Maybe this is discussed in one of the linked articles (I haven’t read them). But interestingly, the following examples of demon topics all have one thing in common:
Latent underlying disagreements about how to think properly… or ideal social norms… or which coalitions should be highest status… or pure, simple you’re insulting me and I’m angry…
While it’s possible to discuss most things without also making status implications, it’s not possible with these issues. Like, even when discussing IQ, race, or gender, it’s usually possible to signal that you aren’t making a status attack, and just discuss the object-level thing. But with the quoted items, the object-level is about status.
If one method of thinking empirically works better, others work worse, and so the facts themselves are a status challenge, and so every technicality must be hashed out as thoroughly as possible to minimize the loss of status. If some social norm is ideal, then others aren’t, and so you must rally your tribe to explain all the benefits of the social norm under attack. Same with which coalition should have highest status.
You could move borderline topics like IQ into that category by discussing a specific person’s IQ, or by making generalizations about people with a certain IQ without simultaneously signaling that there are many exceptions and that IQ is only really meaningful for discussing broad trends.
Random musings:
I wonder if most/all demon topics are inherently about status hierarchies? Like, within a single group, what percent of the variation in whether a thread turns demonic is explained by how much status is intrinsically tied to the original topic?
It would be interesting to rate a bunch of post titles on /r/Change My View (or somewhere similar without LW’s ban on politics) by intrinsic status importance, and then correlate that with the number of deleted comments by the mods, based on the logs. The second part could be scripted, but the first bit would require someone to manually rate everything 0 if it wasn’t intrinsically about status, or 1 if it was. Or better yet, get a representative sample of people to answer how much status they and their tribes would loose, from 0 to 1, if the post went unanswered.
I’d bet that a good chunk the variance in number of deleted comments could be attributed to intrinsically status-relevant topics. A bunch more would be due to topics which were simply adjacent to these intrinsically status-changing topics. Maybe if you marked enough comments that drifted onto these topics, you could build a machine-learning system to predict the probability of a discussion going there based on the starting topic? That would give you a measure of inferential-distance between topics which are intrinsically about status and those adjacent to them.
A big chunk is actually due to the people involved being inflammatory, but my current impression after ~5min of thought is that more than half of demon threads in more intellectual communities either start on topics which are intrinsically about status, or are adjacent to such topics but discussion wanders into that minefield.
I’ll keep an eye out for demon threads, and look for counterexamples. If true though, then there’s a fairly clear line for mods to follow. That’d be a huge step up from the current state of the art in Moderationology. (Messy subjective guesswork and personal untested hypotheses.)
This was basically my initial guess (I was conscious of it as I described those things), although zulupineapple’s comment was a reminder that this isn’t always the case.
Can you give some examples of topics that are definitely not about status? It seems to me that every topic that people care about can be said to be about status, which would make your theory have very little explanatory power.
Good point. I dono, maybe almost everything really is about status. But some things seem to have a much stronger influence on status than others, and some are perceived as much larger threats than others, regardless of whether those perceptions are accurate outside of our evolutionary environment.
Even if everything has a nonzero status component, so long as there is variation we’d need a theory to explain the various sources of that variation. I was trying to gesture at situations where the status loss was large (high severity) and would inevitably happen to at least one side (large scope, relative to audience size).
Change My View (the source I thought might make a good proxy for LW with politics) has a list of common topics. I think they span both the scope and severity range.
Abortion/Legal Parental Surrender: Small scope, high severity. If discussed in the abstract, think mostly only people who’ve had abortions are likely to loose status if they let a statement stand that infers that they made a bad decision. If the discussion branches out to body autonomy, though, this would be a threat to anyone who might be prevented from having one or have tribal members who would be prevented.
Climate Change: Low scope, low severity. Maybe some climatologists will always loose status by letting false statements stand, but most other people’s status is about as divorced from the topic as it’s possible to be. Maybe there’s a tiny status hit from the inference that you’re a bad person if you’re not helping, which motivates a defensive desire to deny it’s really a problem. But both scope of people with status ties and the severity of status losses are about zero.
Donald Trump: If I say “Donald Trump is 1.88m tall” no one looses any status, so that topic is low-scope, low-severity. that’s defining him as a topic overly narrowly, though. There certainly are a surprisingly large number of extremely inflammatory topics immediately adjacent. The topic of whether he’s doing a good job will inevitably be a status hit for either people who voted for him or against him, since at least one side had to have made a poor decision. But not everyone votes, so the scope is maybe medium sized. The severity depends on the magnitude of the particular criticism/praise.
Feminism: Judgments make feminists look bad, but I don’t really know what fraction of people identify as feminist, so I don’t quite know how to rate the scope. Probably medium-ish? Again, severity depends on the strength of the criticism. And of course specific feminist issues may have status implications for a different fraction of people in the discussion.
