I missed the fact that most of my readers aren’t in the habit of spending ~10 hours carefully reading a dense article
I’m a bit confused—are you referring to one of your LessWrong articles? Were you anticipating that readers would spend ~10 hours reading and thinking about it before commenting?
Not an upfront investment of ~10 hours, but my implicit model was that people would be inclined to spend that amount of time after having read a really substantive article. I may have spent ~1000 hours thinking about Scott Alexander’s article Generalizing From One Example: it’s very profound. When I comment on an article, I’ve almost always at least carefully read every word and made sure that I understand what the author was saying.
Consider the discussion around me saying that I now know how to feel universal love and compassion like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. In the past I would have found this very exasperating, feeling like “it’s really not that hard to understand what I meant, these people care so little about epistemic rationality that it’s not possible to have a productive conversation with them.”
What I came to realize is that the standard of careful reading that I had in mind (similar to the level of attention that I put into checking a mathematical proof) may be entirely alien to most of my readers, so that I may have been totally misreading them as not caring about epistemic rationality.
What I came to realize is that the standard of careful reading that I had in mind (similar to the level of attention that I put into checking a mathematical proof) may be entirely alien to most of my readers, so that I may have been totally misreading them as not caring about epistemic rationality.
I think “careful reading” mistakes what that debate is about. Perceiving status claims in your writing is picking up on elements of your writing by carefully reading it.
If you want people to ignore that layer of meaning you are asking them to ignore information. You are asking them to read less carefully. The fact that you didn’t make a conscious choice to deliberately make a status claim doesn’t change this.
Apart from status if you assume that learning deep stuff takes a lot of time your claim that you got to world class in a skill in a short amount of time invites challenge. The most likely explanation is that you simply underrate what it takes to be world class in the skill.
Could you explain how more careful reading would prevent that interpretation? I don’t see how spending more time with the article would change anything.
What I meant was that my focus was on the fact that I now perceive their dispositions to be learnable to a much greater extent then I had thought, not on my quality relative to other people. Note also that there are two different interpretations of “like” in in this context—qualitatively similar and quantitatively similar, and that my own focus was more on the former than on the latter.
To the extent that the information was not already in the original article, I would consider an appropriate response to be a request for clarification: “what exactly are you claiming?” rather than a challenge as to why I believe something.that I may or may not believe.
Robin’s article Againt Disclaimers is highly relevant here—efficiency of communication is greatly restricted by the need to clarify that you don’t mean things that you didn’t saybefore even having engaged with readers.
qualitatively similar and quantitatively similar, and that my own focus was more on the former than on the latter.
If it’s true that you don’t claimed that you reach the level of Martin Luther King then why did you object to James Miller’s
Add something like “of course I know I personally will never come close to having his level of compassion.”
by saying:
I don’t know whether you’re being playful, defeatist, or misreading me. :-)
If it just about the quality and not about the level you have at it, I don’t see misreading on James part.
I would consider an appropriate response to be a request for clarification: “what exactly are you claiming?” rather than a challenge as to why I believe something.that I may or may not believe.
“What exactly are you claiming?” gives the other person no information about where the disagreement might be and where things are unclear. A challenge that provides more details on the other hand allows you to understand what your writing communicated to the other person and use that understanding to clarify what you mean.
This is especially true in communication that isn’t live. In live communications it’s possible to ask a lot of questions for clarification.
efficiency of communication is greatly restricted by the need to clarify that you don’t mean things that you didn’t say before even having engaged with readers.
It’s also not like we Yudkowsky hadn’t written “Politics is the Mindkiller” which clearly explains why using political examples for non-political issues is a bad idea if you care about epistemic rationality.
There a conflict between claiming that you are much more advanced than your audience and making basic errors like that .
You also speak about wanting to appeal to a certain aura. That means your listeners standards for what qualifies of worthy of that aura matter. It’s not up to you to define that standard.
If I’m reading you correctly, you’re misreading me in the exact way that I was describing!
If it just about the quality and not about the level you have at it, I don’t see misreading on James part.
What I was objecting to there was the use of never: I would guess that > 0.1% of the population is capable of developing it. I didn’t intend to make a strong claim about my current level.
