Thanks for engaging, I found this comment very… traction-ey? Like we’re getting closer to cruxes. And you’re right that I want to disagree with your ontology.
I think “duty to be clear” skips over the hard part, which is that “being clear” is a transitive verb. It doesn’t make sense to say if a post is clear or not clear, only who one is clear and unclear to.
To use a trivial example: Well taught physics 201 is clear if you’ve had the prerequisite physics classes or are a physics savant, but not to laymen. Poorly taught physics 201 is clear to a subset of the people who would understand it if well-taught. And you can pile on complications from there. Not all prerequisites are as obvious as Physics 101 → Physics 201, but that doesn’t make them not prerequisites. People have different writing and reading styles. Authors can decide the trade-offs are such that they want to write a post but use fairly large step sizes, and leave behind people who can’t fill in the gaps themselves.
So the question is never “is this post clear?”, it’s “who is this post intended for?” and “what percentage of its audience actually finds it clear?” The answers are never “everyone” and “100%” but being more specific than that can be hard and is prone to disagreement.
Commenters of course have every right to say “I don’t understand this” and politely ask questions. But I, and I suspect the mods and most authors, reject the idea that publishing a piece on LessWrong gives me a duty to make every reader understand it. That may cost me karma or respect and I think that’s fine*, I’m not claiming a positive right to other people’s high regard.
You might respond “fine, authors have a right not to answer, but that doesn’t mean commenters don’t have a right to ask”. I think that’s mostly correct but not at the limit, there is a combination of high volume, aggravating approach, and entitlement that drives off far more value than it creates.
*although I think downvoting things I don’t understand is tricky specifically because it’s hard to tell where the problem lies, so I rarely do.
You might respond “fine, authors have a right not to answer, but that doesn’t mean commenters don’t have a right to ask”. I think that’s mostly correct but not at the limit, there is a combination of high volume, aggravating approach, and entitlement that drives off far more value than it creates.
YES. I think this is hugely important, and I think it’s a pretty good definition of the difference between a confused person and a crank.
Confused people ask questions of people they think can help them resolve their confusion. They signal respect, because they perceive themselves as asking for a service to be performed on their behalf by somebody who understands more than they do. They put effort into clarifying their own confusion and figuring out what the author probably meant. They assume they’re lucky if they get one reply from the author, and so they try not to waste their one question on uninteresting trivialities that they could have figured out for themselves.
Cranks ask questions of people they think are wrong, in order to try and expose the weaknesses in their arguments. They signal aloofness, because their priority is on being seen as an authority who deserves similar or higher status (at least on the issue at hand) as the person they’re addressing. They already expect the author they’re questioning is fundamentally confused, and so they don’t waste their own time trying to figure out what the author might have meant. The author, and the audience, are lucky to have the crank’s attention, since they’re obviously collectively lost in confusion and need a disinterested outsider to call attention to that fact.
There’s absolutely a middle ground. There are many times when I ask questions—let’s say of an academic author—where I think the author is probably either wrong or misguided in their analysis. But outside of pointing out specific facts that I know are wrong and suspect the author might not have noticed, I never address these authors in the manner of a crank. If I bother to contact them, it’s to ask questions to do things like:
Describe my specific disagreement succinctly, and ask the author to explain why they think or approach the issue differently
Ask about the points in the author’s argument I don’t fully understand, in case those turn out to be cruxes
Ask what they think about my counterargument, on the assumption that they’ve already thought about it and have a pretty good answer that I’m genuinely interested in hearing
This made something click for me. I wonder if some of the split is people who think comments are primarily communication with the author of a post, vs with other readers.
Cranks ask questions of people they think are wrong, in order to try and expose the weaknesses in their arguments. They signal aloofness, because their priority is on being seen as an authority who deserves similar or higher status (at least on the issue at hand) as the person they’re addressing. They already expect the author they’re questioning is fundamentally confused, and so they don’t waste their own time trying to figure out what the author might have meant. The author, and the audience, are lucky to have the crank’s attention, since they’re obviously collectively lost in confusion and need a disinterested outsider to call attention to that fact.
And this attitude is particularly corrosive to feelings of trust, collaboration, “jamming together,” etc. … it’s like walking into a martial arts academy and finding a person present who scoffs at both the instructors and the other students alike, and who doesn’t offer sufficient faith to even try a given exercise once before first a) hearing it comprehensively justified and b) checking the sparring records to see if people who did that exercise win more fights.
