First, my read of both Said and Duncan is that they appreciate attention to the object level in conflicts like this. If what’s at stake for them is a fact of the matter, shouldn’t that fact get settled before considering other issues? So I will begin with that. What follows is my interpretation (mentioned here so I can avoid saying “according to me” each sentence).
In this comment, Said describes as bad “various proposed norms of interaction such as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” and so on”, without specifically identifying Duncan as proposing that norm (tho I think it’s heavily implied).
Then gjm objects to that characterization as a straw man.
In this comment Said defends it, pointing out that Duncan’s standard of “critics should do some of the work of crossing the gap” is implicitly a rule against “asking people for examples of their claims [without anything else]”, given that Duncan thinks asking for examples doesn’t count as doing the work of crossing the gap. (Earlier in the conversation Duncan calls it 0% of the work.) I think the point as I have written it here is correct and uncontroversial; I think there is an important difference between the point as I wrote it and the point as Said wrote it.
In the response I would have wanted to see, Duncan would have clearly and correctly pointed to that difference. He is in favor of people asking for examples [combined with other efforts to cross the gap], does it himself, gives examples himself, and so on. The unsaid [without anything else] part is load-bearing and thus inappropriate to leave out or merely hint at. [Or, alternatively, using “ask people for examples” to refer to comments that do only that, as opposed to the conversational move which can be included or not in a comment with other moves.]
Instead we got this comment, where Duncan interprets Said’s claim narrowly, disagrees, and accuses Said of either lying or being bad at reading comprehension. (This does not count as two hypotheses in my culture.)
Said provides four examples; Duncan finds them unconvincing and calls using them as citations a blatant falsehood. Said leaves it up to the readers to adjudicate here. I do think this was a missed opportunity for Said to see the gap between what he stated and what I think he intended to state.
From my perspective, my reading of Said’s accusation is not clearly suggested in the comment gjm objected to, is obviously suggested from the comment Duncan responds to, with the second paragraph[1] doing most of the work, and then further pointed at by later comments. If Said ate breakfasts of only cereal, and Duncan said that was unhealthy and he shouldn’t do it, it is not quite right to say Duncan ‘thinks you shouldn’t eat cereal’, as he might be in favor of cereal as part of a balanced breakfast; but also it is not quite right for Duncan to ignore Said’s point that one of the main issues under contention is whether Said can eat cereal by itself (i.e. asking for examples without putting in interpretative labor). This looks like white horses are not horses.
So what about Said’s four examples? As one might expect, all four are evidence for my interpretation, and none of the four are evidence for Duncan’s interpretation. I would not call this a blatant falsehood,[2] and think all four of Duncan’s example-by-example responses are weak. Do we treat the examples as merely ‘evidence for the claim’, or also as ‘identification of the claim’?
So then we have to step back and consider non-object-level considerations, of which I see a few:
I think this situation is, on some level, pretty symmetric.
I think the features of Said’s commenting style that people (not just Duncan!) find annoying are things that Said is deliberately optimizing for or the results of principled commitments he’s made, so it’s not just a simple bug that can be fixed.
I think the features of Duncan’s conflict resolution methods that people find offputting are similarly things that Duncan is deliberately optimizing for or the results of principled commitments he’s made, so it’s not just a simple bug that can be fixed.
I think both Said and Duncan a) contribute great stuff to the site and b) make some people like posting on LW less and it’s unclear what to do about that balance. This is one of the things that’s nice about clear rules that people are either following or not—it makes it easier for everyone to tell whether something is ‘allowed’ or ‘not allowed’, ‘fine’ or ‘not fine’, and so on, rather than making complicated judgments of whether or not you want someone around. I think the mod team does want to exercise some judgment and discernment beyond just rule-following, however.
How bad is it to state something that’s incorrect because it is too broad and then narrow it afterwards? Duncan has written about this in Ruling Out Everything Else, and I think Said did an adequate but not excellent job.
What’s the broader context of this discussion? Said has a commenting style that Duncan strongly dislikes, and Duncan seems to be in the midst of an escalating series of comments and posts pointing towards “the mods should ban Said”. My reckless speculation is that this comment looked to Duncan like the smoking gun that he could use to prove Said’s bad faith, and he tried to prosecute it accordingly. (Outside of context, I would be surprised by my reading not being raised to Duncan’s attention; in context, it seems obvious why he would not want (consciously or subconsciously) to raise that hypothesis.) My explanation is that Said’s picture of good faith is different than Duncan’s (and, as far as I can tell, both fit within the big tent of ‘rationality’).
Incidentally, I should note that I view Duncan’s escalation as something of a bet, where if the mods had clearly agreed with Duncan, that probably would have been grounds for banning Said. If the mods clearly disagree with Duncan, then what does ‘losing the bet’ look like? What was staked here?
The legal system sees a distinction between ‘false testimony’ (being wrong under oath) and ‘perjury’ (deliberately being wrong under oath), and it seems like a lot of this case hinges on “was Said deliberately wrong, or accidentally wrong?” and “was Duncan deliberately wrong, or accidentally wrong?”.
I also don’t expect it to be uncontroversial “who started it”. Locally, my sense is Duncan started it, and yet when I inhabit Duncan’s perspective, this is all a response to Said and his style. I interpret a lot of Duncan’s complaints here thru the lens of imaginary injury that he writes about here.
I think also there’s something going on where Duncan is attempting to mimic Said’s style when interacting with Said, but in a way that wouldn’t pass Said’s ITT. Suppose my comment here had simply been a list of ways that Duncan behaved poorly in this exchange; then I think Duncan could take the approach of “well, but Said does the same thing in places A, B, and C!”. I think he overestimates how convincing I would find that, and Duncan did a number of things in this exchange that my model of Said would not do and has not done (according to my interpretation, but not my model of Duncan’s, in a mirror of the four examples above).
I think Said is trying to figure out which atomic actions are permissible or impermissible (in part because it is easier to do local validity checking on atomic actions), and Duncan is trying to suggest what is permissible or impermissible is more relational and deals with people’s attitudes towards each other (as suggested by gjm here). I feel sympathetic to both views here; I think Duncan often overestimates how familiar readers will be with his works / how much context he can assume, and yet also I think Said is undercounting how much people’s memory of past interactions colors their experience of comments. [Again, I think these are not simple bugs but deliberate choices—I think Duncan wants to build up a context in which people can hold each other accountable and build further work together, and I think Said views colorblindness of this sort as superior to being biased.]
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.
I note that my reasons for this are themselves perhaps white horses are not horses reasons, where I think Said’s original statement and follow-up are both imprecise, but they’re missing the additional features that would make them ‘blatant falsehood’s, while both imprecise statements and blatant falsehoods are ‘incorrect’.
Vaniver privately suggested to me that I may want to offer some commentary on what I could’ve done in this situation in order for it to have gone better, which I thought was a good and reasonable suggestion. I’ll do that in this comment, using Vaniver’s summary of the situation as a springboard of sorts.
In this comment, Said describes as bad “various proposed norms of interaction such as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” and so on”, without specifically identifying Duncan as proposing that norm (tho I think it’s heavily implied).
Then gjm objects to that characterization as a straw man.
So, first of all, yes, I was clearly referring to Duncan. (I didn’t expect that to be obscure to anyone who’d bother to read that subthread in the first place, and indeed—so far as I can tell—it was not. If anyone had been confused, they would presumably have asked “what do you mean?”, and then I’d have linked what I mean—which is pretty close to what happened anyway. This part, in any case, is not the problem.)
The obvious problem here is that “don’t ask people for examples of their claims”—taken literally—is, indeed, a strawman.
The question is, whose problem (to solve) is it?
There are a few possible responses to this (which are not mutually exclusive).
On the one hand, if I want people to know what I mean, and instead of saying what I mean, I say something which is only approximately what I mean, and people assume that I meant what I said, and respond to it—well, whose fault is that, but mine?
Certainly one could make protestations along the lines of “haven’t you people ever heard of [ hyperbole / colloquialisms / writing off the cuff and expecting that readers will infer from surrounding context / whatever ]”, but such things are always suspect. (And even if one insists that there’s nothing un-virtuous about any particular instance of any one of those rhetorical or conversational patterns, nevertheless it would be a bit rich to get huffy about people taking words literally on Less Wrong, of all places.)
So, in one sense, the whole problem would’ve been avoided if I’d taken pains to write as precisely as I usually try to do. Since I didn’t do that, and could have, the fault would seem to be mine; case closed.
But that account doesn’t quite work.
For one thing, if someone says something you think is wrong, and you say “seems wrong to me actually”, and they reply “actually I meant this other thing”—well, that seems to me to be a normal and reasonable sort of exchange; this is how understanding is reached. I made a claim; gjm responded that it seemed like a strawman; I responded with a clarification.
Note that here I definitely made a mistake; what I should’ve included in that comment, but left out, was a clear and unambiguous statement along the lines of:
“Yes, taken literally, ‘don’t ask people for examples of their claims’ would of course be a strawman. I thought that the intended reading would be clear, but I definitely see the potential for literal (mis-)reading, sorry. To clarify:”
The rest of that comment would then have proceeded as written. I don’t think that it much needs amendment. In particular, the second paragraph (which, as Vaniver notes, does much of the work) gives a concise and clear statement of the claim which I was originally (and, at first, sloppily) alluding to. I stand by that clarified claim, and have seen nothing that would dissuade me from it.
Importantly, however, we can see that Duncan objects, quite strenuously, even to this clarified and narrowed form of what I said!
(As I note in this comment, it was not until after essentially the whole discussion had already taken place that Duncan edited his reply to my latter comment to explicitly disclaim the view that I ascribed to him. For the duration of that whole long comment exchange, it very much seemed to me that Duncan was not objecting because I was ascribing to him a belief he does not hold, but rather because he had not said outright that he held such a belief… but, of course, I never claimed that he had!)
So even if that clarified comment had come first (having not, therefore, needed any acknowledgment of previous sloppiness), there seems to be little reason to believe that Duncan would not have taken umbrage at it.
Despite that, failing to include that explicit acknowledgement was an error. Regardless of whether it can be said to be responsible for the ensuing heated back-and-forth (I lean toward “probably not”), this omission was very much a failure of “local validity” on my part, and for that there is no one to blame but me.
Of the rest of the discussion thread, there is little that needs to be said. (As Vaniver notes, some of my subsequent comments both clarify my claims further and also provide evidence for them.)
In the response I would have wanted to see, Duncan would have clearly and correctly pointed to that difference. He is in favor of people asking for examples [combined with other efforts to cross the gap], does it himself, gives examples himself, and so on. The unsaid [without anything else] part is load-bearing and thus inappropriate to leave out or merely hint at. [Or, alternatively, using “ask people for examples” to refer to comments that do only that, as opposed to the conversational move which can be included or not in a comment with other moves.]
I agree that the hypothetical comment you describe as better is in fact better. I think something like … twenty-or-so exchanges with Said ago, I would have written that comment? I don’t quite know how to weigh up [the comment I actually wrote is worse on these axes of prosocial cooperation and revealing cruxes and productively clarifying disagreement and so forth] with [having a justified true belief that putting forth that effort with Said in particular is just rewarded with more branches being created].
(e.g. there was that one time recently where Said said I’d blocked people due to disagreeing with me/criticizing me, and I said no, I haven’t blocked anybody for disagreeing/criticizing, and he responded “I didn’t say anything about ‘blocked for disagreeing [or criticizing]’. (Go ahead, check!)” and the actual thing he’d said was that they’d been blocked due to disagreeing/criticizing; that’s the level of … gumming up the works? gish-gallop? … that I’ve viscerally come to expect.)
Like, I think there’s plausibly a CEV-ish code of conduct in which I “should”, at that point, still have put forth the effort, but I think it’s also plausible that the correct code of conduct is one in which doing so is a genuine mistake and … noticing that there’s a hypothetical “better” comment is not the same as there being an implication that I should’ve written it?
Something something, how many turns of the cheek are actually correct, especially given that, the week prior, multiple commenters had been unable, with evidence+argument+personal testimony, to shift Said away from a strikingly uncharitable prior.
Mine either, to be clear; I felt by that point that Said had willingly put himself outside of the set of [signatories to the peace treaty], turning down many successive opportunities to remain in compliance with it. I was treating his statements closer to the way I think it is correct to treat the statements of the literal Donald Trump than the way I think it is correct to treat the statements of an undistinguished random Republican.
(I can go into the reasoning for that in more detail, but it seems sort of conflicty to do so unprompted.)
If Said ate breakfasts of only cereal, and Duncan said that was unhealthy and he shouldn’t do it, it is not quite right to say Duncan ‘thinks you shouldn’t eat cereal’, as he might be in favor of cereal as part of a balanced breakfast; but also it is not quite right for Duncan to ignore Said’s point that one of the main issues under contention is whether Said can eat cereal by itself (i.e. asking for examples without putting in interpretative labor).
I’m a little lost in this analogy; this is sort of where the privileging-the-hypothesis complaint comes in.
The conversation had, in other places, centered on the question of whether Said can eat cereal by itself; Logan for instance highlighted Said’s claim in a reply on FB:
Furthermore, you have mentioned the “inferential gap” several times, and suggested that it is the criticizer’s job, at least in part, to bridge it. I disagree.
There, the larger question of “can you eat only cereal, or must you eat other things in balance?” is front-and-center.
But at that point in the subthread, it was not front-and-center; yes, it was relevant context, but the specific claim being made by Said was clear, and discrete, and not at all dependent-on or changed-by that context.
The history of that chain:
Said includes, in a long comment “In summary, I think that what’s been described as ‘aiming for convergence on truth’ is some mixture of” … “contentless” … “good but basically unrelated to the rest of it” … “bad (various proposed norms of interaction such as ‘don’t ask people for examples of their claims’ and so on)”
gjm, in another long comment, includes “I don’t know where you get ‘don’t ask people for examples of their claims’ from and it sounds like a straw man” and goes on to elaborate “I think the things Duncan has actually said are more like ‘Said engages in unproductive modes of discussion where he is constantly demanding more and more rigour and detail from his interlocutors while not providing it himself’, and wherever that lands on a scale from ’100% truth’ to ‘100% bullshit’ it is not helpful to pretend that he said ‘it is bad to ask people for examples of their claims’.
There’s a bunch of other stuff going on in their back and forth, but that particular thread has been isolated and directly addressed, in other words. gjm specifically noted the separation between the major issue of whether balance is required, and this other, narrower claim.
Said replied:
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”.
Which, yes, I straightforwardly agree with the if-then statement; if “asking people for examples of their claims” didn’t fit my stated criteria for what constitutes acceptable engagement or criticism, then it would be correct to describe me as advocating for a norm of “don’t ask people for examples of their claims.”
But like. The if does not hold. It really clearly doesn’t hold. It was enough of an out-of-nowhere strawman/non-sequitur that gjm specifically called it out as ”???” at which point Said doubled down, saying the above and also
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.
It seems like, in your interpretation, I “should” (in some sense) be extending a hand of charity and understanding and, I dunno, helping Said to coax out his broader, potentially more valid point—helping him to get past his own strawman and on to something more steel, or at least flesh. Like, if I am reading you correctly above, you’re saying that, by focusing in on the narrow point that had been challenged by gjm and specifically reaffirmed by Said, I myself was making some sort of faux pas.
(Am I in fact reading you correctly?)
I do not think so. I think that, twenty exchanges prior, I perhaps owed Said something like that degree of care and charity and helping him avoid tying his own shoelaces together. I certainly feel I would owe it to, I dunno, Eric Rogstad or Julia Galef, and would not be the slightest bit loath to provide it.
But here, Said had just spent several thousand words the week prior, refusing to be budged from a weirdly uncharitable belief about the internals of my mind, despite that belief being incoherent with observable evidence and challenged by multiple non-me people. I don’t think it’s wise-in-the-sense-of-wisdom to a) engage with substantial charity in that situation, or b) expect someone else to engage with substantial charity in that situation.
(You can tell that my stated criteria do not rule out asking people for examples of their claims in part because I’ve written really quite a lot about what I think constitutes acceptable engagement or criticism, and I’ve just never come anywhere close to a criterion like that, nor have I ever complained about someone asking for examples unless it was after a long, long string of what felt like them repeatedly not sharing in the labor of truthseeking. Like, the closest I can think of is this thread with tailcalled, in which (I think/I hope) it’s pretty clear that what’s going on is that I was trying to cap the total attention paid to the essay and its discussion, and thus was loath to enter into something like an exchange of examples—not that it was bad in any fundamental sense for someone to want some. I did in fact provide some, a few comments deeper in the thread, though I headlined that I hadn’t spent much time on them.)
So in other words: I don’t think it was wrong to focus on the literal, actual claim that Said had made (since he made it, basically, twice in a row, affirming “no, I really mean this” after gjm’s objection and even saying that he thinks it is so obvious as to not be controversial. I don’t think I “ought” to have had a broader focus, under the circumstances—Said was making a specific, concrete, and false claim, and his examples utterly fail to back up that specific, concrete, and false claim (though I do agree with you that they back up something like his conception of our broader disagreement).
I dunno, I’m feeling kind of autistic, here, but I feel like if, on Less Wrong dot com, somebody makes a specific, concrete claim about my beliefs or policies, clarifies that yes, they really meant that claim, and furthermore says that such-and-such links are “citations for [me] expressing the sentiment [they’ve] ascribed to [me]” when they simply are not—
It feels likeemphatic and unapologetic rejection should be 100% okay, and not looked at askance. The fact that they are citations supporting a different claim is (or at least, I claim, should be) immaterial; it’s not my job to steelman somebody who spent hours and hours negatively psychologizing me in public (while claiming to have no particular animus, which, boy, a carbon copy of Said sure would have had Words about).
