s answer. This sort of thing is one case of a larger category of questions one might ask. Others include:
“Is the raw data available for download/viewing?” (No reason to be insulted, if your answer is “yes”, or if you have a good reason/excuse for not providing the data. Definitely reason to be insulted otherwise—but then you deserve the “insult”. Scare quotes because “insult” is really the wrong word; it’s more like “fairly inflicted disapproval”.)
“Could you make the code for your experimental setup available?” (Ditto. There could be good reasons why you can’t or won’t provide this! There’s no insult in that case. But if you don’t provide the code and you have no good reason for not doing so, then you deserve the disapproval.)
“Do you have a reference for that?” (Providing references for claims is good, but not always possible. But if you make an unreferenced claim and you have no good reason for doing that, you deserve the disapproval.)
In cases like this, there is, or should be, an expectation that people who are communicating and truth-seeking in good faith, with integrity, with honest intention of effectiveness, etc., will offer cooperation to each other and to their potential audience. This cooperation takes the form of—where possible—citing references for claims, providing data, publishing code, providing examples, clarifying usage of terms, etc., etc. Where possible, note! Of course these things cannot always be done. But where they can be done, they should be. These are simply the basic expectations, the basic epistemic courtesies we owe to each other (and to ourselves!).
So a question or request like “what are some examples”, “where is the data”, “citation please”—these are nothing more than requests (or reminders, if you like) for those basic elements of cooperation. There is no reason not to fulfill them, if you can. (And plenty of reasons to do so!) Sometimes you can’t, of course; then you say so, explaining why.
But why would you be insulted by any of this? What is the sense in refusing to cooperate in these ways?
(Especially if you have the answer to the question! If you have examples to provide—or data, code, citations, etc.—how the heck am I supposed to extract these things from you, if you think that asking for them is outré? You can provide them up front, or provide them on request—but if you don’t do the first, and take umbrage to the second, then… what’s left?)
(Flagging this as the second of the two comments I said Said could make. I’ve disabled his ability to comment/post for now. You’re welcome to send moderators PMs to continue discussion with us. I’m working on a reply to your other comment addressed more specifically)
I actually do think it is the crux, because you seem to be rearticulating the point of view that I was ascribing to you.
You think that:
Your comments don’t usually provoke feelings of insult in the target.
Or if they are, it’s the other person’s fault for being thin-skinned or writing a bad post
And anyway, there’s a lot of value in calling out flaws with brief remarks, enough to overcome any downsides with being insulting you might want to impute
And I am saying:
Your comments routinely provoke feelings of insult in the target.
Authors are typically not blameworthy for feeling insulted, and their response to you is not very indicative of their correctness or depth of thought
And the value of calling out flaws with brief remarks is small, and not nearly worth it relative to the damage you do by being insulting while you go about it
Sounds pretty cruxy to me.
Once again you miss a (the?) key point.
“What are some examples?” does not constitute “calling out a flaw”—unless there should be examples but aren’t. Otherwise, it’s an innocuous question, and a helpful prompt.
“What are some examples?” therefore will not be perceived as insulting—except in precisely those cases where any perceived insult is the author’s fault.
Of course, I also totally disagree with this:
Calling out flaws with brief remarks is not only good (because calling out flaws is good), but (insofar as it’s correct, precise, etc.), it’s much better than calling out flaws with long comments. It is not always possible, mind you! Condensing a cogent criticism into a brief remark is no small feat. But where possible, it ought to be praised and rewarded.
And I want to note a key disagreement with your construal of this part:
Things would be different if what I were advocating was something like “if a post is bad, in your view, then it’s ok to say ‘as would be obvious to anyone with half a brain, your post is wrong in such-and-such ways; and saying so-and-so is just dumb; and only a dunderhead like you would fail to see it, you absolute moron. you idiot.’”.
Then it would be totally fair to rebuke me in the way similar to what you suggest—to say “however bad a post may actually be, however right you may be in your criticisms, it’s wrong of you to resort to insults and belittlement”.
