Yes. I’m trying to remind people why they should care.
You’re fighting fire with fire. It’s hard for me to imagine a single standard that would permit this post as acceptably LessWrongian and also deem the posts you linked to as unacceptable.
Here’s an outline of the tactic that I see as common to both.
You have a goal X.
To achieve X, you need to coordinate people to do Y.
The easiest way to coordinate people to do Y is to use exhortatory rhetoric and pull social strings, while complaining when your opponent does the same thing.
You can justify (3) by appealing to a combination of the importance of X and of your lack of energy or desire not to be perfectionistic, while insisting that your opponents rise to a higher standard, and denying that you’re doing any of this—or introspecting for a while and then shrugging and doing it anyway.
If you can convince others to agree with you on the overriding importance of X (using rhetoric and social strings), then suddenly the possibly offensive moral odor associated with the tactic disappears. After all, everybody (who counts) agrees with you, and it’s not manipulative to just say what everybody (who counts) was thinking anyway, right?
“Trying to remind people why they should care” is an example of step (3).
This isn’t straightforwaredly wrong. It’s just a way to coordinate people, one with certain advantages and disadvantages relative to other coordination mechanisms, and one that is especially tractable for certain goals in certain contexts.
In this case, it seems like one of your goals is to effect a site culture in which this tactic self-destructs. The site’s culture is just so stinkin’ rational that step (3) gets nipped in the bud, every time.
This is the tension I feel in reading your post. On the one hand, I recognize that it’s allowing itself an exception to the ban it advocates on this 5-step tactic in the service of expunging the 5-step tactic from LessWrong. On the other hand, it’s not clear to me whether, if I agreed with you, I would criticize this post, or join forces with it.
A successful characterization of a problem generally suggests a solution. My confusion about the correct response to your characterization therefore leads me to fear your characterization is incorrect. Let me offer an alternative characterization.
Perhaps we are dealing with a problem of market size.
In a very small market, there is little ability to specialize. Poverty is therefore rampant. Everybody has to focus on providing themselves with the basics, and has to do most things themselves. Trade is also rare because the economy lacks the infrastructure to facilitate trades. So nobody has much of anything, and it’s very hard to invest.
What if we think about a movement and online community like this as a market? In a nice big rationality market, we’d have plenty of attention to allocate to all the many things that need doing. We’d have proofreaders galore, and lots of post writers. There’d be lots of money sloshing around for bounties on posts, and plenty of people thinking about how to get this just right. There’d be plenty of comments, critical, supportive, creative, and extensive. Comments would be such an important feature of the discourse surrounding a post that there’d be heavy demand for improved commenting infrastructure, for moderation and value-extraction from the comments. There’d be all kinds of curation going on, and ways to allocate rewards and support the development of writers on the website.
In theory, all we’d need to generate a thriving rationality market like this is plenty of time, and a genuine (though not necessarily exclusive) demand for rationality. It would self-organize pretty naturally through some combination of barter, social exchange, and literal cash payments for various research, writing, editing, teaching, and moderation services.
The problem is the slow pace at which this is emerging on its own, and the threat of starvation in the meantime. Let’s even get a little bit ecological. A small LW will go through random fluctuations in activity and participation. If it gets too small, it could easily dip into an irrecoverable lack of participation. And the smaller the site is, the harder it will be to attain the market size necessary to permit specialization, since any participant will have to do most everything for themselves.
Under this frame, then, your post is advocating for some things that seem useful and some that seem harmful. You give lots of ideas for jobs that seem helpful (in some form) in a LW economy big enough to support such specialized labor.
On the other hand, you advocate an increase in regulation, which will come with an inevitable shrinking of the population. I fear that this will have the opposite of the effect you intend. Rather than making the site hospitable for a resurgence of “true rationalists,” you will create the conditions for starvation by reducing our already-small market still further. Even the truest of rationalists will have a hard time taking care of their rationality requirements when the population of the website has shrunk to that extent.