I think there’s a thing here of standards unevenly applied; surely whatever standard would’ve had me address Said’s “real” concern would’ve also had Said behave much differently at many steps prior, possibly never strawmanning me so hard in the first place?
I think this situation is, on some level, pretty symmetric.
I think the features of Said’s commenting style that people (not just Duncan!) find annoying are things that Said is deliberately optimizing for or the results of principled commitments he’s made, so it’s not just a simple bug that can be fixed.
I think the features of Duncan’s conflict resolution methods that people find offputting are similarly things that Duncan is deliberately optimizing for or the results of principled commitments he’s made, so it’s not just a simple bug that can be fixed.
I think the asymmetry breaks in that, like, a bunch of people have asked Said to stop and he won’t; I’m quite eager to stop doing the conflict resolution that people don’t like, if there can pretty please be some kind of system in place that obviates it. I much prefer the world where there are competent police to the world where I have to fight off muggers in the alley—that’s why I’m trying so hard to get there to be some kind of actually legible standards rather than there always being some plausible reason why maybe we shouldn’t just say “no” to the bullshit that Zack or Said or anonymouswhoever is pulling.
Right now, though, it feels like we’ve gone from “Ben Hoffman will claim Duncan wants to ghettoize people and it’ll be left upvoted for nine days with no mod action” to “Ray will expound on why he thinks it’s kinda off for Said to be doing what he’s doing but there won’t be anything to stop Said from doing it” and I take Oli’s point about this stuff being hard and there being other priorities but like, it’s been years. And I get a stance of, like, “well, Duncan, you’re asking for a lot,” but I’m trying pretty hard to earn it, and to … pave the way? Help make the ask smaller? … with things like the old Moderating LessWrong post and the Concentration of Force post and the more recent Basics post. Like, I can’t think of much more that someone with zero authority and zero mantle can do. My problem is that abuse and strawmanning of me gets hosted on LW and upvoted on LW and people are like, well, maybe if you patiently engaged with and overturned the abuse and strawmanning in detail instead of fighting back—
I dunno. If mods would show up and be like “false” and “cut it out” I would pretty happily never get into a scrap on LW ever again.
At the risk of guessing wrong, and perhaps typical-mind-fallacying, I imagining that you’re [rightly?] feeling a lot frustration, exasperation, and even despair about moderation on LessWrong. You’ve spend dozens (more?) and tens of thousands of words trying to make LessWrong the garden you think it ought to be (and to protect yourself here against attackers) and just to try to uphold, indeed basic standards for truthseeking discourse. You’ve written that some small validation goes a long way, so this is me trying to say that I think your feelings have a helluva lot of validity.
I don’t think that you and I share exactly the same ideals for LessWrong. PerfectLessWrong!Ruby and PerfectLessWrong!Duncan would be different (or heck, even just VeryGoodLessWrongs), though I also am pretty sure that you’d be much happier with my ideal, you’d think it was pretty good if not perfect. Respectable, maybe adequate. A garden.
And I’m really sad that the current LessWrong feels really really far short of my own ideals (and Ray of his ideals, and Oli of his ideals), etc. And not just short of a super-amazing-lofty-ideal, also short of a “this place is really under control” kind of ideal. I take responsibility for it not being so, and I’m sorry. I wouldn’t blame you for saying this isn’t good enough and wanting to leave[1], there are some pretty bad flaws.
But sir, you impugn my and my site’s honor. This is not a perfect garden, it also not a jungle. And there is an awful lot of gardening going on. I take it very seriously that LessWrong is not just any place, and it takes ongoing work to keep it so. This is approx my full-time job (and that of others too), and while I don’t work 80-hour weeks, I feel like I put a tonne of my soul into this site.
Over the last year, I’ve been particularly focused on what I suspect are existential threats to LessWrong (not even the ideal, just the decently-valuable thing we have now). I think this very much counts as gardening. The major one over last year is how to both have all the AI content (and I do think AI is the most important topic right now) and not have it eat LessWrong and turn it into the AI-website rather than the truth-seeking/effectiveness/rationality website which is actually what I believe is its true spirit[2]. So far, I feel like we’re still failing at this. On many days, the Frontpage is 90+% AI posts. It’s not been a trivial problem for many problems.
The other existential problem, beyond the topic, that I’ve been anticipating for a long time and is now heating up is the deluge of new users flowing to the site because of the rising prominence of AI. Moderation is currently our top focus, but even before that, every day – the first thing we do when the team gets in the morning – is review every new post, all first time submissions from users, and the activity of users who are getting a lot of downvotes. It’s not exactly fun, but we do it basically everyday[3]. In the interests of greater transparency and accountability, we will soon build a Rejected Content section of the site where you’ll be able to view the content we didn’t go live, and I predict that will demonstrate just how much this garden is getting tended, and that counterfactually the quality would be a lot lot worse. You can see here a recent internal document that describes my sense of priorities for the team.
I think the discourse norms and bad behavior (and I’m willing to say now in advance of my more detailed thoughts that there’s a lot of badness to how Said behaves) are also serious threats to the site, and we do give those attention too. They haven’t felt like the most pressing threats (or for that matter, opportunities, recently), and I could be making a mistake there, but we do take them seriously. Our focus (which I think has a high opportunity cost) has been turned to the exchanges between you and Said this week, plausibly you’ve done us a service to draw our attention to behavior we should be deeming intolerable, and it’s easily 50-100 hours of team attention.
It is plausible the LessWrong team has made a mistake in not prioritizing this stuff more highly over the years (it has been years – though Said and Zack and others have in fact received hundreds of hours of attention), and there are definitely particular projects that I think turned out to be misguided and less valuable than marginal moderation would have been, but I’ll claim that it was definitely not an obvious mistake that we haven’t addressed the problems you’re most focused on.
It is actually on my radar and I’ve been actively wanted for a while a system that reliably gets the mod team to show up and say “cut it out” sometimes. I suspect that’s what should have happened a lot earlier on in your recent exchanges with Said. I might have liked to say “Duncan, we the mods certify that if you disengage, it is no mark against you” or something. I’m not sure. Ray mentioned the concept of “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Moderation” and I like that idea, and would like to get soon to the higher level where we’re actively intervening in this cases. I regret that I in particular on the team am not great at dropping what I’m doing to pivot when these threads come up, perhaps I should work on that.
I think a claim you could make is the LessWrong team should have hired more people so they could cover more of this. Arguing why we haven’t (or why Lightcone as a whole didn’t keep more team members on LessWrong team) is a bigger deal. I think things would be worse if LessWrong had been bigger most of the time, and barring unusually good candidate, it’d be bad to hire right now.
All this to say, this garden has a lot of shortcomings, but the team works quite hard to keep it at least as good as it is and try to make it better. Fair enough if it doesn’t meet your standards or not how you’d do it, perhaps we’re not all that competent, fair enough.
(And also you’ve had a positive influence on us, so your efforts are not completely in vain. We do refer to your moderation post/philosophy even if we haven’t adopted it wholesale, and make use of many of the concepts you’ve crystallized. For that I am grateful. Those are contributions I’d be sad to lose, but I don’t want to push you to offer to them to us if doing so is too costly for you.)
I will also claim though that a better version of Duncan would be better able to tolerate the shortcomings of LessWrong and improve it too; that even if your efforts to change LW aren’t working enough, there are efforts on yourself that would make you better, and better able to benefit from the LessWrong that is.
This is fair, and I apologize; in that line I was speaking from despair and not particularly tracking Truth.
A [less straightforwardly wrong and unfair] phrasing would have been something like “this is not a Japanese tea garden; it is a British cottage garden.”
I probably rushed this comment out the door in a “defend my honor, set the record straight” instinct that I don’t think reliably leads to good discourse and is not what I should be modeling on LessWrong.
I didn’t make it to every point, but hopefully you find this more of the substantive engagement you were hoping for.
I did, thanks.
gjm specifically noted the separation between the major issue of whether balance is required, and this other, narrower claim.
I think gjm’s comment was missing the observation that “comment that just ask for examples” are themselves an example of “unproductive modes of discussion where he is constantly demanding more and more rigour and detail from his interlocutors while not providing it himself”, and so it wasn’t cleanly about “balance: required or not?”. I think a reasonable reader could come away from that comment of gjm’s uncertain whether or not Said simply saying “examples?” would count as an example.
My interpretation of this section is basically the double crux dots arguing over the labels they should have, with Said disagreeing strenuously with calling his mode “unproductive” (and elsewhere over whether labor is good or bad, or how best to minimize it) and moving from the concrete examples to an abstract pattern (I suspect because he thinks the former is easier to defend than the latter).
I should also note here that I don’t think you have explicitly staked out that you think Said just saying “examples?” is bad (like, you didn’t here, which was the obvious place to), I am inferring that from various things you’ve written (and, tho this source is more suspect and so has less influence, ways other people have reacted to Said before).
Said to coax out his broader, potentially more valid point
Importantly, I think Said’s more valid point was narrower, not broader, and the breadth was the ‘strawmanning’ part of it. (If you mean to refer to the point dealing with the broader context, I agree with that.) The invalid “Duncan’s rule against horses” turning into the valid “Duncan’s rule against white horses”. If you don’t have other rules against horses—you’re fine with brown ones and black one and chestnut ones and so on—I think that points towards your rule against white horses pretty clearly. [My model of you thinks that language is for compiling into concepts instead of pointing at concepts and so “Duncan’s rule against horses” compiles into “Duncan thinks horses should be banned” which is both incorrect and wildly inconsistent with the evidence. I think language is for both, and when one gives you a nonsense result, you should check the other.]
I will note a way here in which it is not quite fair that I am saying “I think you didn’t do a reasonable level of interpretive labor when reading Said”, in the broader context of your complaint that Said doesn’t do much interpretive labor (deliberately!). I think it is justified by the difference in how the two of you respond to the failure of that labor.
(Am I in fact reading you correctly?)
I am trying to place the faux pas not in that you “reacted at all to that prompt” but “how you reacted to the prompt”. More in the next section.
clarifies that yes, they really meant that claim,
I think this point is our core disagreement. I see the second comment saying “yeah, Duncan’s rule against horses, the thing where he dislikes white ones”, and you proceeding as if he just said “Duncan’s rule against horses.” I think there was a illusion of transparency behind “specifically reaffirmed by Said”.
Like, I think if you had said “STRAWMAN!” and tried to get us to put a scarlet S in Said’s username, this would have been a defensible accusation, and the punishment unusual but worth considering. Instead I think you said “LIAR!” and that just doesn’t line up with my reading of the thread (tho I acknowledge disagreement about the boundary between ‘lying’ and ‘strawmanning’) or my sense of how to disagree properly. In my favorite world, you call it a mislabeling and identify why you think the label fails to match (again, noting that gjm attempted to do so, tho I think not in a way that bridged the gap).
I think there’s a thing here of standards unevenly applied; surely whatever standard would’ve had me address Said’s “real” concern would’ve also had Said behave much differently at many steps prior, possibly never strawmanning me so hard in the first place?
I mean, for sure I wish Said had done things differently! I described them in some detail, and not strawmanning you so hard in the first place was IMO the core one.
When I say “locally”, I am starting the clock at Killing Socrates, which was perhaps unclear.
if there can pretty please be some kind of system in place that obviates it.
Do you think Said would not also stop if, for every post he read on LW, he found that someone else had already made the comment he would have liked to have made?
(I do see a difference where the outcomes you seek to achieve are more easily obtained with mod powers backing them up, but I don’t think that affects the primary point.)
If mods would show up and be like “false” and “cut it out” I would pretty happily never get into a scrap on LW ever again.
So, over here Elizabeth ‘summarizes’ Said in an unflattering way, and Said objects. I don’t think I will reliably see such comments before those mentioned in them do (there were only 23 minutes before Said objected) and it is not obvious to me that LW would be improved by me also objecting now.
But perhaps our disagreement is that, on seeing Elizabeth’s comment, I didn’t have a strong impulse to ‘set the record straight’; I attribute that mostly to not seeing Elizabeth’s comment as “the record,” tho I’m open to arguments that I should.
I think a reasonable reader could come away from that comment of gjm’s uncertain whether or not Said simply saying “examples?” would count as an example.
...
I should also note here that I don’t think you have explicitly staked out that you think Said just saying “examples?” is bad (like, you didn’t here, which was the obvious place to), I am inferring that from various things you’ve written (and, tho this source is more suspect and so has less influence, ways other people have reacted to Said before).
To clarify:
If one starts out looking to collect and categorize evidence of their conversational partner not doing their fair share of the labor, then a bunch of comments that just say “Examples?” would go into the pile. But just encountering a handful of comments that just say “Examples?” would not be enough to send a reasonable person toward the hypothesis that their conversational partner reliably doesn’t do their fair share of the labor.
“Do you have examples?” is one of the core, common, prosocial moves, and correctly so. It is a bid for the other person to put in extra work, but the scales of “are we both contributing?” don’t need to be balanced every three seconds, or even every conversation. Sometimes I’m the asker/learner and you’re the teacher/expounder, and other times the roles are reversed, and other times we go back and forth.
The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It’s having 85+% of your engagement be asking other people to do labor on your behalf, and never reciprocating, and when people are like, hey, could you not, or even just a little less? being supercilious about it.
Said simply saying “examples?” is an example, then, but only because of the strong prior from his accumulated behavior; if the rule is something like “doing this <100x/wk is fine, doing it >100x/wk is less fine,” then the question of whether a given instance “is an example” is slightly tricky.
I think this point is our core disagreement. I see the second comment saying “yeah, Duncan’s rule against horses, the thing where he dislikes white ones”, and you proceeding as if he just said “Duncan’s rule against horses.” I think there was a illusion of transparency behind “specifically reaffirmed by Said”.
Yeah, you may have pinned it down (the disagreement). I definitely don’t (currently) think it’s sensible to read the second comment that way, and certainly not sensible enough to mentally dock someone for not reading it that way even if that reading is technically available (which I agree it is).
Like, I think if you had said “STRAWMAN!” and tried to get us to put a scarlet S in Said’s username, this would have been a defensible accusation
I perhaps have some learned helplessness around what I can, in fact, expect from the mod team; I claim that if I had believed that this would be received as defensible I would’ve done that instead. At the time, I felt helpless and alone*/had no expectation of mod support for reasons I think are reasonable, and so was not proceeding as if there was any kind of request I could make, and so was not brainstorming requests.
*alone vis-a-vis moderators, not alone vis-a-vis other commenters like gjm
I do think that you should put a scarlet P in Said’s username, since he’s been doing it for a couple weeks now and is still doing it (c.f. “I have yet to see any compelling reason to conclude that this [extremely unlikely on its face hypothesis] is false.”).
In my favorite world, you call it a mislabeling and identify why you think the label fails to match (again, noting that gjm attempted to do so, tho I think not in a way that bridged the gap).
I again agree that this is clearly a better set of moves in some sense, but I’m thinking in a fabricated options frame and being, like, is that really actually a possible world, in that the whole problem is Said’s utterly exhausting and unrewarding mode of engagement. Like, I wonder if I might convince you that your favorite world is incoherent and impossible, because it’s one in which people are engaging in the colloquial definition of insanity and never updating their heuristics based on feedback. Or maybe you’re saying “do it for the audience and for site norms, then,” which feels less like throwing good money after bad.
But like. I think I’m getting dinged for impatience when I did not, previously, get headpats for patience? The wanted behavior feels unincentivized relative to the unwanted behavior.
When I say “locally”, I am starting the clock at Killing Socrates, which was perhaps unclear.
No, that was pretty clear, and that’s what generated the :((((((((. The choice to start the clock there feels unfair-to-Neville, like if I were a teacher I would glance at that and say “okay, obviously this is not the local beginning” and look further.
Do you think Said would not also stop if, for every post he read on LW, he found that someone else had already made the comment he would have liked to have made?
I am wary of irresponsibly theorizing about the contents of someone else’s mind. I do think that, if one looks over the explosive proliferation of his threads once he starts a back-and-forth, it’s unlikely that there’s some state in which Said is like “ah, people are already saying all the things!” I suspect that Said (like others, to be clear; this is not precisely a criticism) has an infinite priority list, and if all the things of top priority are handled by other commenters, he’ll move down to lower ones.
I do think that if you took all of Said’s comments, and distributed 8% of them each into the corpus of comments of Julia Galef, Anna Salamon, Rob Bensinger, Scott Garrabrant, you, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Logan Brienne Strohl, Oliver Habryka, Kelsey Piper, Nate Soares, Eric Rogstad, Spencer Greenberg, and Dan Keys this would be much better. Part of the problem is the sheer concentration of princely entitlement and speaking-as-if-it-is-the-author’s-job-to-convince-Said-particularly-regardless-of-whether-Said’s-skepticism-is-a-signal-of-any-real-problem-with-the-claims.
If Kelsey Piper locally is like, buddy, you need to give me more examples, or if Spencer Greenberg locally is like, but what the heck do you even mean by “annoying,” there’s zero sense (on my part, at least) that here we go again, more taking-without-contributing. Instead, with Kelsey and Spencer it feels like a series of escalating favors and a tightening of the web of mutual obligation in which everybody is grateful to everybody else for having put in so many little bits of work here and there, of course I want to spill some words to help connect the dots for Kelsey and Spencer, they’ve spilled so many words helping me.