But of course I neither advocate, nor do, any such thing.
Being able to tolerate “insults” that are nothing more than calm criticisms of one’s ideas should be no more than the price of admission to Less Wrong—regardless of the entirely uncontroversial fact that most people, in most situations, do indeed tend to find criticisms of their ideas insulting.
This is especially true because there is no way of not being “insulting”, in this sense, while still criticizing someone’s ideas. If someone finds criticism of their ideas insulting, that is irreduceable. You either offer such criticism or you do not. There’s no way of offering it while also not offering it.
Mm, I still think my original articulation of our crux is fine.
Here, you’re mostly making semantic quibbles or just disagreeing with my POV, rather than saying I identified the wrong crux.
However, we established the distinction between an insulting comment (i.e. a comment the target is likely to feel insulted by) from a deliberate insult (i.e. a comment primarily intended to provoke feelings of insult) in a whole separate thread, which most people won’t see here. It is “insulting comment” that I meant in the above, and I will update the articulation to make that more clear.
A meta point that is outside of the scope of the object level disagreement/is a tangent:
I note that the following exchange recently took place:
Said: [multiple links to him just saying “Examples?”]
Me: [in a style I would not usually use but with content that is not far from my actual belief] I’m sorry, how do any of those (except possibly 4) satisfy any reasonable definition of the word “criticism?”
Said: Well, I think that “criticism”, in a context like this topic of discussion, certainly includes something like “pointing to a flaw or lacuna, or suggesting an important or even necessary avenue for improvement”.
So we have Said a couple of days ago defending “What are some examples?” as definitely being under the umbrella of criticism, further defined as the subset of criticism which is pointing to a flaw or suggesting an important or even necessary avenue for improvement.
Then we have Said here saying that it is a key point that “What are some examples?” does not constitute calling out a flaw.
(The difference between the two situations being (apparently) the entirely subjective/mysterious/unstated property of “whether there should be examples but aren’t,” noting that Said thinking there exists a skipped step or a confusing leap is not particularly predictive of the median high-karma LWer thinking there exists a skipped step or a confusing leap.)
I am reminded again of Said saying that I A’d people due to their B, and I said no, I had not A’d anyone for B’ing, and Said replied ~”I never said you A’d anyone for B’ing; you can go check; I said you’d A’d them due to B’ing.”
i.e. splitting hairs and swirling words around to create a perpetual motte-and-bailey fog that lets him endlessly nitpick and retreat and say contradictory things at different times using the same words, and pretending to a sort of principle/coherence/consistency that he does not actually evince.
Yeah, almost like splitting hairs around whether making the public statement “I now categorize Said as a liar” is meaningfully different than “Said is a liar”.
Or admonishing someone for taking a potshot at you when they said
...while acting as though somehow that would have been less offensive if they had only added “I suspect” to the latter half of that sentence as well. Raise your hand if you think that “I suspect that you won’t like this idea, because I suspect that you have the emotional maturity of a child” is less offensive because it now represents an unambiguously true statement of an opinion rather than being misconstrued as a fact. A reasonable person would say “No, that’s obviously intended to be an insult”—almost as though there can be meaning beyond just the words as written.
The problem is that if we believe in your philosophy of constantly looking for the utmost literal interpretation of the written word, you’re tricking us into playing a meta-gamed, rules-lawyered, “Sovereign citizen”-esque debate instead of, what’s the word—oh, right, Steelmanning. Assuming charity from the other side. Seeking to find common ground.
For example, I can point out that Said clearly used the word “or” in their statement. Since reading comprehension seems to be an issue for a “median high-karma LWer” like yourself, I’ll bold it for you.
Is it therefore consistent for “asking for examples” to be contained by that set, while likewise not being pointing to a flaw? Yes, because if we say that a thing is contained by a set of “A or B”, it could be “A”, or it could be “B”.
Now that we’ve done your useless exercise of playing with words, what have we achieved? Absolutely nothing, which is why games like these aren’t tolerated in real workplaces, since this is a waste of everyone’s time.
