Here’s a potential alternative wording of your previous statement.
Original: (I find your stated reason bizarre to the point where I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here.)
New version: I am very confused by your stated reason, and I’m genuinely having trouble seeing things from your point of view. But I would genuinely like to. Here’s a version that makes a little more sense to me [give it your best shot]… but here’s where that breaks down [explain]. What am I missing?
I claim with very high confidence that this new version is much less insulting (or is not insulting at all). It took me all of 15 seconds to come up with, and I claim that it either conveys the same thing as your original comment (plus added extras), or that the difference is negligible and could be overcome with an ongoing and collegial dialog of a kind that the original, insulting version makes impossible. If you have an explanation for what of value is lost in translation here, I’m listening.
It’s certainly possible to write more words and thereby to obfuscate what you’re saying and/or alter your meaning in the direction of vagueness.
And you can, certainly, simply say additional things—things not contained in the original message, and that aren’t simply transformations of the meaning, but genuinely new content—that might (you may hope) “soften the blow”, as it were.
But all of that aside, what I’d actually like to note, in your comment, is this part:
It took me all of 15 seconds to come up with
First of all, while it may be literally true that coming up with that specific wording, with the bracketed parts un-filled-in, took you 15 seconds (if you say it, I believe it), the connotation that transmuting a comment from the “original” to the (fully qualified, as it were) “new version” takes somewhere on the order of 15 seconds (give or take a couple of factors of two, perhaps) is not believable.
Of course you didn’t claim that—it’s a connotation, not a denotation. But do you think it’s true? I don’t. I don’t think that it’s true even for you.
(For one thing, simply typing out the “fully qualified” version—with the “best shot” at explanation outlined, and the pitfalls noted, and the caveats properly caveated—is going to take a good bit longer. Type at 60 WPM? Then you’ve got the average adult beat, and qualify as a “professional typist”; but even so just the second paragraph of your comment would take you most of a minute to type out. Fill out those brackets, and how many words are you adding? 100? 300? More?)
But, perhaps more importantly, that stuff requires not just more typing, but much more thinking (and reading). What is worse, it’s thinking of a sort that is very, very likely to be a complete waste of time, because it turns out to be completely wrong.
For example, consider this attempt, by me, to describe in detail Duncan’s approach to banning people from his posts. It seemed—and still seems—to me to be an accurate characterization; and certainly it was written in such a way that I quite expected Duncan to assent to it. But instead the response was, more or less, “nah”. Now, either Duncan is lying there, and my characterization was correct but he doesn’t want to admit it; or, my characterization was wrong. In the former case I’ve mostly wasted my time; in the latter case I’ve entirely wasted my time. And this sort of outcome is ubiquitous, in my experience. Trying to guess what people are thinking, when you’re unsure or confused, is pointless. Guessing incorrectly tends to annoy people, so it doesn’t help to build bridges or maintain civility. The attempt wastes the guesser’s time and energy. It’s pretty much all downside, no upside.
It’s certainly possible to write more words and thereby to obfuscate what you’re saying and/or alter your meaning in the direction of vagueness.
And you can, certainly, simply say additional things—things not contained in the original message, and that aren’t simply transformations of the meaning, but genuinely new content—that might (you may hope) “soften the blow”, as it were.
This is the part I think is important in your objection—I agree with you that expanding the bracketed part would take more than 15 seconds. You’re claiming somewhere on the implicit-explicit spectrum that something substantial is lost in the translation from the original insulting version by you to the new non-insulting version by me.
I just straightforwaredly disagree with that, and I challenge you to articulate what exactly you think is lost and why it matters.
As far as saying additional things goes—well, uh, the additional things are the additional things. The original version doesn’t contain any guessing of meaning or any kind of thing like that. That’s strictly new.
As I said, the rest is transparent boilerplate. It doesn’t much obfuscate anything, but nor does it improve anything. It’s just more words for more words’ sake.
I don’t think anything substantive is lost in terms of meaning; the losses are (a) the time and effort on the part of the comment-writer, (b) annoyance (or worse) on the part of the comment target (due to the inevitably-incorrect guessing), (c) annoyance (or worse) on the part of the comment target (due to the transparent fluff that pretends to hide a fundamentally insulting meaning).
The only way for someone not to be insulted by a comment that says something like this is just to not be insulted by what it says. (Take my word for this—I’ve had comments along these lines directed at me many, many times, in many places! I mostly don’t find them insulting—and it’s not because people who say such things couch them in fluff. They do no such thing.)
I don’t think anything substantive is lost in terms of meaning; the losses are (a) the time and effort on the part of the comment-writer, (b) annoyance (or worse) on the part of the comment target (due to the inevitably-incorrect guessing), (c) annoyance (or worse) on the part of the comment target (due to the transparent fluff that pretends to hide a fundamentally insulting meaning).