Which, yeah, that’s one way to zero in on the best martial arts practices, if the other people around you also signed up for that kind of culture and have patience for that level of suspicion and mistrust!
(I choose martial arts specifically because it’s a domain full of anti-epistemic garbage and claims that don’t pan out.)
But in practice, few people will participate in such a martial arts academy for long, and it’s not true that a martial arts academy lacking that level of rigor makes no progress in discovering and teaching useful things to its students.
You’re describing a deeply dysfunctional gym, and then implying that the problem lies with the attitude of this one character rather than the dysfunction that allows such an attitude to be disruptive.
The way to jam with such a character is to bet you can tap him with the move of the day, and find out if you’re right. If you can, and he gets tapped 10 times in a row with the move he just scoffed at every day he does it, then it becomes increasingly difficult for him to scoff the next time, and increasingly funny and entertaining for everyone else. If you can’t, and no one can, then he might have a point, and the gym gets to learn something new.
If your gym knows how to jam with and incorporate dissonance without perceiving it as a threat, then not only are such expressions of distrust/disrespect not corrosive, they’re an active part of the productive collaboration, and serve as opportunities to form the trust and mutual respect which clearly weren’t there in the first place. It’s definitely more challenging to jam with dissonant characters like that (especially if they’re dysfunctionally dissonant, as your description implies), and no one wants to train at a gym which fails to form trust and mutual respect, but it’s important to realize that the problem isn’t so much the difficulty as the inability to overcome the difficulty, because the solutions to each are very different.
Strong disagree that I’m describing a deeply dysfunctional gym; I barely described the gym at all and it’s way overconfident/projection-y to extrapolate “deeply dysfunctional” from what I said.
There’s a difference between “hey, I want to understand the underpinnings of this” and the thing I described, which is hostile to the point of “why are you even here, then?”
Edit: I view the votes on this and the parent comment as indicative of a genuine problem; jimmy above is exhibiting actually bad reasoning (à la representativeness) and the LWers who happen to be hanging around this particular comment thread are, uh, apparently unaware of this fact. Alas.
Strong disagree that I’m describing a deeply dysfunctional gym; I barely described the gym at all and it’s way overconfident/projection-y to extrapolate “deeply dysfunctional” from what I said.
Well, you mentioned the scenario as an illustration of a “particularly corrosive” attitude. It therefore seems reasonable to fill in the unspecified details (like just how disruptive the guy’s behavior is, how much of everyone’s time he wastes, how many instructors are driven away in shame or irritation) with pretty negative ones—to assume the gym has in fact been corroded, being at least, say, moderately dysfunctional as a result.
Maybe “deeply dysfunctional” was going too far, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to call that “way overconfident/projection-y”. Nor does the difference between “deeply dysfunctional” and “moderately dysfunctional” matter for jimmy’s point.
votes
FYI, I’m inclined to upvote jimmy’s comment because of the second paragraph: it seems to be the perfect solution to the described situation (and to all hypothetical dysfunction in the gym, minor or major), and has some generalizability (look for cheap tests of beliefs, challenge people to do them). And your comment seems to be calling jimmy out inappropriately (as I’ve argued above), so I’m inclined to at least disagree-vote it.
“Let’s imagine that these unspecified details, which could be anywhere within a VERY wide range, are specifically such that the original point is ridiculous, in support of concluding that the original point is ridiculous” does not seem like a reasonable move to me.
Yes, Jimmy was either projecting (filling in unspecified details with dysfunction, where function would also fit) or making an unjustified claim (that any gym matching your description must be dysfunctional). I think projection is more likely. Neither of these options is great.
But it’s not clear how important that mistake is to his comment. I expect people were mostly reacting to paragraphs 2 and 3, and you could cut paragraph 1 out and they’d stand by themselves.
Do the more-interesting parts of the comment implicitly rely on the projection/unjustified-claim? Also not clear to me. I do think the comment is overstated. (“The way to jam”?) But e.g. “the problem isn’t so much the difficulty as the inability to overcome the difficulty” seems… well, I’d say this is overstated too, but I do think it’s pointing at something that seems valuable to keep in mind even if we accept that the gym is functional.
So I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the parent got significantly upvoted, though I didn’t upvote it myself; and I don’t think it’s unreasonable that your correction didn’t, since it looks correct to me but like it’s not responding to the main point.
Maybe you think paragraphs 2 and 3 were relying more on the projection than it currently seems to me? In that case you actually are responding to what-I-see-as the main point. But if so I’d need it spelled out in more detail.
