This is not directly related to the current situation, but I think is in part responsible for it.
Said claims that it is impossible to guess what someone might mean by something they wrote, if for some reason the reader decided that the writer likely didn’t intend the straightforward interpretation parsed by the reader. It’s somewhat ambiguous to me whether Said thinks that this is impossible for him, specifically, or impossible for people (either most or all).
Relevant part of the first comment making this point:
(B) Alice meant something other than what it seems like she wrote.
What might that be? Who knows. I could try to guess what Alice meant. However, that is impossible. So I won’t try. If Alice didn’t mean the thing that it seems, on a straightforward reading, like she meant, then what she actually meant could be anything at all.
“Impossible” in a social context means “basically never happens, and if it does happen then it is probably by accident” (rather than “the laws of physics forbid it!”). Also, it is, of course, possible to guess what someone means by sheer dumb luck—picking an interpretation at random out of some pool of possibilities, no matter how unlikely-seeming, and managing by chance to be right.
But, I can’t remember a time when I’ve read what someone said, rejected the obvious (but obviously wrong) interpretation, tried to guess what they actually meant, and succeeded. When I’ve tried, the actual thing that (as it turned out) they meant was always something which I could never have even imagined as a hypothesis, much less picked out as the likeliest meaning. (And, conversely, when someone else has tried to interpret my comments in symmetric situations, the result has been the same.)
In my experience, this is true: for all practical purposes, either you understand what someone meant, or it’s impossible to guess what they could’ve meant instead.
For the sake of argument, I will accept that Said finds this impossible. With that said, the idea that this is impossible—or that it “basically never happens, and if it does happen then it is probably by accident”—is incompatible with my experience, and the experience of approximately anybody I have queried on the subject. (Said may object here, and claim that people are not reliable reporters. And yet conversations happen anyways; I’ve done this before in situations where there was no possible double illusion of transparency. This is not to say that there are no trade-offs; I would not be surprised if Said finds himself confidently holding an incorrect understanding of others’ claims less often than most people.)
My guess is that this is responsible for a large part of what many consider to be objectionable about Said’s conversational style. Many other objections presented in the comments here (and in the past) seem confused, wrong, or misguided. It might be slightly more pleasant to read Said’s comments if he added some trimmings of “niceness” to them, but I agree with him that sort of thing carries meaningful costs. Rather, I think the bigger problem is that the way Said responds to other people’s writing, when he is e.g. seeking clarification, or arguing a point, is that he does not believe in the value of interpretive labor, and therefore doesn’t think it’s valuable to do any upfront work to reduce how much interpretive labor his interlocutors will need to do, since according to him, that should in any case be “zero”.
This basically doesn’t work when you’re trying to communicate with people who do, in fact, successfully[1] do interpretive labor, and therefore expect their conversational partners to share in that effort, to some degree.
Separately, and more to the matter at hand, although I think that there were supererogatory paths that Duncan could have taken to reduce escalation at various points, I do think that Said’s claim that Duncan advocated for a norm of interaction accurately described as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” was obviously unsupported by his linked evidence. After Duncan calls this out, Said doubles down, and then later (in the comments on this post) tries to offload this onto a distinction between whether he was making a claim about what Duncan literally wrote, vs. what could straightforwardly be inferred about Duncan’s intentions (based on what he wrote).
I find this uncompelling given that Said has also admitted (in the comments here) that his literal claim was indeed a strawman, while at the same time the entire thread was precipitated by gjm indicating that he thought the claim was a strawman. Said claims to have then given a more “clarified and narrow form” of his claim in response to gjm’s comment:
If “asking people for examples of their claims” doesn’t fit Duncan’s stated criteria for what constitutes acceptable engagement/criticism, then it is not pretending, but in fact accurate, to describe Duncan as advocating for a norm of “don’t ask people for examples of their claims”. (See, for example, this subthread on this very post, where Duncan alludes to good criticism requiring that the critic “[put] forth at least half of the effort required to bridge the inferential gap between you and the author as opposed to expecting them to connect all the dots themselves”. Similar descriptions and rhetoric can be found in many of Duncan’s recent posts and comments.)