You are behaving in a seriously insufferable way right now.
Sorry, I meant—“I think that you are behaving in what feels like to me a seriously insufferable way right now, where by insufferable I mean
having or showing unbearable arrogance or conceit”.On reflection, I do think both Duncan and Said are demonstrating a significant amount of hair-splitting and less consistent, clear communication than they seem to think. That’s not necessarily bad in and of itself—LW can be a place for making fine distinctions and working out unclear thoughts, when there’s something important there.
It’s really just using them as the basis for a callout and fuel for an endless escalation-spiral when they become problematic.
When I think about this situation from both Duncan and Said’s point of views to the best of my ability, I understand why they’d be angry/frustrated/whatever, and how the search for reasons and rebuttals has escalated to the point where the very human and ordinary flaws of inconsistency and hair-splitting can seem like huge failings.
At this point, I really have lost the ability and interest to track the rounds and rounds of prosecutorial hair-splitting across multiple comment threads. It was never fun, it’s not enlightening, and I don’t think it’s really the central issue at stake. It’s more of a bitch eating crackers scenario at this point.
I made an effort to understand Said’s point of view, and whatever his qualms with how I’ve expressed the crux of our disagreement, I feel satisfied with my level of understanding. From previous interactions and readings, I also think I understand what Duncan is frustrated about.
In my opinion, we need to disaggregate:
The interpersonal behavior of Duncan and Said
Their ideas
Their ways of expressing those ideas
My feeling right now is that Duncan and Said both have contributed valuable things in the past, and hopefully will in the future. Their ideas, and ways of expressing them, are not always perfect, and that is OK. But their approach to interpersonal behavior on this website, especially toward each other but also, to a lesser extent, toward other people, is not OK. We’re really in the middle of a classic feud where “who started it” and “who’s worse” and the litany of who-did-what-to-whom just goes on forever and ever, and I think the traditional solution in these cases is for some higher authority to come in and say “THIS FEUD IS DECLARED ENDED BY THE AUTHORITY OF THE CROWN.”
If they can both recognize that about themselves, I would be satisfied if they just agreed to not speak to each other for a long time and to drop the argument. I would also like it if they both worked on figuring out how to cut their rate of becoming involved in angry escalation-spirals in half. Now would be an excellent time to begin that journey. I would also be open to that being mod-enforced in some sense.
Communication is difficult; communication when subtleties must be conveyed, while there is interpersonal conflict taking place, much more difficult.
I don’t imagine that I have, in every comment I’ve written over the past day, or the past week (or month, or year, or decade), succeeded perfectly in getting my point across to all readers. I’ve tried to be clear and precise, as I always do; sometimes I succeed excellently, sometimes less so. If you say “Said, in that there comment you did not make your meaning very clear”, I think that’s a plausible criticism a priori, and certainly a fair one in some actual cases.
This is, to a greater or lesser degree, true of everyone. I think it is true of me less so than is the average—that is, I think that my writing tends to be more clear than most people’s. (Of course anyone is free to disagree; this sort of holistic judgment isn’t easy to operationalize!)
What I think I can’t be accused of, in general, is:
failing to provide (at least attempted) clarifications upon request
failing to cooperate with efforts aimed at achieving mutual understanding
failing to acknowledge the difficulties of communication, and to make reasonable attempts to overcome them
failing to maintain a civil and polite demeanor in the process
(Do you disagree?)
It also seems to me that there has been no “escalation” on my part, at any point in this process. (In general, I would say that as far as interpersonal behavior goes, mine has been close to exemplary given the circumstances.)
I am perfectly content to be ignored by Duncan. He is perfectly welcome to pretend that I don’t exist, as far as I’m concerned. I won’t even take it as an insult; I take the freedom of association quite seriously, and I believe that if some person simply doesn’t want to associate with another person, that is (barring various exceptional circumstances—having to do with, e.g., offices of public responsibility, etc.—none of which, as far as I can tell, apply here) their absolute right.
