Demon Threads are explosive, frustrating, many-tentacled conversations that feel important but aren’t.
I want to object to this framing, particularly the “but aren’t.” It’s far from clear to me that demon threads are unimportant. It may seem like nothing much happened afterwards, but that could be due to everyone in the thread successfully canceling out everyone else’s damage. If that’s true it means that no one side can unilaterally back down in a demon thread without the thing they’re protecting potentially getting damaged, even while the actual observed outcome of demon threads is that nobody apparently benefited.
(I have a particular example in mind as I write this where I think that I personally partially canceled out potential damage from a demon thread, both on the thread and later in a RL conversation, but I guess it would be in bad taste to go into specifics.)
In this frame the appropriate response to demon seeds is to delete them, so nobody bears the burden of backing down. That might be a little too extreme though.
Actually, on second thought, I’m doubling down on “doesn’t matter.”
(Or, “the degree to which it matters is horribly un-coupled from your intuitions about it.”)
The discussions that first crystalized “demon thread” for me were related to the Effective Altruism world—people were making controversial claims, people and organization’s relative status was at stake. And I felt compelled to log in and slog through the comments myself....
...and then I looked at the effective-altruism.com front page, and all the other threads that were not about juicy social drama… but where the thing at stake was “which intervention will actually save lives / bring about great value to the world if people donated money to it, in a community that is about donating money or taking actions on things that matter.”
And on one hand, it would have been a lot of less-fun effort to think about the actual “effective altruism” discussions. And there’s some case to be made that my marginal contribution wouldn’t have affected anything.
But, on the other hand… the social stakes in the Drama Thread didn’t actually affect me, and in some cases, didn’t affect anyone I cared about.
There were some people for whom the drama was object-level relevant, and maybe it was right for them to wade in. But it was clearly a waste of my time. I just got swept up into it because of an illusion of mattering.
There are different degrees of mattering, and not mattering. There’s:
“Literally the President or Congress or Leaders of the industry would have to be paying attention for you for this internet argument to matter.” They won’t, so it doesn’t matter. At all.
“Literally millions of people would need to work in tandem for this social norm to matter.” But you aren’t strategically engaging millions of people or working in-concert with organizers who are, so it won’t matter. At all.
A smallish-dunbar-ish number of people will in fact be affected by this thing, but not anyone you directly care about. Your intuition that this matters isn’t wrong per se but I’m pretty sure if you optimized for things-that-matter-to-you you’d be doing something else.
(if you have a wide circle of concern, something that looks more like Classic Effective Altruism. If you have smaller circle of concern, something that looks more like spending time on people closest to you and disengaging from people who make you unhappy. “Medium circles of concern” might actually have it actually be Worth It)
And finally, “your comments will actually change behaviors or minds in a way that you care about upon reflection”.
(In this case, it’s still worth reflecting on how much of your engagement is about the-mattering, and how much is about you just engaging socially with other primates because it’s fun. If the former, maybe think about what would bring about the most change that you care about).
There’s a Sarah Constantin post arguing something like “if you’re arguing about whether your fandom is problematic, you’re not Helping The World, you are having fun engaging with your fandom. And that’s fine, but it’s not the same thing.” This seems mostly true to me, and it applies whether your fandom is a TV show or a rationality blog.
[note: later on I may write a post that delves into the object-level examples, for now, I’m keeping an anecdote vague enough to just use as reference. please don’t dive into whatever you think I’m talking about]
This does sound reasonable. I had some thoughts I was planning to write up later on “when are Demon Threads in fact a useful tool you should use on purpose?” (partly because not acknowledging that would be dishonest, and partly because it’s actually useful, and partly to highlight that I think most situations are not useful much of the time)
Quick thoughts for now:
My goal with this post is to move towards a world where we successively prevent demon threads in the first place, not one where we try to stop them or unilaterally disarm after the fact. This is only possible in places with some minimum threshold of… well, I’ll just call it “civility”. I think LW can be such a place (and probably you can carve out sections of FB/tumblr to be that, with more effort).
Note that in my suggested-solution-comment, the ideal execution is to double-crux on the issue before it explodes, and then do a joint-post that explains whatever you were able to agree on and/or how to constructively discuss the issue further.
I think the second best solution is, after the seed has exploded into a thread, find the people who are the loudest/highest-profile (or highest-profile-who-are-in-the-stratosphere-of-people-who’d-listen-to-you), double crux with them, and then do a collective effortpost.
I think one of the most useful things demon threads offer in a Civil World is a threat that you will escalate to them, and cause a major bruhaha. If you do so, everyone has to spend a much of time, and the overton window moves only slightly. So just like politics can be cheaper/more efficient than war, a single cooperative effort by people on opposite sides of a dispute might be cheaper/more efficient than a giant controversy (as well as preserving a status quo where people try earnestly to seek truth / not think tribally, which there is tremendous value to)
I do want to acknowledge—resolving disputes about the overton window needs to happen somehow in Civil World.
I think at least some of those disputes can dissolve in an Archipelago-esque lens.
I think a lot of things-that-cause-demon-threads are actually just pointless. (i.e. demon threads about economic policy seem less useful than demon threads about social norms, since the latter actually affect your social group. The former are only useful for tribal signaling, which is probably also important but I think can probably be refactored a bit).
(Man, I’m not happy with the connotations of “Civil World”, in particular because I’m the one who linked to Civility is Never Neutral at the beginning. Not sure what else to call it. “Rational World” feels, well, differently loaded. “Idealized/Platonic Rational World?”)