Duncan has, I think, made it very clear that that a comment that just says “what are some examples of this claim?” is, in his view, unacceptable. That’s what I was talking about. I really do not think it’s controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan.
If Said is referring to the parenthetical starting with “See, for example”, then I am sorry to say that adding such a parenthetical in the context of repeating the original claim nearly verbatim (to describe Duncan as advocating for a norm of “don’t ask people for examples of their claims”, and “what are some examples of this claim?” is, in his view, unacceptable) does not count as clarifying or narrowing his claim, but is simply performing the same motion that Duncan took issue with, which is attempting to justify a false claim with evidence that would support a slightly-related but importantly different claim.
I’m leaving out a lot of salient details because this is, frankly, exhausting. I think the dynamics around Killing Socrates were not great, but I also have less well-formed thoughts there.
This basically doesn’t work when you’re trying to communicate with people who do, in fact, successfully do interpretive labor, and therefore expect their conversational partners to share in that effort, to some degree.
Ability to be successful is crucially different from considering it a useful activity. The expectation of engaging isn’t justified by capability to do so.
Separately from my other reply, I want to call attention to this:
This basically doesn’t work when you’re trying to communicate with people who do, in fact, successfully[1] do interpretive labor, and therefore expect their conversational partners to share in that effort, to some degree.
[1] Sometimes—often enough that it’s worth relying on, at least.
I have said this in the past, I think, but I want to note again that I am deeply skeptical of the claim that such “interpretive labor” actually succeeds often enough to be worth its serious downsides. I think that—much more often than most people here care to admit—the result of such efforts are illusionary understanding, and (to speak frankly) the erosion of the ability, of all involved, to detect bullshit (both their own and that of others), and to identify when they simply do not know or do not understand something.
I think that it would be greatly to the benefit of all participants of Less Wrong if everyone here was all much, much more reluctant to perform such “labor”.
I just want to make it clear—since I think this point may have gotten lost in the shuffle—that I still think that this part of my comment is pretty clearly true:
Duncan has, I think, made it very clear that that a comment that just says “what are some examples of this claim?” is, in his view, unacceptable. That’s what I was talking about.
(The next sentence, which says “I really do not think it’s controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan.”, is now clearly false; it is, obviously, controversial, as demonstrated by the controversy which has resulted. I think that to retain its truth value while still being assertable now, that sentence would now have to say something like “I really do not see why it should be controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan”, or perhaps “I don’t see that there was any reason, prior to that point, to have expected it to be controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan”, or something else along these lines. But this is not as important as the previous two sentences.)
I have yet to see any compelling reason to conclude that this is false. (I am aware that Duncan specifically disclaims this, and do not find that to be a compelling reason, in this circumstance.) (EDIT: See below for more)
I say this to forestall any potential misunderstandings in general, but also, more specifically, to note that any analysis of the situation which depends on the notion that I’ve admitted to having been wrong, or to have insisted on a position which I now admit was untenable, must be mistaken—as I have, indeed, neither admitted doing, nor done, either of those things.
Finally, I must object that, relative to the original, sloppily phrased, version of the claim (‘various proposed norms of interaction such as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” and so on’, with the contextual implication that this referred to Duncan), the above-quoted sentences absolutely (and, in my view, quite obviously) do count as clarifying and narrowing the claim. The quoted text provides a narrower and more specific rendition of the claim, and makes it clear that this is the claim which was intended. (It is, again, a perfectly normal conversational pattern, where one person says a thing, another person says “that seems weird/wrong”, and the first says “what I meant was [some clarified / corrected version]”; there is nothing blameworthy about that.)