Ah, I see. So the main thing I’m understanding here is that the meaning you were trying to convey to Duncan is understood, by you, as a fundamentally insulting one. You could “soften” it by the type of rewording I proposed. But this is not a case where you mean to say something non-insulting, and it comes out sounding insulting by accident. Instead, you mean to say something insulting, and so you’re just saying it, understanding that the other person will probably, very naturally, feel insulted.
An example of saying something fundamentally insulting is to tell somebody that you think they are stupid or ugly. You are making a statement of this kind. Is that correct?
An example of saying something fundamentally insulting is to tell somebody that you think they are stupid or ugly. You are making a statement of this kind. Is that correct?
I don’t think anything substantive is lost in terms of meaning; the losses are… (c) annoyance (or worse) on the part of the comment target (due to the transparent fluff that pretends to hide a fundamentally insulting meaning).
My understanding of this statement was that you are asserting that the core meaning of the original quote by you, in both your original version and my rewrite, was a fundamentally insulting one. Are you saying it was a different kind of fundamental insult from calling somebody stupid or ugly? Or are you now saying it was not an insult?
Well, firstly—as I say here, I think that there’s a subtle difference between “insulting” and “an insult”. But that’s perhaps not the key point.
That aside, it really seems like your question is answered, very explicitly, in this earlier comment of mine. But let’s try again:
Is my comment insulting? Yes, as I said earlier, I think that it is (or at least, it would not be unreasonable for someone to perceive it thus).
(Should it be insulting? Who knows; it’s complicated. Is it gratuitously insulting, or insulting in a way that is extraneous to its propositional meaning? No, I don’t think so. Would all / most people perceive it as insulting if they were its target? No / probably, respectively. Is it possible not to be insulted by it? Yes, it’s possible; as I said earlier, I’ve had this sort of thing said to me, many times, and I have generally failed to be insulted by it. Is it possible for Duncan, specifically, to not be insulted by that comment as written by me, specifically? I don’t know; probably not. Is that, specifically, un-virtuous of Duncan? No, probably not.)
Is my comment thereby similar to other things which are also insulting, in that it shares with those other things the quality of being insulting? By definition, yes.
Is it insulting in the same way as is calling someone stupid, or calling someone ugly? No, all three of these are different things, which can all be said to be insulting in some way, but not in the same way.
So it sounds like you perceive your comment as conveying information—a fact or a sober judgment of yours—that will, in its substance, tend to trigger a feeling of being insulted in the other person, possibly because they are sensitive to that fact or judgment being called to their attention.
But it is not primarily intended by you to provoke that feeling of being insulted. You might prefer it if the other person did not experience the feeling of being insulted (or you might simply not care) - your aim is to convey the information, irrespective of whether or not it makes the other person feel insulted.
Now that we’ve established this, what is your goal when you make insulting comments? (Note: I’ll refer to your comments as “insulting comments,” defined in the way I described in my previous comment). If you subscribe to a utilitarian framework, how does the cost/benefit analysis work out? If you are a virtue ethicist, what virtue are you practicing? If you are a deontologist, what maxim are you using? If none of these characterizes the normative beliefs you’re acting under, then please articulate what motivates you to make them in whatever manner makes sense to you. Making statements, however true, that you expect to make the other person feel insulted seems like a substantial drawback that needs some rationale.
If you care more about not making social attacks than telling the truth, you will get an environment which does not tell the truth when it might be socially inconvenient. And the truth is almost always socially inconvenient to someone.
So if you are a rationalist, i.e. someone who strongly cares about truth-seeking, this is highly undesirable.
Most people are not capable of executing on this obvious truth even when they try hard; the instinct to socially-smooth is too strong. The people who are capable of executing on it are, generally, big-D Disagreeable, and therefore also usually little-d disagreeable and often unpleasant. (I count myself as all three, TBC. I’d guess Said would as well, but won’t put words in his mouth.)
Yes, caring too much about not offending people means that people do not call out bullshit.
However, are rude environments more rational? Or do they just have different ways of optimizing for something other than truth? -- Just guessing here, but maybe disagreeable people derive too much pleasure from disagreeing with someone, or offending someone, so their debates skew that way. (How many “harsh truths” are not true at all; they are just popular because offend someone?)
(When I tried to think about examples, I thought I found one: military. No one cares about the feelings of their subordinates, and yet things get done. However, people in the military care about not offending their superiors. So, probably not a convincing example for either side of the argument.)