I could continue for the rest of the common topics on the list, but I think I’m repeating myself. I’m having a hard time selecting words to precisely define the exact concepts I’m pointing at though, so maybe more examples would help triangulate meaning?
So you’ve listed a few topics. How likely is each of them to result in demon threads? I can easily see people furiously arguing about any of those, I doubt there is much variation between them. The fact that many people happen to have opinions on these topics (i.e. that they are common in CMV) seems more relevant than any reality-based measure of their importance. Consider also more niche topics such as “best programming language” that sometimes also result in demon threads (though, to be fair, I haven’t personally seen any recently), while having objectively no impact on the real world.
maybe almost everything really is about status
No, it’s not that everything is “about status”, it’s that “about status” is just an obtuse way to say “people care”. Every interaction between two people is by definition social, and LW is very happy to reduce all social interactions to status comparisons. But what exactly does that explain?
I can easily see people furiously arguing about any of those, I doubt there is much variation between them.
My prediction is that almost no discussion that starts about whether Donald Trump is 1.88m tall should turn into a demon thread, unless someone first changes the topic to something else.
Similarly, the details of climate change itself should start fewer object-level arguments. I would first expect to see a transition to (admitedly closely related) topics like climate change deniers and/or gullible liberals. Sure, people may then pull out the charts and links on the object level issue, but the subtext is then ”...and therefore the outgroup are idiots/the ingroup isn’t dumb”.
We could test this by seeing whether strict and immediate moderator action prevents demon threads if it’s done as soon as discussion drifts into inherently-about-status topics. I think if so, we could safely discuss status-adjacent topics without anywhere near as many incidents. (Although I don’t actually think there’s much value in such discussions most of the time, so I wouldn’t advocate for a rule change to allow them.)
no discussion that starts about whether Donald Trump is 1.88m tall should turn into a demon thread
Trump’s height is definitely not why “Donald Trump” is a common topic in CMV, so I don’t see how that’s relevant. On the other hand, such trivial fact based topics can easily become demonic—consider birtherism. If there was a subset of population that believed “Trump is actually 1.87m tall”, this could easily lead to demon threads. There is nothing inherent about height that prevents it from being a demon topic.
Similarly, the details of climate change itself should start fewer object-level arguments.
Object level disagreements about climate change are definitely a big part of why it’s a common topic and why it might cause demon threads. Of course, the argument eventually involves insulting the outgroup, but that’s hardly a topic.
We could test this by seeing whether strict and immediate moderator action prevents demon threads if it’s done as soon as discussion drifts into inherently-about-status topics
This is based on the assumption that some topics really are inherently about status. My claim is that topic popularity is a decent predictor of demonic threads, and that your status related evaluations add very little to that.
Maybe this is discussed in one of the linked articles (I haven’t read them). But interestingly, the following examples of demon topics all have one thing in common:
While it’s possible to discuss most things without also making status implications, it’s not possible with these issues. Like, even when discussing IQ, race, or gender, it’s usually possible to signal that you aren’t making a status attack, and just discuss the object-level thing. But with the quoted items, the object-level is about status.
If one method of thinking empirically works better, others work worse, and so the facts themselves are a status challenge, and so every technicality must be hashed out as thoroughly as possible to minimize the loss of status. If some social norm is ideal, then others aren’t, and so you must rally your tribe to explain all the benefits of the social norm under attack. Same with which coalition should have highest status.
You could move borderline topics like IQ into that category by discussing a specific person’s IQ, or by making generalizations about people with a certain IQ without simultaneously signaling that there are many exceptions and that IQ is only really meaningful for discussing broad trends.
Random musings:
I wonder if most/all demon topics are inherently about status hierarchies? Like, within a single group, what percent of the variation in whether a thread turns demonic is explained by how much status is intrinsically tied to the original topic?
It would be interesting to rate a bunch of post titles on /r/Change My View (or somewhere similar without LW’s ban on politics) by intrinsic status importance, and then correlate that with the number of deleted comments by the mods, based on the logs. The second part could be scripted, but the first bit would require someone to manually rate everything 0 if it wasn’t intrinsically about status, or 1 if it was. Or better yet, get a representative sample of people to answer how much status they and their tribes would loose, from 0 to 1, if the post went unanswered.
I’d bet that a good chunk the variance in number of deleted comments could be attributed to intrinsically status-relevant topics. A bunch more would be due to topics which were simply adjacent to these intrinsically status-changing topics. Maybe if you marked enough comments that drifted onto these topics, you could build a machine-learning system to predict the probability of a discussion going there based on the starting topic? That would give you a measure of inferential-distance between topics which are intrinsically about status and those adjacent to them.
A big chunk is actually due to the people involved being inflammatory, but my current impression after ~5min of thought is that more than half of demon threads in more intellectual communities either start on topics which are intrinsically about status, or are adjacent to such topics but discussion wanders into that minefield.