It’s also not like we Yudkowsky hadn’t written “Politics is the Mindkiller” which clearly explains why using political examples for non-political issues is a bad idea if you care about epistemic rationality. There a conflict between claiming that you are much more advanced than your audience and making basic errors like that .
Political issues aren’t triggering for me personally. My error here is specific to my mediocre social skills. I don’t claim to be more advanced than my audience with respect to social skills – I’ve acknowledged that they’re a major weakness for me.
You also speak about wanting to appeal to a certain aura. That means your listeners standards for what qualifies of worthy of that aura matter. It’s not up to you to define that standard.
You seem to be thinking that I was saying that people should view me as having an aura. That’s not what I was saying. I was saying that the aura that people associate with MLK and Gandhi is distortionary, because people forget that they’re human like you and me.
My error here is specific to my mediocre social skills. I don’t claim to be more advanced than my audience with respect to social skills – I’ve acknowledged that they’re a major weakness for me.
Feeling compassion is something that I consider to be in the area of social skills.
Doing it right means that your body does certain things. It relaxes. It likely releases oxytocin. It’s noticeable to other people.
It’s more than just an absence of anger at the other person. I do see how the strategy that you describes creates a state where you aren’t angry at the other person. I don’t see how it creates genuine compassion or love for the other person. Those words are more than just metaphors. They are embodied feelings.
Political issues aren’t triggering for me personally.
Quite a lot of people believe that to be the case for them. On the other hand if you put them into charged political situations they don’t think as clearly as before anymore. What’s makes you believe that you are immune to that?
That’s not what I was saying. I was saying that the aura that people associate with MLK and Gandhi is distortionary, because people forget that they’re human like you and me.
As far as I understand you neither interacted face to face with either of those people. I haven’t meet either of them either but I have meet people who do have skills in that area.
I have the experience of a person trying to mug me without me being angry about them or negatively triggered. In that extreme situation I worked well. At the same time I know that I can’t do certain things I have experienced other people doing.
If you as a math phd would tell me that Terence Tao is just a human and we shouldn’t put him on a pedastal that would be fine. I grant you that you know enough about math and how to be good at math to have a meaningful opinion on that issue.
I don’t grant that for universal love to a mathematician for whom social skills are a weakness.
Yes, technically someone who’s word-class is still a human but they are world-class. They can do things that other people can’t.
In case you are interested in my math background, I do pass the test of having done mathematical proofs in calculus. On the other hand I don’t have advanced math abilities.
Just because I have access to a heuristic, I won’t you use the hammer for every problem.
I agree with many of your points. Note that we’ve moved some distance afield from the question of whether my post and comments were initially misread.
A large part of my thinking here is that if something that I write seems obviously wrong, there’s probably been a miscommunication—if it were so obvious that a commenter could notice a major flaw in ~30 minutes when I’ve thought about it for hundreds of hours, I would have caught it already! :-)
if it were so obvious that a commenter could notice a major flaw in ~30 minutes when I’ve thought about it for hundreds of hours, I would have caught it already!
I don’t think this is a good approach to take.
Consider that “if it were so obvious that an outside reviewer could notice a major bug in ~30 minutes when I’ve spent hundreds of hours writing this code, I would have caught it already” is widely held as false in programming.
See my comment here. I’ve vetted my ideas in the course of conversations with many good thinkers. By now you’ve seen enough instances in which I’ve appeared to be saying something different from what I was intending to communicate so that you should give substantial weight to that possibility when I say something that seems obviously wrong.
if it were so obvious that a commenter could notice a major flaw in ~30 minutes when I’ve thought about it for hundreds of hours, I would have caught it already! :-)
I have a lot more than 30 minutes of thinking about the term “unconditional love”.
Imagine a math freshman comes to you. He spend 100 hours thinking that he has found a way to prove P=NP. After all the famous mathematicians are also only human. Will it take you 30 minutes to find the flaw in his argument?
Likely not because you spent a lot of time thinking about math and how to do mathematical proofs while the freshman hasn’t.
It’s also not only thinking time. You likely would be less good at math if you wouldn’t have learned from capable teachers about how math works.
What I meant was in part that what I appeared to be saying to you is not what I believe. There are semantic issued involved (what do the words “universal love and compassion mean?”). I was in fact talking specifically about being able to overcome knee jerk negative reactions to apparent hostility.
If you want people to ignore that layer of meaning you are asking them to ignore information. You are asking them to read less carefully.