I’m sure there is an amount of rudeness which generates more optimization-away-from-truth than it prevents. I’m less sure that this is a level of rudeness achievable in actual human societies. And for whether LW could attain that level of rudeness within five years even if it started pushing for rudeness as normative immediately and never touched the brakes—well, I’m pretty sure it couldn’t. You’d need to replace most of the mod team (stereotypically, with New Yorkers, which TBF seems both feasible and plausibly effective) to get that to actually stick, probably, and it’d still be a large ship turning slowly.
A monoculture is generally bad, so having a diversity of permitted conduct is probably a good idea regardless. That’s extremely hard to measure, so as a proxy, ensuring there are people representing both extremes who are prolific and part of most important conversations will do well enough.
I am probably just saying the obvious here, but a rude environment is not only one where people say true things rudely, but also where people say false things rudely.
So when we imagine the interactions that happen there, it is not just “someone says the truth, ignoring the social consequences” which many people would approve, but also “someone tries to explain something complicated, and people not only respond by misunderstanding and making fallacies, but they are also assholes about it” where many people would be tempted to say ‘fuck this’ and walk away. So the website would gravitate towards a monoculture anyway.
(I wanted to give theMotte as an example of a place that is further in that direction and the quality seems to be lower… but I just noticed that the place is effectively dead.)
a rude environment is not only one where people say true things rudely, but also where people say false things rudely
The concern is with requiring the kind of politeness that induces substantive self-censorship. This reduces efficiency of communicating dissenting observations, sometimes drastically. This favors beliefs/arguments that fit the reigning vibe.
The problems with (tolerating) rudeness don’t seem as asymmetric, it’s a problem across the board, as you say. It’s a price to consider for getting rid of the asymmetry of over-the-top substantive-self-censorship-inducing politeness.
The Motte has its own site now. (I agree the quality is lower than LW, or at least it was several months ago and that’s part of why I stopped reading. Though idk if I’d attribute that to rudeness.)
(When I tried to think about examples, I thought I found one: military. No one cares about the feelings of their subordinates, and yet things get done. However, people in the military care about not offending their superiors. So, probably not a convincing example for either side of the argument.)
There’s another example, frats.
Even though the older frat members harass their subordinates via hazing rituals and so on, the new members wouldn’t stick around if they genuinely thought the older members were disagreeable people out to get them.
Now that we’ve established this, what is your goal when you make [comments that will, in [their] substance, tend to trigger a feeling of being insulted in the other person, possibly because they are sensitive to that fact or judgment being called to their attention … [but that are] not primarily intended by you to provoke that feeling of being insulted]?
I write comments for many different reasons. (See this, this, etc.) Whether a comment happens to be (or be likely to be perceived as) “insulting” or not generally doesn’t change those reasons.
Making statements, however true, that you expect to make the other person feel insulted seems like a substantial drawback that needs some rationale.
OK, I have read the comments you linked. My understanding is this:
You understand that you have a reputation for making comments perceived as social attacks, although you don’t intend them as such.
You don’t care whether or not the other person feels insulted by what you have to say. It’s just not a moral consideration for your commenting behavior.
Your aesthetic is that you prefer to accept that what you have to say has an insulting meaning, and to just say it clearly and succinctly.
Do you care about the manner in which other people talk to you? For example, if somebody wished to say something with an insulting meaning to you, would you prefer them to say it to you in the same way you say such things to others?
(Incidentally, I don’t know who’s been going through our comment thread downvoting you, but it wasn’t me. I’m saying this because I now see myself being downvoted, and I suspect it may be retaliation from you, but I am not sure about that).
You understand that you have a reputation for making comments perceived as social attacks, although you don’t intend them as such.
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.
You don’t care whether or not the other person feels insulted by what you have to say. It’s just not a moral consideration for your commenting behavior.
Certainly I would prefer that things were otherwise. (Isn’t this often the case, for all of us?) But this cannot be a reason to avoid making such comments; to do so would be even more blameworthy, morally speaking, than is the habit on the part of certain interlocutors to take those comments as attacks in the first place. (See also this old comment thread, which deals with the general questions of whether, and how, to alter one’s behavior in response to purported offense experienced by some person.)
Your aesthetic is that you prefer to accept that what you have to say has an insulting meaning, and to just say it clearly and succinctly.
I don’t know if “aesthetic” is the right term here. Perhaps you mean something by it other than what I understand the term to mean.
In any case, indeed, clarity and succinctness are the key considerations here—out of respect for both my interlocutors and for any readers, who surely deserve not to have their time wasted by having to read through nonsense and fluff.
Do you care about the manner in which other people talk to you? For example, if somebody wished to say something with an insulting meaning to you, would you prefer them to say it to you in the same way you say such things to others?