Posts just won’t get written. Comments won’t be posted. People won’t take risks. People won’t improve. They’ll find themselves frustrated by nitpicks, and stop participating. A handful of people will remain for a while, glorying in the victory of their purge, and then they’ll quit too after a few months or a few years once that gets boring.
I advocate instead that you trust that everybody on this website is an imperfect rationalist with a genuine preference for this elusive thing called “rationality.” Allow a thousand seeds to be planted. Some will bloom. Gradually, the rationalist economy will grow, and you’ll see the results you desire without needing much in the way of governance or intervention. And when we have need of governance, we’ll be able to support it better.
It’s always hard, I think, for activists to accept that the people and goals they care about can and will largely take care of themselves without the activist’s help.
I am not fighting fire with fire. I request that you explicitly retract the assertion, given that it is both a) objectively false, and b) part of a class of utterances that are in general false far more often than they are true, and which tend to make it harder to think and see clearly in exactly the way I’m gesturing at with the OP.
Some statements that would not have been false:
“This seems to me like it’s basically fighting fire with fire.”
“I believe that, in practice, this ends up being fighting fire with fire.”
“I’m having a hard time summing this up as anything other than ‘fighting fire with fire.’”
...and I reiterate that those subtle differences make a substantial difference in people’s general ability to do the collaborative truth-seeking thing, and are in many ways precisely what I’m arguing for above.
I clearly outline what I am identifying as “fire” in the above post. I have one list which is things brains do wrong, and another list which lays out some “don’ts” that roughly correspond to those problems.
I am violating none of those don’ts, and, in my post, exhibiting none of those wrongbrains. I in fact worked quite hard to make sure that the wrongbrains did not creep in, and abandoned a draft that was three-quarters complete because it was based on one.
In many ways, the above essay is an explicit appeal that people not fight fire with fire. It identifies places where people abandon their principles in pursuit of some goal or other, and says “please don’t, even if this leads to local victory.”
You’re fighting fire with fire. It’s hard for me to imagine a single standard that would permit this post as acceptably LessWrongian and also deem the posts you linked to as unacceptable.
It’s the one that I laid out in my post. If you find it confusing, you can ask a clarifying question. If one of the examples seems wrong or backwards, you can challenge it. I appreciate the fact that you hedged your statement by saying that you have a hard time imagining, which is better than in the previous sentence, where you simply declared that I was doing a thing (which I wasn’t), rather than saying that it seemed to you like X or felt like X or you thought it was X for Y and Z reasons.
The standard is: don’t violate the straightforward list of rationality 101 principles and practices that we have a giant canon of knowledge and agreement upon. There’s a separate substandard that goes something like “don’t use dark-artsy persuasion; don’t yank people around by their emotions in ways they can’t see and interact with; don’t deceive them by saying technically true things which you know will result in a false interpretation, etc.”
I’m adhering to that standard, above.
There’s fallacy-of-the-grey in your rounding-off of “here’s a post where the author acknowledged in their end notes that they weren’t quite up to the standard they are advocating” and “you’re fighting fire with fire.” There’s also fallacy-of-the-grey in pretending that there’s only one kind of “fire.”
I strongly claim that I am, in general, not frequently in violation of any of the principles that I have explicitly endorsed, and that if it seems I’m holding others to a higher standard than I’m holding myself, it’s likely that the standard I’m holding has been misunderstood. I also believe that people who are trying to catch me when I’m actually failing to live up are on my side and doing me a favor, and though I’m not perfect and sometimes it takes me a second to get past the flinch and access the gratitude, I think I’m credible about acting in accordance with that overall.
You have a goal X.
To achieve X, you need to coordinate people to do Y.
The easiest way to coordinate people to do Y is to use exhortatory rhetoric and pull social strings, while complaining when your opponent does the same thing.
You can justify (3) by appealing to a combination of the importance of X and of your lack of energy or desire not to be perfectionistic, while insisting that your opponents rise to a higher standard, and denying that you’re doing any of this—or introspecting for a while and then shrugging and doing it anyway.
