A lot of digital ink has been spilled, and if I were a random commenter I wouldn’t think it that valuable to dig into my object level reasoning. But, since I’m the one making the final calls here it seemed important to lay out how I think about the broader patterns in Said’s behavior.
I’ll start by clarifying my own take on the “what’s up with Said and asking for examples?”
I think it is (all else being equal) basically always fine to ask for examples. I think most posts could be improved by having them, I agree that the process of thinking about concrete examples is useful for sanity checking that your idea is real at all. And there is something good and rationalistly wholesome about not seeing it as an attack, but just as “hey, this is a useful thing to consider” (whether or not Said is consistent about this interpretation)
My take on “what the problem here is” is not the part where Said asks for examples, but that when Said shows up in a particular kind of thread, I have a pretty high expectation that there will be a resulting long conversation that won’t actually clarify anything important.
The “particular kind of thread” is a cluster of things surrounding introspection, interpersonal-interaction, modeling other people’s inner states, and/or interpretative labor. Said is highly skeptical of claims about things in this cluster, and the couple of times I’ve seen someone actually pursue a conversation with him through to completion the results have rarely seemed illuminating or satisfying. (It seems like Said’s experience of things in this space is genuinely different from most people I know. He’ll ask for examples, I anticipate giving examples, the examples will be subtle and not obviously real to him. I don’t mind that he doesn’t believe the examples, but then he’ll ask a bunch of followup questions with increasing skepticism/vague-undertone-of-insultingness that is both infuriating and pointless)
I think Said sees himself in often pointing out “the emperor has no clothes”, but, I think he just doesn’t actually have good taste in what clothes look like in a number of domains that I think are essential for improving the art of rationality.
I do actually get some value from his first couple comments in a thread – they do serve a useful reminder to me to step outside my current frame, see what what hidden assumptions I’m making, etc. I feel fine doing this because I feel comfortable just ignoring him after he’s said those initial things, when a normal/common social script would consider that somewhat rude. But this requires a significant amount of backbone. Backbone is great, more people should build it, but I don’t think it’s super correlated with people who are otherwise intellectually generative. And meanwhile there’s still something missing-stair-y about Said, where he’s phrasing his questions in ways that are just under the radar of feeling unreasonable, until you find yourself knee deep in a long annoying comment tree, so “it’s time to use some backbone” isn’t even obvious.
I do sometimes think he successfully points out “emperor has no clothes”. Or, more commonly/accurately, “the undergrad has no thesis.” In some cases his socratic questioning seems like an actually-appropriate relationship between an adjunct professor, and an undergrad who shows up to his philosophy class writing an impassioned manifesto that doesn’t actually make sense and is riddled with philosophical holes. I don’t super mind when Said plays this role, but often in my experience Said is making these comments about people I respect a lot more, who’ve put hundreds/thousands of hours into studying how to teach rationality (which absolutely requires being able to model people’s minds, what mistakes they’re likely to be making, what thought processes tend to lead to significant breakthroughs)
Said takes pride in only posting ~1 post a year or so that actually passes his bar for correct and useful. I think this is massively missing the point of how intellectual progress works. I’ve talked to many people who seem to reliably turn out philosophically competent advances, and a very common thread is that their early stage idea-formation is fragile, they’re not always able to rigorously explain it right away. It eventually stands up to scrutiny but it wouldn’t be at all helpful to subject their early idea formation to Said’s questioning.
Said is holding LessWrong to the standard of a final-publication-journal, when the thing I think LessWrong needs to be includes many stages before that, when you see the messy process that actually generated those final ideas.
I do think there are some important unsolved problems here. I quite liked DirectedEvolution’s comment here where he notes:
I do agree with Said that LessWrong can benefit from improved formative evaluations. I have written some fairly popular LessWrong reviews, and one of the things I’ve uncovered is that some of the most memorable and persuasive evidence underpinning key ideas is much weaker and more ambiguous than I thought it was when I originally read the post. At LessWrong, we’re fairly familiar as a culture with factors contributing to irreproducibility in science—p-hacking and the like.
The time for figuring out whether the ideas or claims in a post are even coherent, or falsifiable, or whether readers even agree on what the post is saying, is immediately.
Immediately—before an idea is absorbed into the local culture, before it becomes the foundation of a dozen more posts that build on it as an assumption, before it balloons into a whole “sequence”—when there’s still time to say “oops” with minimal cost, to course-correct, to notice important caveats or important implications, to avoid pitfalls of terminology, or (in some cases) to throw the whole thing out, shrug, and say “ah well, back to the drawing board”.
[...]
It is an accepted truism among usability professionals that any company, org, or development team that only or mostly does summative evaluations, and neglects or disdains formative evaluations, is not serious about usability.