I would prefer that people say things to me in whatever way is most appropriate and effective, given the circumstances. Generally it is better to be more concise, more clear, more comprehensive, more unambiguous. (Some of those goals conflict, you may notice! Such is life; we must navigate such trade-offs.)
I have other preferences as well, though they are less important. I dislike vulgarity, for example, and name-calling. Avoiding these things is, I think, no more than basic courtesy. I do not employ them myself, and certainly prefer not to hear them addressed to me, or even in my presence. (This has never presented a problem, in either, direction, on Less Wrong, and I don’t expect this to change.) Of course one can conceive of cases when these preferences must be violated in order to serve the goals of conciseness, clarity, etc.; in such a case I’d grin and bear it, I suppose. (But I can’t recall encountering such.)
Now that I’ve answered your questions, here’s one of my own:
What, exactly, is the point of this line of questioning? We seem to be going very deep down this rabbit hole, litigating these baroque details of connotation and perception… and it seems to me that nothing of any consequence hinges on any of this. What makes this tangent even slightly worth either my time or yours?
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.
Just a small note that “Said interpreting someone as [interpreting Said’s comment as an attack]” is, in my own personal experience, not particularly correlated with [that person in fact having interpreted Said’s comment as an attack].
Said has, in the past, seemed to have perceived me as perceiving him as attacking me, when in fact I was objecting to his comments for other reasons, and did not perceive them as an attack, and did not describe them as attacks, either.
What, exactly, is the point of this line of questioning? We seem to be going very deep down this rabbit hole, litigating these baroque details of connotation and perception… and it seems to me that nothing of any consequence hinges on any of this. What makes this tangent even slightly worth either my time or yours?
I wrote about five paragraphs in response to this, which I am fine with sharing with you on two conditions. First, because my honest answer contains quite a bit of potentially insulting commentary toward you (expressed in the same matter of fact tone I’ve tried to adopt throughout our interaction here), I want your explicit approval to share it. I am open to not sharing it, DMing it to you, or posting it here.
Secondly, if I do share it, I want you to precommit not to respond with insulting comments directed at me.
Secondly, if I do share it, I want you to precommit not to respond with insulting comments directed at me.
This seems like a very strange, and strangely unfair, condition. I can’t make much sense of it unless I read “insulting” as “deliberately insulting”, or “intentionally insulting”, or something like it. (But surely you don’t mean it that way, given the conversational context…?)
Could you explain the point of this? I find that I’m increasingly perplexed by just what the heck is going on in this conversation, and this latest comment has made me more confused than ever…
Yes, it’s definitely an unfair condition, and I knew that when I wrote it. Nevertheless—that is my condition.
If you would prefer a vague answer with no preconditions, I am satisfying my curiosity about somebody who thinks very differently about commenting norms than I do.
(Incidentally, I don’t know who’s been going through our comment thread downvoting you, but it wasn’t me. I’m saying this because I now see myself being downvoted, and I suspect it may be retaliation from you, but I am not sure about that).
I did (weak-)downvote one comment of yours in this comment section, but only one. If you’re seeing multiple comments downvoted, then those downvotes aren’t from me. (Of course I don’t know how I’d prove that… but for whatever my word’s worth, you have it.)
Guessing incorrectly tends to annoy people, so it doesn’t help to build bridges or maintain civility. The attempt wastes the guesser’s time and energy. It’s pretty much all downside, no upside.
If you don’t know, just say that you don’t know.
I like the norm of discussing a hypothetical interpretation you find interesting/relevant, without a need to discuss (let alone justify) its relation to the original statement or God forbid intended meaning. If someone finds it interesting to move the hypothetical in another direction (perhaps towards the original statement, or even intended meaning), that is a move of the same kind, not a move of a different and privileged kind.
I agree that this can often be a reasonable and interesting thing to do.
I would certainly not support any such thing becoming expected or mandatory. (Not that you implied such a thing—I just want to forestall the obvious bad extrapolation.)
I like the norm of discussing a hypothetical interpretation you find interesting/relevant, without a need to discuss (let alone justify) its relation to the original statement or God forbid intended meaning.
I would certainly not support any such thing becoming expected or mandatory.
Do you mean that you don’t support the norm of it not being expected for hypothetical interpretations of statements to not needing to justify themselves as being related to those statements? In other words, that (1) you endorse the need to justify discussion of hypothetical interpretations of statements by showing those interpretations to be related to the statements they interpret, or something like that? Or (2) that you don’t endorse endless tangents becoming the norm, forgetting about the original statement? The daisy chain is too long.