If you can convince others to agree with you on the overriding importance of X (using rhetoric and social strings), then suddenly the possibly offensive moral odor associated with the tactic disappears. After all, everybody (who counts) agrees with you, and it’s not manipulative to just say what everybody (who counts) was thinking anyway, right?
I did not “use exhortatory rhetoric and pull social strings.” I should walk back my mild “yeah fair” in response to the earlier comment, since you’re taking it and adversarially running with it.
If you read the OP and do not choose to let your brain project all over it, what you see is, straightforwardly, a mass of claims about how I feel,how I think,what I believe, and what I think should be the case.
I explicitly underscore that I think little details matter, and second-to-second stuff counts, so if you’re going to dismiss all of the “I” statements as being mere window dressing or something (I’m not sure that’s what you’re doing, but it seems like something like that is necessary, to pretend that they weren’t omnipresent in what I wrote), you need to do so explicitly. You need to argue for them not-mattering; you can’t just jump straight to ignoring them, and pretending that I was propagandizing.
I also did not complain about other people using exhortatory rhetoric and pulling social strings. That’s a strawman of my point. I complained about people a) letting their standards on what’s sufficiently justified to say slip, when it was convenient, and b) en-masse upvoting and otherwise tolerating other people doing so.
I gave specifics; I gave a model. Where that model wasn’t clear, I offered to go in-depth on more examples (an offer that I haven’t yet seen anyone take me up on, though I’m postponing looking at some other comments while I reply to this one).
I thoroughly and categorically reject (3) as being anywhere near a summary of what I’m doing above, and (4) is … well, I would say “you’re being an uncharitable asshole, here,” except that what’s actually true and defensible and prosocial is to note that I am having a strongly negative emotional reaction to it, and to separately note that you’re not passing my ITT and you’re impugning my motives and in general you’re hand-waving away the part where you have actual reasons for the attempt to delegitimize and undermine both me and my points.
In this case, it seems like one of your goals is to effect a site culture in which this tactic self-destructs. The site’s culture is just so stinkin’ rational that step (3) gets nipped in the bud, every time.
I recognize that it’s allowing itself an exception to the ban it advocates on this 5-step tactic in the service of expunging the 5-step tactic from LessWrong.
No. You’ve failed to pass my ITT, you’ve failed to understand my point, and as you drift further and further from what I was actually trying to say, it gets harder and harder to address it line-by-line because I keep being unable to bring things back around.
I’m not trying to cause appeals-to-emotion to disappear. I’m not trying to cause strong feelings oriented on one’s values to be outlawed. I’m trying to cause people to run checks, and to not sacrifice their long-term goals for the sake of short-term point-scoring.
I definitely do not believe that this post, as written, would not survive or belong on the better version of LessWrong I’m envisioning (setting aside the fact that it wouldn’t be necessary there). I’m not trying to effect a site culture where the tactic of the OP self-destructs, and I’m not sure where that belief came from. I just believe that, in the steel LW, this post would qualify as mediocre, instead of decent.
The place where I’m most able to engage with you is:
On the other hand, you advocate an increase in regulation, which will come with an inevitable shrinking of the population. I fear that this will have the opposite of the effect you intend. Rather than making the site hospitable for a resurgence of “true rationalists,” you will create the conditions for starvation by reducing our already-small market still further. Even the truest of rationalists will have a hard time taking care of their rationality requirements when the population of the website has shrunk to that extent.
Posts just won’t get written. Comments won’t be posted. People won’t take risks. People won’t improve. They’ll find themselves frustrated by nitpicks, and stop participating. A handful of people will remain for a while, glorying in the victory of their purge, and then they’ll quit too after a few months or a few years once that gets boring.
Here, you assert some things that are, in fact, only hypotheses. They’re certainly valid hypotheses, to be clear. But it seems to me that you’re trying to shift the conversation onto the level of competing stories, as if what’s true is either “Duncan’s optimistic frame, in which the bad people leave and the good people stay” or “the pessimistic frame, in which the optimistic frame is naive and the site just dies.”