We’re now ~4 years into experimenting with the LessWrong Review, it’s accomplished some of the goals I had for it but not all of them. Five years ago, before the first Review year was even complete, we told Said:
I, Oli and Ray will build a better evaluative process for this online community, that incentivises powerful criticism. But right now this site is trying to build a place where we can be generative (and evaluative) together in a way that’s fun and not aggressive. While we have an incentive toward better ideas (weighted karma and curation), it is far from a finished system. We have to build this part as well as the evaluative before the whole system works, and while we’ve not reached there you’re correct to be worried and want to enforce the standards yourself with low-effort comments (and I don’t mean to imply the comments don’t often contain implicit within them very good ideas).
Five years later, we’ve built part of the evaluative system, but I did update after this year’s Review that yeah, we need some kind of faster system as well. I’ve found the comments in this discussion helpful for thinking through what needs to happen here. I’ll hopefully write up a top level post about that.
For now, I agree we probably need to directly incentivize good formative critique. But I don’t think Said is actually very good at that in many cases. The best critiques of (say) Circling IMO have come from people who actually understood the good things about Circling, got some value from it, and nonetheless said “but, CFAR still massively overinvested in it” or “the people who do tons of circling get better at relating but in a distorted way, where they go off to circling retreats where everyone is into Openness and Connection, and they don’t do the sort of crosstraining you need to actually also be good at working as a professional or being a good roommate.”
I agree that in the domain of “rationality training”, it’s pretty easy to fool yourself. i.e. Schools Proliferating Without Evidence and whatnot. I think there’s a difficulty that lives in the territory of “it actually does take awhile to hone in on the training processes that work best, and navigating that domain is going to look from the outside like futzing around with stuff that isn’t obviously real/important. (I have thoughts on how to do this better, that are outside the scope here)
...
I note that this comment is focused on particular genre of conversation-involving-Said, which isn’t necessarily directly relevant to the case at hand. But it seemed like important background for a lot of the discussion and eventual decisionmaking here.
My take on “what the problem here is” is not the part where Said asks for examples, but that when Said shows up in a particular kind of thread, I have a pretty high expectation that there will be a resulting long conversation that won’t actually clarify anything important.
“You should have deduced it yourself, Mr. Potter,” Professor Quirrell said mildly. “You must learn to blur your vision until you can see the forest obscured by the trees. Anyone who heard the stories about you, and who did not know that you were the mysterious Boy-Who-Lived, could easily deduce your ownership of an invisibility cloak. Step back from these events, blur away their details, and what do we observe? There was a great rivalry between students, and their competition ended in a perfect tie. That sort of thing only happens in stories, Mr. Potter, and there is one person in this school who thinks in stories. There was a strange and complicated plot, which you should have realized was uncharacteristic of the young Slytherin you faced. But there is a person in this school who deals in plots that elaborate, and his name is not Zabini. And I did warn you that there was a quadruple agent; you knew that Zabini was at least a triple agent, and you should have guessed a high chance that it was he. No, I will not declare the battle invalid. All three of you failed the test, and lost to your common enemy.”
When I blur my vision so that the details are fuzzy but the broad strokes are still visible, I too see “a pretty high expectation that there will be a resulting long conversation that won’t actually clarify anything important”. And I think that this approach of blurring ones vision is a wise one to adopt in this situation.
I feel fine doing this because I feel comfortable just ignoring him after he’s said those initial things, when a normal/common social script would consider that somewhat rude. But this requires a significant amount of backbone.
I still wish that LW would try my idea for solving this (and related) problem(s), but it doesn’t seem like that’s ever going to happen. (I’ve tried to remind LW admins about my feature request over the years, but don’t think I’ve ever seen an admin say why it’s not worth trying.) As an alternative, I’ve seen people suggest that it’s fine to ignore comments unless they’re upvoted. That makes sense to me (as a second best solution). What about making that a site-wide norm, i.e., making it explicit that we don’t or shouldn’t consider it rude or otherwise norm-violating to ignore comments unless they’ve been upvoted above some specific karma threshold?
This way authors are less motivated to take steps that discourage criticism (including steps such as not writing things). Criticism should remain convenient, not costly, and directly associated with the criticised thing (instead of getting pushed to be published elsewhere).
Hmm. On one hand, I do think it’s moderately likely we experiment with Reacts, which can partially address your desire here.
But it seems like the problem you’re mostly trying to solve is not that big a problem to me (i.e I think it’s totally fine for conversations to just peter out, nobody is entitled to being responded to. I’d at least want to see a second established user asking for it before I considered prioritizing it more. I personally expect a “there is a norm of responding to upvoted comments” to make the site much worse. “Getting annoying comments that miss the point” is one of the most cited things people dislike about LW, and forcing authors to engage with them seems like it’d exacerbate it.)
Generally, people are busy, don’t have time to reply to everything, and commenters should just assume they won’t necessarily get a response unless the author/their-conversation-partner continues to thinks a conversation is rewarding.