EDIT: What I wrote in this comment is also relevant (the “you” here is Duncan, naturally):
Now, you may protest that the claim is actually false. Perhaps. Certainly I don’t make any pretensions to omniscience. But neither do I withdraw the claim entirely. While I would no longer say that I “do not think it’s controversial at all to ascribe this opinion” to you (obviously it is controversial!), your previous statements (including some in this very discussion thread) and your behavior continue (so it seems to me) to support my claim about your apparent views.
I now say “apparent”, of course, because you did say that you don’t, in fact, hold the belief which I ascribed to you. But that still leaves the question of why you write and act as though you did hold that belief. Is it that your actual views on the matter are similar to (perhaps even indistinguishable for practical purposes from) the previously-claimed belief, but differ in some nuance (whether that be important nuance or not)? Is it that there are some circumstantial factors at play, which you perceive but I do not? Something else?
I think that it would be useful—not just to you or to me, but to everyone on Less Wrong—to dig into this further.
Just to provide a concrete example, I am quite confident Duncan would not mind a comment of the form “Do you have more examples?” from me or really anyone else on the Lightcone team, I am pretty sure.
I don’t know whether he would always respond, but my sense is the cost Duncan (and a decent number of other authors) perceive as a result of that post is related primarily to the follow-up conversation to that question, not the question itself, as well as the background model of the motivations of the person asking it.
Not sure how much this counts as evidence for you, but I do want to flag that I would take bets against your current suggested prediction.
This certainly counts as evidence. (I’m not sure how we’d operationalize “how much” here, but that’s probably not necessary anyhow.)
Basically, what you’re providing here is part of an answer to the question I ask (“you”, again, refers to Duncan):
But that still leaves the question of why you write and act as though you did hold that belief. Is it that your actual views on the matter are similar to (perhaps even indistinguishable for practical purposes from) the previously-claimed belief, but differ in some nuance (whether that be important nuance or not)? Is it that there are some circumstantial factors at play, which you perceive but I do not? Something else?
And you’re saying, I take it, that the answer is “indeed, there are circumstantial factors at play”.
Well, fair enough. The follow-up questions are then things like “What is the import of those circumstantial factors?”, and “Taking into account those factors, what then is the fully clarified principle/belief?”, and “What justifies that principle/belief?”, and so on.
I don’t know if it would be productive to explore those questions here, in this thread. (Or anywhere? Well, that depends on the outcome of this discussion, I imagine…)
I will note, though, that it seems like a whole lot of this could’ve been avoided if Duncan had replied to one of my earliest comments, in that thread or perhaps even an earlier thread on a previous topic, with something like: “To clarify, I think asking for examples is fine, and here are links to me doing so [A] [B] [C] and here are links to other people doing so to me and me answering them [1] [2] [3], but I specifically think that when you, Said, ask for examples, that is bad, for specific reasons X Y Z which, as we can see, do not apply to my other examples”.
I note for any other readers that Said is evincing a confusion somewhere in the neighborhood of the Second Guideline and the typical mind fallacy.
In particular, it’s false that I “write and act as though I did hold that belief,” in the sense that a supermajority of those polled would check “true” on a true-false question about it, after reading through (say) two of my essays and a couple dozen of my comments.
(“That belief” = “Duncan has, I think, made it very clear that that a comment that just says ‘what are some examples of this claim?’ is, in his view, unacceptable.”)
It’s pretty obvious that it seems to Said that I write and act in this way. But one of the skills of a competent rationalist is noticing that [how things seem to me] might not be [how they actually are] or [how they seem to others].
Said, in my experience, is not versed in this skill, and does not, as a matter of habit, notice “ah, here I’m stating a thing about my interpretation as if it’s fact, or as if it’s nearly-universal among others.”
e.g. an unequivocally true statement would have been something like “But that still leaves the question of why you write and act in a way that indicates to me that you do hold that belief.”