It’s unclear how to shape the latter option with policy. For the former option, the issue is demand for particular proof. Things can be interesting for whatever reason, doesn’t have to be a standard kind of reason. Prohibiting arbitrary reasons is damaging to the results, in this case I think for no gain.
Do you mean that … (1) you endorse the need to justify discussion of hypothetical interpretations of statements by showing those interpretations to be related to the statements they interpret, or something like that?
No, absolutely not.
Or (2) that you don’t endorse endless tangents becoming the norm, forgetting about the original statement?
Yeah.
My view is that first it’s important to get clear on what was meant by some claim or statement or what have you. Then we can discuss whatever. (If that “whatever” includes some hypothetical interpretation of the original (ambiguous) claim, which someone in the conversation found interesting—sure, why not.) Or, at the very least, it’s important to get that clarity regardless—the tangent can proceed in parallel, if it’s something the participants wish.
EDIT: More than anything, what I don’t endorse is a norm that says that someone asking “what did you mean by that word/phrase/sentence/etc.?” must provide some intepretation of their own, whether that be a guess at the OP’s meaning, or some hypothetical, or what have you. Just plain asking “what did you mean by that?” should be ok!
Things can be interesting for whatever reason, doesn’t have to be a standard kind of reason. Prohibiting arbitrary reasons is damaging to the results, in this case I think for no gain.
Here’s a potential alternative wording of your previous statement.
Original: (I find your stated reason bizarre to the point where I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here.)
New version: I am very confused by your stated reason, and I’m genuinely having trouble seeing things from your point of view. But I would genuinely like to. Here’s a version that makes a little more sense to me [give it your best shot]… but here’s where that breaks down [explain]. What am I missing?
I claim with very high confidence that this new version is much less insulting (or is not insulting at all). It took me all of 15 seconds to come up with, and I claim that it either conveys the same thing as your original comment (plus added extras), or that the difference is negligible and could be overcome with an ongoing and collegial dialog of a kind that the original, insulting version makes impossible. If you have an explanation for what of value is lost in translation here, I’m listening.
It’s certainly possible to write more words and thereby to obfuscate what you’re saying and/or alter your meaning in the direction of vagueness.
And you can, certainly, simply say additional things—things not contained in the original message, and that aren’t simply transformations of the meaning, but genuinely new content—that might (you may hope) “soften the blow”, as it were.
But all of that aside, what I’d actually like to note, in your comment, is this part:
First of all, while it may be literally true that coming up with that specific wording, with the bracketed parts un-filled-in, took you 15 seconds (if you say it, I believe it), the connotation that transmuting a comment from the “original” to the (fully qualified, as it were) “new version” takes somewhere on the order of 15 seconds (give or take a couple of factors of two, perhaps) is not believable.
Of course you didn’t claim that—it’s a connotation, not a denotation. But do you think it’s true? I don’t. I don’t think that it’s true even for you.
(For one thing, simply typing out the “fully qualified” version—with the “best shot” at explanation outlined, and the pitfalls noted, and the caveats properly caveated—is going to take a good bit longer. Type at 60 WPM? Then you’ve got the average adult beat, and qualify as a “professional typist”; but even so just the second paragraph of your comment would take you most of a minute to type out. Fill out those brackets, and how many words are you adding? 100? 300? More?)
But, perhaps more importantly, that stuff requires not just more typing, but much more thinking (and reading). What is worse, it’s thinking of a sort that is very, very likely to be a complete waste of time, because it turns out to be completely wrong.
For example, consider this attempt, by me, to describe in detail Duncan’s approach to banning people from his posts. It seemed—and still seems—to me to be an accurate characterization; and certainly it was written in such a way that I quite expected Duncan to assent to it. But instead the response was, more or less, “nah”. Now, either Duncan is lying there, and my characterization was correct but he doesn’t want to admit it; or, my characterization was wrong. In the former case I’ve mostly wasted my time; in the latter case I’ve entirely wasted my time. And this sort of outcome is ubiquitous, in my experience. Trying to guess what people are thinking, when you’re unsure or confused, is pointless. Guessing incorrectly tends to annoy people, so it doesn’t help to build bridges or maintain civility. The attempt wastes the guesser’s time and energy. It’s pretty much all downside, no upside.
If you don’t know, just say that you don’t know.
And the rest is transparent boilerplate.
This is the part I think is important in your objection—I agree with you that expanding the bracketed part would take more than 15 seconds. You’re claiming somewhere on the implicit-explicit spectrum that something substantial is lost in the translation from the original insulting version by you to the new non-insulting version by me.
I just straightforwaredly disagree with that, and I challenge you to articulate what exactly you think is lost and why it matters.
I confess that I am not sure what you’re asking.