I’d at least want to see a second established user asking for it before I considered prioritizing it more.
I doubt you’ll ever see this, because when you’re an established / high status member, ignoring other people feels pretty natural and right, and few people ignore you so you don’t notice any problems. I made the request back when I had lower status on this forum. I got ignored by others way more than I do now, and ignored others way less than I do now. (I had higher motivation to “prove” myself to my critics and the audience.)
If I hadn’t written down my request back then, in all likelihood I would have forgotten my old perspective and wouldn’t be talking about this today.
“Getting annoying comments that miss the point” is one of the most cited things people dislike about LW, and forcing authors to engage with them seems like it’d exacerbate it.)
In my original feature request, I had a couple of “agreement statuses” that require only minimal engagement, like “I don’t understand this. I give up.” and “I disagree, but don’t want to bother writing out why.” We could easily add more, like “I think further engagement won’t be productive.” or “This isn’t material to my main point.” And then we could experiment with setting norms for how much social reward or punishment to give out for such responses (if people’s natural reactions to them cause bad consequences). I wouldn’t be surprised that such a system ends up making authors more willing or more comfortable to engage less with annoying critics, and makes their LW experience better, by making it more explicit that it’s ok to engage with such critics minimally.
We are currently thinking about “reacts” as a way of providing users with an 80:20 for giving feedback on comments, though motivated by a somewhat different set of concerns. It’s a tricky UX problem and not at the very top of our priority list, but it has come up recently.
This… still misconstrues my views, in quite substantive and important ways. Very frustrating.
You write:
Said is holding LessWrong to the standard of a final-publication-journal, when the thing I think LessWrong needs to be includes many stages before that, when you see the messy process that actually generated those final ideas.
I absolutely am not doing that. It makes no sense to say this! It would be like saying “this user test that you’re doing with our wireframe is holding the app we’re developing to the standard of a final-release product”. It’s simply a complete confusion about what testing is even for. The whole point of doing the user test now is that it is just a wireframe, not even a prototype or an alpha version, so getting as much information as possible now is extremely helpful! Nobody’s saying that you have to throw out the whole project and fire everyone involved into the sun the moment you get a single piece of negative user feedback; but if you don’t subject the thing to testing, you’re losing out on a critical opportunity to improve, to correct course… heck, to just plain learn something new! (And for all you know, the test might have a surprisingly positive result! Maybe some minor feature or little widget, which your designers threw in on a lark, elicits an effusive response from your test users, and clues you in to a highly fruitful design approach which you wouldn’t’ve thought worth pursuing. But you’ll never learn that if you don’t test!)
It feels to me like I’ve explained this… maybe as many as a dozen times in this post’s comment section alone. (I haven’t counted. Probably it’s not quite that many. But several, at least!)
I have to ask: is that you read my explanations but found them unconvincing, and concluded that “oh sure, Said says he believes so-and-so, but I don’t find his actions consistent with those purported beliefs, despite his explicit explanations of why they are consistent with them”?
If so, then the follow-up question is: why do you think that?
I don’t super mind when Said plays this role, but often in my experience Said is making these comments about people I respect a lot more, who’ve put hundreds/thousands of hours into studying how to teach rationality (which absolutely requires being able to model people’s minds, what mistakes they’re likely to be making, what thought processes tend to lead to significant breakthroughs)
What jumps out at me immediately, in this description, is that you describe the people in question as having put a lot of time into studying how to teach rationality. (This, you imply, allows us to assume certain qualifications or qualities on these individuals’ parts, from which we may further conclude… well, you don’t say it explicitly, but the implication seems to be something like “clearly such people know what they’re talking about, and deserve the presumption of such, and therefore it’s epistemically and/or socially inappropriate to treat them as though their ideas might be bullshit the equivalent of an eager undergrad’s philosophy manifesto”.)
But I notice that you don’t instead (or even in addition) say anything like “people … who have a clear and impressive track record of successfully teaching rationality”.
Of course this could be a simple omission, so I’ll ask explicitly: do you think that the people in question have such a track record?
If you do, and if they do, then of course that’s the relevant fact. And then at least part of the reply to my (perhaps at least seemingly) skeptical questioning (maybe after you give some answer to a question, but I’m not buying it, or ask follow-ups, etc.) might be “well, Said, here’s my track record; that’s who I am; and when I say it’s like this, you can disbelieve my explanations, but my claims are borne out in what I’ve demonstrably done”.
Now, it’s entirely possible that some people might find such a reply unconvincing, in any given case. Being an expert at something doesn’t make you omniscient, even on one subject! But it’s definitely the sort of response which buys you a good bit of indulgence from skepticism, so to speak, about claims for which you cannot (or don’t care to) provide legible evidence, on the spot and at the moment.
But (as I’ve noted before, though I can’t seem to find the comment in question, right now), those sorts of unambiguous qualifications tend to be mostly or entirely absent, in such cases.