In addition to being unequivocally true (since it limits its claims to the contents of Said’s own experience, about which he has total authority to speak), it also highlights the territory more clearly, since it draws the reader’s attention to the fact that what’s going isn’t:
Duncan writes and acts in a way that indicates [period; no qualification] that he holds that belief
but rather
Duncan writes and acts in a way that indicates [to me, Said] that he holds that belief
Which makes it more clear that the problem is either in Duncan’s words and actions or in Said’s oft-idiosyncratic interpretation, rather than eliding the whole question and predeciding that of course it’s a Duncan-problem.
My various models of Said retort that:
This is a meaningless distinction; too small to care about and drowned out by nose (I disagree)
Everybody Knows that his statement comes with a prepended “it seems to me” and it’s silly to treat it as if it were intended to be a stronger claim than that (I argue that this is a motte-and-bailey)
This is too much labor to expect of a person (that they correctly confine their commentary to true things, or herald their speculation as speculation; I am unsympathetic)
But I think a lot of Said’s confusions would actually make more sense to Said if he came to the realization that he’s odd, actually, and that the way he uses words is quite nonstandard, and that many of the things which baffle and confuse him are not, in fact, fundamentally baffling or confusing but rather make sense to many non-Said people.
But I think a lot of Said’s confusions would actually make more sense to Said if he came to the realization that he’s odd, actually, and that the way he uses words is quite nonstandard, and that many of the things which baffle and confuse him are not, in fact, fundamentally baffling or confusing but rather make sense to many non-Said people.
There is nothing shocking about finding oneself to be unusual, even (or, perhaps, especially) on Less Wrong. So this particular revelation isn’t very… revelatory.
But I don’t think that many of the things that baffle and confuse me actually make sense to many others. What I do think is that many others think that those things make sense to them—but beneath that perception of understanding is not, fact, any real understanding.
Of course this isn’t true of everything that I find confusing. (How could it be?) But it sure is true of many more things than anyone generally cares to admit.
(As for using words in a nonstandard way, I hardly think that you’re one to make such an accusation characterization! Of the two of us, it seems to me that your use of language is considerably more “nonstandard” than is mine…)
As for using words in a nonstandard way, I hardly think that you’re one to make such an accusation!
I think the best response to this is one of Said’s own comments:
I have (it would seem) a reputation for making certain sorts of comments, which are of course not intended as “attacks” of any sort (social, personal, etc.), but which are sometimes perceived as such—and which perception, in my view, reflects quite poorly on those who thus perceive said comments.
I am not optimizing particularly hard for Said not feeling criticized but also treating my comment above as an “accusation” seems to somewhat belie Said’s nominal policy of looking down on people for interpreting statements as attacks.
In any event: oh yah for sure I use language SUPER weird, on the regular, but I’m also a professional communicator whose speech and writing is widely acclaimed and effective and “nuh uh YOU’RE the one who uses words weird” is orthogonal to the question of whether Said has blind spots and disabilities here (which he does).
(If there was another copy of Said lying around, I might summon him to point out the sheer ridiculousness of responding to “You do X” with “how dare you say I do X when YOU do X”, since that seems like the sort of thing Said loves to do. But in any event, I don’t think having a trait would in fact make me less able to notice and diagnose the trait in others.)
“Accusation” in the grandparent wasn’t meant to imply anything particularly blameworthy or adversarial, though I see how it could be thus perceived, given the context. Consider the word substituted with “characterization” (and I will so edit the previous comment).
In any event: oh yah for sure I use language SUPER weird, on the regular, but I’m also a professional communicator whose speech and writing is widely acclaimed and effective and “nuh uh YOU’RE the one who uses words weird” is orthogonal to the question of whether Said has blind spots and disabilities here (which he does).
I dispute the claim of effectiveness. (As for “acclaimed”, well, the value of this really depends on who’s doing the acclaiming.)