This is an antisocial move, on my post where I’m specifically trying to get people to stop pulling this kind of crap.
Raise your hypothesis. Argue that it’s another possible outcome. Propose tests or lines of reasoning that help us to start figuring out which model is a better match for the territory, and what each is made of, and how we might synthesize them.
I wrote several hundred words on a model of evaporative cooling, and how it drives social change. Your response boils down to “no u.” It’s full of bald assertions. It’s lacking in epistemic humility. It’s exhausting in all the ways that you seem to be referring to when you point at “frustrated by nitpicks, and stop participating.” The only reason I engaged with it to this degree is that it’s an excellent example of the problem.
I would like to register that I think this is an excellent comment, and in fact caused me to downvote the grandparent where I would otherwise have neutral or upvoted. (This is not the sort of observation I would ordinarily feel the need to point out, but in this case it seemed rather appropriate to do so, given the context.)
I had literally the exact same experience before I read your comment dxu.
I imagine it’s likely that Duncan could sort of burn out on being able to do this [1] since it’s pretty thankless difficult cognitive work. [2]
But it’s really insightful to watch. I do think he could potentially tune up [3] the diplomatic savvy a bit [4] since I think while his arguments are quite sound [5] I think he probably is sometimes making people feel a little bit stupid via his tone. [6]
Nevertheless, it’s really fascinating to read and observe. I feel vaguely like I’m getting smarter.
###
Rigor for the hell of it [7]:
[1] Hedged hypothesis.
[2] Two-premise assertion with a slightly subjective basis, but I think a true one.
[3] Elaborated on a slightly different but related point further in my comment below to him with an example.
[4] Vague but I think acceptably so. To elaborate, I mean making one’s ideas even when in disagreement with a person palatable to the person one is disagreeing with. Note: I’m aware it doesn’t acknowledge the cost of doing so and running that filter. Note also: I think, with skill and practice, this can be done without sacrificing the content of the message. It is almost always more time-consuming though, in my experience.
[5] There’s some subjective judgments and utility function stuff going on, which is subjective naturally, but his core factual arguments, premises, and analyses basically all look correct to me.
[6] Hedged hypothesis. Note: doesn’t make a judgment either way as to whether it’s worth it or not.
[7] Added after writing to double-check I’m playing by the rules and clear up ambiguity. “For the hell of it” is just random stylishness and can be safely mentally deleted.
(Or perhaps, if I introspect closely, a way to not be committed to this level of rigor all the time. As stated below though, minor stylistic details aside, I’m always grateful whenever a member of a community attempts to encourage raising and preserving high standards.)
Nope. False, and furthermore Kafkaesque; there is no defensible reading of either the post or my subsequent commentary that justifies this line, and that alone being up-front and framing the rest of what you have to say is extremely bad, and a straightforward example of the problem.
It is a nuance-destroying move, a rounding-off move, a making-it-harder-for-people-to-see-and-think-clearly move, an implanting-falsehoods move. Strong downvote as I compose a response to the rest.
Given that there is lots of “let’s comment on what things about a comment are good and which things are bad” going on in this thread, I will make more explicit a thing that I would have usually left implicit:
My current sense is that this comment maybe was better to write than no comment, given the dynamics of the situation, but I think the outcome would have been better if you had waited to write your long comment. This comment felt like it kicked up the heat a bunch, and while I think that was better than just leaving things unresponded, my sense is the discussion overall would have gone better if you had just written your longer comment.
In response to this, I’ll bow out (from this subthread) for a minimum period of 3 days. (This is in accordance with a generally wise policy I’m trying to adopt.)
EDIT: I thought Oli was responding to a different thing (I replied to this from the sidebar). I was already planning not to add anything substantive here for a few days. I do note, though, that even if two people both unproductively turn up the heat, one after the other, in my culture it still makes a difference which one broke peace first.