And in the absence of such qualifications, but in the presence of claims like those about “circling” and other such things, it is not less but rather more appropriate to apply the at-least-potentially-skeptical, exploratory, questioning approach. It is not less but rather more important to “poke” at ideas, in ways that may be expected to reveal interesting and productive strengths if the ideas are strong, but to reveal weaknesses if the ideas are weak. It is not less but rather more important not to suppress all but those comments which take the “non-bullshit” nature of the claims for granted.
Said: I absolutely am not doing that. It makes no sense to say this!
Yeah I agree this phrasing didn’t capture your take correctly, and I do recall explicit comments about that in this thread, sorry.
I do claim your approach is in practice often anti-conducive to people doing early stage research. You’ve stated a willingness (I think eagerness?) to drive people away and cause fewer posts from people who I think are actually promising.
But I notice that you don’t instead (or even in addition) say anything like “people … who have a clear and impressive track record of successfully teaching rationality”. Of course this could be a simple omission, so I’ll ask explicitly: do you think that the people in question have such a track record?
My actual answer is “To varying degrees, some more than others.” I definitely do not claim any of them have reached the point of ‘we have a thing working well enough we could persuade an arbitrary skeptic our thing is real and important.’ (i.e. a reliable training program that demonstrably improves quantifiable real world successes). But I think this is a process you should naturally expect to take 4-20 years.
Meanwhile, there are many steps along the way that don’t “produce a cake a skeptical third party can eat”, but if you’re actually involved and paying attention, like, clearly are having an effect that is relevant, and is at least an indication that you’re on a promising path worth experimenting more with. I observe the people practicing various CFAR and Leverage techniques seem to have a good combination of habits that makes it easier to have difficult conversations in domains with poor feedback loops. The people doing the teaching have hundreds of hours of practice trying to teach skills, seeing mistakes people make along the way, and see them making fewer mistakes and actually grokking the skill.
Some of the people involved do feel a bit like they’re making some stuff up and coasting on CFAR’s position in the ecosystem, but other seem like they’re legitimately embarking on longterm research projects, tracking their progress in ways that make sense, looking for the best feedback loops they can find, etc.
Anecdata: I talked a bunch with a colleague who I respect a lot in 2014, who seemed much smarter -. We parted ways for 3 years. Later, I met him again, we talked a bunch over the course of a month, and he said “hey, man, you seem smarter than you did 3 years ago.” I said “oh, huh, yeah I thought so too and, like, had worked to become smarter on purpose, but I wasn’t sure whether it worked.”
Nowadays, when I observe people as they do their thinking, I notice tools they’re not using, mistakes they’re making, suggest fixes, and it seems like they in fact do better thinking.
I think it’s reasonable to not believe me (that the effect is significant, or that it’s CFAR/Leverage mediated). I think it is quite valuable to poke at this. I just don’t think you’re very good at it, and I’m not very interested in satisfying your particular brand of skepticism.
My actual answer is “To varying degrees, some more than others.” I definitely do not claim any of them have reached the point of ‘we have a thing working well enough we could persuade an arbitrary skeptic our thing is real and important.’ (i.e. a reliable training program that demonstrably improves quantifiable real world successes).
An arbitrary skeptic is perhaps too high a bar, but what about a reasonable skeptic? I think that, from that perspective (and especially given the “outside view” on similar things attempted in the past), if you don’t have “a reliable training program that demonstrably improves quantifiable real world successes”, you basically just don’t have anything. If someone asks you “do you have anything to show for all of this”, and all you’ve got is what you’ve got, then… well, I think that I’m not showing any even slightly unreasonable skepticism, here.
But I think this is a process you should naturally expect to take 4-20 years.
Well, CFAR was founded 11 years ago. That’s well within the “4–20” range. Are you saying that it’s still too early to see clear results?
Is there any reason to believe that there will be anything like “a reliable training program that demonstrably improves quantifiable real world successes” in five years (assuming AI doesn’t kill us all or what have you)? Has there been any progress? (On evaluation methods, even?) Is CFAR even measuring progress, or attempting to measure progress, or… what?
Meanwhile, there are many steps along the way … Anecdata …
But you see how these paragraphs are pretty unconvincing, though, right? Like, at the very least, even if you are indeed seeing all these things you describe, and even if they’re real things, you surely can see how there’s… basically no way for me, or anyone else who isn’t hanging out with you and your in-person acquaintances on a regular basis, to see or know or verify any of this?
I think it’s reasonable to not believe me (that the effect is significant, or that it’s CFAR/Leverage mediated). I think it is quite valuable to poke at this. I just don’t think you’re very good at it, and I’m not very interested in satisfying your particular brand of skepticism.
Hold on—you’ve lost track of the meta-level point.
The question isn’t whether it’s valuable to poke at these specific things, or whether I’m good at poking at these specific things.