As far as saying additional things goes—well, uh, the additional things are the additional things. The original version doesn’t contain any guessing of meaning or any kind of thing like that. That’s strictly new.
As I said, the rest is transparent boilerplate. It doesn’t much obfuscate anything, but nor does it improve anything. It’s just more words for more words’ sake.
I don’t think anything substantive is lost in terms of meaning; the losses are (a) the time and effort on the part of the comment-writer, (b) annoyance (or worse) on the part of the comment target (due to the inevitably-incorrect guessing), (c) annoyance (or worse) on the part of the comment target (due to the transparent fluff that pretends to hide a fundamentally insulting meaning).
The only way for someone not to be insulted by a comment that says something like this is just to not be insulted by what it says. (Take my word for this—I’ve had comments along these lines directed at me many, many times, in many places! I mostly don’t find them insulting—and it’s not because people who say such things couch them in fluff. They do no such thing.)
Ah, I see. So the main thing I’m understanding here is that the meaning you were trying to convey to Duncan is understood, by you, as a fundamentally insulting one. You could “soften” it by the type of rewording I proposed. But this is not a case where you mean to say something non-insulting, and it comes out sounding insulting by accident. Instead, you mean to say something insulting, and so you’re just saying it, understanding that the other person will probably, very naturally, feel insulted.
An example of saying something fundamentally insulting is to tell somebody that you think they are stupid or ugly. You are making a statement of this kind. Is that correct?
No, I don’t think so…
But this comment of yours baffles me. Did we not already cover this ground?
Then what did you mean by this:
My understanding of this statement was that you are asserting that the core meaning of the original quote by you, in both your original version and my rewrite, was a fundamentally insulting one. Are you saying it was a different kind of fundamental insult from calling somebody stupid or ugly? Or are you now saying it was not an insult?
Well, firstly—as I say here, I think that there’s a subtle difference between “insulting” and “an insult”. But that’s perhaps not the key point.
That aside, it really seems like your question is answered, very explicitly, in this earlier comment of mine. But let’s try again:
Is my comment insulting? Yes, as I said earlier, I think that it is (or at least, it would not be unreasonable for someone to perceive it thus).
(Should it be insulting? Who knows; it’s complicated. Is it gratuitously insulting, or insulting in a way that is extraneous to its propositional meaning? No, I don’t think so. Would all / most people perceive it as insulting if they were its target? No / probably, respectively. Is it possible not to be insulted by it? Yes, it’s possible; as I said earlier, I’ve had this sort of thing said to me, many times, and I have generally failed to be insulted by it. Is it possible for Duncan, specifically, to not be insulted by that comment as written by me, specifically? I don’t know; probably not. Is that, specifically, un-virtuous of Duncan? No, probably not.)
Is my comment thereby similar to other things which are also insulting, in that it shares with those other things the quality of being insulting? By definition, yes.
Is it insulting in the same way as is calling someone stupid, or calling someone ugly? No, all three of these are different things, which can all be said to be insulting in some way, but not in the same way.
OK, this is helpful.
So it sounds like you perceive your comment as conveying information—a fact or a sober judgment of yours—that will, in its substance, tend to trigger a feeling of being insulted in the other person, possibly because they are sensitive to that fact or judgment being called to their attention.
But it is not primarily intended by you to provoke that feeling of being insulted. You might prefer it if the other person did not experience the feeling of being insulted (or you might simply not care) - your aim is to convey the information, irrespective of whether or not it makes the other person feel insulted.
Is that correct?
Sounds about right.
Now that we’ve established this, what is your goal when you make insulting comments? (Note: I’ll refer to your comments as “insulting comments,” defined in the way I described in my previous comment). If you subscribe to a utilitarian framework, how does the cost/benefit analysis work out? If you are a virtue ethicist, what virtue are you practicing? If you are a deontologist, what maxim are you using? If none of these characterizes the normative beliefs you’re acting under, then please articulate what motivates you to make them in whatever manner makes sense to you. Making statements, however true, that you expect to make the other person feel insulted seems like a substantial drawback that needs some rationale.
If you care more about not making social attacks than telling the truth, you will get an environment which does not tell the truth when it might be socially inconvenient. And the truth is almost always socially inconvenient to someone.
So if you are a rationalist, i.e. someone who strongly cares about truth-seeking, this is highly undesirable.
Most people are not capable of executing on this obvious truth even when they try hard; the instinct to socially-smooth is too strong. The people who are capable of executing on it are, generally, big-D Disagreeable, and therefore also usually little-d disagreeable and often unpleasant. (I count myself as all three, TBC. I’d guess Said would as well, but won’t put words in his mouth.)
Yes, caring too much about not offending people means that people do not call out bullshit.