I’ll keep an eye out for demon threads, and look for counterexamples. If true though, then there’s a fairly clear line for mods to follow. That’d be a huge step up from the current state of the art in Moderationology. (Messy subjective guesswork and personal untested hypotheses.)
This was basically my initial guess (I was conscious of it as I described those things), although zulupineapple’s comment was a reminder that this isn’t always the case.
Can you give some examples of topics that are definitely not about status? It seems to me that every topic that people care about can be said to be about status, which would make your theory have very little explanatory power.
Good point. I dono, maybe almost everything really is about status. But some things seem to have a much stronger influence on status than others, and some are perceived as much larger threats than others, regardless of whether those perceptions are accurate outside of our evolutionary environment.
Even if everything has a nonzero status component, so long as there is variation we’d need a theory to explain the various sources of that variation. I was trying to gesture at situations where the status loss was large (high severity) and would inevitably happen to at least one side (large scope, relative to audience size).
Change My View (the source I thought might make a good proxy for LW with politics) has a list of common topics. I think they span both the scope and severity range.
Abortion/Legal Parental Surrender: Small scope, high severity. If discussed in the abstract, think mostly only people who’ve had abortions are likely to loose status if they let a statement stand that infers that they made a bad decision. If the discussion branches out to body autonomy, though, this would be a threat to anyone who might be prevented from having one or have tribal members who would be prevented.
Climate Change: Low scope, low severity. Maybe some climatologists will always loose status by letting false statements stand, but most other people’s status is about as divorced from the topic as it’s possible to be. Maybe there’s a tiny status hit from the inference that you’re a bad person if you’re not helping, which motivates a defensive desire to deny it’s really a problem. But both scope of people with status ties and the severity of status losses are about zero.
Donald Trump: If I say “Donald Trump is 1.88m tall” no one looses any status, so that topic is low-scope, low-severity. that’s defining him as a topic overly narrowly, though. There certainly are a surprisingly large number of extremely inflammatory topics immediately adjacent. The topic of whether he’s doing a good job will inevitably be a status hit for either people who voted for him or against him, since at least one side had to have made a poor decision. But not everyone votes, so the scope is maybe medium sized. The severity depends on the magnitude of the particular criticism/praise.
Feminism: Judgments make feminists look bad, but I don’t really know what fraction of people identify as feminist, so I don’t quite know how to rate the scope. Probably medium-ish? Again, severity depends on the strength of the criticism. And of course specific feminist issues may have status implications for a different fraction of people in the discussion.
I could continue for the rest of the common topics on the list, but I think I’m repeating myself. I’m having a hard time selecting words to precisely define the exact concepts I’m pointing at though, so maybe more examples would help triangulate meaning?
So you’ve listed a few topics. How likely is each of them to result in demon threads? I can easily see people furiously arguing about any of those, I doubt there is much variation between them. The fact that many people happen to have opinions on these topics (i.e. that they are common in CMV) seems more relevant than any reality-based measure of their importance. Consider also more niche topics such as “best programming language” that sometimes also result in demon threads (though, to be fair, I haven’t personally seen any recently), while having objectively no impact on the real world.
No, it’s not that everything is “about status”, it’s that “about status” is just an obtuse way to say “people care”. Every interaction between two people is by definition social, and LW is very happy to reduce all social interactions to status comparisons. But what exactly does that explain?
My prediction is that almost no discussion that starts about whether Donald Trump is 1.88m tall should turn into a demon thread, unless someone first changes the topic to something else.
Similarly, the details of climate change itself should start fewer object-level arguments. I would first expect to see a transition to (admitedly closely related) topics like climate change deniers and/or gullible liberals. Sure, people may then pull out the charts and links on the object level issue, but the subtext is then ”...and therefore the outgroup are idiots/the ingroup isn’t dumb”.
We could test this by seeing whether strict and immediate moderator action prevents demon threads if it’s done as soon as discussion drifts into inherently-about-status topics. I think if so, we could safely discuss status-adjacent topics without anywhere near as many incidents. (Although I don’t actually think there’s much value in such discussions most of the time, so I wouldn’t advocate for a rule change to allow them.)
Trump’s height is definitely not why “Donald Trump” is a common topic in CMV, so I don’t see how that’s relevant. On the other hand, such trivial fact based topics can easily become demonic—consider birtherism. If there was a subset of population that believed “Trump is actually 1.87m tall”, this could easily lead to demon threads. There is nothing inherent about height that prevents it from being a demon topic.
Object level disagreements about climate change are definitely a big part of why it’s a common topic and why it might cause demon threads. Of course, the argument eventually involves insulting the outgroup, but that’s hardly a topic.
This is based on the assumption that some topics really are inherently about status. My claim is that topic popularity is a decent predictor of demonic threads, and that your status related evaluations add very little to that.