I do sometimes think [Said] successfully points out “emperor has no clothes”. Or, more commonly/accurately, “the undergrad has no thesis.” In some cases his socratic questioning seems like an actually-appropriate relationship between an adjunct professor, and an undergrad who shows up to his philosophy class writing an impassioned manifesto that doesn’t actually make sense and is riddled with philosophical holes. I don’t super mind when Said plays this role, but often in my experience Said is making these comments about people I respect a lot more, who’ve put hundreds/thousands of hours into studying how to teach rationality (which absolutely requires being able to model people’s minds, what mistakes they’re likely to be making, what thought processes tend to lead to significant breakthroughs)
Which I summarized/interpreted as:
… the implication seems to be something like “clearly such people know what they’re talking about, and deserve the presumption of such, and therefore it’s epistemically and/or socially inappropriate to treat them as though their ideas might be bullshit the equivalent of an eager undergrad’s philosophy manifesto”.
(You didn’t object to that interpretation, so I’m assuming for now that it’s basically correct.)
But the problem is that it’s not clear that the people in question know what they’re talking about. Maybe they do! But it’s certainly not clear, and indeed there’s really no way for me (or any other person outside your social circle) to know that, nor is there any kind of evidence for it, other than personal testimony/anecdata, which is not worth much.
So it doesn’t make sense to suggest that we (the commentariat of Less Wrong) must, or should, treat such folks any differently from anyone else, such as, say, me. There’s no basis for it. From my epistemic position—which, it seems to me, is an eminently reasonable one—these are people who may have good ideas, or they may have bad ideas; they may know what they’re talking about, or may be spouting the most egregious nonsense; I really don’t have any reason to presume one or the other, no more than they have any reason to presume this of me. (Of course we can judge one another by things like public writings, etc., but in this, the people you refer to are no different from any other Less Wrong participant, including wholly anonymous or pseudonymous ones.)
And that, in turn, means that when you say:
… but often in my experience Said is making these comments about people I respect a lot more, who’ve put hundreds/thousands of hours into studying how to teach rationality
… there is actually no good reason at all why that should mean anything or carry any weight in any kind of decision or evaluation.
(There are bad reasons, of course. But we may take it as given that you are not swayed by any such.)
A lot of digital ink has been spilled, and if I were a random commenter I wouldn’t think it that valuable to dig into my object level reasoning. But, since I’m the one making the final calls here it seemed important to lay out how I think about the broader patterns in Said’s behavior.
I’ll start by clarifying my own take on the “what’s up with Said and asking for examples?”
I think it is (all else being equal) basically always fine to ask for examples. I think most posts could be improved by having them, I agree that the process of thinking about concrete examples is useful for sanity checking that your idea is real at all. And there is something good and rationalistly wholesome about not seeing it as an attack, but just as “hey, this is a useful thing to consider” (whether or not Said is consistent about this interpretation)
My take on “what the problem here is” is not the part where Said asks for examples, but that when Said shows up in a particular kind of thread, I have a pretty high expectation that there will be a resulting long conversation that won’t actually clarify anything important.
The “particular kind of thread” is a cluster of things surrounding introspection, interpersonal-interaction, modeling other people’s inner states, and/or interpretative labor. Said is highly skeptical of claims about things in this cluster, and the couple of times I’ve seen someone actually pursue a conversation with him through to completion the results have rarely seemed illuminating or satisfying. (It seems like Said’s experience of things in this space is genuinely different from most people I know. He’ll ask for examples, I anticipate giving examples, the examples will be subtle and not obviously real to him. I don’t mind that he doesn’t believe the examples, but then he’ll ask a bunch of followup questions with increasing skepticism/vague-undertone-of-insultingness that is both infuriating and pointless)
I think Said sees himself in often pointing out “the emperor has no clothes”, but, I think he just doesn’t actually have good taste in what clothes look like in a number of domains that I think are essential for improving the art of rationality.
I do actually get some value from his first couple comments in a thread – they do serve a useful reminder to me to step outside my current frame, see what what hidden assumptions I’m making, etc. I feel fine doing this because I feel comfortable just ignoring him after he’s said those initial things, when a normal/common social script would consider that somewhat rude. But this requires a significant amount of backbone. Backbone is great, more people should build it, but I don’t think it’s super correlated with people who are otherwise intellectually generative. And meanwhile there’s still something missing-stair-y about Said, where he’s phrasing his questions in ways that are just under the radar of feeling unreasonable, until you find yourself knee deep in a long annoying comment tree, so “it’s time to use some backbone” isn’t even obvious.