The first 20 pages or so are almost a must-read in my opinion.
Highly recommended, for you in particular.
A Google search with filetype:pdf will find you a copy. You can skim it fast — not needed to close read it — and you’ll get the gems.
Edit for exhortation: I think you’ll get a whole lot out of it such that I’d stake some “Sebastian has good judgment” points on it that you can subtract from my good judgment rep if I’m wrong. Seriously please check it out. It’s fast and worth it.
This response I would characterize as steps (3) and (4) of the 5-step tactic I described. You are using more firey rhetoric (“Kafkaesque,” “extremely bad,” “implanting falsehoods,”), while denying that this is what you are doing.
I am not going to up-vote or down-vote you. I will read and consider your next response here, but only that response, and only once. I will read no other comments on this post, and will not re-read the post itself unless it becomes necessary.
I infer from your response that from your perspective, my comment here, and me by extension, are in the bin of content and participants you’d like to see less or none of on this website. I want to assure you that your response here in no way will affect my participation on the rest of this website.
Your strategy of concentration of force only works if other people are impacted by that force. As far as your critical comment here, as the Black Knight said, I’ve known worse.
If you should continue this project and attack me outside of this post, I am precommitting now to simply ignoring you, while also not engaging in any sort of comment or attack on your character to others. I will evaluate your non-activist posts the same way I evaluate anything else on this website. So just be aware that from now on, any comment of yours that strikes me as having a tone similar to this one of yours will meet with stony silence from me. I will take steps to mitigate any effect it might have on my participation via its emotional effect. Once I notice that it has a similar rhetorical character, I will stop reading it. I am specifically neutralizing the effect of this particular activist campaign of yours on my thoughts and behavior.
Jumping in here in what i hope is a prosocial way. I assert as hypothesis that the two of you currently disagree about what level of meta the conversation is/should-be at, and each feels that the other has an obligation to meet them at their level, and this has turned up the heat a lot.
maybe there is a more oblique angle then this currently heated one?
It’s prosocial. For starters, AllAmericanBreakfast’s “let’s not engage,” though itself stated in a kind of hot way, is good advice for me, too. I’m going to step aside from this thread for at least three days, and if there’s something good to come back to, I will try to do so.
You’re fighting fire with fire. It’s hard for me to imagine a single standard that would permit this post as acceptably LessWrongian and also deem the posts you linked to as unacceptable.
Here’s an outline of the tactic that I see as common to both.
You have a goal X.
To achieve X, you need to coordinate people to do Y.
The easiest way to coordinate people to do Y is to use exhortatory rhetoric and pull social strings, while complaining when your opponent does the same thing.
You can justify (3) by appealing to a combination of the importance of X and of your lack of energy or desire not to be perfectionistic, while insisting that your opponents rise to a higher standard, and denying that you’re doing any of this—or introspecting for a while and then shrugging and doing it anyway.
If you can convince others to agree with you on the overriding importance of X (using rhetoric and social strings), then suddenly the possibly offensive moral odor associated with the tactic disappears. After all, everybody (who counts) agrees with you, and it’s not manipulative to just say what everybody (who counts) was thinking anyway, right?
“Trying to remind people why they should care” is an example of step (3).
This isn’t straightforwaredly wrong. It’s just a way to coordinate people, one with certain advantages and disadvantages relative to other coordination mechanisms, and one that is especially tractable for certain goals in certain contexts.
In this case, it seems like one of your goals is to effect a site culture in which this tactic self-destructs. The site’s culture is just so stinkin’ rational that step (3) gets nipped in the bud, every time.
This is the tension I feel in reading your post. On the one hand, I recognize that it’s allowing itself an exception to the ban it advocates on this 5-step tactic in the service of expunging the 5-step tactic from LessWrong. On the other hand, it’s not clear to me whether, if I agreed with you, I would criticize this post, or join forces with it.
A successful characterization of a problem generally suggests a solution. My confusion about the correct response to your characterization therefore leads me to fear your characterization is incorrect. Let me offer an alternative characterization.