And the question certainly is not orthogonal. My point was that your use of words is more weird and more often weird than mine. You have no place to stand, in my view, when saying of me that I use words weirdly, in some way that leads to misunderstandings. (I also don’t think that the claim is true; but regardless of whether it’s true in general, it’s unusually unconvincing coming from you.)
(If there was another copy of Said lying around, I might summon him to point out the sheer ridiculousness of responding to “You do X” with “how dare you say I do X when YOU do X”, since that seems like the sort of thing Said loves to do.
Indeed this is not ridiculous, when the X in question is something like “using words weirdly”, which can be understood only in a relative way. The point is not “how dare you” but rather “you are unusually unqualified to evaluate this”.
But in any event, I don’t think having a trait would in fact make me less able to notice and diagnose the trait in others.)
This could surely not be claimed for arbitrary traits, but for a trait like this, it seems to me to make plenty of sense.
Quick note re: “acclaimed”: Duncan had fairly largish number of posts highly upvoted during the 2021 Review. You might dispute whether that’s a noteworthy achievement, but, well, in terms of what content should be considered good on LessWrong, I don’t know of a more objective measure of “what the LessWrong community voted on as good, with lots of opportunity for people to argue that each other are mistaken.” (and, notably, Duncan’s posts show up in the top 50 and a couple in the top 20 whether you’re tracking votes from all users or just high karma ones)
(I suppose seeing posts actually cited outside the LessWrong community would be a better/more-objective measure of “something demonstrably good is happening, not potentially just circle-jerky”. I’m interested in tracking that although it seems trickier)
((Not intending to weigh in on any of the other points in this comment))
(I suppose seeing posts actually cited outside the LessWrong community would be a better/more-objective measure of “something demonstrably good is happening, not potentially just circle-jerky”. I’m interested in tracking that although it seems trickier)
In order from “slightly outside of LessWrong” to “very far outside of LessWrong,” I refactored the CFAR handbook against (mild) internal resistance from CFAR and it was received well, I semi-regularly get paid four or low-five figures to teach people rationality, I’ve been invited to speak at 4+ EA Globals and counting, my In Defense of Punch Bug essay has 1800 claps which definitely did not primarily come from this community, my Magic color wheel article has 18,800 claps and got a shoutout from CGPGrey, my sixth grade classroom was featured in a chapter in a book on modern education, and my documentary on parkour was translated by volunteers into like eight different languages and cited by the founder as his favorite parkour video of all time (at at least one moment in time). *shrug
This is not directly related to the current situation, but I think is in part responsible for it.
Said claims that it is impossible to guess what someone might mean by something they wrote, if for some reason the reader decided that the writer likely didn’t intend the straightforward interpretation parsed by the reader. It’s somewhat ambiguous to me whether Said thinks that this is impossible for him, specifically, or impossible for people (either most or all).
Relevant part of the first comment making this point:
Relevant part of the second comment:
For the sake of argument, I will accept that Said finds this impossible. With that said, the idea that this is impossible—or that it “basically never happens, and if it does happen then it is probably by accident”—is incompatible with my experience, and the experience of approximately anybody I have queried on the subject. (Said may object here, and claim that people are not reliable reporters. And yet conversations happen anyways; I’ve done this before in situations where there was no possible double illusion of transparency. This is not to say that there are no trade-offs; I would not be surprised if Said finds himself confidently holding an incorrect understanding of others’ claims less often than most people.)
My guess is that this is responsible for a large part of what many consider to be objectionable about Said’s conversational style. Many other objections presented in the comments here (and in the past) seem confused, wrong, or misguided. It might be slightly more pleasant to read Said’s comments if he added some trimmings of “niceness” to them, but I agree with him that sort of thing carries meaningful costs. Rather, I think the bigger problem is that the way Said responds to other people’s writing, when he is e.g. seeking clarification, or arguing a point, is that he does not believe in the value of interpretive labor, and therefore doesn’t think it’s valuable to do any upfront work to reduce how much interpretive labor his interlocutors will need to do, since according to him, that should in any case be “zero”.