(Of course, that choice, while it is wholly Duncan’s, cannot possibly impose on me any obligation to act in any way I would not normally be obligated to act—to avoid referring to Duncan, to avoid replying to his comments, to avoid criticizing his ideas, etc. That’s just how the world is: you can control your own actions, but not the actions of others. Most people learn that lesson fairly early in life.)
Speaking to our interactions in this post, I do agree with you on all counts. Elsewhere, I think you fall short of my minimum definition of ‘cooperative,’ but I also understand that you have very different standards for what constitutes cooperative and I see this as a normative crux, one that is unlikely to be resolved through debate.
I also think this is true for our interactions here. Elsewhere, I disagree—you frequently are one of two main players in escalation spirals. I understand that, for you, that is typically the other person’s fault. The most charitable way I can put my point of view is that, even if it is the other person’s fault, I think that you should prioritize figuring out how to cut your rate of being involved in escalation spirals in half. That might involve a choice to reconsider certain comments, to comment differently, or to redirect your attention to people who have demonstrated a higher level of appreciation for your comments in the past.
I think another lesson people learn early in life is that you can do whatever you want, but often, you shouldn’t, because it has negative effects on others, and they learn to empathically care about other people’s wellbeing. Our previous exchanges have convinced me that in important ways, you reject the idea that you ought to care about how your words and actions affect other people as long as they’re within the bounds of the law. Again, I think this just brings us back to the crux of our disagreement, over whether and to what extent the feelings of insult you provoke in others is a moral consideration in deciding how to interact.
As I have grown quite confident in the nature of our disagreement, as well as its intractability, I am going to commit to signing off of LessWrong entirely for two weeks, because I think it will distract me. I will revisit further comments of yours (or PMs if you prefer) at that time.
If we’re referring to my participation in Less Wrong specifically (and I must assume that you are), then I have to point out that it would be very easy for me to cut my rate of being involved in what you call “escalation spirals” (regardless of whether I agree with your characterization of the situations in question) not only in half or even tenfold, but to zero. To do this, I would simply stop posting and commenting here.
The question then becomes whether there’s any unilateral action I can take, any unilateral change I can make, whose result would be that I could continue spending time on participation in Less Wrong discussions in such a way that there’s any point or utility in my doing so, while also to any non-trivial degree reducing the incidence of people being insulted (or “insulted”), escalating, etc.
It seems to me that there is not.
Certainly there are actions that other people (such as, say, the moderators of the site) could take, that would have that sort of outcome! Likewise, there are all sorts of trends, cultural shifts, organic changes in norms, etc., which would have a similarly fortuitous result.
But is there anything that I could do, alone, to “solve” this “problem”, other than just not posting or commenting here? I certainly can’t imagine anything like that.
(EDIT: And this is, of course, to say nothing of the question of whether it even should be “my problem to solve”! I think you can guess where I stand on that issue…)
I do not think that this is an accurate characterization of any views that I hold.
✋
The thing that makes LW meaningfully different from the rest of the internet is people bothering to pay attention to meaningful distinctions even a little bit.
The distance between “I categorize Said as a liar” and “Said is a liar” is easily 10x and quite plausibly 100-1000x the distance between “You blocked people due to criticizing you” and “you blocked people for criticizing you.” The latter is two synonymous phrases; the former is not.
(I also explicitly acknowledged that Ray’s rounding was the right rounding to make, whereas Said was doing the opposite and pretending that swapping “due to” and “for” had somehow changed the meaning in a way that made the paraphrase invalid.)
You being like “Stop using phrases that meticulously track uncommon distinctions you’ve made; we already have perfectly good phrases that ignore those distinctions!” is not the flex you seem to think it is; color blindness is not a virtue.
In my opinion, the internet has fine-grained distinctions aplenty. In fact, where to split hairs and where to twist braids is sort of basic to each political subculture. What I think makes LessWrong different is that we take a somewhat, maybe not agnostic but more like a liberal/pluralistic view of the categories. We understand them as constructs, “made for man,” as Scott put it once, and as largely open to critical investigation and not just enforcement. We try and create the social basis for a critical investigation to happen productively.