In general this is a useful move, looking for an idealized version of what is being said, abstracted from irrelevant details. What is relevant depends on context. For example, a mathematical statement with a minor error should probably be understood to refer to its corrected version, which may be easy to find based on the surrounding discussion.
In the Martin Luther King/Gandhi example, the problem is not the idea of ignoring some of the details as irrelevant for the idealized version of the intended claim (about Jonah’s emotional state), but lack of convincing justification for their irrelevance for a different claim (about Jonah’s status on LW), a signal that is proving hard to disclaim. Even then it seems clear that these details are irrelevant for the intended claim and should be discarded from its idealized reading.
In general this is a useful move, looking for an idealized version of what is being said, abstracted from irrelevant details.
Depending on your goal it makes sense to focus on different information while reading. If you read a mathematical proof, status is completely irrelevant. It’s rational to completely ignore that layer.
If you read an article on a platform like this it’s useful to understand what’s driven the author. Jonah thinks that because he spend his 10,000 hours on training epistemic rationality people should pay more attention to his writing. Paying more attention to his writing means treating him as higher status. The status is not irrelevant for a reader because it influences how the reader spends his time.
To me it’s not a big issue. I usually don’t parse for status when reading LW posts. At the same time it’s there.
As far as I understand Jonah suggests that when people derivate from “mathematical style reasoning” that means they aren’t reading carefully. That it’s due to not having enough training in epistemic rationality.
the problem is not the idea of ignoring some of the details as irrelevant for the idealized version of the intended claim (about Jonah’s emotional state)
I parse the post as saying: “Jonah’s advanced skills in reasoning allowed him in a short amount of time to learn MLK style compassion.”
That would be evidence that suggests that Jonah is indeed having advanced skills in reasoning and thus deserving of a high status. High status that results in people spending more time reading and contemplating his posts.
I usually don’t focus on the status layer when I read LW either.
In this case Jonah not only intends to make a claim about his emotional state. He also makes a claim that MLK is just a human, which indicates that MLK abilities aren’t as impressive as people who hold him to be “more than a human” believe. Given that MLK is a political figure, that claim is even more problematic than it otherwise would be.
There’s also the claim that his emotional state is desirable and that it’s desirability means that other people should copy Jonah’s technique that gave Jonah that emotional state.
Careful reading means picking up those 3 claims in addition to the claim about Jonah’s emotional state. That’s very different then mathematical style reasoning. In a mathematical proof you only have to focus on explicitly made claims. If you just focus on Jonah’s emotional state and consider everything else insignificant I don’t think you are engaging with the substance of his post.
Of course that doesn’t means that it’s always important to engage with every claim that’s made. I usually don’t parse LW posts for status or focus on those claims.
I’m trying to clarify the issue by introducing the distinction between different implicit claims, so that relevance for each of these claims can be considered on its own. A reader may be interested in multiple claims, so that if a detail is relevant for one of them, it becomes relevant for the reader. But when it’s relevant for the reader, it may still be irrelevant for some of the claims. Talking about irrelevance for the reader collapses this distinction.
When Jonah is pointing to careful reading, that includes awareness of various claims that are being considered and relevance of presented details for each of them. Clarification may address uncertainty about these claims individually.
I’m a bit confused—are you referring to one of your LessWrong articles? Were you anticipating that readers would spend ~10 hours reading and thinking about it before commenting?
Not an upfront investment of ~10 hours, but my implicit model was that people would be inclined to spend that amount of time after having read a really substantive article. I may have spent ~1000 hours thinking about Scott Alexander’s article Generalizing From One Example: it’s very profound. When I comment on an article, I’ve almost always at least carefully read every word and made sure that I understand what the author was saying.
Consider the discussion around me saying that I now know how to feel universal love and compassion like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. In the past I would have found this very exasperating, feeling like “it’s really not that hard to understand what I meant, these people care so little about epistemic rationality that it’s not possible to have a productive conversation with them.”
What I came to realize is that the standard of careful reading that I had in mind (similar to the level of attention that I put into checking a mathematical proof) may be entirely alien to most of my readers, so that I may have been totally misreading them as not caring about epistemic rationality.
I think “careful reading” mistakes what that debate is about. Perceiving status claims in your writing is picking up on elements of your writing by carefully reading it.