I want to object to this framing, particularly the “but aren’t.” It’s far from clear to me that demon threads are unimportant. It may seem like nothing much happened afterwards, but that could be due to everyone in the thread successfully canceling out everyone else’s damage. If that’s true it means that no one side can unilaterally back down in a demon thread without the thing they’re protecting potentially getting damaged, even while the actual observed outcome of demon threads is that nobody apparently benefited.
(I have a particular example in mind as I write this where I think that I personally partially canceled out potential damage from a demon thread, both on the thread and later in a RL conversation, but I guess it would be in bad taste to go into specifics.)
In this frame the appropriate response to demon seeds is to delete them, so nobody bears the burden of backing down. That might be a little too extreme though.
Actually, on second thought, I’m doubling down on “doesn’t matter.”
(Or, “the degree to which it matters is horribly un-coupled from your intuitions about it.”)
The discussions that first crystalized “demon thread” for me were related to the Effective Altruism world—people were making controversial claims, people and organization’s relative status was at stake. And I felt compelled to log in and slog through the comments myself....
...and then I looked at the effective-altruism.com front page, and all the other threads that were not about juicy social drama… but where the thing at stake was “which intervention will actually save lives / bring about great value to the world if people donated money to it, in a community that is about donating money or taking actions on things that matter.”
And on one hand, it would have been a lot of less-fun effort to think about the actual “effective altruism” discussions. And there’s some case to be made that my marginal contribution wouldn’t have affected anything.
But, on the other hand… the social stakes in the Drama Thread didn’t actually affect me, and in some cases, didn’t affect anyone I cared about.
There were some people for whom the drama was object-level relevant, and maybe it was right for them to wade in. But it was clearly a waste of my time. I just got swept up into it because of an illusion of mattering.
There are different degrees of mattering, and not mattering. There’s:
“Literally the President or Congress or Leaders of the industry would have to be paying attention for you for this internet argument to matter.” They won’t, so it doesn’t matter. At all.
“Literally millions of people would need to work in tandem for this social norm to matter.” But you aren’t strategically engaging millions of people or working in-concert with organizers who are, so it won’t matter. At all.
A smallish-dunbar-ish number of people will in fact be affected by this thing, but not anyone you directly care about. Your intuition that this matters isn’t wrong per se but I’m pretty sure if you optimized for things-that-matter-to-you you’d be doing something else.
(if you have a wide circle of concern, something that looks more like Classic Effective Altruism. If you have smaller circle of concern, something that looks more like spending time on people closest to you and disengaging from people who make you unhappy. “Medium circles of concern” might actually have it actually be Worth It)
And finally, “your comments will actually change behaviors or minds in a way that you care about upon reflection”.
(In this case, it’s still worth reflecting on how much of your engagement is about the-mattering, and how much is about you just engaging socially with other primates because it’s fun. If the former, maybe think about what would bring about the most change that you care about).
There’s a Sarah Constantin post arguing something like “if you’re arguing about whether your fandom is problematic, you’re not Helping The World, you are having fun engaging with your fandom. And that’s fine, but it’s not the same thing.” This seems mostly true to me, and it applies whether your fandom is a TV show or a rationality blog.
[note: later on I may write a post that delves into the object-level examples, for now, I’m keeping an anecdote vague enough to just use as reference. please don’t dive into whatever you think I’m talking about]
I think I still disagree but I don’t know how to productively explain my disagreement without going into object-level examples and details.
[Note: Qiaochu and I eventually talked in private, and I wrote up a summary of my takeaways here]
This does sound reasonable. I had some thoughts I was planning to write up later on “when are Demon Threads in fact a useful tool you should use on purpose?” (partly because not acknowledging that would be dishonest, and partly because it’s actually useful, and partly to highlight that I think most situations are not useful much of the time)
Quick thoughts for now:
My goal with this post is to move towards a world where we successively prevent demon threads in the first place, not one where we try to stop them or unilaterally disarm after the fact. This is only possible in places with some minimum threshold of… well, I’ll just call it “civility”. I think LW can be such a place (and probably you can carve out sections of FB/tumblr to be that, with more effort).
Note that in my suggested-solution-comment, the ideal execution is to double-crux on the issue before it explodes, and then do a joint-post that explains whatever you were able to agree on and/or how to constructively discuss the issue further.
I think the second best solution is, after the seed has exploded into a thread, find the people who are the loudest/highest-profile (or highest-profile-who-are-in-the-stratosphere-of-people-who’d-listen-to-you), double crux with them, and then do a collective effortpost.
I think one of the most useful things demon threads offer in a Civil World is a threat that you will escalate to them, and cause a major bruhaha. If you do so, everyone has to spend a much of time, and the overton window moves only slightly. So just like politics can be cheaper/more efficient than war, a single cooperative effort by people on opposite sides of a dispute might be cheaper/more efficient than a giant controversy (as well as preserving a status quo where people try earnestly to seek truth / not think tribally, which there is tremendous value to)
I do want to acknowledge—resolving disputes about the overton window needs to happen somehow in Civil World.
I think at least some of those disputes can dissolve in an Archipelago-esque lens.
I think a lot of things-that-cause-demon-threads are actually just pointless. (i.e. demon threads about economic policy seem less useful than demon threads about social norms, since the latter actually affect your social group. The former are only useful for tribal signaling, which is probably also important but I think can probably be refactored a bit).
(Man, I’m not happy with the connotations of “Civil World”, in particular because I’m the one who linked to Civility is Never Neutral at the beginning. Not sure what else to call it. “Rational World” feels, well, differently loaded. “Idealized/Platonic Rational World?”)