Yes, Jimmy was either projecting (filling in unspecified details with dysfunction, where function would also fit) or making an unjustified claim (that any gym matching your description must be dysfunctional). I think projection is more likely. Neither of these options is great.
FWIW, that is a claim I’m fully willing and able to justify. It’s hard to disclaim all the possible misinterpretations in a brief comment (e.g. “deeply” != “very”), but I do stand by a pretty strong interpretation of what I said as being true, justifiable, important, and relevant.
There’s a difference between “hey, I want to understand the underpinnings of this” and the thing I described, which is hostile to the point of “why are you even here, then?”
Yes, and that’s why I described the attitude as “dysfunctionally dissonant” (emphasis in original). It’s not a good way of challenging the instructors, and not the way I recommend behaving.
What I’m talking about is how a healthy gym environment is robust to this sort of dysfunctional dissonance, and how to productively relate to unskilled dissonance by practicing skillfully enough yourself that the system’s combined dysfunction never becomes supercritical and instead decays towards productive cooperation.
it’s way overconfident/projection-y to extrapolate “deeply dysfunctional” from what I said.
That’s certainly one possibility. But isn’t it also conceivable though that I simply see underlying dynamics (and lack thereof) which you don’t see, and which justify the confidence level I display?
It certainly makes sense to track the hypothesis that I am overconfident here, but ironically it strikes me as overconfident to be asserting that I am being overconfident without first checking things like “Can I pass his ITT”/”Can I point to a flaw in his argument that makes him stutter if not change his mind”/etc.
To be clear, my view here is based on years of thinking about this kind of problem and practicing my proposed solutions with success, including in a literal martial arts gym for the last eight years. Perhaps I should have written more about these things on LW so my confidence doesn’t appear to come out of nowhere, but I do believe I am able to justify what I’m saying very well and won’t hesitate to do so if anyone wants further explanation or sees something which doesn’t seem to fit. And hey, if it turns out I’m wrong about how well supported my perspective is, I promise not to be a poor sport about it.
jimmy above is exhibiting actually bad reasoning (à la representativeness)
In absence of an object level counterargument, this is textbook ad hominem. I won’t argue that there isn’t a place for that (or that it’s impossible that my reasoning is flawed), but I think it’s hard to argue that it isn’t premature here. As a general rule, anyone that disagrees with anyone can come up with a million accusations of this sort, and it isn’t uncommon for some of it to be right to an extent, but it’s really hard to have a productive conversation if such accusations are used as a first resort rather than as a last resort. Especially when they aren’t well substantiated.
I see that you’ve deactivated your account now so it might be too late, but I want to point out explicitly that I actively want you to stick around and feel comfortable contributing here. I’m pushing back against some of the things you’re saying because I think that it’s important to do so, but I do not harbor any ill will towards you nor do I think what you said was “ridiculous”. I hope you come back.
Thanks for engaging, I found this comment very… traction-ey? Like we’re getting closer to cruxes. And you’re right that I want to disagree with your ontology.
I think “duty to be clear” skips over the hard part, which is that “being clear” is a transitive verb. It doesn’t make sense to say if a post is clear or not clear, only who one is clear and unclear to.
To use a trivial example: Well taught physics 201 is clear if you’ve had the prerequisite physics classes or are a physics savant, but not to laymen. Poorly taught physics 201 is clear to a subset of the people who would understand it if well-taught. And you can pile on complications from there. Not all prerequisites are as obvious as Physics 101 → Physics 201, but that doesn’t make them not prerequisites. People have different writing and reading styles. Authors can decide the trade-offs are such that they want to write a post but use fairly large step sizes, and leave behind people who can’t fill in the gaps themselves.
So the question is never “is this post clear?”, it’s “who is this post intended for?” and “what percentage of its audience actually finds it clear?” The answers are never “everyone” and “100%” but being more specific than that can be hard and is prone to disagreement.
Commenters of course have every right to say “I don’t understand this” and politely ask questions. But I, and I suspect the mods and most authors, reject the idea that publishing a piece on LessWrong gives me a duty to make every reader understand it. That may cost me karma or respect and I think that’s fine*, I’m not claiming a positive right to other people’s high regard.
You might respond “fine, authors have a right not to answer, but that doesn’t mean commenters don’t have a right to ask”. I think that’s mostly correct but not at the limit, there is a combination of high volume, aggravating approach, and entitlement that drives off far more value than it creates.