The pattern of “give, then take, then give, then take, then take, then take, then give, then give” is a healthy one to model, and is patriotically Athenian in the frame of my recent essay, and is not one which, if a thousand newbies were to start emulating, would cause a problem.
But perhaps our disagreement is that, on seeing Elizabeth’s comment, I didn’t have a strong impulse to ‘set the record straight’
I don’t think that mods should be chiming in and setting the record straight on every little thing. But when, like, Said spends multiple thousands of words in a literally irrational (in the sense of not having cruxes and not being open to update and being directly contradicted by evidence) screed strawmanning me and claiming that I block people for disagreeing with my claims or criticizing my arguments—
—and furthermore when I ask for mod help—
—then I do think that a LessWrong where a mod shows up to say “false” and “actually cut it out for real” is meaningfully different and meaningfully better than the current Wild West feel where Said doesn’t get in trouble but I do.
The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It’s having 85+% of your engagement be asking other people to do labor on your behalf, and never reciprocating, and when people are like, hey, could you not, or even just a little less? being supercilious about it.
But why should this be a problem?
Why should people say “hey, could you not, or even just a little less”? If you do something that isn’t bad, that isn’t not a problem, why should people ask you to stop? If it’s a good thing to do, why wouldn’t they instead ask you to do it more?
And why, indeed, are you still speaking in this transactional way?
If you write a post about some abstract concept, without any examples of it, and I write a post that says “What are some examples?”, I am not asking you to do labor on my behalf, I am not asking for a favor (which must be justified by some “favor credit”, some positive account of favors in the bank of Duncan). Quite frankly, I find that claim ridiculous to the point of offensiveness. What I am doing, in that scenario, is making a positive contribution to the discussion, both for your benefit and (even more importantly) for the benefit of other readers and commenters.
There is no good reason why you should resent responding to a request like “what are some examples”. There is no good reason why you should view it as an unjustified and entitled demand for a favor. There is definitely no good reason why you should view acceding to that request as being “for my benefit” (instead of, say, for your benefit, and for the benefit of readers).
(And the gall of saying “never reciprocating”, to me! When I write a post, I include examples pre-emptively, because I know that I should be asked to do so otherwise. Not “will be asked”, of course—but “should”. And when I write a post without enough examples, and someone asks for examples, I respond in great detail. Note that my responses in that thread are much, much longer than the comment which asked for examples. Of course they are! Because the question doesn’t need to be longer—but the answers do!)
(And you might say: “but Said, you barely write any posts—like one a year, at best!”. Indeed. Indeed.)
There is no good reason why you should resent responding to a request like “what are some examples”.
Maybe “resent” is doing most work here, but an excellent reason to not respond is that it takes work. To the extent that there are norms in place that urge response, they create motivation to suppress criticism that would urge response. An expectation that it’s normal for criticism to be a request for response that should normally be granted is pressure to do the work of responding, which is costly, which motivates defensive action in the form of suppressing criticism.
A culture could make it costless (all else equal) to ignore the event of a criticism having been made. This is an inessential reason for suppressing criticism that can be removed, and therefore should, to make criticism cheaper and more abundant.
The content of criticism may of course motivate the author of a criticized text to make further statements, but the fact of criticism’s posting by itself should not. The fact of not responding to criticism is some sort of noisy evidence of not having a good response that is feasible or hedonic to make, but that’s Law, not something that can change for the sake of mechanism design.
It’s certainly doing a decent amount of work, I agree.
Anyhow, your overall point is taken—although I have to point out that that your last sentence seems like a rebuttal of your next-to-last sentence.
That having been said, of course the content of criticism matters. A piece of criticism could simply be bad, and clearly wrong; and then it’s good and proper to just ignore it (perhaps after having made sure that an interested party could, if they so wished, easily see or learn why that criticism is bad). I do not, and would not, advocate for a norm that all comments, all critical questions, etc., regardless of their content, must always be responded to. That is unreasonable.
I also want to note—as I’ve said several times in this discussion, but it bears repeating—there is nothing problematic or blameworthy about someone other than the author of a post responding to questions, criticism, requests for examples, etc. That is fine. Collaborative development of ideas is a perfectly normal and good thing.
What that adds up to, I think, is a set of requirements for a set of social norms which is quite compatible with your suggestion of making it “costless (all else equal) to ignore the event of a criticism having been made”.
The content of criticism may of course motivate the author of a criticized text to make further statements, but the fact of criticism’s posting by itself should not. The fact of not responding to criticism is some sort of noisy evidence of not having a good response that is feasible or hedonic to make, but that’s Law, not something that can change for the sake of mechanism design.
I have to point out that that your last sentence seems like a rebuttal of your next-to-last sentence
They are in opposition, but the point is that they are about different kinds of things, and one of them can’t respond to policy decisions. It’s useful to have a norm that lessens the burden of addressing criticism. It’s Law of reasoning that this burden can nonetheless materialize. The Law is implacable but importantly asymmetric, it only holds when it does, not when the court of public opinion says it should. While the norms are the other way around, and their pressure is somewhat insensitive to facts of a particular situation, so it’s worth pointing them in a generally useful direction, with no hope for their nuanced or at all sane response to details.
Perhaps the presence of Law justifies norms that are over-the-top forgiving to ignoring criticism, or find ignoring criticism a bit praiseworthy when it would be at all unpleasant not to ignore it, to oppose the average valence of Law, while of course attempting to preserve its asymmetry. So I’d say my last sentence in that comment argues that the next-to-last sentence should be stronger. Which I’m not sure I agree with, but here’s the argument.
Said, above, is saying a bunch of things, many of which I agree with, as if they are contra my position or my previous claims.
He can’t pass my ITT (not that I’ve asked him to), which means that he doesn’t understand the thing he’s trying to disagree with, which means that his disagreement is not actually pointing at my position; the things he finds ridiculous and offensive are cardboard cutouts of his own construction. More detail on that over here.
BTW I was surprised earlier to see you agree with the ‘relational’ piece of this comment because Duncan’s grandparent comment seems like it’s a pretty central example of that. (I view you as having more of a “visitor-commons” orientation towards LW, and Duncan has more of an orientation where this is a place where people inhabit their pairwise relationships, as well as more one-to-many relationships.)
Sorry, I’m not quite sure I follow the references here. You’re saying that… this comment… is a central example of… what, exactly?
(I view you as having more of a “visitor-commons” orientation towards LW, and Duncan has more of an orientation where this is a place where people inhabit their pairwise relationships, as well as more one-to-many relationships.)
That… seems like it’s probably accurate… I think? I think I’d have to more clearly understand what you’re getting at in your comment, in order to judge whether this part makes sense to me.
Sorry, my previous comment wasn’t very clear. Earlier I said:
Duncan is trying to suggest what is permissible or impermissible is more relational and deals with people’s attitudes towards each other (as suggested by gjm here).
and you responded with:
I also—and, perhaps, more importantly—think that the interactions in question are not only fine, but good, in a “relational” sense.
(and a few related comments) which made me think “hmm, I don’t think we mean the same thing by ‘relational’. Then Duncan’s comment had a frame that I would have described as ‘relational’—as in focusing on the relationships between the people saying and hearing the words—which you then described as transactional.
I think that the sense in which I would characterize Duncan’s description as “transactional” is… mostly orthogonal to the question of “is this a relational frame”. I don’t think that this has much to do with the “‘visitor commons’ vs. ‘pairwise relationships’” distinction, either (although that distinction is an interesting and possibly important one in its own right, and you’re certainly more right than wrong about where my preferences lie in that regard).
(There’s more that I could say about this, but I don’t know whether anything of importance hinges on this point. It seems like it mostly shouldn’t, but perhaps you are a better judge of that…)
“—then I do think that a LessWrong where a mod shows up to say “false” and “actually cut it out for real” is meaningfully different and meaningfully better than the current Wild West feel where Said doesn’t get in trouble but I do.”
I think Vaniver right now is focusing on resolving the point “is Said a liar?”, but not resolving the “who did most wrong?” question. (I’m not actually 100% sure on Vaniver’s goals/takes at the moment). I agree this is an important subquestion but it’s not the primary question I’m interested in.
I’m somewhat worried about this thread taking in more energy that it quite warrants, and making Duncan feel more persecuted than really makes sense here.
I roughly agree with Vaniver than “Liar!” isn’t the right accusation to have levied, but also don’t judge you harshly for having made it.
I think this comment of mine summarizes my relevant opinions here.
(tagging @Vaniver to make sure he’s at least tracking this comment)
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 interpret a lot of Duncan’s complaints here thru the lens of imaginary injury that he writes about here.
I just want to highlight this link (to one of Duncan’s essays on his Medium blog), which I think most people are likely to miss otherwise.
That is an excellent post! If it was posted on Less Wrong (I understand why it wasn’t, of course EDIT: I was mistaken about understanding this; see replies), I’d strong-upvote it without reservation. (I disagree with some parts of it, of course, such as one of the examples—but then, that is (a) an excellent reason to provide specific examples, and part of what makes this an excellent post, and (b) the reason why top-level posts quite rightly don’t have agree/disagree voting. On the whole, the post’s thesis is simply correct, and I appreciate and respect Duncan for having written it.)
It’s not on LessWrong because of you, specifically. Like, literally that specific essay, I consciously considered where to put it, and decided not to put it here because, at the time, there was no way to prevent you from being part of the subsequent conversation.
Said, as a quick note—this particular comment reminds me of the “bite my thumb” scene from Romeo and Juliet. To you, it might be innocuous, but to me, and I suspect to Duncan and others, it sounds like a deliberate insult, with just enough of a veil of innocence to make it especially infuriating.
I am presuming you did not actually mean this as an insult, but were instead meaning to express your genuine confusion about Duncan’s thought process. I am curious to know a few things:
Did you recognize that it sounded potentially insulting?
If so, why did you choose to express yourself in this insulting-sounding manner?
If not, does it concern you that you may not recognize when you are expressing yourself in an insulting-sounding way, and is that something you are interested in changing?
And if you didn’t know you sounded insulting, and don’t care to change, why is that?
There are some things which cannot be expressed in a non-insulting manner (unless we suppose that the target is such a saint that no criticism can affect their ego; but who among us can pretend to that?).
I did not intend insult, in the sense that insult wasn’t my goal. (I never intend insult, as a rule. What few exceptions exist, concern no one involved in this discussion.)
But, of course, I recognize that my comment is insulting. That is not its purpose, and if I could write it non-insultingly, I would do so. But I cannot.
So, you ask:
If so, why did you choose to express yourself in this insulting-sounding manner?
The choice was between writing something that was necessary for the purpose of fulfilling appropriate and reasonable conversational goals, but could be written only in such a way that anyone but a saint would be insulted by it—or writing nothing.
I chose the former because I judged it to be the correct choice: writing nothing, simply in order to to avoid insult, would have been worse than writing the comment which I wrote.
(This explanation is also quite likely to apply to any past or future comments I write which seem to be insulting in similar fashion.)
But, of course, I recognize that my comment is insulting. That is not its purpose, and if I could write it non-insultingly, I would do so. But I cannot.
I want to register that I don’t believe you that you cannot, if we’re using the ordinary meaning of “cannot”. I believe that it would be more costly for you, but it seems to me that people are very often able to express content like that in your comment, without being insulting.
I’m tempted to try to rephrase your comment in a non-insulting way, but I would only be able to convey its meaning-to-me, and I predict that this is different enough from its meaning-to-you that you would object on those grounds. However, insofar as you communicated a thing to me, you could have said that thing in a non-insulting way.
I believe you when you say that you don’t believe me.
But I submit to you that unless you can provide a rephrasing which (a) preserves all relevant meaning while not being insulting, and (b) could have been generated by me, your disbelief is not evidence of anything except the fact that some things seem easy until you discover that they’re impossible.
My guess is that you believe it’s impossible because the content of your comment implies a negative fact about the person you’re responding to. But insofar as you communicated a thing to me, it was in fact a thing about your own failure to comprehend, and your own experience of bizarreness. These are not unflattering facts about Duncan, except insofar as I already believe your ability to comprehend is vast enough to contain all “reasonable” thought processes.
Indeed, they are not—or so it would seem. So why would my comment be insulting?
After all, I didn’t write “your stated reason is bizarre”, but “I find your stated reason bizarre”. I didn’t write “it seems like your thinking here is incoherent”, but “I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here”. I didn’t… etc.
So what makes my comment insulting?
Please note, I am not saying “my comment isn’t insulting, and anyone who finds it so is silly”. It is insulting! And it’s going to stay insulting no matter how you rewrite it, unless you either change what it actually says or so obfuscate the meaning that it’s not possible to tell what it actually says.
The thing I am actually saying—the meaning of the words, the communicated claims—imply unflattering facts about Duncan.[1] There’s no getting around that.
The only defensible recourse, for someone who objects to my comment, is to say that one should simply not say insulting things; and if there are relevant things to say which cannot be said non-insultingly, then they oughtn’t be said… and if anything is lost thereby, well, too bad.
And that would be a consistent point of view, certainly. But not one to which I subscribe; nor do I think that I ever will.
To whatever extent a reader believes that I’m a basically reasonable person, anyway. Ironically, a reader with a low opinion of me should find my comment less insulting to Duncan. Duncan himself, one might imagine, would not finding it insulting at all. But of course that’s not how people work, and there’s no point in deluding ourselves otherwise…
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that one should never say insulting things. I think that people should avoid saying insulting things in certain contexts, and that LessWrong comments are one such context.
I find it hard to square your claim that insultingness was not the comment’s purpose with the claim that it cannot be rewritten to elide the insult.
An insult is not simply a statement with a meaning that is unflattering to its target—it involves using words in a way that aggressively emphasizes the unflatteringness and suggests, to some extent, a call to non-belief-based action on the part of the reader.
If I write a comment entirely in bold, in some sense I cannot un-bold it without changing its effect on the reader. But I think it would be pretty frustrating to most people if I then claimed that I could not un-bold it without changing its meaning.
I’m not sure what you mean—as far as I can tell, I’m the one who suggested trying to rephrase the insulting comment, and in my world Said roughly agreed with me about its infeasibility in his response, since it’s not going to be possible for me to prove either point: Any rephrasing I give will elicit objections on both semantics-relative-to-Said and Said-generatability grounds, and readers who believe Said will go on believing him, while readers who disbelieve will go on disbelieving.
Nor should I, unless I believe that someone somewhere might honestly reconsider their position based on such an attempt. So far my guess is that you’re not saying that you expect to honestly reconsider your position, and Said certainly isn’t. If that’s wrong then let me know! I don’t make a habit of starting doomed projects.
Nor should I, unless I believe that someone somewhere might honestly reconsider their position based on such an attempt.
I think for the purposes of promoting clarity this is a bad rule of thumb. The decision to explain should be more guided by effort/hedonicity and availability of other explanations of the same thing that are already there, not by strategically withholding things based on predictions of how others would treat an explanation. (So for example “I don’t feel like it” seems like an excellent reason not to do this, and doesn’t need to be voiced to be equally valid.)
I think I agree that this isn’t a good explicit rule of thumb, and I somewhat regret how I put this.
But it’s also true that a belief in someone’s good-faith engagement (including an onlooker’s), and in particular their openness to honest reconsideration, is an important factor in the motivational calculus, and for good reasons.
openness to honest reconsideration, is an important factor in the motivational calculus
The structure of a conflict and motivation prompted by that structure functions in a symmetric way, with the same influence irrespective of whether the argument is right or wrong.
But the argument itself, once presented, is asymmetric, it’s all else equal stronger when correct than when it’s not. This is a reason to lean towards publishing things, perhaps even setting up weird mechanisms like encouraging people to ignore criticism they dislike in order to make its publication more likely.
If you’re not even willing to attempt the thing you say should be done, you have no business claiming to be arguing or negotiating in good faith.
You claimed this was low-effort. You then did not put in the effort to do it. This strongly implies that you don’t even believe your own claim, in which case why should anyone else believe it?
It also tests your theory. If you can make the modification easily, then there is room for debate about whether Said could. If you can’t, then your claim was wrong and Said obviously can’t either.
I think it’s pretty rough for me to engage with you here, because you seem to be consistently failing to read the things I’ve written. I did not say it was low-effort. I said that it was possible. Separately, you seem to think that I owe you something that I just definitely do not owe you. For the moment, I don’t care whether you think I’m arguing in bad faith; at least I’m reading what you’ve written.
Additionally, yes, you do owe me something. The same thing you owe to everyone else reading this comment section, Said included. An actual good-faith effort to probe at cruxes to the extent possible. You have shown absolutely no sign of that in this part of the conversation and precious little of it in the rest of it. Which means that your whole side of this conversation has been weak evidence that Said is correct and you are not.
Which means that your whole side of this conversation has been weak evidence that Said is correct and you are not.
This might be true, but it doesn’t follow that anyone owes anyone anything as a result. Doing something as a result might shift the evidence, but people don’t have obligations to shift evidence.
Also, I think cultivating an environment where arguments against your own views can take root is more of an obligation than arguing for them, and it’s worth arguing against your own views when you see a clear argument pointing in that direction. But still, I wouldn’t go so far as to call even that an actual obligation.
You’ve said very little in a great deal of words. And, as I said initially, you haven’t even attempted this.
unless you can provide a rephrasing which (a) preserves all relevant meaning while not being insulting, and (b) could have been generated by me, your disbelief is not evidence of anything except the fact that some things seem easy until you discover that they’re impossible.
Forget requirement (b). You haven’t even attempted fulfilling requirement (a). And for as long as you haven’t, it is unarguably true that your disbelief is not evidence for any of your claims or beliefs.