If you want people to ignore that layer of meaning you are asking them to ignore information. You are asking them to read less carefully. The fact that you didn’t make a conscious choice to deliberately make a status claim doesn’t change this.
Apart from status if you assume that learning deep stuff takes a lot of time your claim that you got to world class in a skill in a short amount of time invites challenge. The most likely explanation is that you simply underrate what it takes to be world class in the skill. Could you explain how more careful reading would prevent that interpretation? I don’t see how spending more time with the article would change anything.
What I meant was that my focus was on the fact that I now perceive their dispositions to be learnable to a much greater extent then I had thought, not on my quality relative to other people. Note also that there are two different interpretations of “like” in in this context—qualitatively similar and quantitatively similar, and that my own focus was more on the former than on the latter.
To the extent that the information was not already in the original article, I would consider an appropriate response to be a request for clarification: “what exactly are you claiming?” rather than a challenge as to why I believe something.that I may or may not believe.
Robin’s article Againt Disclaimers is highly relevant here—efficiency of communication is greatly restricted by the need to clarify that you don’t mean things that you didn’t say before even having engaged with readers.
If it’s true that you don’t claimed that you reach the level of Martin Luther King then why did you object to James Miller’s
by saying:
If it just about the quality and not about the level you have at it, I don’t see misreading on James part.
“What exactly are you claiming?” gives the other person no information about where the disagreement might be and where things are unclear. A challenge that provides more details on the other hand allows you to understand what your writing communicated to the other person and use that understanding to clarify what you mean.
This is especially true in communication that isn’t live. In live communications it’s possible to ask a lot of questions for clarification.
It’s also not like we Yudkowsky hadn’t written “Politics is the Mindkiller” which clearly explains why using political examples for non-political issues is a bad idea if you care about epistemic rationality. There a conflict between claiming that you are much more advanced than your audience and making basic errors like that .
You also speak about wanting to appeal to a certain aura. That means your listeners standards for what qualifies of worthy of that aura matter. It’s not up to you to define that standard.
If I’m reading you correctly, you’re misreading me in the exact way that I was describing!
What I was objecting to there was the use of never: I would guess that > 0.1% of the population is capable of developing it. I didn’t intend to make a strong claim about my current level.
Political issues aren’t triggering for me personally. My error here is specific to my mediocre social skills. I don’t claim to be more advanced than my audience with respect to social skills – I’ve acknowledged that they’re a major weakness for me.
You seem to be thinking that I was saying that people should view me as having an aura. That’s not what I was saying. I was saying that the aura that people associate with MLK and Gandhi is distortionary, because people forget that they’re human like you and me.
Feeling compassion is something that I consider to be in the area of social skills. Doing it right means that your body does certain things. It relaxes. It likely releases oxytocin. It’s noticeable to other people.
It’s more than just an absence of anger at the other person. I do see how the strategy that you describes creates a state where you aren’t angry at the other person. I don’t see how it creates genuine compassion or love for the other person. Those words are more than just metaphors. They are embodied feelings.
Quite a lot of people believe that to be the case for them. On the other hand if you put them into charged political situations they don’t think as clearly as before anymore. What’s makes you believe that you are immune to that?
As far as I understand you neither interacted face to face with either of those people. I haven’t meet either of them either but I have meet people who do have skills in that area.
I have the experience of a person trying to mug me without me being angry about them or negatively triggered. In that extreme situation I worked well. At the same time I know that I can’t do certain things I have experienced other people doing.
If you as a math phd would tell me that Terence Tao is just a human and we shouldn’t put him on a pedastal that would be fine. I grant you that you know enough about math and how to be good at math to have a meaningful opinion on that issue. I don’t grant that for universal love to a mathematician for whom social skills are a weakness.
Yes, technically someone who’s word-class is still a human but they are world-class. They can do things that other people can’t.
In case you are interested in my math background, I do pass the test of having done mathematical proofs in calculus. On the other hand I don’t have advanced math abilities. Just because I have access to a heuristic, I won’t you use the hammer for every problem.
I agree with many of your points. Note that we’ve moved some distance afield from the question of whether my post and comments were initially misread.