*although I think downvoting things I don’t understand is tricky specifically because it’s hard to tell where the problem lies, so I rarely do.
YES. I think this is hugely important, and I think it’s a pretty good definition of the difference between a confused person and a crank.
Confused people ask questions of people they think can help them resolve their confusion. They signal respect, because they perceive themselves as asking for a service to be performed on their behalf by somebody who understands more than they do. They put effort into clarifying their own confusion and figuring out what the author probably meant. They assume they’re lucky if they get one reply from the author, and so they try not to waste their one question on uninteresting trivialities that they could have figured out for themselves.
Cranks ask questions of people they think are wrong, in order to try and expose the weaknesses in their arguments. They signal aloofness, because their priority is on being seen as an authority who deserves similar or higher status (at least on the issue at hand) as the person they’re addressing. They already expect the author they’re questioning is fundamentally confused, and so they don’t waste their own time trying to figure out what the author might have meant. The author, and the audience, are lucky to have the crank’s attention, since they’re obviously collectively lost in confusion and need a disinterested outsider to call attention to that fact.
There’s absolutely a middle ground. There are many times when I ask questions—let’s say of an academic author—where I think the author is probably either wrong or misguided in their analysis. But outside of pointing out specific facts that I know are wrong and suspect the author might not have noticed, I never address these authors in the manner of a crank. If I bother to contact them, it’s to ask questions to do things like:
Describe my specific disagreement succinctly, and ask the author to explain why they think or approach the issue differently
Ask about the points in the author’s argument I don’t fully understand, in case those turn out to be cruxes
Ask what they think about my counterargument, on the assumption that they’ve already thought about it and have a pretty good answer that I’m genuinely interested in hearing
This made something click for me. I wonder if some of the split is people who think comments are primarily communication with the author of a post, vs with other readers.
And this attitude is particularly corrosive to feelings of trust, collaboration, “jamming together,” etc. … it’s like walking into a martial arts academy and finding a person present who scoffs at both the instructors and the other students alike, and who doesn’t offer sufficient faith to even try a given exercise once before first a) hearing it comprehensively justified and b) checking the sparring records to see if people who did that exercise win more fights.
Which, yeah, that’s one way to zero in on the best martial arts practices, if the other people around you also signed up for that kind of culture and have patience for that level of suspicion and mistrust!
(I choose martial arts specifically because it’s a domain full of anti-epistemic garbage and claims that don’t pan out.)
But in practice, few people will participate in such a martial arts academy for long, and it’s not true that a martial arts academy lacking that level of rigor makes no progress in discovering and teaching useful things to its students.
You’re describing a deeply dysfunctional gym, and then implying that the problem lies with the attitude of this one character rather than the dysfunction that allows such an attitude to be disruptive.
The way to jam with such a character is to bet you can tap him with the move of the day, and find out if you’re right. If you can, and he gets tapped 10 times in a row with the move he just scoffed at every day he does it, then it becomes increasingly difficult for him to scoff the next time, and increasingly funny and entertaining for everyone else. If you can’t, and no one can, then he might have a point, and the gym gets to learn something new.
If your gym knows how to jam with and incorporate dissonance without perceiving it as a threat, then not only are such expressions of distrust/disrespect not corrosive, they’re an active part of the productive collaboration, and serve as opportunities to form the trust and mutual respect which clearly weren’t there in the first place. It’s definitely more challenging to jam with dissonant characters like that (especially if they’re dysfunctionally dissonant, as your description implies), and no one wants to train at a gym which fails to form trust and mutual respect, but it’s important to realize that the problem isn’t so much the difficulty as the inability to overcome the difficulty, because the solutions to each are very different.
Strong disagree that I’m describing a deeply dysfunctional gym; I barely described the gym at all and it’s way overconfident/projection-y to extrapolate “deeply dysfunctional” from what I said.
There’s a difference between “hey, I want to understand the underpinnings of this” and the thing I described, which is hostile to the point of “why are you even here, then?”
Edit: I view the votes on this and the parent comment as indicative of a genuine problem; jimmy above is exhibiting actually bad reasoning (à la representativeness) and the LWers who happen to be hanging around this particular comment thread are, uh, apparently unaware of this fact. Alas.
Well, you mentioned the scenario as an illustration of a “particularly corrosive” attitude. It therefore seems reasonable to fill in the unspecified details (like just how disruptive the guy’s behavior is, how much of everyone’s time he wastes, how many instructors are driven away in shame or irritation) with pretty negative ones—to assume the gym has in fact been corroded, being at least, say, moderately dysfunctional as a result.