This is the meaning of “put up or shut up”. If you want to be taken seriously, act seriously.
I think that people should avoid saying insulting things in certain contexts, and that LessWrong comments are one such context.
I more or less agree with this; I think that posting and commenting on Less Wrong is definitely a place to try to avoid saying anything insulting.
But not to try infinitely hard. Sometimes, there is no avoiding insult. If you remove all the insult that isn’t core to what you’re saying, and if what you’re saying is appropriate, relevant, etc., and there’s still insult left over—I do not think that it’s a good general policy to avoid saying the thing, just because it’s insulting.
An insult is not simply a statement with a meaning that is unflattering to its target—it involves using words in a way that aggressively emphasizes the unflatteringness and suggests, to some extent, a call to non-belief-based action on the part of the reader.
By that measure, my comment does not qualify as an insult. (And indeed, as it happens, I wouldn’t call it “an insult”; but “insulting” is slightly different in connotation, I think. Either way, I don’t think that my comment may fairly be said to have these qualities which you list. Certainly there’s no “call to non-belief-based action”…!)
If I write a comment entirely in bold, in some sense I cannot un-bold it without changing its effect on the reader. But I think it would be pretty frustrating to most people if I then claimed that I could not un-bold it without changing its meaning.
True, of course… but also, so thoroughly dis-analogous to the actual thing that we’re discussing that it mostly seems to me to be a non sequitur.
By that measure, my comment does not qualify as an insult. (And indeed, as it happens, I wouldn’t call it “an insult”; but “insulting” is slightly different in connotation, I think. Either way, I don’t think that my comment may fairly be said to have these qualities which you list.
I think I disagree that your comment does not have these qualities in some measure, and they are roughly what I’m objecting to when I ask that people not be insulting. I don’t think I want you to never say anything with an unflattering implication, though I do think this is usually best avoided as well. I’m hopeful that this is a crux, as it might explain some of the other conversation I’ve seen about the extent to which you can predict people’s perception of rudeness.
There are of course more insulting ways you could have conveyed the same meaning. But there are also less insulting ways (when considering the extent to which the comment emphasizes the unflatteringness and the call to action that I’m suggesting readers will infer).
Certainly there’s no “call to non-belief-based action”…!)
I believe that none was intended, but I also expect that people (mostly subconsciously!) interpret (a very small) one from the particular choice of words and phrasing. Where the action is something like “you should scorn this person”, and not just “this person has unflattering quality X”. The latter does not imply the former.
I think that, at this point, we’re talking about nuances so subtle, distinctions so fragile (in that they only rarely survive even minor changes of context, etc.), that it’s basically impossible to predict how they will affect any particular person’s response to any particular comment in any particular situation.
To put it another way, the variation (between people, between situations, etc.) in how any particular bit of wording will be perceived, is much greater than the difference made by the changes in wording that you seem to be talking about. So the effects of any attempt to apply the principles you suggest is going to be indistinguishable from noise.
And that means that any effort spent on doing so will be wasted.
I actually DO believe you can’t write this in not-insulting way. I find it the result of not prioritizing developing and practicing those skills in general.
while i do judge you for this, i judge you for this one time, on the meta-level, instead of judging any instance separately. as i find this behavior orderly and predictable.
Original: “I find your stated reason bizarre to the point where I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here.”
New version 1: “I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here.”
New version 2: “I don’t understand your stated reason at all.”
New version 3: Omit that sentence.
These shift the sentence from a judgment on Duncan’s reasoning to a sharing of Said’s own experience, which (for me, at least) removes the unnecessary/escalatory part of the insult.
New version 4: “(I find your stated reason bizarre to the point where I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here. Like, this is a statement about me, not about your thinking, but that’s where I am. I kinda wish there was a way to say this non-insultingly, but I don’t know such a way.)”
It seems to me that Czynski is just plain wrong here. But I have no expectation of changing his mind, no expectation that engaging with him will be fun or enlightening for me, and also I think he’s wrong in ways that not many bystanders will be confused about if they even see this.
If someone other than Czynski or Said would be interested in a reply to the above comment, feel free to say so and I’ll provide one.
Version 1 is probably not the same content, since it is mostly about the speaker, and in any case preserves most of the insultingness. Version 2 is making it entirely about the speaker and therefore definitely different, losing the important content. Version 3 is very obviously definitely not the same content and I don’t know why you bothered including it. (Best guess: you were following the guideline of naming 3 things rather than 1. If so, there is a usual lesson when that guideline fails.)
Shifting to sharing the speaker’s experience is materially different. The content of the statement was a truth claim—making it a claim about an individual’s experience changes it from being about reality to being about social reality, which is not the same thing. It is important to be able to make truth claims directly about other people’s statements, because truth claims are the building blocks of real models of the world.
Hmm interesting. I agree that there is a difference between a claim about an individual’s experience, and a claim about reality. The former is about a perception of reality, whereas the latter is about reality itself. In that case, I see why you would object to the paraphrasing—it changes the original statement into a weaker claim.
I also agree that it is important to be able to make claims about reality, including other people’s statements. After all, people’s statements are also part of our reality, so we need to be able to discuss and reason about it.
I suppose what I disagree with thus that the original statement is valid as a claim about reality. It seems to me that statements are generally/by default claims about our individual perceptions of reality. (e.g. “He’s very tall.”) A claim becomes a statement about reality only when linked (implicitly or explicitly) to something concrete. (e.g. “He’s in the 90th percentile in height for American adult males.” or “He’s taller than Daddy.” or “He’s taller than the typical gymnast I’ve trained for competitions.”)
To say a stated reason is “bizarre” is a value judgment, and therefore cannot be considered a claim about reality. This is because there is no way to measure its truth value. If bizarre means “strange/unusual”, then what exactly is “normal/usual”? How Less Wrong posters who upvoted Said’s comment would think? How people with more than 1000 karma on Less Wrong would think? There is no meaning behind the word “bizarre” except as an indicator of the writer’s perspective (i.e. what the claim is trying to say is “The stated reason is bizarre to Said”).
I suppose this also explains why such a statement would seem insulting to people who are more Duncan-like. (I acknowledge that you find the paraphrase as insulting as the original. However, since the purpose of discussion is to find a way so people who are Duncan-like and people who are Said-like can communicate and work together, I believe the key concern should be whether or not someone who is Duncan-like would feel less insulted by the paraphrase. After all, people who are Duncan-like feel insulted by different things than people who are Said-like.)
For people who are Duncan-like, I expect the insult comes about because it presents a subjective (social reality) statement in the form of an objective (reality) statement. Said is making a claim about his own perspective, but he is presenting it as if it is objective truth, which can feel like he is invalidating all other possible perspectives. I would guess that people who are more Said-like are less sensitive, either because they think it is already obvious that Said is just making a claim from his own perspective or because they are less susceptible to influence from other people’s claims (e.g. I don’t care if the entire world tells me I am wrong, I don’t ever waver because I know that I am right.)
Version 3 is very obviously definitely not the same content and I don’t know why you bothered including it.
I included Version 3 because after coming up with Version 2, I noticed it was very similar to the earlier sentence (“I definitely no longer understand.”), so I thought another valid example would be simply omitting the sentence. It seemed appropriate to me because part of being polite is learning to keep your thoughts to yourself when they do not contribute anything useful to the conversation.
somewhere (i can’t find it now) some else wrote that if he will do that, Said always can say it’s not exactly what he means.
In this case, i find the comment itself not very insulting—the insult is in the general absent of Goodwill between Said and Duncan, and in the refuse to do interpretive labor. so any comment of “my model of you was <model> and now i just confused” could have worked.
my model of Duncan avoided to post it here from the general problems in LW, but i wasn’t surprised it was specific problem. I have no idea what was Said’s model of Duncan. but, i will try, with the caveat that the Said’s model of Duncan suggested is almost certainly not true :
I though that you avoid putting it in LW because there will be strong and wrong pushback here against the concept of imaginary injury. it seem coherent with the crux of the post. now, when I learn the true, i simply confused. in my model, what you want to avoid is exactly the imaginary injury described in the post, and i can’t form coherent model of you.
i suspect Said would have say i don’t pass his ideological Turning test on that, or continue to say it’s not exact. I submit that if i cannot, it’s not writing not-insultingly, but passing his ideological turning test.
There are some things which cannot be expressed in a non-insulting manner (unless we suppose that the target is such a saint that no criticism can affect their ego; but who among us can pretend to that?).
I did not intend insult, in the sense that insult wasn’t my goal. (I never intend insult, as a rule. What few exceptions exist, concern no one involved in this discussion.)
But, of course, I recognize that my comment is insulting. That is not its purpose, and if I could write it non-insultingly, I would do so. But I cannot.
I’m not quite clear: are you saying that it’s literally impossible to express certain non-insulting meanings in a non-insulting way? Or that you personally are not capable of doing so? Or that you potentially could, but you’re not motivated to figure out how?
Edit—also, do you mean that it’s impossible to even reduce the degree to which it sounds insulting? Or are you just saying that such comments are always going to sound at least a tiny bit insulting?
The choice was between writing something that was necessary for the purpose of fulfilling appropriate and reasonable conversational goals, but could be written only in such a way that anyone but a saint would be insulted by it—or writing nothing.
I chose the former because I judged it to be the correct choice: writing nothing, simply in order to to avoid insult, would have been worse than writing the comment which I wrote.
(This explanation is also quite likely to apply to any past or future comments I write which seem to be insulting in similar fashion.)
This is helpful to me understanding you better. Thank you.
I’m not quite clear: are you saying that it’s literally impossible to express certain non-insulting meanings in a non-insulting way? Or that you personally are not capable of doing so? Or that you potentially could, but you’re not motivated to figure out how?
I… think that the concept of “non-insulting meaning” is fundamentally a confused one in this context.
Edit—also, do you mean that it’s impossible to even reduce the degree to which it sounds insulting? Or are you just saying that such comments are always going to sound at least a tiny bit insulting?
Reduce the degree? Well, it seems like it should be possible, in principle, in at least some cases. (The logic being that it seems like it should be quite possible to increase the degree of insultingness without changing the substance, and if that’s the case, then one would have to claim that I always succeed at selecting exactly the least insulting possible version—without changes in substance—of any comment; and that seems like it’s probably unlikely. But there’s a lot of “seems” in that reasoning, so I wouldn’t place very much confidence in it. And I can also tell a comparably plausible story that leads to the opposite conclusion, reducing my confidence even further.)
But I am not sure what consequence that apparent in-principle truth has on anything.
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.
The key thing missing from your account of my views is that while I certainly think that “local validity checking” is important, I also—and, perhaps, more importantly—think that the interactions in question are not only fine, but good, in a “relational” sense.
So, for example, it’s not just that a comment that just says “What are some examples of this?” doesn’t, by itself, break any rules or norms, and is “locally valid”. It’s that it’s a positive contribution to the discussion, which is aimed at (a) helping a post author to get the greatest use out of his post and the process and experience of posting it, and (b) helping the commentariat get the greatest use out of the author’s post. (Of course, (b) is more important than (a)—but they are both important!)
Some points that follow from this, or depend on this:
First, such contributions should be socially rewarded to the degree that they are necessary. By “necessary”, here, I mean that if it is the case that some particular sort of criticism or some particular sort of question is good (i.e., it contributes substantially to how much use can be gotten out of a post), but usually nobody asks that sort of question or makes that sort of criticism, then anyone who does do that, should be seen as making not only a good but a very important contribution. (And it’s a bad sign when this sort of thing is common—it means that at least some sorts of important criticisms, or some sorts of important questions, are not asked nearly often enough!)
Meanwhile, asking a sort of question or making a sort of criticism which is equally good but is usually or often made, such that it is fairly predictable and authors can, with decent probability, expect to get it, then such a question or criticism is still good and praiseworthy, but not individually as important (though of course still virtuous!).
In the limit, an author will know that if they don’t address something in their post, somebody will ask about it, or comment on it. (And note that it’s not always necessary, in such a case, to anticipate a criticism or question in your post, even if you expect it will be made! You can leave it to the comments, being ready to respond to it if it’s brought up—or proactively bringing it up yourself, filling the role of your own devil’s advocate.)
I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself “Dijkstra would not have liked this”, well, that would be enough immortality for me.
And this is a good thing. If you posit some abstraction in your post, you should think “they’re gonna ask me for examples in the comments”. (It’s a bad sign, again, if what you actually think is “Said Achmiz is gonna ask me for examples in the comments”!) And this should make you think about whether you have examples; and what those examples demonstrate; or, if you don’t have any, what that means; etc.
And the same goes for many other sorts of questions one could ask, or criticisms one could make.
(Relatedly: I, too, want to “build up a context in which people can hold each other accountable”. But what exactly do you think that looks like?)
Second, it is no demerit to a post author, if one commenter asks a question, and another commenter answers it, without the OP’s involvement (or perhaps with merely a quick note saying “endorsed!”). Indeed it’s no demerit to an author, even, if questions are asked, or criticisms made, in the comments, to which the OP has no good answer, but which are answered satisfactorily by others, such that the end result is that knowledge and understanding are constructed by a collective effort that results in even the author of the post, himself, learning something new!
This, by the way, is related to the reasons why I find the “authors can ban people from their posts” thing so frustrating and so thoroughly counterproductive. If I write a comment under someone’s post, about someone’s post, certainly there’s an obvious sense in which it’s addressed to the author of the post—but it’s not just addressed to them! If I wanted to talk to someone one-on-one, I could send a private message… but unless I make a point of noting that I’m soliciting the OP’s response in particular (and even then, what’s to stop anyone else from answering anyway?), or ask for something that only the OP would know… comments / questions are best seen as “put to the whole table”, so to speak. Yes, if the post author has an answer they think is appropriate to provide, they can, and should, do that. But so can and should anyone else!
It’s no surprise that, as others have noted, the comments section of a post is, not infrequently, at least as useful as the post itself. And that is fine! It’s no indictment of a post’s author, when that turns out to be the case!
The upshot of this point and the previous one is that in (what I take to be) a healthy discussion environment, when someone writes a comment under your post that just says, for instance, “What are some examples of this?”, there is no good reason why that should contribute to any “relational” difficulties. It is the sort of thing that helps to make posts useful, not just to the commentariat as a whole but also to those posts’ authors; and the site is better if people regularly make such comments, ask such questions, pose such criticisms.
And, thus: third, if someone finds that they react to such engagement as if it were some sort of attack, annoyance, problem, etc., that is a bug, and one which they should want to fix. Reacting to a good thing as if it were a bad thing is, quite simply, a mistake.
Note, again, that the question isn’t whether some particular comment is “locally valid” in an “atomic” sense while being problematic in a “relational” sense. The question, rather, is whether the comment is simply good (in a “relational” sense or in any other sense), but is being mistakenly reacted to as though it were bad.
I don’t have any strong objections to any of this (various minor ones, but that’s to be expected)…
… except the last paragraph (#5, starting with “I think Said is trying to figure out …”). There I think you importantly mis-characterize my views; or, to be more precise, you leave out a major aspect, which (in addition to being a missing key point), by its absence colors the rest of your characterization. (What is there is not wrong, per se, but, again, the missing aspect makes it importantly misleading.)
I would, of course, normally elaborate here, but I hesitate to end up with this comment thread/section being filled with my comments. Let me know if you want me to give my thoughts on this in detail here, or elsewhere.
I would appreciate more color on your views; by that point I was veering into speculation and hesitant to go too much further, which naturally leads to incompleteness.
By the way, I will note that I am both quite surprised and, separately, something like dismayed, at how devastatingly effective has been what I will characterize as “Said’s privileging-the-hypothesis gambit.”
Like, Said proposed, essentially, “Duncan holds a position which basically no sane person would advocate, and he has somehow held this position for years without anyone noticing, and he conspicuously left this position out of his very-in-depth statement of his beliefs about discourse norms just a couple of months ago”
and if I had realized that I actually needed to seriously counter this claim, I might have started with “bro do you even Bayes?”
(Surely a reasonable prior on someone holding such a position is very very very low even before taking into account the latter parts of the conjunction.)
Like, that Vaniver would go so far as to take the hypothesis
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”
and then go sifting through the past few comments with an eye toward using them to distinguish between “true” and “false” is startling to me.
“Foolishness,” Severus said softly. “Utter foolishness. The Dark Mark has not faded, nor has its master.”
“See, that’s what I mean by formally insufficient Bayesian evidence. Sure, it sounds all grim and foreboding and stuff, but is it that unlikely for a magical mark to stay around after the maker dies? Suppose the mark is certain to continue while the Dark Lord’s sentience lives on, but a priori we’d only have guessed a twenty percent chance of the Dark Mark continuing to exist after the Dark Lord dies. Then the observation, ‘The Dark Mark has not faded’ is five times as likely to occur in worlds where the Dark Lord is alive as in worlds where the Dark Lord is dead. Is that really commensurate with the prior improbability of immortality? Let’s say the prior odds were a hundred-to-one against the Dark Lord surviving. If a hypothesis is a hundred times as likely to be false versus true, and then you see evidence five times more likely if the hypothesis is true versus false, you should update to believing the hypothesis is twenty times as likely to be false as true. Odds of a hundred to one, times a likelihood ratio of one to five, equals odds of twenty to one that the Dark Lord is dead—”
“Where are you getting all these numbers, Potter?”
“That is the admitted weakness of the method,” Harry said readily. “But what I’m qualitatively getting at is why the observation, ‘The Dark Mark has not faded’, is not adequate support for the hypothesis, ‘The Dark Lord is immortal.’ The evidence isn’t as extraordinary as the claim.”