However, are rude environments more rational? Or do they just have different ways of optimizing for something other than truth? -- Just guessing here, but maybe disagreeable people derive too much pleasure from disagreeing with someone, or offending someone, so their debates skew that way. (How many “harsh truths” are not true at all; they are just popular because offend someone?)
(When I tried to think about examples, I thought I found one: military. No one cares about the feelings of their subordinates, and yet things get done. However, people in the military care about not offending their superiors. So, probably not a convincing example for either side of the argument.)
I’m sure there is an amount of rudeness which generates more optimization-away-from-truth than it prevents. I’m less sure that this is a level of rudeness achievable in actual human societies. And for whether LW could attain that level of rudeness within five years even if it started pushing for rudeness as normative immediately and never touched the brakes—well, I’m pretty sure it couldn’t. You’d need to replace most of the mod team (stereotypically, with New Yorkers, which TBF seems both feasible and plausibly effective) to get that to actually stick, probably, and it’d still be a large ship turning slowly.
A monoculture is generally bad, so having a diversity of permitted conduct is probably a good idea regardless. That’s extremely hard to measure, so as a proxy, ensuring there are people representing both extremes who are prolific and part of most important conversations will do well enough.
I am probably just saying the obvious here, but a rude environment is not only one where people say true things rudely, but also where people say false things rudely.
So when we imagine the interactions that happen there, it is not just “someone says the truth, ignoring the social consequences” which many people would approve, but also “someone tries to explain something complicated, and people not only respond by misunderstanding and making fallacies, but they are also assholes about it” where many people would be tempted to say ‘fuck this’ and walk away. So the website would gravitate towards a monoculture anyway.
(I wanted to give theMotte as an example of a place that is further in that direction and the quality seems to be lower… but I just noticed that the place is effectively dead.)
The concern is with requiring the kind of politeness that induces substantive self-censorship. This reduces efficiency of communicating dissenting observations, sometimes drastically. This favors beliefs/arguments that fit the reigning vibe.
The problems with (tolerating) rudeness don’t seem as asymmetric, it’s a problem across the board, as you say. It’s a price to consider for getting rid of the asymmetry of over-the-top substantive-self-censorship-inducing politeness.
The Motte has its own site now. (I agree the quality is lower than LW, or at least it was several months ago and that’s part of why I stopped reading. Though idk if I’d attribute that to rudeness.)
I do not think that is the usual result.
There’s another example, frats.
Even though the older frat members harass their subordinates via hazing rituals and so on, the new members wouldn’t stick around if they genuinely thought the older members were disagreeable people out to get them.
I write comments for many different reasons. (See this, this, etc.) Whether a comment happens to be (or be likely to be perceived as) “insulting” or not generally doesn’t change those reasons.
I do not agree.
Please see this comment and this comment for more details on my approach to such matters.
OK, I have read the comments you linked. My understanding is this:
You understand that you have a reputation for making comments perceived as social attacks, although you don’t intend them as such.
You don’t care whether or not the other person feels insulted by what you have to say. It’s just not a moral consideration for your commenting behavior.
Your aesthetic is that you prefer to accept that what you have to say has an insulting meaning, and to just say it clearly and succinctly.
Do you care about the manner in which other people talk to you? For example, if somebody wished to say something with an insulting meaning to you, would you prefer them to say it to you in the same way you say such things to others?
(Incidentally, I don’t know who’s been going through our comment thread downvoting you, but it wasn’t me. I’m saying this because I now see myself being downvoted, and I suspect it may be retaliation from you, but I am not sure about that).
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.
Certainly I would prefer that things were otherwise. (Isn’t this often the case, for all of us?) But this cannot be a reason to avoid making such comments; to do so would be even more blameworthy, morally speaking, than is the habit on the part of certain interlocutors to take those comments as attacks in the first place. (See also this old comment thread, which deals with the general questions of whether, and how, to alter one’s behavior in response to purported offense experienced by some person.)
I don’t know if “aesthetic” is the right term here. Perhaps you mean something by it other than what I understand the term to mean.
In any case, indeed, clarity and succinctness are the key considerations here—out of respect for both my interlocutors and for any readers, who surely deserve not to have their time wasted by having to read through nonsense and fluff.
I would prefer that people say things to me in whatever way is most appropriate and effective, given the circumstances. Generally it is better to be more concise, more clear, more comprehensive, more unambiguous. (Some of those goals conflict, you may notice! Such is life; we must navigate such trade-offs.)