This basically doesn’t work when you’re trying to communicate with people who do, in fact, successfully[1] do interpretive labor, and therefore expect their conversational partners to share in that effort, to some degree.
Separately, and more to the matter at hand, although I think that there were supererogatory paths that Duncan could have taken to reduce escalation at various points, I do think that Said’s claim that Duncan advocated for a norm of interaction accurately described as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” was obviously unsupported by his linked evidence. After Duncan calls this out, Said doubles down, and then later (in the comments on this post) tries to offload this onto a distinction between whether he was making a claim about what Duncan literally wrote, vs. what could straightforwardly be inferred about Duncan’s intentions (based on what he wrote).
I find this uncompelling given that Said has also admitted (in the comments here) that his literal claim was indeed a strawman, while at the same time the entire thread was precipitated by gjm indicating that he thought the claim was a strawman. Said claims to have then given a more “clarified and narrow form” of his claim in response to gjm’s comment:
If Said is referring to the parenthetical starting with “See, for example”, then I am sorry to say that adding such a parenthetical in the context of repeating the original claim nearly verbatim (
to describe Duncan as advocating for a norm of “don’t ask people for examples of their claims”, and“what are some examples of this claim?” is, in his view, unacceptable) does not count as clarifying or narrowing his claim, but is simply performing the same motion that Duncan took issue with, which is attempting to justify a false claim with evidence that would support a slightly-related but importantly different claim.I’m leaving out a lot of salient details because this is, frankly, exhausting. I think the dynamics around Killing Socrates were not great, but I also have less well-formed thoughts there.
Sometimes—often enough that it’s worth relying on, at least.
Ability to be successful is crucially different from considering it a useful activity. The expectation of engaging isn’t justified by capability to do so.
Separately from my other reply, I want to call attention to this:
I have said this in the past, I think, but I want to note again that I am deeply skeptical of the claim that such “interpretive labor” actually succeeds often enough to be worth its serious downsides. I think that—much more often than most people here care to admit—the result of such efforts are illusionary understanding, and (to speak frankly) the erosion of the ability, of all involved, to detect bullshit (both their own and that of others), and to identify when they simply do not know or do not understand something.
I think that it would be greatly to the benefit of all participants of Less Wrong if everyone here was all much, much more reluctant to perform such “labor”.
I just want to make it clear—since I think this point may have gotten lost in the shuffle—that I still think that this part of my comment is pretty clearly true:
(The next sentence, which says “I really do not think it’s controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan.”, is now clearly false; it is, obviously, controversial, as demonstrated by the controversy which has resulted. I think that to retain its truth value while still being assertable now, that sentence would now have to say something like “I really do not see why it should be controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan”, or perhaps “I don’t see that there was any reason, prior to that point, to have expected it to be controversial at all to ascribe this opinion to Duncan”, or something else along these lines. But this is not as important as the previous two sentences.)
I have yet to see any compelling reason to conclude that this is false. (I am aware that Duncan specifically disclaims this, and do not find that to be a compelling reason, in this circumstance.) (EDIT: See below for more)
I say this to forestall any potential misunderstandings in general, but also, more specifically, to note that any analysis of the situation which depends on the notion that I’ve admitted to having been wrong, or to have insisted on a position which I now admit was untenable, must be mistaken—as I have, indeed, neither admitted doing, nor done, either of those things.
Finally, I must object that, relative to the original, sloppily phrased, version of the claim (‘various proposed norms of interaction such as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” and so on’, with the contextual implication that this referred to Duncan), the above-quoted sentences absolutely (and, in my view, quite obviously) do count as clarifying and narrowing the claim. The quoted text provides a narrower and more specific rendition of the claim, and makes it clear that this is the claim which was intended. (It is, again, a perfectly normal conversational pattern, where one person says a thing, another person says “that seems weird/wrong”, and the first says “what I meant was [some clarified / corrected version]”; there is nothing blameworthy about that.)