The observation “Duncan groused at Said for doing too little interpretive and intellectual labor relative to that which he solicited from others” is not adequate support for “Duncan generally thinks that asking for examples is unacceptable.” This is what I meant by the strength of the phrase “blatant falsehood.” I suppose if you are starting from “either Mortimer Snodgrass did it, or not,” rather than from “I wonder who did the murder,” then you can squint at my previous comments—
(including the one that was satirical, which satire, I infer from Vaniver pinging me about my beliefs on that particular phrase offline, was missed)
—and see in them that the murderer has dark hair, and conclude from Mortimer’s dark hair that there should be a large update toward his guilt.
But I rather thought we didn’t do that around here, and did not expect anyone besides Said to seriously entertain the hypothesis, which is ludicrous.
(I get that Said probably genuinely believed it, but the devout genuinely believe in their gods and we don’t give them points for that around here.)
Again, just chiming in, leaving the actual decision up to Ray:
My current take here is indeed that Said’s hypothesis, taking fully literal and within your frame was quite confused and bad.
But also, like, people’s frames, especially in the domain of adversarial actions, hugely differ, and I’ve in the past been surprised by the degree to which some people’s frames, despite seeming insane and gaslighty to me at first turned out to be quite valuable. Most concretely I have in my internal monologue indeed basically fully shifted towards using “lying” and “deception” the way Zack, Benquo and Jessica are using it, because their concept seems to carve reality at its joints much better than my previous concept of lying and deception. This despite me telling them many times that their usage of those terms is quite adversarial and gaslighty.
My current model is that when Said was talking about the preference he ascribes to you, there is a bunch of miscommunication going on, and I probably also have deep disagreements with his underlying model, but I have updated against trying to stamp down on that kind of stuff super hard, even if it sounds quite adversarial to me on first glance.
This might be crazy, and maybe making this a moderation policy would give rise to all kinds of accusations thrown around and a ton of goodwill being destroyed, but I currently generally feel more excited about exploring different people’s accusations of adversarialness in a bunch of depth, even if they seem unlikely on the face of it. This is definitely also partially driven by my thoughts on FTX, and trying to somehow create a space where more uncharitable/adversarial accusations could have been brought up somehow.
But this is really all very off-the-cuff and I have thought about this specific situation and the relevant thread much less than Ray and Ruby have, so I am currently leaving the detailed decisions up to them. But seemed potentially useful to give some of my models here.
I think you are mistaken about the process that generated my previous comment; I would have preferred a response that engaged more with what I wrote.
In particular, it looks to me like you think the core questions are “is the hypothesis I quote correct? Is it backed up by the four examples?”, and the parent comment looks to me like you wrote it thinking I thought the hypothesis you quote is correct and backed up by the examples. I think my grandparent comment makes clear that I think the hypothesis you quote is not correct and is not backed up by the four examples.
Why does the comment not just say “Duncan is straightforwardly right”? Well, I think we disagree about what the core questions are. If you are interested in engaging with that disagreement, so am I; I don’t think it looks like your previous comment.
(I intended to convey with “by the way” that I did not think I had (yet) responded to the full substance of your comment/that I was doing something of an aside.)
If the mods clearly disagree with Duncan, then what does ‘losing the bet’ look like? What was staked here?
I plan to just leave/not post essays here anymore if this isn’t fixed. LW is a miserable place to be, right now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(I also said the following in a chat with several of the moderators on 4/8: > I spent some time wondering if I would endorse a LW where both Duncan and Said were banned, and my conclusion was “yes, b/c that place sounds like it knows what it’s for and is pruning and weeding accordingly.”)
First, my read of both Said and Duncan is that they appreciate attention to the object level in conflicts like this. If what’s at stake for them is a fact of the matter, shouldn’t that fact get settled before considering other issues? So I will begin with that. What follows is my interpretation (mentioned here so I can avoid saying “according to me” each sentence).
In this comment, Said describes as bad “various proposed norms of interaction such as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” and so on”, without specifically identifying Duncan as proposing that norm (tho I think it’s heavily implied).
Then gjm objects to that characterization as a straw man.
In this comment Said defends it, pointing out that Duncan’s standard of “critics should do some of the work of crossing the gap” is implicitly a rule against “asking people for examples of their claims [without anything else]”, given that Duncan thinks asking for examples doesn’t count as doing the work of crossing the gap. (Earlier in the conversation Duncan calls it 0% of the work.) I think the point as I have written it here is correct and uncontroversial; I think there is an important difference between the point as I wrote it and the point as Said wrote it.
In the response I would have wanted to see, Duncan would have clearly and correctly pointed to that difference. He is in favor of people asking for examples [combined with other efforts to cross the gap], does it himself, gives examples himself, and so on. The unsaid
[without anything else]part is load-bearing and thus inappropriate to leave out or merely hint at. [Or, alternatively, using “ask people for examples” to refer to comments that do only that, as opposed to the conversational move which can be included or not in a comment with other moves.]Instead we got this comment, where Duncan interprets Said’s claim narrowly, disagrees, and accuses Said of either lying or being bad at reading comprehension. (This does not count as two hypotheses in my culture.)
Said provides four examples; Duncan finds them unconvincing and calls using them as citations a blatant falsehood. Said leaves it up to the readers to adjudicate here. I do think this was a missed opportunity for Said to see the gap between what he stated and what I think he intended to state.
From my perspective, my reading of Said’s accusation is not clearly suggested in the comment gjm objected to, is obviously suggested from the comment Duncan responds to, with the second paragraph[1] doing most of the work, and then further pointed at by later comments. If Said ate breakfasts of only cereal, and Duncan said that was unhealthy and he shouldn’t do it, it is not quite right to say Duncan ‘thinks you shouldn’t eat cereal’, as he might be in favor of cereal as part of a balanced breakfast; but also it is not quite right for Duncan to ignore Said’s point that one of the main issues under contention is whether Said can eat cereal by itself (i.e. asking for examples without putting in interpretative labor). This looks like white horses are not horses.
So what about Said’s four examples? As one might expect, all four are evidence for my interpretation, and none of the four are evidence for Duncan’s interpretation. I would not call this a blatant falsehood,[2] and think all four of Duncan’s example-by-example responses are weak. Do we treat the examples as merely ‘evidence for the claim’, or also as ‘identification of the claim’?
So then we have to step back and consider non-object-level considerations, of which I see a few:
I think this situation is, on some level, pretty symmetric.
I think the features of Said’s commenting style that people (not just Duncan!) find annoying are things that Said is deliberately optimizing for or the results of principled commitments he’s made, so it’s not just a simple bug that can be fixed.
I think the features of Duncan’s conflict resolution methods that people find offputting are similarly things that Duncan is deliberately optimizing for or the results of principled commitments he’s made, so it’s not just a simple bug that can be fixed.
I think both Said and Duncan a) contribute great stuff to the site and b) make some people like posting on LW less and it’s unclear what to do about that balance. This is one of the things that’s nice about clear rules that people are either following or not—it makes it easier for everyone to tell whether something is ‘allowed’ or ‘not allowed’, ‘fine’ or ‘not fine’, and so on, rather than making complicated judgments of whether or not you want someone around. I think the mod team does want to exercise some judgment and discernment beyond just rule-following, however.
How bad is it to state something that’s incorrect because it is too broad and then narrow it afterwards? Duncan has written about this in Ruling Out Everything Else, and I think Said did an adequate but not excellent job.
What’s the broader context of this discussion? Said has a commenting style that Duncan strongly dislikes, and Duncan seems to be in the midst of an escalating series of comments and posts pointing towards “the mods should ban Said”. My reckless speculation is that this comment looked to Duncan like the smoking gun that he could use to prove Said’s bad faith, and he tried to prosecute it accordingly. (Outside of context, I would be surprised by my reading not being raised to Duncan’s attention; in context, it seems obvious why he would not want (consciously or subconsciously) to raise that hypothesis.) My explanation is that Said’s picture of good faith is different than Duncan’s (and, as far as I can tell, both fit within the big tent of ‘rationality’).
Incidentally, I should note that I view Duncan’s escalation as something of a bet, where if the mods had clearly agreed with Duncan, that probably would have been grounds for banning Said. If the mods clearly disagree with Duncan, then what does ‘losing the bet’ look like? What was staked here?
The legal system sees a distinction between ‘false testimony’ (being wrong under oath) and ‘perjury’ (deliberately being wrong under oath), and it seems like a lot of this case hinges on “was Said deliberately wrong, or accidentally wrong?” and “was Duncan deliberately wrong, or accidentally wrong?”.
I also don’t expect it to be uncontroversial “who started it”. Locally, my sense is Duncan started it, and yet when I inhabit Duncan’s perspective, this is all a response to Said and his style. I interpret a lot of Duncan’s complaints here thru the lens of imaginary injury that he writes about here.
I think also there’s something going on where Duncan is attempting to mimic Said’s style when interacting with Said, but in a way that wouldn’t pass Said’s ITT. Suppose my comment here had simply been a list of ways that Duncan behaved poorly in this exchange; then I think Duncan could take the approach of “well, but Said does the same thing in places A, B, and C!”. I think he overestimates how convincing I would find that, and Duncan did a number of things in this exchange that my model of Said would not do and has not done (according to my interpretation, but not my model of Duncan’s, in a mirror of the four examples above).
I think Said is trying to figure out which atomic actions are permissible or impermissible (in part because it is easier to do local validity checking on atomic actions), and Duncan is trying to suggest what is permissible or impermissible is more relational and deals with people’s attitudes towards each other (as suggested by gjm here). I feel sympathetic to both views here; I think Duncan often overestimates how familiar readers will be with his works / how much context he can assume, and yet also I think Said is undercounting how much people’s memory of past interactions colors their experience of comments. [Again, I think these are not simple bugs but deliberate choices—I think Duncan wants to build up a context in which people can hold each other accountable and build further work together, and I think Said views colorblindness of this sort as superior to being biased.]
I note that my reasons for this are themselves perhaps
white horses are not horsesreasons, where I think Said’s original statement and follow-up are both imprecise, but they’re missing the additional features that would make them ‘blatant falsehood’s, while both imprecise statements and blatant falsehoods are ‘incorrect’.Vaniver privately suggested to me that I may want to offer some commentary on what I could’ve done in this situation in order for it to have gone better, which I thought was a good and reasonable suggestion. I’ll do that in this comment, using Vaniver’s summary of the situation as a springboard of sorts.
So, first of all, yes, I was clearly referring to Duncan. (I didn’t expect that to be obscure to anyone who’d bother to read that subthread in the first place, and indeed—so far as I can tell—it was not. If anyone had been confused, they would presumably have asked “what do you mean?”, and then I’d have linked what I mean—which is pretty close to what happened anyway. This part, in any case, is not the problem.)
The obvious problem here is that “don’t ask people for examples of their claims”—taken literally—is, indeed, a strawman.
The question is, whose problem (to solve) is it?
There are a few possible responses to this (which are not mutually exclusive).
On the one hand, if I want people to know what I mean, and instead of saying what I mean, I say something which is only approximately what I mean, and people assume that I meant what I said, and respond to it—well, whose fault is that, but mine?
Certainly one could make protestations along the lines of “haven’t you people ever heard of [ hyperbole / colloquialisms / writing off the cuff and expecting that readers will infer from surrounding context / whatever ]”, but such things are always suspect. (And even if one insists that there’s nothing un-virtuous about any particular instance of any one of those rhetorical or conversational patterns, nevertheless it would be a bit rich to get huffy about people taking words literally on Less Wrong, of all places.)
So, in one sense, the whole problem would’ve been avoided if I’d taken pains to write as precisely as I usually try to do. Since I didn’t do that, and could have, the fault would seem to be mine; case closed.
But that account doesn’t quite work.
For one thing, if someone says something you think is wrong, and you say “seems wrong to me actually”, and they reply “actually I meant this other thing”—well, that seems to me to be a normal and reasonable sort of exchange; this is how understanding is reached. I made a claim; gjm responded that it seemed like a strawman; I responded with a clarification.
Note that here I definitely made a mistake; what I should’ve included in that comment, but left out, was a clear and unambiguous statement along the lines of:
“Yes, taken literally, ‘don’t ask people for examples of their claims’ would of course be a strawman. I thought that the intended reading would be clear, but I definitely see the potential for literal (mis-)reading, sorry. To clarify:”
The rest of that comment would then have proceeded as written. I don’t think that it much needs amendment. In particular, the second paragraph (which, as Vaniver notes, does much of the work) gives a concise and clear statement of the claim which I was originally (and, at first, sloppily) alluding to. I stand by that clarified claim, and have seen nothing that would dissuade me from it.
Importantly, however, we can see that Duncan objects, quite strenuously, even to this clarified and narrowed form of what I said!
(As I note in this comment, it was not until after essentially the whole discussion had already taken place that Duncan edited his reply to my latter comment to explicitly disclaim the view that I ascribed to him. For the duration of that whole long comment exchange, it very much seemed to me that Duncan was not objecting because I was ascribing to him a belief he does not hold, but rather because he had not said outright that he held such a belief… but, of course, I never claimed that he had!)
So even if that clarified comment had come first (having not, therefore, needed any acknowledgment of previous sloppiness), there seems to be little reason to believe that Duncan would not have taken umbrage at it.
Despite that, failing to include that explicit acknowledgement was an error. Regardless of whether it can be said to be responsible for the ensuing heated back-and-forth (I lean toward “probably not”), this omission was very much a failure of “local validity” on my part, and for that there is no one to blame but me.
Of the rest of the discussion thread, there is little that needs to be said. (As Vaniver notes, some of my subsequent comments both clarify my claims further and also provide evidence for them.)
I agree that the hypothetical comment you describe as better is in fact better. I think something like … twenty-or-so exchanges with Said ago, I would have written that comment? I don’t quite know how to weigh up [the comment I actually wrote is worse on these axes of prosocial cooperation and revealing cruxes and productively clarifying disagreement and so forth] with [having a justified true belief that putting forth that effort with Said in particular is just rewarded with more branches being created].
(e.g. there was that one time recently where Said said I’d blocked people due to disagreeing with me/criticizing me, and I said no, I haven’t blocked anybody for disagreeing/criticizing, and he responded “I didn’t say anything about ‘blocked for disagreeing [or criticizing]’. (Go ahead, check!)” and the actual thing he’d said was that they’d been blocked due to disagreeing/criticizing; that’s the level of … gumming up the works? gish-gallop? … that I’ve viscerally come to expect.)
Like, I think there’s plausibly a CEV-ish code of conduct in which I “should”, at that point, still have put forth the effort, but I think it’s also plausible that the correct code of conduct is one in which doing so is a genuine mistake and … noticing that there’s a hypothetical “better” comment is not the same as there being an implication that I should’ve written it?
Something something, how many turns of the cheek are actually correct, especially given that, the week prior, multiple commenters had been unable, with evidence+argument+personal testimony, to shift Said away from a strikingly uncharitable prior.
Mine either, to be clear; I felt by that point that Said had willingly put himself outside of the set of [signatories to the peace treaty], turning down many successive opportunities to remain in compliance with it. I was treating his statements closer to the way I think it is correct to treat the statements of the literal Donald Trump than the way I think it is correct to treat the statements of an undistinguished random Republican.
(I can go into the reasoning for that in more detail, but it seems sort of conflicty to do so unprompted.)
I’m a little lost in this analogy; this is sort of where the privileging-the-hypothesis complaint comes in.
The conversation had, in other places, centered on the question of whether Said can eat cereal by itself; Logan for instance highlighted Said’s claim in a reply on FB:
There, the larger question of “can you eat only cereal, or must you eat other things in balance?” is front-and-center.
But at that point in the subthread, it was not front-and-center; yes, it was relevant context, but the specific claim being made by Said was clear, and discrete, and not at all dependent-on or changed-by that context.
The history of that chain:
Said includes, in a long comment “In summary, I think that what’s been described as ‘aiming for convergence on truth’ is some mixture of” … “contentless” … “good but basically unrelated to the rest of it” … “bad (various proposed norms of interaction such as ‘don’t ask people for examples of their claims’ and so on)”
gjm, in another long comment, includes “I don’t know where you get ‘don’t ask people for examples of their claims’ from and it sounds like a straw man” and goes on to elaborate “I think the things Duncan has actually said are more like ‘Said engages in unproductive modes of discussion where he is constantly demanding more and more rigour and detail from his interlocutors while not providing it himself’, and wherever that lands on a scale from ’100% truth’ to ‘100% bullshit’ it is not helpful to pretend that he said ‘it is bad to ask people for examples of their claims’.
There’s a bunch of other stuff going on in their back and forth, but that particular thread has been isolated and directly addressed, in other words. gjm specifically noted the separation between the major issue of whether balance is required, and this other, narrower claim.
Said replied:
Which, yes, I straightforwardly agree with the if-then statement; if “asking people for examples of their claims” didn’t fit my stated criteria for what constitutes acceptable engagement or criticism, then it would be correct to describe me as advocating for a norm of “don’t ask people for examples of their claims.”
But like. The if does not hold. It really clearly doesn’t hold. It was enough of an out-of-nowhere strawman/non-sequitur that gjm specifically called it out as ”???” at which point Said doubled down, saying the above and also
It seems like, in your interpretation, I “should” (in some sense) be extending a hand of charity and understanding and, I dunno, helping Said to coax out his broader, potentially more valid point—helping him to get past his own strawman and on to something more steel, or at least flesh. Like, if I am reading you correctly above, you’re saying that, by focusing in on the narrow point that had been challenged by gjm and specifically reaffirmed by Said, I myself was making some sort of faux pas.