A large part of my thinking here is that if something that I write seems obviously wrong, there’s probably been a miscommunication—if it were so obvious that a commenter could notice a major flaw in ~30 minutes when I’ve thought about it for hundreds of hours, I would have caught it already! :-)
I don’t think this is a good approach to take.
Consider that “if it were so obvious that an outside reviewer could notice a major bug in ~30 minutes when I’ve spent hundreds of hours writing this code, I would have caught it already” is widely held as false in programming.
See my comment here. I’ve vetted my ideas in the course of conversations with many good thinkers. By now you’ve seen enough instances in which I’ve appeared to be saying something different from what I was intending to communicate so that you should give substantial weight to that possibility when I say something that seems obviously wrong.
I have a lot more than 30 minutes of thinking about the term “unconditional love”.
Imagine a math freshman comes to you. He spend 100 hours thinking that he has found a way to prove P=NP. After all the famous mathematicians are also only human. Will it take you 30 minutes to find the flaw in his argument? Likely not because you spent a lot of time thinking about math and how to do mathematical proofs while the freshman hasn’t.
It’s also not only thinking time. You likely would be less good at math if you wouldn’t have learned from capable teachers about how math works.
What I meant was in part that what I appeared to be saying to you is not what I believe. There are semantic issued involved (what do the words “universal love and compassion mean?”). I was in fact talking specifically about being able to overcome knee jerk negative reactions to apparent hostility.
In general this is a useful move, looking for an idealized version of what is being said, abstracted from irrelevant details. What is relevant depends on context. For example, a mathematical statement with a minor error should probably be understood to refer to its corrected version, which may be easy to find based on the surrounding discussion.
In the Martin Luther King/Gandhi example, the problem is not the idea of ignoring some of the details as irrelevant for the idealized version of the intended claim (about Jonah’s emotional state), but lack of convincing justification for their irrelevance for a different claim (about Jonah’s status on LW), a signal that is proving hard to disclaim. Even then it seems clear that these details are irrelevant for the intended claim and should be discarded from its idealized reading.
Depending on your goal it makes sense to focus on different information while reading. If you read a mathematical proof, status is completely irrelevant. It’s rational to completely ignore that layer.
If you read an article on a platform like this it’s useful to understand what’s driven the author. Jonah thinks that because he spend his 10,000 hours on training epistemic rationality people should pay more attention to his writing. Paying more attention to his writing means treating him as higher status. The status is not irrelevant for a reader because it influences how the reader spends his time.
To me it’s not a big issue. I usually don’t parse for status when reading LW posts. At the same time it’s there. As far as I understand Jonah suggests that when people derivate from “mathematical style reasoning” that means they aren’t reading carefully. That it’s due to not having enough training in epistemic rationality.
I parse the post as saying: “Jonah’s advanced skills in reasoning allowed him in a short amount of time to learn MLK style compassion.” That would be evidence that suggests that Jonah is indeed having advanced skills in reasoning and thus deserving of a high status. High status that results in people spending more time reading and contemplating his posts.
I usually don’t focus on the status layer when I read LW either.
In this case Jonah not only intends to make a claim about his emotional state. He also makes a claim that MLK is just a human, which indicates that MLK abilities aren’t as impressive as people who hold him to be “more than a human” believe. Given that MLK is a political figure, that claim is even more problematic than it otherwise would be.
There’s also the claim that his emotional state is desirable and that it’s desirability means that other people should copy Jonah’s technique that gave Jonah that emotional state.
Careful reading means picking up those 3 claims in addition to the claim about Jonah’s emotional state. That’s very different then mathematical style reasoning. In a mathematical proof you only have to focus on explicitly made claims. If you just focus on Jonah’s emotional state and consider everything else insignificant I don’t think you are engaging with the substance of his post.
Of course that doesn’t means that it’s always important to engage with every claim that’s made. I usually don’t parse LW posts for status or focus on those claims.
I’m trying to clarify the issue by introducing the distinction between different implicit claims, so that relevance for each of these claims can be considered on its own. A reader may be interested in multiple claims, so that if a detail is relevant for one of them, it becomes relevant for the reader. But when it’s relevant for the reader, it may still be irrelevant for some of the claims. Talking about irrelevance for the reader collapses this distinction.
When Jonah is pointing to careful reading, that includes awareness of various claims that are being considered and relevance of presented details for each of them. Clarification may address uncertainty about these claims individually.