EDIT: What I wrote in this comment is also relevant (the “you” here is Duncan, naturally):
Just to provide a concrete example, I am quite confident Duncan would not mind a comment of the form “Do you have more examples?” from me or really anyone else on the Lightcone team, I am pretty sure.
I don’t know whether he would always respond, but my sense is the cost Duncan (and a decent number of other authors) perceive as a result of that post is related primarily to the follow-up conversation to that question, not the question itself, as well as the background model of the motivations of the person asking it.
Not sure how much this counts as evidence for you, but I do want to flag that I would take bets against your current suggested prediction.
This certainly counts as evidence. (I’m not sure how we’d operationalize “how much” here, but that’s probably not necessary anyhow.)
Basically, what you’re providing here is part of an answer to the question I ask (“you”, again, refers to Duncan):
And you’re saying, I take it, that the answer is “indeed, there are circumstantial factors at play”.
Well, fair enough. The follow-up questions are then things like “What is the import of those circumstantial factors?”, and “Taking into account those factors, what then is the fully clarified principle/belief?”, and “What justifies that principle/belief?”, and so on.
I don’t know if it would be productive to explore those questions here, in this thread. (Or anywhere? Well, that depends on the outcome of this discussion, I imagine…)
I will note, though, that it seems like a whole lot of this could’ve been avoided if Duncan had replied to one of my earliest comments, in that thread or perhaps even an earlier thread on a previous topic, with something like: “To clarify, I think asking for examples is fine, and here are links to me doing so [A] [B] [C] and here are links to other people doing so to me and me answering them [1] [2] [3], but I specifically think that when you, Said, ask for examples, that is bad, for specific reasons X Y Z which, as we can see, do not apply to my other examples”.
(Indeed, he can still do so!)
I note for any other readers that Said is evincing a confusion somewhere in the neighborhood of the Second Guideline and the typical mind fallacy.
In particular, it’s false that I “write and act as though I did hold that belief,” in the sense that a supermajority of those polled would check “true” on a true-false question about it, after reading through (say) two of my essays and a couple dozen of my comments.
(“That belief” = “Duncan has, I think, made it very clear that that a comment that just says ‘what are some examples of this claim?’ is, in his view, unacceptable.”)
It’s pretty obvious that it seems to Said that I write and act in this way. But one of the skills of a competent rationalist is noticing that [how things seem to me] might not be [how they actually are] or [how they seem to others].
Said, in my experience, is not versed in this skill, and does not, as a matter of habit, notice “ah, here I’m stating a thing about my interpretation as if it’s fact, or as if it’s nearly-universal among others.”
e.g. an unequivocally true statement would have been something like “But that still leaves the question of why you write and act in a way that indicates to me that you do hold that belief.”
In addition to being unequivocally true (since it limits its claims to the contents of Said’s own experience, about which he has total authority to speak), it also highlights the territory more clearly, since it draws the reader’s attention to the fact that what’s going isn’t:
but rather
Which makes it more clear that the problem is either in Duncan’s words and actions or in Said’s oft-idiosyncratic interpretation, rather than eliding the whole question and predeciding that of course it’s a Duncan-problem.
My various models of Said retort that:
This is a meaningless distinction; too small to care about and drowned out by nose (I disagree)
Everybody Knows that his statement comes with a prepended “it seems to me” and it’s silly to treat it as if it were intended to be a stronger claim than that (I argue that this is a motte-and-bailey)
This is too much labor to expect of a person (that they correctly confine their commentary to true things, or herald their speculation as speculation; I am unsympathetic)
But I think a lot of Said’s confusions would actually make more sense to Said if he came to the realization that he’s odd, actually, and that the way he uses words is quite nonstandard, and that many of the things which baffle and confuse him are not, in fact, fundamentally baffling or confusing but rather make sense to many non-Said people.