(Am I in fact reading you correctly?)
I do not think so. I think that, twenty exchanges prior, I perhaps owed Said something like that degree of care and charity and helping him avoid tying his own shoelaces together. I certainly feel I would owe it to, I dunno, Eric Rogstad or Julia Galef, and would not be the slightest bit loath to provide it.
But here, Said had just spent several thousand words the week prior, refusing to be budged from a weirdly uncharitable belief about the internals of my mind, despite that belief being incoherent with observable evidence and challenged by multiple non-me people. I don’t think it’s wise-in-the-sense-of-wisdom to a) engage with substantial charity in that situation, or b) expect someone else to engage with substantial charity in that situation.
(You can tell that my stated criteria do not rule out asking people for examples of their claims in part because I’ve written really quite a lot about what I think constitutes acceptable engagement or criticism, and I’ve just never come anywhere close to a criterion like that, nor have I ever complained about someone asking for examples unless it was after a long, long string of what felt like them repeatedly not sharing in the labor of truthseeking. Like, the closest I can think of is this thread with tailcalled, in which (I think/I hope) it’s pretty clear that what’s going on is that I was trying to cap the total attention paid to the essay and its discussion, and thus was loath to enter into something like an exchange of examples—not that it was bad in any fundamental sense for someone to want some. I did in fact provide some, a few comments deeper in the thread, though I headlined that I hadn’t spent much time on them.)
So in other words: I don’t think it was wrong to focus on the literal, actual claim that Said had made (since he made it, basically, twice in a row, affirming “no, I really mean this” after gjm’s objection and even saying that he thinks it is so obvious as to not be controversial. I don’t think I “ought” to have had a broader focus, under the circumstances—Said was making a specific, concrete, and false claim, and his examples utterly fail to back up that specific, concrete, and false claim (though I do agree with you that they back up something like his conception of our broader disagreement).
I dunno, I’m feeling kind of autistic, here, but I feel like if, on Less Wrong dot com, somebody makes a specific, concrete claim about my beliefs or policies, clarifies that yes, they really meant that claim, and furthermore says that such-and-such links are “citations for [me] expressing the sentiment [they’ve] ascribed to [me]” when they simply are not—
It feels like emphatic and unapologetic rejection should be 100% okay, and not looked at askance. The fact that they are citations supporting a different claim is (or at least, I claim, should be) immaterial; it’s not my job to steelman somebody who spent hours and hours negatively psychologizing me in public (while claiming to have no particular animus, which, boy, a carbon copy of Said sure would have had Words about).
I think there’s a thing here of standards unevenly applied; surely whatever standard would’ve had me address Said’s “real” concern would’ve also had Said behave much differently at many steps prior, possibly never strawmanning me so hard in the first place?
I think the asymmetry breaks in that, like, a bunch of people have asked Said to stop and he won’t; I’m quite eager to stop doing the conflict resolution that people don’t like, if there can pretty please be some kind of system in place that obviates it. I much prefer the world where there are competent police to the world where I have to fight off muggers in the alley—that’s why I’m trying so hard to get there to be some kind of actually legible standards rather than there always being some plausible reason why maybe we shouldn’t just say “no” to the bullshit that Zack or Said or anonymouswhoever is pulling.
Right now, though, it feels like we’ve gone from “Ben Hoffman will claim Duncan wants to ghettoize people and it’ll be left upvoted for nine days with no mod action” to “Ray will expound on why he thinks it’s kinda off for Said to be doing what he’s doing but there won’t be anything to stop Said from doing it” and I take Oli’s point about this stuff being hard and there being other priorities but like, it’s been years. And I get a stance of, like, “well, Duncan, you’re asking for a lot,” but I’m trying pretty hard to earn it, and to … pave the way? Help make the ask smaller? … with things like the old Moderating LessWrong post and the Concentration of Force post and the more recent Basics post. Like, I can’t think of much more that someone with zero authority and zero mantle can do. My problem is that abuse and strawmanning of me gets hosted on LW and upvoted on LW and people are like, well, maybe if you patiently engaged with and overturned the abuse and strawmanning in detail instead of fighting back—
I dunno. If mods would show up and be like “false” and “cut it out” I would pretty happily never get into a scrap on LW ever again.
:(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
This, more than anything else, is like “just give up and leave, this is definitely not a garden.”
I didn’t make it to every point, but hopefully you find this more of the substantive engagement you were hoping for.
At the risk of guessing wrong, and perhaps typical-mind-fallacying, I imagining that you’re [rightly?] feeling a lot frustration, exasperation, and even despair about moderation on LessWrong. You’ve spend dozens (more?) and tens of thousands of words trying to make LessWrong the garden you think it ought to be (and to protect yourself here against attackers) and just to try to uphold, indeed basic standards for truthseeking discourse. You’ve written that some small validation goes a long way, so this is me trying to say that I think your feelings have a helluva lot of validity.
I don’t think that you and I share exactly the same ideals for LessWrong. PerfectLessWrong!Ruby and PerfectLessWrong!Duncan would be different (or heck, even just VeryGoodLessWrongs), though I also am pretty sure that you’d be much happier with my ideal, you’d think it was pretty good if not perfect. Respectable, maybe adequate. A garden.
And I’m really sad that the current LessWrong feels really really far short of my own ideals (and Ray of his ideals, and Oli of his ideals), etc. And not just short of a super-amazing-lofty-ideal, also short of a “this place is really under control” kind of ideal. I take responsibility for it not being so, and I’m sorry. I wouldn’t blame you for saying this isn’t good enough and wanting to leave[1], there are some pretty bad flaws.
But sir, you impugn my and my site’s honor. This is not a perfect garden, it also not a jungle. And there is an awful lot of gardening going on. I take it very seriously that LessWrong is not just any place, and it takes ongoing work to keep it so. This is approx my full-time job (and that of others too), and while I don’t work 80-hour weeks, I feel like I put a tonne of my soul into this site.
Over the last year, I’ve been particularly focused on what I suspect are existential threats to LessWrong (not even the ideal, just the decently-valuable thing we have now). I think this very much counts as gardening. The major one over last year is how to both have all the AI content (and I do think AI is the most important topic right now) and not have it eat LessWrong and turn it into the AI-website rather than the truth-seeking/effectiveness/rationality website which is actually what I believe is its true spirit[2]. So far, I feel like we’re still failing at this. On many days, the Frontpage is 90+% AI posts. It’s not been a trivial problem for many problems.
The other existential problem, beyond the topic, that I’ve been anticipating for a long time and is now heating up is the deluge of new users flowing to the site because of the rising prominence of AI. Moderation is currently our top focus, but even before that, every day – the first thing we do when the team gets in the morning – is review every new post, all first time submissions from users, and the activity of users who are getting a lot of downvotes. It’s not exactly fun, but we do it basically everyday[3]. In the interests of greater transparency and accountability, we will soon build a Rejected Content section of the site where you’ll be able to view the content we didn’t go live, and I predict that will demonstrate just how much this garden is getting tended, and that counterfactually the quality would be a lot lot worse. You can see here a recent internal document that describes my sense of priorities for the team.
I think the discourse norms and bad behavior (and I’m willing to say now in advance of my more detailed thoughts that there’s a lot of badness to how Said behaves) are also serious threats to the site, and we do give those attention too. They haven’t felt like the most pressing threats (or for that matter, opportunities, recently), and I could be making a mistake there, but we do take them seriously. Our focus (which I think has a high opportunity cost) has been turned to the exchanges between you and Said this week, plausibly you’ve done us a service to draw our attention to behavior we should be deeming intolerable, and it’s easily 50-100 hours of team attention.
It is plausible the LessWrong team has made a mistake in not prioritizing this stuff more highly over the years (it has been years – though Said and Zack and others have in fact received hundreds of hours of attention), and there are definitely particular projects that I think turned out to be misguided and less valuable than marginal moderation would have been, but I’ll claim that it was definitely not an obvious mistake that we haven’t addressed the problems you’re most focused on.
It is actually on my radar and I’ve been actively wanted for a while a system that reliably gets the mod team to show up and say “cut it out” sometimes. I suspect that’s what should have happened a lot earlier on in your recent exchanges with Said. I might have liked to say “Duncan, we the mods certify that if you disengage, it is no mark against you” or something. I’m not sure. Ray mentioned the concept of “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Moderation” and I like that idea, and would like to get soon to the higher level where we’re actively intervening in this cases. I regret that I in particular on the team am not great at dropping what I’m doing to pivot when these threads come up, perhaps I should work on that.
I think a claim you could make is the LessWrong team should have hired more people so they could cover more of this. Arguing why we haven’t (or why Lightcone as a whole didn’t keep more team members on LessWrong team) is a bigger deal. I think things would be worse if LessWrong had been bigger most of the time, and barring unusually good candidate, it’d be bad to hire right now.
All this to say, this garden has a lot of shortcomings, but the team works quite hard to keep it at least as good as it is and try to make it better. Fair enough if it doesn’t meet your standards or not how you’d do it, perhaps we’re not all that competent, fair enough.
(And also you’ve had a positive influence on us, so your efforts are not completely in vain. We do refer to your moderation post/philosophy even if we haven’t adopted it wholesale, and make use of many of the concepts you’ve crystallized. For that I am grateful. Those are contributions I’d be sad to lose, but I don’t want to push you to offer to them to us if doing so is too costly for you.)
I will also claim though that a better version of Duncan would be better able to tolerate the shortcomings of LessWrong and improve it too; that even if your efforts to change LW aren’t working enough, there are efforts on yourself that would make you better, and better able to benefit from the LessWrong that is.
Something like the core identity of LessWrong is rationality. In alternate worlds, that is the same, but the major topic could be something else.
Over the weekend, some parts of the reviewing get deferred till the work week.
This is fair, and I apologize; in that line I was speaking from despair and not particularly tracking Truth.
A [less straightforwardly wrong and unfair] phrasing would have been something like “this is not a Japanese tea garden; it is a British cottage garden.”
I have been to the Japanese tea garden in Portland, and found it exquisite, so I think get your referent there.
Aye, indeed it is not that.
I probably rushed this comment out the door in a “defend my honor, set the record straight” instinct that I don’t think reliably leads to good discourse and is not what I should be modeling on LessWrong.
I did, thanks.
I think gjm’s comment was missing the observation that “comment that just ask for examples” are themselves an example of “unproductive modes of discussion where he is constantly demanding more and more rigour and detail from his interlocutors while not providing it himself”, and so it wasn’t cleanly about “balance: required or not?”. I think a reasonable reader could come away from that comment of gjm’s uncertain whether or not Said simply saying “examples?” would count as an example.
My interpretation of this section is basically the double crux dots arguing over the labels they should have, with Said disagreeing strenuously with calling his mode “unproductive” (and elsewhere over whether labor is good or bad, or how best to minimize it) and moving from the concrete examples to an abstract pattern (I suspect because he thinks the former is easier to defend than the latter).
I should also note here that I don’t think you have explicitly staked out that you think Said just saying “examples?” is bad (like, you didn’t here, which was the obvious place to), I am inferring that from various things you’ve written (and, tho this source is more suspect and so has less influence, ways other people have reacted to Said before).
Importantly, I think Said’s more valid point was narrower, not broader, and the breadth was the ‘strawmanning’ part of it. (If you mean to refer to the point dealing with the broader context, I agree with that.) The invalid “Duncan’s rule against horses” turning into the valid “Duncan’s rule against white horses”. If you don’t have other rules against horses—you’re fine with brown ones and black one and chestnut ones and so on—I think that points towards your rule against white horses pretty clearly. [My model of you thinks that language is for compiling into concepts instead of pointing at concepts and so “Duncan’s rule against horses” compiles into “Duncan thinks horses should be banned” which is both incorrect and wildly inconsistent with the evidence. I think language is for both, and when one gives you a nonsense result, you should check the other.]
I will note a way here in which it is not quite fair that I am saying “I think you didn’t do a reasonable level of interpretive labor when reading Said”, in the broader context of your complaint that Said doesn’t do much interpretive labor (deliberately!). I think it is justified by the difference in how the two of you respond to the failure of that labor.
I am trying to place the faux pas not in that you “reacted at all to that prompt” but “how you reacted to the prompt”. More in the next section.
I think this point is our core disagreement. I see the second comment saying “yeah, Duncan’s rule against horses, the thing where he dislikes white ones”, and you proceeding as if he just said “Duncan’s rule against horses.” I think there was a illusion of transparency behind “specifically reaffirmed by Said”.
Like, I think if you had said “STRAWMAN!” and tried to get us to put a scarlet S in Said’s username, this would have been a defensible accusation, and the punishment unusual but worth considering. Instead I think you said “LIAR!” and that just doesn’t line up with my reading of the thread (tho I acknowledge disagreement about the boundary between ‘lying’ and ‘strawmanning’) or my sense of how to disagree properly. In my favorite world, you call it a mislabeling and identify why you think the label fails to match (again, noting that gjm attempted to do so, tho I think not in a way that bridged the gap).
I mean, for sure I wish Said had done things differently! I described them in some detail, and not strawmanning you so hard in the first place was IMO the core one.
When I say “locally”, I am starting the clock at Killing Socrates, which was perhaps unclear.
Do you think Said would not also stop if, for every post he read on LW, he found that someone else had already made the comment he would have liked to have made?
(I do see a difference where the outcomes you seek to achieve are more easily obtained with mod powers backing them up, but I don’t think that affects the primary point.)
So, over here Elizabeth ‘summarizes’ Said in an unflattering way, and Said objects. I don’t think I will reliably see such comments before those mentioned in them do (there were only 23 minutes before Said objected) and it is not obvious to me that LW would be improved by me also objecting now.
But perhaps our disagreement is that, on seeing Elizabeth’s comment, I didn’t have a strong impulse to ‘set the record straight’; I attribute that mostly to not seeing Elizabeth’s comment as “the record,” tho I’m open to arguments that I should.
To clarify:
If one starts out looking to collect and categorize evidence of their conversational partner not doing their fair share of the labor, then a bunch of comments that just say “Examples?” would go into the pile. But just encountering a handful of comments that just say “Examples?” would not be enough to send a reasonable person toward the hypothesis that their conversational partner reliably doesn’t do their fair share of the labor.
“Do you have examples?” is one of the core, common, prosocial moves, and correctly so. It is a bid for the other person to put in extra work, but the scales of “are we both contributing?” don’t need to be balanced every three seconds, or even every conversation. Sometimes I’m the asker/learner and you’re the teacher/expounder, and other times the roles are reversed, and other times we go back and forth.
The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It’s having 85+% of your engagement be asking other people to do labor on your behalf, and never reciprocating, and when people are like, hey, could you not, or even just a little less? being supercilious about it.
Said simply saying “examples?” is an example, then, but only because of the strong prior from his accumulated behavior; if the rule is something like “doing this <100x/wk is fine, doing it >100x/wk is less fine,” then the question of whether a given instance “is an example” is slightly tricky.
Yeah, you may have pinned it down (the disagreement). I definitely don’t (currently) think it’s sensible to read the second comment that way, and certainly not sensible enough to mentally dock someone for not reading it that way even if that reading is technically available (which I agree it is).
I perhaps have some learned helplessness around what I can, in fact, expect from the mod team; I claim that if I had believed that this would be received as defensible I would’ve done that instead. At the time, I felt helpless and alone*/had no expectation of mod support for reasons I think are reasonable, and so was not proceeding as if there was any kind of request I could make, and so was not brainstorming requests.
*alone vis-a-vis moderators, not alone vis-a-vis other commenters like gjm
I do think that you should put a scarlet P in Said’s username, since he’s been doing it for a couple weeks now and is still doing it (c.f. “I have yet to see any compelling reason to conclude that this [extremely unlikely on its face hypothesis] is false.”).
I again agree that this is clearly a better set of moves in some sense, but I’m thinking in a fabricated options frame and being, like, is that really actually a possible world, in that the whole problem is Said’s utterly exhausting and unrewarding mode of engagement. Like, I wonder if I might convince you that your favorite world is incoherent and impossible, because it’s one in which people are engaging in the colloquial definition of insanity and never updating their heuristics based on feedback. Or maybe you’re saying “do it for the audience and for site norms, then,” which feels less like throwing good money after bad.
But like. I think I’m getting dinged for impatience when I did not, previously, get headpats for patience? The wanted behavior feels unincentivized relative to the unwanted behavior.
No, that was pretty clear, and that’s what generated the :((((((((. The choice to start the clock there feels unfair-to-Neville, like if I were a teacher I would glance at that and say “okay, obviously this is not the local beginning” and look further.
I am wary of irresponsibly theorizing about the contents of someone else’s mind. I do think that, if one looks over the explosive proliferation of his threads once he starts a back-and-forth, it’s unlikely that there’s some state in which Said is like “ah, people are already saying all the things!” I suspect that Said (like others, to be clear; this is not precisely a criticism) has an infinite priority list, and if all the things of top priority are handled by other commenters, he’ll move down to lower ones.
I do think that if you took all of Said’s comments, and distributed 8% of them each into the corpus of comments of Julia Galef, Anna Salamon, Rob Bensinger, Scott Garrabrant, you, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Logan Brienne Strohl, Oliver Habryka, Kelsey Piper, Nate Soares, Eric Rogstad, Spencer Greenberg, and Dan Keys this would be much better. Part of the problem is the sheer concentration of princely entitlement and speaking-as-if-it-is-the-author’s-job-to-convince-Said-particularly-regardless-of-whether-Said’s-skepticism-is-a-signal-of-any-real-problem-with-the-claims.