I do sometimes think he successfully points out “emperor has no clothes”. Or, more commonly/accurately, “the undergrad has no thesis.” In some cases his socratic questioning seems like an actually-appropriate relationship between an adjunct professor, and an undergrad who shows up to his philosophy class writing an impassioned manifesto that doesn’t actually make sense and is riddled with philosophical holes. I don’t super mind when Said plays this role, but often in my experience Said is making these comments about people I respect a lot more, who’ve put hundreds/thousands of hours into studying how to teach rationality (which absolutely requires being able to model people’s minds, what mistakes they’re likely to be making, what thought processes tend to lead to significant breakthroughs)
Said takes pride in only posting ~1 post a year or so that actually passes his bar for correct and useful. I think this is massively missing the point of how intellectual progress works. I’ve talked to many people who seem to reliably turn out philosophically competent advances, and a very common thread is that their early stage idea-formation is fragile, they’re not always able to rigorously explain it right away. It eventually stands up to scrutiny but it wouldn’t be at all helpful to subject their early idea formation to Said’s questioning.
Said is holding LessWrong to the standard of a final-publication-journal, when the thing I think LessWrong needs to be includes many stages before that, when you see the messy process that actually generated those final ideas.
I do think there are some important unsolved problems here. I quite liked DirectedEvolution’s comment here where he notes:
And I do agree in many ways with Said’s prior comment:
We’re now ~4 years into experimenting with the LessWrong Review, it’s accomplished some of the goals I had for it but not all of them. Five years ago, before the first Review year was even complete, we told Said:
I, Oli and Ray will build a better evaluative process for this online community, that incentivises powerful criticism. But right now this site is trying to build a place where we can be generative (and evaluative) together in a way that’s fun and not aggressive. While we have an incentive toward better ideas (weighted karma and curation), it is far from a finished system. We have to build this part as well as the evaluative before the whole system works, and while we’ve not reached there you’re correct to be worried and want to enforce the standards yourself with low-effort comments (and I don’t mean to imply the comments don’t often contain implicit within them very good ideas).
Five years later, we’ve built part of the evaluative system, but I did update after this year’s Review that yeah, we need some kind of faster system as well. I’ve found the comments in this discussion helpful for thinking through what needs to happen here. I’ll hopefully write up a top level post about that.
For now, I agree we probably need to directly incentivize good formative critique. But I don’t think Said is actually very good at that in many cases. The best critiques of (say) Circling IMO have come from people who actually understood the good things about Circling, got some value from it, and nonetheless said “but, CFAR still massively overinvested in it” or “the people who do tons of circling get better at relating but in a distorted way, where they go off to circling retreats where everyone is into Openness and Connection, and they don’t do the sort of crosstraining you need to actually also be good at working as a professional or being a good roommate.”
I agree that in the domain of “rationality training”, it’s pretty easy to fool yourself. i.e. Schools Proliferating Without Evidence and whatnot. I think there’s a difficulty that lives in the territory of “it actually does take awhile to hone in on the training processes that work best, and navigating that domain is going to look from the outside like futzing around with stuff that isn’t obviously real/important. (I have thoughts on how to do this better, that are outside the scope here)
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I note that this comment is focused on particular genre of conversation-involving-Said, which isn’t necessarily directly relevant to the case at hand. But it seemed like important background for a lot of the discussion and eventual decisionmaking here.
Agreed. It reminds me of this excerpt from HPMoR:
When I blur my vision so that the details are fuzzy but the broad strokes are still visible, I too see “a pretty high expectation that there will be a resulting long conversation that won’t actually clarify anything important”. And I think that this approach of blurring ones vision is a wise one to adopt in this situation.
I still wish that LW would try my idea for solving this (and related) problem(s), but it doesn’t seem like that’s ever going to happen. (I’ve tried to remind LW admins about my feature request over the years, but don’t think I’ve ever seen an admin say why it’s not worth trying.) As an alternative, I’ve seen people suggest that it’s fine to ignore comments unless they’re upvoted. That makes sense to me (as a second best solution). What about making that a site-wide norm, i.e., making it explicit that we don’t or shouldn’t consider it rude or otherwise norm-violating to ignore comments unless they’ve been upvoted above some specific karma threshold?
My guess is that people should be rewarded for ignoring criticism they want to ignore, it should be convenient for them to do so. So I disagree with the caveat.
This way authors are less motivated to take steps that discourage criticism (including steps such as not writing things). Criticism should remain convenient, not costly, and directly associated with the criticised thing (instead of getting pushed to be published elsewhere).
I already wrote a separate reply saying a similar, but I did particularly like your frame here and wanted to +1 it.
Hmm. On one hand, I do think it’s moderately likely we experiment with Reacts, which can partially address your desire here.
But it seems like the problem you’re mostly trying to solve is not that big a problem to me (i.e I think it’s totally fine for conversations to just peter out, nobody is entitled to being responded to. I’d at least want to see a second established user asking for it before I considered prioritizing it more. I personally expect a “there is a norm of responding to upvoted comments” to make the site much worse. “Getting annoying comments that miss the point” is one of the most cited things people dislike about LW, and forcing authors to engage with them seems like it’d exacerbate it.)