When anonymousaisafety complains of hair-splitting, I think they are saying that, while the distinction between “I categorize Said as a liar” and “Said is a liar” is probably actually 100-1000x as important a distinction between “due to” and “for” in your mind, other people also get to weigh in on that question and may not agree with you, at least not in context.
If you really think the difference between these two very similar phrasings is so huge, and you want that to land with other people, then you need to make that difference apparent in your word choice. You also need to accept that other factors beyond word choice play into how your words will be perceived: claiming this distinction is of tremendous importance lands differently in the context of this giant adversarial escalation-spiral than it would in an alternate reality where you were writing a calm and collected post and had never gotten into a big argument with Said. This is part of why it’s so important to figure out how to avoid these conflict spirals. They make it very difficult to avoid reading immediate personal motivations into your choice of words and where you lay the emphasis, and thus it becomes very hard to consider your preferred categorization scheme as a general principle. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be good—just that the context in which you’re advocating for it gets in the way.
That said, I continue to think anonymousaisafety is clearly taking sides here, and continuing to use an escalatory/inflammatory tone that only contributes further to the dynamic. While I acknowledge that I am disagreeing with Duncan here, and that might be very frustrating for him, I hope that I come across not as blaming but more as explaining my point of view on what the problem is here, and registering my personal reaction to what Duncan is arguing for in context.
Er. I very explicitly did not claim that it was a distinction of tremendous importance. I was just objecting to the anonymous person’s putting them in the same bucket.
Endorsed/updated; this is a better summary than the one I gave.
So are you saying that although the distinction between the two versions of the “liar” phrase is 100-1000x bigger than between the due to/for distinction, it is still not tremendously important?
As a single point of evidence: it’s immediately obvious to me what the difference is between “X is true” and “I think X” (for starters, note that these two sentences have different subjects, with the former’s subject being “X” and the latter’s being “I”). On the other hand, “you A’d someone due to their B’ing” and “you A’d someone for B’ing” do, actually, sound synonymous to me—and although I’m open to the idea that there’s a distinction I’m missing here (just as there might be people to whom the first distinction is invisible), from where I currently stand, the difference between the first pair of sentences looks, not just 10x or 1000x bigger, but infinitely bigger than the difference between the second, because the difference between the second is zero.
(And if you accept that [the difference between the second pair of phrases is zero], then yes, it’s quite possible for some other difference to be massively larger than that, and yet not be tremendously important.)
Here, I do think that Duncan is doing something different from even the typical LWer, in that he—so far as I can tell—spends much more time and effort talking about these fine-grained distinctions than do others, in a way that I think largely drags the conversation in unproductive directions; but I also think that in this context, where the accusation is that he “splits hairs” too much, it is acceptable for him to double down on the hair-splitting and point that, actually, no, he only splits those hairs that are actually splittable.
With the caveat that I think this sort of “litigation of minutiae of nuance” is of very limited utility[1], I am curious: would you consider “you A’d someone as a consequence of their B’ing” different from both the other two forms? Synonymous with them both? Synonymous with one but not the other?
I find that I am increasingly coming around to @Vladimir_Nesov’s stance on nuance.
Yeah, I think I probably agree.
Synonymous as far as I can tell. (If there’s an actual distinction in your view, which you’re currently trying to lead me to via some kind of roundabout, Socratic pathway, I’d appreciate skipping to the part where you just tell me what you think the distinction is.)
I had no such intention. It’s just that we already know that I think that X and Y seem like different things, and you think X and Y seem like the same thing, and since X and Y are the two forms which actually appeared in the referenced argument, there’s not much further to discuss, except to satisfy curiosity about the difference in our perceptions (which inquiry may involve positing some third thing Z). That’s really all that my question was about.