I have other preferences as well, though they are less important. I dislike vulgarity, for example, and name-calling. Avoiding these things is, I think, no more than basic courtesy. I do not employ them myself, and certainly prefer not to hear them addressed to me, or even in my presence. (This has never presented a problem, in either, direction, on Less Wrong, and I don’t expect this to change.) Of course one can conceive of cases when these preferences must be violated in order to serve the goals of conciseness, clarity, etc.; in such a case I’d grin and bear it, I suppose. (But I can’t recall encountering such.)
Now that I’ve answered your questions, here’s one of my own:
What, exactly, is the point of this line of questioning? We seem to be going very deep down this rabbit hole, litigating these baroque details of connotation and perception… and it seems to me that nothing of any consequence hinges on any of this. What makes this tangent even slightly worth either my time or yours?
Just a small note that “Said interpreting someone as [interpreting Said’s comment as an attack]” is, in my own personal experience, not particularly correlated with [that person in fact having interpreted Said’s comment as an attack].
Said has, in the past, seemed to have perceived me as perceiving him as attacking me, when in fact I was objecting to his comments for other reasons, and did not perceive them as an attack, and did not describe them as attacks, either.
The comment you quoted was not, in fact, about you. It was about this (which you can see if you read the thread in which you’re commenting).
Note that in the linked discussion thread, it is not I, but someone else, who claims that certain of my comments are perceived as attacks.
In short, your comment is a non sequitur in this context.
No, it’s relevant context, especially given that you’re saying in the above ~[and I judge people for it].
(To be clear, I didn’t think that the comment I quoted was about me. Added a small edit to make that clearer.)
I wrote about five paragraphs in response to this, which I am fine with sharing with you on two conditions. First, because my honest answer contains quite a bit of potentially insulting commentary toward you (expressed in the same matter of fact tone I’ve tried to adopt throughout our interaction here), I want your explicit approval to share it. I am open to not sharing it, DMing it to you, or posting it here.
Secondly, if I do share it, I want you to precommit not to respond with insulting comments directed at me.
This seems like a very strange, and strangely unfair, condition. I can’t make much sense of it unless I read “insulting” as “deliberately insulting”, or “intentionally insulting”, or something like it. (But surely you don’t mean it that way, given the conversational context…?)
Could you explain the point of this? I find that I’m increasingly perplexed by just what the heck is going on in this conversation, and this latest comment has made me more confused than ever…
Yes, it’s definitely an unfair condition, and I knew that when I wrote it. Nevertheless—that is my condition.
If you would prefer a vague answer with no preconditions, I am satisfying my curiosity about somebody who thinks very differently about commenting norms than I do.
Alright, thanks.
I did (weak-)downvote one comment of yours in this comment section, but only one. If you’re seeing multiple comments downvoted, then those downvotes aren’t from me. (Of course I don’t know how I’d prove that… but for whatever my word’s worth, you have it.)
I believe you, and it doesn’t matter to me. I just didn’t want you to perceive me incorrectly as downvoting you.
I like the norm of discussing a hypothetical interpretation you find interesting/relevant, without a need to discuss (let alone justify) its relation to the original statement or God forbid intended meaning. If someone finds it interesting to move the hypothetical in another direction (perhaps towards the original statement, or even intended meaning), that is a move of the same kind, not a move of a different and privileged kind.
I agree that this can often be a reasonable and interesting thing to do.
I would certainly not support any such thing becoming expected or mandatory. (Not that you implied such a thing—I just want to forestall the obvious bad extrapolation.)
Do you mean that you don’t support the norm of it not being expected for hypothetical interpretations of statements to not needing to justify themselves as being related to those statements? In other words, that (1) you endorse the need to justify discussion of hypothetical interpretations of statements by showing those interpretations to be related to the statements they interpret, or something like that? Or (2) that you don’t endorse endless tangents becoming the norm, forgetting about the original statement? The daisy chain is too long.
It’s unclear how to shape the latter option with policy. For the former option, the issue is demand for particular proof. Things can be interesting for whatever reason, doesn’t have to be a standard kind of reason. Prohibiting arbitrary reasons is damaging to the results, in this case I think for no gain.
No, absolutely not.
Yeah.
My view is that first it’s important to get clear on what was meant by some claim or statement or what have you. Then we can discuss whatever. (If that “whatever” includes some hypothetical interpretation of the original (ambiguous) claim, which someone in the conversation found interesting—sure, why not.) Or, at the very least, it’s important to get that clarity regardless—the tangent can proceed in parallel, if it’s something the participants wish.
EDIT: More than anything, what I don’t endorse is a norm that says that someone asking “what did you mean by that word/phrase/sentence/etc.?” must provide some intepretation of their own, whether that be a guess at the OP’s meaning, or some hypothetical, or what have you. Just plain asking “what did you mean by that?” should be ok!
Totally agreed.