Generally, people are busy, don’t have time to reply to everything, and commenters should just assume they won’t necessarily get a response unless the author/their-conversation-partner continues to thinks a conversation is rewarding.
I doubt you’ll ever see this, because when you’re an established / high status member, ignoring other people feels pretty natural and right, and few people ignore you so you don’t notice any problems. I made the request back when I had lower status on this forum. I got ignored by others way more than I do now, and ignored others way less than I do now. (I had higher motivation to “prove” myself to my critics and the audience.)
If I hadn’t written down my request back then, in all likelihood I would have forgotten my old perspective and wouldn’t be talking about this today.
In my original feature request, I had a couple of “agreement statuses” that require only minimal engagement, like “I don’t understand this. I give up.” and “I disagree, but don’t want to bother writing out why.” We could easily add more, like “I think further engagement won’t be productive.” or “This isn’t material to my main point.” And then we could experiment with setting norms for how much social reward or punishment to give out for such responses (if people’s natural reactions to them cause bad consequences). I wouldn’t be surprised that such a system ends up making authors more willing or more comfortable to engage less with annoying critics, and makes their LW experience better, by making it more explicit that it’s ok to engage with such critics minimally.
We are currently thinking about “reacts” as a way of providing users with an 80:20 for giving feedback on comments, though motivated by a somewhat different set of concerns. It’s a tricky UX problem and not at the very top of our priority list, but it has come up recently.
This… still misconstrues my views, in quite substantive and important ways. Very frustrating.
You write:
I absolutely am not doing that. It makes no sense to say this! It would be like saying “this user test that you’re doing with our wireframe is holding the app we’re developing to the standard of a final-release product”. It’s simply a complete confusion about what testing is even for. The whole point of doing the user test now is that it is just a wireframe, not even a prototype or an alpha version, so getting as much information as possible now is extremely helpful! Nobody’s saying that you have to throw out the whole project and fire everyone involved into the sun the moment you get a single piece of negative user feedback; but if you don’t subject the thing to testing, you’re losing out on a critical opportunity to improve, to correct course… heck, to just plain learn something new! (And for all you know, the test might have a surprisingly positive result! Maybe some minor feature or little widget, which your designers threw in on a lark, elicits an effusive response from your test users, and clues you in to a highly fruitful design approach which you wouldn’t’ve thought worth pursuing. But you’ll never learn that if you don’t test!)
It feels to me like I’ve explained this… maybe as many as a dozen times in this post’s comment section alone. (I haven’t counted. Probably it’s not quite that many. But several, at least!)
I have to ask: is that you read my explanations but found them unconvincing, and concluded that “oh sure, Said says he believes so-and-so, but I don’t find his actions consistent with those purported beliefs, despite his explicit explanations of why they are consistent with them”?
If so, then the follow-up question is: why do you think that?
What jumps out at me immediately, in this description, is that you describe the people in question as having put a lot of time into studying how to teach rationality. (This, you imply, allows us to assume certain qualifications or qualities on these individuals’ parts, from which we may further conclude… well, you don’t say it explicitly, but the implication seems to be something like “clearly such people know what they’re talking about, and deserve the presumption of such, and therefore it’s epistemically and/or socially inappropriate to treat them as though their ideas might be
bullshitthe equivalent of an eager undergrad’s philosophy manifesto”.)But I notice that you don’t instead (or even in addition) say anything like “people … who have a clear and impressive track record of successfully teaching rationality”.
Of course this could be a simple omission, so I’ll ask explicitly: do you think that the people in question have such a track record?
If you do, and if they do, then of course that’s the relevant fact. And then at least part of the reply to my (perhaps at least seemingly) skeptical questioning (maybe after you give some answer to a question, but I’m not buying it, or ask follow-ups, etc.) might be “well, Said, here’s my track record; that’s who I am; and when I say it’s like this, you can disbelieve my explanations, but my claims are borne out in what I’ve demonstrably done”.
Now, it’s entirely possible that some people might find such a reply unconvincing, in any given case. Being an expert at something doesn’t make you omniscient, even on one subject! But it’s definitely the sort of response which buys you a good bit of indulgence from skepticism, so to speak, about claims for which you cannot (or don’t care to) provide legible evidence, on the spot and at the moment.
But (as I’ve noted before, though I can’t seem to find the comment in question, right now), those sorts of unambiguous qualifications tend to be mostly or entirely absent, in such cases.
And in the absence of such qualifications, but in the presence of claims like those about “circling” and other such things, it is not less but rather more appropriate to apply the at-least-potentially-skeptical, exploratory, questioning approach. It is not less but rather more important to “poke” at ideas, in ways that may be expected to reveal interesting and productive strengths if the ideas are strong, but to reveal weaknesses if the ideas are weak. It is not less but rather more important not to suppress all but those comments which take the “non-bullshit” nature of the claims for granted.