In case you are curious in turn—personally, I’d say that “you A’d someone as a consequence of their B’ing” seems to me to be the same as “you A’d someone due to their B’ing”, but different from “you A’d someone for their B’ing”. As far as characterizing the distinction, I can tell you only that the meaning I, personally, was trying to convey was the difference in what sort of rule or principle was being applied. (See, for instance, the difference between “I shot him for breaking into my house” and “I shot him because he broke into my house”. The former implies a punishment imposed as a judgment for a transgression, while the latter can easily include actions taken in self-defense or defense of property, or even unintentional actions.)
But, as I said, there is probably little point in pursuing this inquiry further.
Gotcha. Thanks for explaining, in any case; I appreciate it.
Yeah. One is small, and the other is tiny. The actual comment that the anonymous person is mocking/castigating said:
I see that reading comprehension was an issue for you, since it seems that you stopped reading my post halfway through. Funny how a similar thing occurred on my last post too. It’s almost like you think that the rules don’t apply to you, since everyone else is required to read every single word in your posts with meticulous accuracy, whereas you’re free to pick & choose at your whim.
I’m deeply uncertain about how often it’s worth litigating the implied meta-level concerns; I’m not at all uncertain that this way of expressing them was inappropriate. I don’t want see sniping like this on LessWrong, and especially not in comment threads like this.
Consider this a warning to knock it off.
Might I ask what you hoped to achieve in this thread by writing this comment?
I expect to perceive a bare “what are some examples?” as mildly insulting even if the author is like “yes absolutely, here you go”. And I expect to percieve a bare “examples?” as slightly more insulting.
I don’t think it’s mildly insulting, I think it’s ambiguously insulting, in that a person wanting to insult you might do it. But in general I think it’s a totally reasonable question in truth-seeking and I’d be sad if people required disclaimers to clarify that it isn’t meant insultingly, just to ask for examples of what the person is talking about.
(Commenting from Recent Discussion)
Seconding Ben Pace’s answer. This sort of thing is one case of a larger category of questions one might ask. Others include:
“Is the raw data available for download/viewing?” (No reason to be insulted, if your answer is “yes”, or if you have a good reason/excuse for not providing the data. Definitely reason to be insulted otherwise—but then you deserve the “insult”. Scare quotes because “insult” is really the wrong word; it’s more like “fairly inflicted disapproval”.)
“Could you make the code for your experimental setup available?” (Ditto. There could be good reasons why you can’t or won’t provide this! There’s no insult in that case. But if you don’t provide the code and you have no good reason for not doing so, then you deserve the disapproval.)
“Do you have a reference for that?” (Providing references for claims is good, but not always possible. But if you make an unreferenced claim and you have no good reason for doing that, you deserve the disapproval.)
In cases like this, there is, or should be, an expectation that people who are communicating and truth-seeking in good faith, with integrity, with honest intention of effectiveness, etc., will offer cooperation to each other and to their potential audience. This cooperation takes the form of—where possible—citing references for claims, providing data, publishing code, providing examples, clarifying usage of terms, etc., etc. Where possible, note! Of course these things cannot always be done. But where they can be done, they should be. These are simply the basic expectations, the basic epistemic courtesies we owe to each other (and to ourselves!).
So a question or request like “what are some examples”, “where is the data”, “citation please”—these are nothing more than requests (or reminders, if you like) for those basic elements of cooperation. There is no reason not to fulfill them, if you can. (And plenty of reasons to do so!) Sometimes you can’t, of course; then you say so, explaining why.
But why would you be insulted by any of this? What is the sense in refusing to cooperate in these ways?
(Especially if you have the answer to the question! If you have examples to provide—or data, code, citations, etc.—how the heck am I supposed to extract these things from you, if you think that asking for them is outré? You can provide them up front, or provide them on request—but if you don’t do the first, and take umbrage to the second, then… what’s left?)
(Flagging this as the second of the two comments I said Said could make. I’ve disabled his ability to comment/post for now. You’re welcome to send moderators PMs to continue discussion with us. I’m working on a reply to your other comment addressed more specifically)