If Kelsey Piper locally is like, buddy, you need to give me more examples, or if Spencer Greenberg locally is like, but what the heck do you even mean by “annoying,” there’s zero sense (on my part, at least) that here we go again, more taking-without-contributing. Instead, with Kelsey and Spencer it feels like a series of escalating favors and a tightening of the web of mutual obligation in which everybody is grateful to everybody else for having put in so many little bits of work here and there, of course I want to spill some words to help connect the dots for Kelsey and Spencer, they’ve spilled so many words helping me.
The pattern of “give, then take, then give, then take, then take, then take, then give, then give” is a healthy one to model, and is patriotically Athenian in the frame of my recent essay, and is not one which, if a thousand newbies were to start emulating, would cause a problem.
I don’t think that mods should be chiming in and setting the record straight on every little thing. But when, like, Said spends multiple thousands of words in a literally irrational (in the sense of not having cruxes and not being open to update and being directly contradicted by evidence) screed strawmanning me and claiming that I block people for disagreeing with my claims or criticizing my arguments—
—and furthermore when I ask for mod help—
—then I do think that a LessWrong where a mod shows up to say “false” and “actually cut it out for real” is meaningfully different and meaningfully better than the current Wild West feel where Said doesn’t get in trouble but I do.
But why should this be a problem?
Why should people say “hey, could you not, or even just a little less”? If you do something that isn’t bad, that isn’t not a problem, why should people ask you to stop? If it’s a good thing to do, why wouldn’t they instead ask you to do it more?
And why, indeed, are you still speaking in this transactional way?
If you write a post about some abstract concept, without any examples of it, and I write a post that says “What are some examples?”, I am not asking you to do labor on my behalf, I am not asking for a favor (which must be justified by some “favor credit”, some positive account of favors in the bank of Duncan). Quite frankly, I find that claim ridiculous to the point of offensiveness. What I am doing, in that scenario, is making a positive contribution to the discussion, both for your benefit and (even more importantly) for the benefit of other readers and commenters.
There is no good reason why you should resent responding to a request like “what are some examples”. There is no good reason why you should view it as an unjustified and entitled demand for a favor. There is definitely no good reason why you should view acceding to that request as being “for my benefit” (instead of, say, for your benefit, and for the benefit of readers).
(And the gall of saying “never reciprocating”, to me! When I write a post, I include examples pre-emptively, because I know that I should be asked to do so otherwise. Not “will be asked”, of course—but “should”. And when I write a post without enough examples, and someone asks for examples, I respond in great detail. Note that my responses in that thread are much, much longer than the comment which asked for examples. Of course they are! Because the question doesn’t need to be longer—but the answers do!)
(And you might say: “but Said, you barely write any posts—like one a year, at best!”. Indeed. Indeed.)
Maybe “resent” is doing most work here, but an excellent reason to not respond is that it takes work. To the extent that there are norms in place that urge response, they create motivation to suppress criticism that would urge response. An expectation that it’s normal for criticism to be a request for response that should normally be granted is pressure to do the work of responding, which is costly, which motivates defensive action in the form of suppressing criticism.
A culture could make it costless (all else equal) to ignore the event of a criticism having been made. This is an inessential reason for suppressing criticism that can be removed, and therefore should, to make criticism cheaper and more abundant.
The content of criticism may of course motivate the author of a criticized text to make further statements, but the fact of criticism’s posting by itself should not. The fact of not responding to criticism is some sort of noisy evidence of not having a good response that is feasible or hedonic to make, but that’s Law, not something that can change for the sake of mechanism design.
It’s certainly doing a decent amount of work, I agree.
Anyhow, your overall point is taken—although I have to point out that that your last sentence seems like a rebuttal of your next-to-last sentence.
That having been said, of course the content of criticism matters. A piece of criticism could simply be bad, and clearly wrong; and then it’s good and proper to just ignore it (perhaps after having made sure that an interested party could, if they so wished, easily see or learn why that criticism is bad). I do not, and would not, advocate for a norm that all comments, all critical questions, etc., regardless of their content, must always be responded to. That is unreasonable.
I also want to note—as I’ve said several times in this discussion, but it bears repeating—there is nothing problematic or blameworthy about someone other than the author of a post responding to questions, criticism, requests for examples, etc. That is fine. Collaborative development of ideas is a perfectly normal and good thing.
What that adds up to, I think, is a set of requirements for a set of social norms which is quite compatible with your suggestion of making it “costless (all else equal) to ignore the event of a criticism having been made”.
They are in opposition, but the point is that they are about different kinds of things, and one of them can’t respond to policy decisions. It’s useful to have a norm that lessens the burden of addressing criticism. It’s Law of reasoning that this burden can nonetheless materialize. The Law is implacable but importantly asymmetric, it only holds when it does, not when the court of public opinion says it should. While the norms are the other way around, and their pressure is somewhat insensitive to facts of a particular situation, so it’s worth pointing them in a generally useful direction, with no hope for their nuanced or at all sane response to details.
Perhaps the presence of Law justifies norms that are over-the-top forgiving to ignoring criticism, or find ignoring criticism a bit praiseworthy when it would be at all unpleasant not to ignore it, to oppose the average valence of Law, while of course attempting to preserve its asymmetry. So I’d say my last sentence in that comment argues that the next-to-last sentence should be stronger. Which I’m not sure I agree with, but here’s the argument.
Said, above, is saying a bunch of things, many of which I agree with, as if they are contra my position or my previous claims.
He can’t pass my ITT (not that I’ve asked him to), which means that he doesn’t understand the thing he’s trying to disagree with, which means that his disagreement is not actually pointing at my position; the things he finds ridiculous and offensive are cardboard cutouts of his own construction. More detail on that over here.
This response is manifestly untenable, given the comment of yours that I was responding to.
BTW I was surprised earlier to see you agree with the ‘relational’ piece of this comment because Duncan’s grandparent comment seems like it’s a pretty central example of that. (I view you as having more of a “visitor-commons” orientation towards LW, and Duncan has more of an orientation where this is a place where people inhabit their pairwise relationships, as well as more one-to-many relationships.)
Sorry, I’m not quite sure I follow the references here. You’re saying that… this comment… is a central example of… what, exactly?
That… seems like it’s probably accurate… I think? I think I’d have to more clearly understand what you’re getting at in your comment, in order to judge whether this part makes sense to me.
Sorry, my previous comment wasn’t very clear. Earlier I said:
and you responded with:
(and a few related comments) which made me think “hmm, I don’t think we mean the same thing by ‘relational’. Then Duncan’s comment had a frame that I would have described as ‘relational’—as in focusing on the relationships between the people saying and hearing the words—which you then described as transactional.
Ah, I see.
I think that the sense in which I would characterize Duncan’s description as “transactional” is… mostly orthogonal to the question of “is this a relational frame”. I don’t think that this has much to do with the “‘visitor commons’ vs. ‘pairwise relationships’” distinction, either (although that distinction is an interesting and possibly important one in its own right, and you’re certainly more right than wrong about where my preferences lie in that regard).
(There’s more that I could say about this, but I don’t know whether anything of importance hinges on this point. It seems like it mostly shouldn’t, but perhaps you are a better judge of that…)
A couple quick notes for now:
I agree with Duncan here it’s kinda silly to start the clock at “Killing Socrates”. Insofar as there’s a current live fight that is worth tracking separately from overall history, I think it probably starts in the comments of LW Team is adjusting moderation policy, and I think the recent-ish back and forth on Basics of Rationalist Discourse and “Rationalist Discourse” Is Like “Physicist Motors” is recent enough to be relevant (hence me including the in the OP)
I think Vaniver right now is focusing on resolving the point “is Said a liar?”, but not resolving the “who did most wrong?” question. (I’m not actually 100% sure on Vaniver’s goals/takes at the moment). I agree this is an important subquestion but it’s not the primary question I’m interested in.
I’m somewhat worried about this thread taking in more energy that it quite warrants, and making Duncan feel more persecuted than really makes sense here.
I roughly agree with Vaniver than “Liar!” isn’t the right accusation to have levied, but also don’t judge you harshly for having made it.
I think this comment of mine summarizes my relevant opinions here.
(tagging @Vaniver to make sure he’s at least tracking this comment)
Thanks.
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.
Nod, seems fair to note.
I just want to highlight this link (to one of Duncan’s essays on his Medium blog), which I think most people are likely to miss otherwise.
That is an excellent post! If it was posted on Less Wrong (
I understand why it wasn’t, of courseEDIT: I was mistaken about understanding this; see replies), I’d strong-upvote it without reservation. (I disagree with some parts of it, of course, such as one of the examples—but then, that is (a) an excellent reason to provide specific examples, and part of what makes this an excellent post, and (b) the reason why top-level posts quite rightly don’t have agree/disagree voting. On the whole, the post’s thesis is simply correct, and I appreciate and respect Duncan for having written it.)It’s not on LessWrong because of you, specifically. Like, literally that specific essay, I consciously considered where to put it, and decided not to put it here because, at the time, there was no way to prevent you from being part of the subsequent conversation.
Hmm. I retract the “I understand why it wasn’t [posted on Less Wrong]” part of my earlier comment! I definitely no longer understand.
(I find your stated reason bizarre to the point where I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here.)
Said, as a quick note—this particular comment reminds me of the “bite my thumb” scene from Romeo and Juliet. To you, it might be innocuous, but to me, and I suspect to Duncan and others, it sounds like a deliberate insult, with just enough of a veil of innocence to make it especially infuriating.
I am presuming you did not actually mean this as an insult, but were instead meaning to express your genuine confusion about Duncan’s thought process. I am curious to know a few things:
Did you recognize that it sounded potentially insulting?
If so, why did you choose to express yourself in this insulting-sounding manner?
If not, does it concern you that you may not recognize when you are expressing yourself in an insulting-sounding way, and is that something you are interested in changing?
And if you didn’t know you sounded insulting, and don’t care to change, why is that?
There are some things which cannot be expressed in a non-insulting manner (unless we suppose that the target is such a saint that no criticism can affect their ego; but who among us can pretend to that?).
I did not intend insult, in the sense that insult wasn’t my goal. (I never intend insult, as a rule. What few exceptions exist, concern no one involved in this discussion.)
But, of course, I recognize that my comment is insulting. That is not its purpose, and if I could write it non-insultingly, I would do so. But I cannot.
So, you ask:
The choice was between writing something that was necessary for the purpose of fulfilling appropriate and reasonable conversational goals, but could be written only in such a way that anyone but a saint would be insulted by it—or writing nothing.
I chose the former because I judged it to be the correct choice: writing nothing, simply in order to to avoid insult, would have been worse than writing the comment which I wrote.
(This explanation is also quite likely to apply to any past or future comments I write which seem to be insulting in similar fashion.)
I want to register that I don’t believe you that you cannot, if we’re using the ordinary meaning of “cannot”. I believe that it would be more costly for you, but it seems to me that people are very often able to express content like that in your comment, without being insulting.
I’m tempted to try to rephrase your comment in a non-insulting way, but I would only be able to convey its meaning-to-me, and I predict that this is different enough from its meaning-to-you that you would object on those grounds. However, insofar as you communicated a thing to me, you could have said that thing in a non-insulting way.
I believe you when you say that you don’t believe me.
But I submit to you that unless you can provide a rephrasing which (a) preserves all relevant meaning while not being insulting, and (b) could have been generated by me, your disbelief is not evidence of anything except the fact that some things seem easy until you discover that they’re impossible.
My guess is that you believe it’s impossible because the content of your comment implies a negative fact about the person you’re responding to. But insofar as you communicated a thing to me, it was in fact a thing about your own failure to comprehend, and your own experience of bizarreness. These are not unflattering facts about Duncan, except insofar as I already believe your ability to comprehend is vast enough to contain all “reasonable” thought processes.
Indeed, they are not—or so it would seem. So why would my comment be insulting?
After all, I didn’t write “your stated reason is bizarre”, but “I find your stated reason bizarre”. I didn’t write “it seems like your thinking here is incoherent”, but “I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here”. I didn’t… etc.
So what makes my comment insulting?
Please note, I am not saying “my comment isn’t insulting, and anyone who finds it so is silly”. It is insulting! And it’s going to stay insulting no matter how you rewrite it, unless you either change what it actually says or so obfuscate the meaning that it’s not possible to tell what it actually says.
The thing I am actually saying—the meaning of the words, the communicated claims—imply unflattering facts about Duncan.[1] There’s no getting around that.
The only defensible recourse, for someone who objects to my comment, is to say that one should simply not say insulting things; and if there are relevant things to say which cannot be said non-insultingly, then they oughtn’t be said… and if anything is lost thereby, well, too bad.
And that would be a consistent point of view, certainly. But not one to which I subscribe; nor do I think that I ever will.
To whatever extent a reader believes that I’m a basically reasonable person, anyway. Ironically, a reader with a low opinion of me should find my comment less insulting to Duncan. Duncan himself, one might imagine, would not finding it insulting at all. But of course that’s not how people work, and there’s no point in deluding ourselves otherwise…
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that one should never say insulting things. I think that people should avoid saying insulting things in certain contexts, and that LessWrong comments are one such context.
I find it hard to square your claim that insultingness was not the comment’s purpose with the claim that it cannot be rewritten to elide the insult.
An insult is not simply a statement with a meaning that is unflattering to its target—it involves using words in a way that aggressively emphasizes the unflatteringness and suggests, to some extent, a call to non-belief-based action on the part of the reader.
If I write a comment entirely in bold, in some sense I cannot un-bold it without changing its effect on the reader. But I think it would be pretty frustrating to most people if I then claimed that I could not un-bold it without changing its meaning.
You still haven’t actually attempted the challenge Said laid out.
I’m not sure what you mean—as far as I can tell, I’m the one who suggested trying to rephrase the insulting comment, and in my world Said roughly agreed with me about its infeasibility in his response, since it’s not going to be possible for me to prove either point: Any rephrasing I give will elicit objections on both semantics-relative-to-Said and Said-generatability grounds, and readers who believe Said will go on believing him, while readers who disbelieve will go on disbelieving.
You haven’t even given an attempt at rephrasing.
Nor should I, unless I believe that someone somewhere might honestly reconsider their position based on such an attempt. So far my guess is that you’re not saying that you expect to honestly reconsider your position, and Said certainly isn’t. If that’s wrong then let me know! I don’t make a habit of starting doomed projects.
I think for the purposes of promoting clarity this is a bad rule of thumb. The decision to explain should be more guided by effort/hedonicity and availability of other explanations of the same thing that are already there, not by strategically withholding things based on predictions of how others would treat an explanation. (So for example “I don’t feel like it” seems like an excellent reason not to do this, and doesn’t need to be voiced to be equally valid.)
I think I agree that this isn’t a good explicit rule of thumb, and I somewhat regret how I put this.
But it’s also true that a belief in someone’s good-faith engagement (including an onlooker’s), and in particular their openness to honest reconsideration, is an important factor in the motivational calculus, and for good reasons.
The structure of a conflict and motivation prompted by that structure functions in a symmetric way, with the same influence irrespective of whether the argument is right or wrong.
But the argument itself, once presented, is asymmetric, it’s all else equal stronger when correct than when it’s not. This is a reason to lean towards publishing things, perhaps even setting up weird mechanisms like encouraging people to ignore criticism they dislike in order to make its publication more likely.
If you’re not even willing to attempt the thing you say should be done, you have no business claiming to be arguing or negotiating in good faith.
You claimed this was low-effort. You then did not put in the effort to do it. This strongly implies that you don’t even believe your own claim, in which case why should anyone else believe it?
It also tests your theory. If you can make the modification easily, then there is room for debate about whether Said could. If you can’t, then your claim was wrong and Said obviously can’t either.
I think it’s pretty rough for me to engage with you here, because you seem to be consistently failing to read the things I’ve written. I did not say it was low-effort. I said that it was possible. Separately, you seem to think that I owe you something that I just definitely do not owe you. For the moment, I don’t care whether you think I’m arguing in bad faith; at least I’m reading what you’ve written.
Additionally, yes, you do owe me something. The same thing you owe to everyone else reading this comment section, Said included. An actual good-faith effort to probe at cruxes to the extent possible. You have shown absolutely no sign of that in this part of the conversation and precious little of it in the rest of it. Which means that your whole side of this conversation has been weak evidence that Said is correct and you are not.
This might be true, but it doesn’t follow that anyone owes anyone anything as a result. Doing something as a result might shift the evidence, but people don’t have obligations to shift evidence.
Also, I think cultivating an environment where arguments against your own views can take root is more of an obligation than arguing for them, and it’s worth arguing against your own views when you see a clear argument pointing in that direction. But still, I wouldn’t go so far as to call even that an actual obligation.
Owing people a good-faith effort to probe at cruxes is not a result of anything in this conversation. It is universal.
You’ve said very little in a great deal of words. And, as I said initially, you haven’t even attempted this.
Forget requirement (b). You haven’t even attempted fulfilling requirement (a). And for as long as you haven’t, it is unarguably true that your disbelief is not evidence for any of your claims or beliefs.
This is the meaning of “put up or shut up”. If you want to be taken seriously, act seriously.
I more or less agree with this; I think that posting and commenting on Less Wrong is definitely a place to try to avoid saying anything insulting.
But not to try infinitely hard. Sometimes, there is no avoiding insult. If you remove all the insult that isn’t core to what you’re saying, and if what you’re saying is appropriate, relevant, etc., and there’s still insult left over—I do not think that it’s a good general policy to avoid saying the thing, just because it’s insulting.