Maybe “deeply dysfunctional” was going too far, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to call that “way overconfident/projection-y”. Nor does the difference between “deeply dysfunctional” and “moderately dysfunctional” matter for jimmy’s point.
FYI, I’m inclined to upvote jimmy’s comment because of the second paragraph: it seems to be the perfect solution to the described situation (and to all hypothetical dysfunction in the gym, minor or major), and has some generalizability (look for cheap tests of beliefs, challenge people to do them). And your comment seems to be calling jimmy out inappropriately (as I’ve argued above), so I’m inclined to at least disagree-vote it.
“Let’s imagine that these unspecified details, which could be anywhere within a VERY wide range, are specifically such that the original point is ridiculous, in support of concluding that the original point is ridiculous” does not seem like a reasonable move to me.
Separately:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WsvpkCekuxYSkwsuG/overconfidence-is-deceit
I think my feeling here is:
Yes, Jimmy was either projecting (filling in unspecified details with dysfunction, where function would also fit) or making an unjustified claim (that any gym matching your description must be dysfunctional). I think projection is more likely. Neither of these options is great.
But it’s not clear how important that mistake is to his comment. I expect people were mostly reacting to paragraphs 2 and 3, and you could cut paragraph 1 out and they’d stand by themselves.
Do the more-interesting parts of the comment implicitly rely on the projection/unjustified-claim? Also not clear to me. I do think the comment is overstated. (“The way to jam”?) But e.g. “the problem isn’t so much the difficulty as the inability to overcome the difficulty” seems… well, I’d say this is overstated too, but I do think it’s pointing at something that seems valuable to keep in mind even if we accept that the gym is functional.
So I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the parent got significantly upvoted, though I didn’t upvote it myself; and I don’t think it’s unreasonable that your correction didn’t, since it looks correct to me but like it’s not responding to the main point.
Maybe you think paragraphs 2 and 3 were relying more on the projection than it currently seems to me? In that case you actually are responding to what-I-see-as the main point. But if so I’d need it spelled out in more detail.
FWIW, that is a claim I’m fully willing and able to justify. It’s hard to disclaim all the possible misinterpretations in a brief comment (e.g. “deeply” != “very”), but I do stand by a pretty strong interpretation of what I said as being true, justifiable, important, and relevant.
Yes, and that’s why I described the attitude as “dysfunctionally dissonant” (emphasis in original). It’s not a good way of challenging the instructors, and not the way I recommend behaving.
What I’m talking about is how a healthy gym environment is robust to this sort of dysfunctional dissonance, and how to productively relate to unskilled dissonance by practicing skillfully enough yourself that the system’s combined dysfunction never becomes supercritical and instead decays towards productive cooperation.
That’s certainly one possibility. But isn’t it also conceivable though that I simply see underlying dynamics (and lack thereof) which you don’t see, and which justify the confidence level I display?
It certainly makes sense to track the hypothesis that I am overconfident here, but ironically it strikes me as overconfident to be asserting that I am being overconfident without first checking things like “Can I pass his ITT”/”Can I point to a flaw in his argument that makes him stutter if not change his mind”/etc.
To be clear, my view here is based on years of thinking about this kind of problem and practicing my proposed solutions with success, including in a literal martial arts gym for the last eight years. Perhaps I should have written more about these things on LW so my confidence doesn’t appear to come out of nowhere, but I do believe I am able to justify what I’m saying very well and won’t hesitate to do so if anyone wants further explanation or sees something which doesn’t seem to fit. And hey, if it turns out I’m wrong about how well supported my perspective is, I promise not to be a poor sport about it.
In absence of an object level counterargument, this is textbook ad hominem. I won’t argue that there isn’t a place for that (or that it’s impossible that my reasoning is flawed), but I think it’s hard to argue that it isn’t premature here. As a general rule, anyone that disagrees with anyone can come up with a million accusations of this sort, and it isn’t uncommon for some of it to be right to an extent, but it’s really hard to have a productive conversation if such accusations are used as a first resort rather than as a last resort. Especially when they aren’t well substantiated.
I see that you’ve deactivated your account now so it might be too late, but I want to point out explicitly that I actively want you to stick around and feel comfortable contributing here. I’m pushing back against some of the things you’re saying because I think that it’s important to do so, but I do not harbor any ill will towards you nor do I think what you said was “ridiculous”. I hope you come back.