(EDIT: Clarified follow-up question)
Yeah I agree this phrasing didn’t capture your take correctly, and I do recall explicit comments about that in this thread, sorry.
I do claim your approach is in practice often anti-conducive to people doing early stage research. You’ve stated a willingness (I think eagerness?) to drive people away and cause fewer posts from people who I think are actually promising.
My actual answer is “To varying degrees, some more than others.” I definitely do not claim any of them have reached the point of ‘we have a thing working well enough we could persuade an arbitrary skeptic our thing is real and important.’ (i.e. a reliable training program that demonstrably improves quantifiable real world successes). But I think this is a process you should naturally expect to take 4-20 years.
Meanwhile, there are many steps along the way that don’t “produce a cake a skeptical third party can eat”, but if you’re actually involved and paying attention, like, clearly are having an effect that is relevant, and is at least an indication that you’re on a promising path worth experimenting more with. I observe the people practicing various CFAR and Leverage techniques seem to have a good combination of habits that makes it easier to have difficult conversations in domains with poor feedback loops. The people doing the teaching have hundreds of hours of practice trying to teach skills, seeing mistakes people make along the way, and see them making fewer mistakes and actually grokking the skill.
Some of the people involved do feel a bit like they’re making some stuff up and coasting on CFAR’s position in the ecosystem, but other seem like they’re legitimately embarking on longterm research projects, tracking their progress in ways that make sense, looking for the best feedback loops they can find, etc.
Anecdata: I talked a bunch with a colleague who I respect a lot in 2014, who seemed much smarter -. We parted ways for 3 years. Later, I met him again, we talked a bunch over the course of a month, and he said “hey, man, you seem smarter than you did 3 years ago.” I said “oh, huh, yeah I thought so too and, like, had worked to become smarter on purpose, but I wasn’t sure whether it worked.”
Nowadays, when I observe people as they do their thinking, I notice tools they’re not using, mistakes they’re making, suggest fixes, and it seems like they in fact do better thinking.
I think it’s reasonable to not believe me (that the effect is significant, or that it’s CFAR/Leverage mediated). I think it is quite valuable to poke at this. I just don’t think you’re very good at it, and I’m not very interested in satisfying your particular brand of skepticism.
An arbitrary skeptic is perhaps too high a bar, but what about a reasonable skeptic? I think that, from that perspective (and especially given the “outside view” on similar things attempted in the past), if you don’t have “a reliable training program that demonstrably improves quantifiable real world successes”, you basically just don’t have anything. If someone asks you “do you have anything to show for all of this”, and all you’ve got is what you’ve got, then… well, I think that I’m not showing any even slightly unreasonable skepticism, here.
Well, CFAR was founded 11 years ago. That’s well within the “4–20” range. Are you saying that it’s still too early to see clear results?
Is there any reason to believe that there will be anything like “a reliable training program that demonstrably improves quantifiable real world successes” in five years (assuming AI doesn’t kill us all or what have you)? Has there been any progress? (On evaluation methods, even?) Is CFAR even measuring progress, or attempting to measure progress, or… what?
But you see how these paragraphs are pretty unconvincing, though, right? Like, at the very least, even if you are indeed seeing all these things you describe, and even if they’re real things, you surely can see how there’s… basically no way for me, or anyone else who isn’t hanging out with you and your in-person acquaintances on a regular basis, to see or know or verify any of this?
Hold on—you’ve lost track of the meta-level point.
The question isn’t whether it’s valuable to poke at these specific things, or whether I’m good at poking at these specific things.
Here’s what you wrote earlier:
Which I summarized/interpreted as:
(You didn’t object to that interpretation, so I’m assuming for now that it’s basically correct.)
But the problem is that it’s not clear that the people in question know what they’re talking about. Maybe they do! But it’s certainly not clear, and indeed there’s really no way for me (or any other person outside your social circle) to know that, nor is there any kind of evidence for it, other than personal testimony/anecdata, which is not worth much.
So it doesn’t make sense to suggest that we (the commentariat of Less Wrong) must, or should, treat such folks any differently from anyone else, such as, say, me. There’s no basis for it. From my epistemic position—which, it seems to me, is an eminently reasonable one—these are people who may have good ideas, or they may have bad ideas; they may know what they’re talking about, or may be spouting the most egregious nonsense; I really don’t have any reason to presume one or the other, no more than they have any reason to presume this of me. (Of course we can judge one another by things like public writings, etc., but in this, the people you refer to are no different from any other Less Wrong participant, including wholly anonymous or pseudonymous ones.)
And that, in turn, means that when you say:
… there is actually no good reason at all why that should mean anything or carry any weight in any kind of decision or evaluation.
(There are bad reasons, of course. But we may take it as given that you are not swayed by any such.)