By that measure, my comment does not qualify as an insult. (And indeed, as it happens, I wouldn’t call it “an insult”; but “insulting” is slightly different in connotation, I think. Either way, I don’t think that my comment may fairly be said to have these qualities which you list. Certainly there’s no “call to non-belief-based action”…!)
True, of course… but also, so thoroughly dis-analogous to the actual thing that we’re discussing that it mostly seems to me to be a non sequitur.
I think I disagree that your comment does not have these qualities in some measure, and they are roughly what I’m objecting to when I ask that people not be insulting. I don’t think I want you to never say anything with an unflattering implication, though I do think this is usually best avoided as well. I’m hopeful that this is a crux, as it might explain some of the other conversation I’ve seen about the extent to which you can predict people’s perception of rudeness.
There are of course more insulting ways you could have conveyed the same meaning. But there are also less insulting ways (when considering the extent to which the comment emphasizes the unflatteringness and the call to action that I’m suggesting readers will infer).
I believe that none was intended, but I also expect that people (mostly subconsciously!) interpret (a very small) one from the particular choice of words and phrasing. Where the action is something like “you should scorn this person”, and not just “this person has unflattering quality X”. The latter does not imply the former.
I think that, at this point, we’re talking about nuances so subtle, distinctions so fragile (in that they only rarely survive even minor changes of context, etc.), that it’s basically impossible to predict how they will affect any particular person’s response to any particular comment in any particular situation.
To put it another way, the variation (between people, between situations, etc.) in how any particular bit of wording will be perceived, is much greater than the difference made by the changes in wording that you seem to be talking about. So the effects of any attempt to apply the principles you suggest is going to be indistinguishable from noise.
And that means that any effort spent on doing so will be wasted.
I actually DO believe you can’t write this in not-insulting way. I find it the result of not prioritizing developing and practicing those skills in general.
while i do judge you for this, i judge you for this one time, on the meta-level, instead of judging any instance separately. as i find this behavior orderly and predictable.
If it’s really a skill issue, why hasn’t anyone done that? If it can be written in a non-insulting way, demonstrate! I submit that you cannot.
I’m curious, what do you think of these options?
Original: “I find your stated reason bizarre to the point where I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here.”
New version 1: “I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here.”
New version 2: “I don’t understand your stated reason at all.”
New version 3: Omit that sentence.
These shift the sentence from a judgment on Duncan’s reasoning to a sharing of Said’s own experience, which (for me, at least) removes the unnecessary/escalatory part of the insult.
New version 4: “(I find your stated reason bizarre to the point where I can’t form any coherent model of your thinking here. Like, this is a statement about me, not about your thinking, but that’s where I am. I kinda wish there was a way to say this non-insultingly, but I don’t know such a way.)”
That’s still shifting to a claim about social reality and therefore not the same thing.
Experiment:
It seems to me that Czynski is just plain wrong here. But I have no expectation of changing his mind, no expectation that engaging with him will be fun or enlightening for me, and also I think he’s wrong in ways that not many bystanders will be confused about if they even see this.
If someone other than Czynski or Said would be interested in a reply to the above comment, feel free to say so and I’ll provide one.
You really have no intellectual integrity at all, do you?
Version 1 is probably not the same content, since it is mostly about the speaker, and in any case preserves most of the insultingness. Version 2 is making it entirely about the speaker and therefore definitely different, losing the important content. Version 3 is very obviously definitely not the same content and I don’t know why you bothered including it. (Best guess: you were following the guideline of naming 3 things rather than 1. If so, there is a usual lesson when that guideline fails.)
Shifting to sharing the speaker’s experience is materially different. The content of the statement was a truth claim—making it a claim about an individual’s experience changes it from being about reality to being about social reality, which is not the same thing. It is important to be able to make truth claims directly about other people’s statements, because truth claims are the building blocks of real models of the world.
Hmm interesting. I agree that there is a difference between a claim about an individual’s experience, and a claim about reality. The former is about a perception of reality, whereas the latter is about reality itself. In that case, I see why you would object to the paraphrasing—it changes the original statement into a weaker claim.
I also agree that it is important to be able to make claims about reality, including other people’s statements. After all, people’s statements are also part of our reality, so we need to be able to discuss and reason about it.
I suppose what I disagree with thus that the original statement is valid as a claim about reality. It seems to me that statements are generally/by default claims about our individual perceptions of reality. (e.g. “He’s very tall.”) A claim becomes a statement about reality only when linked (implicitly or explicitly) to something concrete. (e.g. “He’s in the 90th percentile in height for American adult males.” or “He’s taller than Daddy.” or “He’s taller than the typical gymnast I’ve trained for competitions.”)
To say a stated reason is “bizarre” is a value judgment, and therefore cannot be considered a claim about reality. This is because there is no way to measure its truth value. If bizarre means “strange/unusual”, then what exactly is “normal/usual”? How Less Wrong posters who upvoted Said’s comment would think? How people with more than 1000 karma on Less Wrong would think? There is no meaning behind the word “bizarre” except as an indicator of the writer’s perspective (i.e. what the claim is trying to say is “The stated reason is bizarre to Said”).
I suppose this also explains why such a statement would seem insulting to people who are more Duncan-like. (I acknowledge that you find the paraphrase as insulting as the original. However, since the purpose of discussion is to find a way so people who are Duncan-like and people who are Said-like can communicate and work together, I believe the key concern should be whether or not someone who is Duncan-like would feel less insulted by the paraphrase. After all, people who are Duncan-like feel insulted by different things than people who are Said-like.)
For people who are Duncan-like, I expect the insult comes about because it presents a subjective (social reality) statement in the form of an objective (reality) statement. Said is making a claim about his own perspective, but he is presenting it as if it is objective truth, which can feel like he is invalidating all other possible perspectives. I would guess that people who are more Said-like are less sensitive, either because they think it is already obvious that Said is just making a claim from his own perspective or because they are less susceptible to influence from other people’s claims (e.g. I don’t care if the entire world tells me I am wrong, I don’t ever waver because I know that I am right.)
I included Version 3 because after coming up with Version 2, I noticed it was very similar to the earlier sentence (“I definitely no longer understand.”), so I thought another valid example would be simply omitting the sentence. It seemed appropriate to me because part of being polite is learning to keep your thoughts to yourself when they do not contribute anything useful to the conversation.
somewhere (i can’t find it now) some else wrote that if he will do that, Said always can say it’s not exactly what he means.
In this case, i find the comment itself not very insulting—the insult is in the general absent of Goodwill between Said and Duncan, and in the refuse to do interpretive labor. so any comment of “my model of you was <model> and now i just confused” could have worked.
my model of Duncan avoided to post it here from the general problems in LW, but i wasn’t surprised it was specific problem. I have no idea what was Said’s model of Duncan. but, i will try, with the caveat that the Said’s model of Duncan suggested is almost certainly not true :
I though that you avoid putting it in LW because there will be strong and wrong pushback here against the concept of imaginary injury. it seem coherent with the crux of the post. now, when I learn the true, i simply confused. in my model, what you want to avoid is exactly the imaginary injury described in the post, and i can’t form coherent model of you.
i suspect Said would have say i don’t pass his ideological Turning test on that, or continue to say it’s not exact. I submit that if i cannot, it’s not writing not-insultingly, but passing his ideological turning test.
I’m not quite clear: are you saying that it’s literally impossible to express certain non-insulting meanings in a non-insulting way? Or that you personally are not capable of doing so? Or that you potentially could, but you’re not motivated to figure out how?
Edit—also, do you mean that it’s impossible to even reduce the degree to which it sounds insulting? Or are you just saying that such comments are always going to sound at least a tiny bit insulting?
This is helpful to me understanding you better. Thank you.
I… think that the concept of “non-insulting meaning” is fundamentally a confused one in this context.
Reduce the degree? Well, it seems like it should be possible, in principle, in at least some cases. (The logic being that it seems like it should be quite possible to increase the degree of insultingness without changing the substance, and if that’s the case, then one would have to claim that I always succeed at selecting exactly the least insulting possible version—without changes in substance—of any comment; and that seems like it’s probably unlikely. But there’s a lot of “seems” in that reasoning, so I wouldn’t place very much confidence in it. And I can also tell a comparably plausible story that leads to the opposite conclusion, reducing my confidence even further.)
But I am not sure what consequence that apparent in-principle truth has on anything.
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.
(Expanding on this comment)
The key thing missing from your account of my views is that while I certainly think that “local validity checking” is important, I also—and, perhaps, more importantly—think that the interactions in question are not only fine, but good, in a “relational” sense.
So, for example, it’s not just that a comment that just says “What are some examples of this?” doesn’t, by itself, break any rules or norms, and is “locally valid”. It’s that it’s a positive contribution to the discussion, which is aimed at (a) helping a post author to get the greatest use out of his post and the process and experience of posting it, and (b) helping the commentariat get the greatest use out of the author’s post. (Of course, (b) is more important than (a)—but they are both important!)
Some points that follow from this, or depend on this:
First, such contributions should be socially rewarded to the degree that they are necessary. By “necessary”, here, I mean that if it is the case that some particular sort of criticism or some particular sort of question is good (i.e., it contributes substantially to how much use can be gotten out of a post), but usually nobody asks that sort of question or makes that sort of criticism, then anyone who does do that, should be seen as making not only a good but a very important contribution. (And it’s a bad sign when this sort of thing is common—it means that at least some sorts of important criticisms, or some sorts of important questions, are not asked nearly often enough!)
Meanwhile, asking a sort of question or making a sort of criticism which is equally good but is usually or often made, such that it is fairly predictable and authors can, with decent probability, expect to get it, then such a question or criticism is still good and praiseworthy, but not individually as important (though of course still virtuous!).
In the limit, an author will know that if they don’t address something in their post, somebody will ask about it, or comment on it. (And note that it’s not always necessary, in such a case, to anticipate a criticism or question in your post, even if you expect it will be made! You can leave it to the comments, being ready to respond to it if it’s brought up—or proactively bringing it up yourself, filling the role of your own devil’s advocate.)
In other words—
And this is a good thing. If you posit some abstraction in your post, you should think “they’re gonna ask me for examples in the comments”. (It’s a bad sign, again, if what you actually think is “Said Achmiz is gonna ask me for examples in the comments”!) And this should make you think about whether you have examples; and what those examples demonstrate; or, if you don’t have any, what that means; etc.
And the same goes for many other sorts of questions one could ask, or criticisms one could make.
(Relatedly: I, too, want to “build up a context in which people can hold each other accountable”. But what exactly do you think that looks like?)
Second, it is no demerit to a post author, if one commenter asks a question, and another commenter answers it, without the OP’s involvement (or perhaps with merely a quick note saying “endorsed!”). Indeed it’s no demerit to an author, even, if questions are asked, or criticisms made, in the comments, to which the OP has no good answer, but which are answered satisfactorily by others, such that the end result is that knowledge and understanding are constructed by a collective effort that results in even the author of the post, himself, learning something new!
This, by the way, is related to the reasons why I find the “authors can ban people from their posts” thing so frustrating and so thoroughly counterproductive. If I write a comment under someone’s post, about someone’s post, certainly there’s an obvious sense in which it’s addressed to the author of the post—but it’s not just addressed to them! If I wanted to talk to someone one-on-one, I could send a private message… but unless I make a point of noting that I’m soliciting the OP’s response in particular (and even then, what’s to stop anyone else from answering anyway?), or ask for something that only the OP would know… comments / questions are best seen as “put to the whole table”, so to speak. Yes, if the post author has an answer they think is appropriate to provide, they can, and should, do that. But so can and should anyone else!
It’s no surprise that, as others have noted, the comments section of a post is, not infrequently, at least as useful as the post itself. And that is fine! It’s no indictment of a post’s author, when that turns out to be the case!
The upshot of this point and the previous one is that in (what I take to be) a healthy discussion environment, when someone writes a comment under your post that just says, for instance, “What are some examples of this?”, there is no good reason why that should contribute to any “relational” difficulties. It is the sort of thing that helps to make posts useful, not just to the commentariat as a whole but also to those posts’ authors; and the site is better if people regularly make such comments, ask such questions, pose such criticisms.
And, thus: third, if someone finds that they react to such engagement as if it were some sort of attack, annoyance, problem, etc., that is a bug, and one which they should want to fix. Reacting to a good thing as if it were a bad thing is, quite simply, a mistake.
Note, again, that the question isn’t whether some particular comment is “locally valid” in an “atomic” sense while being problematic in a “relational” sense. The question, rather, is whether the comment is simply good (in a “relational” sense or in any other sense), but is being mistakenly reacted to as though it were bad.
Thank you for laying out your reasoning.
I don’t have any strong objections to any of this (various minor ones, but that’s to be expected)…
… except the last paragraph (#5, starting with “I think Said is trying to figure out …”). There I think you importantly mis-characterize my views; or, to be more precise, you leave out a major aspect, which (in addition to being a missing key point), by its absence colors the rest of your characterization. (What is there is not wrong, per se, but, again, the missing aspect makes it importantly misleading.)
I would, of course, normally elaborate here, but I hesitate to end up with this comment thread/section being filled with my comments. Let me know if you want me to give my thoughts on this in detail here, or elsewhere.
(EDIT: Now expanded upon in this comment.)
I would appreciate more color on your views; by that point I was veering into speculation and hesitant to go too much further, which naturally leads to incompleteness.
By the way, I will note that I am both quite surprised and, separately, something like dismayed, at how devastatingly effective has been what I will characterize as “Said’s privileging-the-hypothesis gambit.”
Like, Said proposed, essentially, “Duncan holds a position which basically no sane person would advocate, and he has somehow held this position for years without anyone noticing, and he conspicuously left this position out of his very-in-depth statement of his beliefs about discourse norms just a couple of months ago”
and if I had realized that I actually needed to seriously counter this claim, I might have started with “bro do you even Bayes?”
(Surely a reasonable prior on someone holding such a position is very very very low even before taking into account the latter parts of the conjunction.)
Like, that Vaniver would go so far as to take the hypothesis
and then go sifting through the past few comments with an eye toward using them to distinguish between “true” and “false” is startling to me.
The observation “Duncan groused at Said for doing too little interpretive and intellectual labor relative to that which he solicited from others” is not adequate support for “Duncan generally thinks that asking for examples is unacceptable.” This is what I meant by the strength of the phrase “blatant falsehood.” I suppose if you are starting from “either Mortimer Snodgrass did it, or not,” rather than from “I wonder who did the murder,” then you can squint at my previous comments—
(including the one that was satirical, which satire, I infer from Vaniver pinging me about my beliefs on that particular phrase offline, was missed)
—and see in them that the murderer has dark hair, and conclude from Mortimer’s dark hair that there should be a large update toward his guilt.
But I rather thought we didn’t do that around here, and did not expect anyone besides Said to seriously entertain the hypothesis, which is ludicrous.
(I get that Said probably genuinely believed it, but the devout genuinely believe in their gods and we don’t give them points for that around here.)
Again, just chiming in, leaving the actual decision up to Ray:
My current take here is indeed that Said’s hypothesis, taking fully literal and within your frame was quite confused and bad.
But also, like, people’s frames, especially in the domain of adversarial actions, hugely differ, and I’ve in the past been surprised by the degree to which some people’s frames, despite seeming insane and gaslighty to me at first turned out to be quite valuable. Most concretely I have in my internal monologue indeed basically fully shifted towards using “lying” and “deception” the way Zack, Benquo and Jessica are using it, because their concept seems to carve reality at its joints much better than my previous concept of lying and deception. This despite me telling them many times that their usage of those terms is quite adversarial and gaslighty.
My current model is that when Said was talking about the preference he ascribes to you, there is a bunch of miscommunication going on, and I probably also have deep disagreements with his underlying model, but I have updated against trying to stamp down on that kind of stuff super hard, even if it sounds quite adversarial to me on first glance.
This might be crazy, and maybe making this a moderation policy would give rise to all kinds of accusations thrown around and a ton of goodwill being destroyed, but I currently generally feel more excited about exploring different people’s accusations of adversarialness in a bunch of depth, even if they seem unlikely on the face of it. This is definitely also partially driven by my thoughts on FTX, and trying to somehow create a space where more uncharitable/adversarial accusations could have been brought up somehow.
But this is really all very off-the-cuff and I have thought about this specific situation and the relevant thread much less than Ray and Ruby have, so I am currently leaving the detailed decisions up to them. But seemed potentially useful to give some of my models here.
I think you are mistaken about the process that generated my previous comment; I would have preferred a response that engaged more with what I wrote.
In particular, it looks to me like you think the core questions are “is the hypothesis I quote correct? Is it backed up by the four examples?”, and the parent comment looks to me like you wrote it thinking I thought the hypothesis you quote is correct and backed up by the examples. I think my grandparent comment makes clear that I think the hypothesis you quote is not correct and is not backed up by the four examples.
Why does the comment not just say “Duncan is straightforwardly right”? Well, I think we disagree about what the core questions are. If you are interested in engaging with that disagreement, so am I; I don’t think it looks like your previous comment.
(I intended to convey with “by the way” that I did not think I had (yet) responded to the full substance of your comment/that I was doing something of an aside.)
I plan to just leave/not post essays here anymore if this isn’t fixed. LW is a miserable place to be, right now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(I also said the following in a chat with several of the moderators on 4/8: > I spent some time wondering if I would endorse a LW where both Duncan and Said were banned, and my conclusion was “yes, b/c that place sounds like it knows what it’s for and is pruning and weeding accordingly.”)
I note that this is leaving out recent and relevant background mentioned in this comment.