There is nothing shocking about finding oneself to be unusual, even (or, perhaps, especially) on Less Wrong. So this particular revelation isn’t very… revelatory.
But I don’t think that many of the things that baffle and confuse me actually make sense to many others. What I do think is that many others think that those things make sense to them—but beneath that perception of understanding is not, fact, any real understanding.
Of course this isn’t true of everything that I find confusing. (How could it be?) But it sure is true of many more things than anyone generally cares to admit.
(As for using words in a nonstandard way, I hardly think that you’re one to make such an
accusationcharacterization! Of the two of us, it seems to me that your use of language is considerably more “nonstandard” than is mine…)(EDIT: Wording)
I think the best response to this is one of Said’s own comments:
I am not optimizing particularly hard for Said not feeling criticized but also treating my comment above as an “accusation” seems to somewhat belie Said’s nominal policy of looking down on people for interpreting statements as attacks.
In any event: oh yah for sure I use language SUPER weird, on the regular, but I’m also a professional communicator whose speech and writing is widely acclaimed and effective and “nuh uh YOU’RE the one who uses words weird” is orthogonal to the question of whether Said has blind spots and disabilities here (which he does).
(If there was another copy of Said lying around, I might summon him to point out the sheer ridiculousness of responding to “You do X” with “how dare you say I do X when YOU do X”, since that seems like the sort of thing Said loves to do. But in any event, I don’t think having a trait would in fact make me less able to notice and diagnose the trait in others.)
“Accusation” in the grandparent wasn’t meant to imply anything particularly blameworthy or adversarial, though I see how it could be thus perceived, given the context. Consider the word substituted with “characterization” (and I will so edit the previous comment).
I dispute the claim of effectiveness. (As for “acclaimed”, well, the value of this really depends on who’s doing the acclaiming.)
And the question certainly is not orthogonal. My point was that your use of words is more weird and more often weird than mine. You have no place to stand, in my view, when saying of me that I use words weirdly, in some way that leads to misunderstandings. (I also don’t think that the claim is true; but regardless of whether it’s true in general, it’s unusually unconvincing coming from you.)
Indeed this is not ridiculous, when the X in question is something like “using words weirdly”, which can be understood only in a relative way. The point is not “how dare you” but rather “you are unusually unqualified to evaluate this”.
This could surely not be claimed for arbitrary traits, but for a trait like this, it seems to me to make plenty of sense.
Quick note re: “acclaimed”: Duncan had fairly largish number of posts highly upvoted during the 2021 Review. You might dispute whether that’s a noteworthy achievement, but, well, in terms of what content should be considered good on LessWrong, I don’t know of a more objective measure of “what the LessWrong community voted on as good, with lots of opportunity for people to argue that each other are mistaken.” (and, notably, Duncan’s posts show up in the top 50 and a couple in the top 20 whether you’re tracking votes from all users or just high karma ones)
(I suppose seeing posts actually cited outside the LessWrong community would be a better/more-objective measure of “something demonstrably good is happening, not potentially just circle-jerky”. I’m interested in tracking that although it seems trickier)
((Not intending to weigh in on any of the other points in this comment))
In order from “slightly outside of LessWrong” to “very far outside of LessWrong,” I refactored the CFAR handbook against (mild) internal resistance from CFAR and it was received well, I semi-regularly get paid four or low-five figures to teach people rationality, I’ve been invited to speak at 4+ EA Globals and counting, my In Defense of Punch Bug essay has 1800 claps which definitely did not primarily come from this community, my Magic color wheel article has 18,800 claps and got a shoutout from CGPGrey, my sixth grade classroom was featured in a chapter in a book on modern education, and my documentary on parkour was translated by volunteers into like eight different languages and cited by the founder as his favorite parkour video of all time (at at least one moment in time). *shrug