Perhaps we are dealing with a problem of market size.
In a very small market, there is little ability to specialize. Poverty is therefore rampant. Everybody has to focus on providing themselves with the basics, and has to do most things themselves. Trade is also rare because the economy lacks the infrastructure to facilitate trades. So nobody has much of anything, and it’s very hard to invest.
What if we think about a movement and online community like this as a market? In a nice big rationality market, we’d have plenty of attention to allocate to all the many things that need doing. We’d have proofreaders galore, and lots of post writers. There’d be lots of money sloshing around for bounties on posts, and plenty of people thinking about how to get this just right. There’d be plenty of comments, critical, supportive, creative, and extensive. Comments would be such an important feature of the discourse surrounding a post that there’d be heavy demand for improved commenting infrastructure, for moderation and value-extraction from the comments. There’d be all kinds of curation going on, and ways to allocate rewards and support the development of writers on the website.
In theory, all we’d need to generate a thriving rationality market like this is plenty of time, and a genuine (though not necessarily exclusive) demand for rationality. It would self-organize pretty naturally through some combination of barter, social exchange, and literal cash payments for various research, writing, editing, teaching, and moderation services.
The problem is the slow pace at which this is emerging on its own, and the threat of starvation in the meantime. Let’s even get a little bit ecological. A small LW will go through random fluctuations in activity and participation. If it gets too small, it could easily dip into an irrecoverable lack of participation. And the smaller the site is, the harder it will be to attain the market size necessary to permit specialization, since any participant will have to do most everything for themselves.
Under this frame, then, your post is advocating for some things that seem useful and some that seem harmful. You give lots of ideas for jobs that seem helpful (in some form) in a LW economy big enough to support such specialized labor.
On the other hand, you advocate an increase in regulation, which will come with an inevitable shrinking of the population. I fear that this will have the opposite of the effect you intend. Rather than making the site hospitable for a resurgence of “true rationalists,” you will create the conditions for starvation by reducing our already-small market still further. Even the truest of rationalists will have a hard time taking care of their rationality requirements when the population of the website has shrunk to that extent.
Posts just won’t get written. Comments won’t be posted. People won’t take risks. People won’t improve. They’ll find themselves frustrated by nitpicks, and stop participating. A handful of people will remain for a while, glorying in the victory of their purge, and then they’ll quit too after a few months or a few years once that gets boring.
I advocate instead that you trust that everybody on this website is an imperfect rationalist with a genuine preference for this elusive thing called “rationality.” Allow a thousand seeds to be planted. Some will bloom. Gradually, the rationalist economy will grow, and you’ll see the results you desire without needing much in the way of governance or intervention. And when we have need of governance, we’ll be able to support it better.
It’s always hard, I think, for activists to accept that the people and goals they care about can and will largely take care of themselves without the activist’s help.
All right, a more detailed response.
I am not fighting fire with fire. I request that you explicitly retract the assertion, given that it is both a) objectively false, and b) part of a class of utterances that are in general false far more often than they are true, and which tend to make it harder to think and see clearly in exactly the way I’m gesturing at with the OP.
Some statements that would not have been false:
“This seems to me like it’s basically fighting fire with fire.”
“I believe that, in practice, this ends up being fighting fire with fire.”
“I’m having a hard time summing this up as anything other than ‘fighting fire with fire.’”
...and I reiterate that those subtle differences make a substantial difference in people’s general ability to do the collaborative truth-seeking thing, and are in many ways precisely what I’m arguing for above.
I clearly outline what I am identifying as “fire” in the above post. I have one list which is things brains do wrong, and another list which lays out some “don’ts” that roughly correspond to those problems.
I am violating none of those don’ts, and, in my post, exhibiting none of those wrongbrains. I in fact worked quite hard to make sure that the wrongbrains did not creep in, and abandoned a draft that was three-quarters complete because it was based on one.
In many ways, the above essay is an explicit appeal that people not fight fire with fire. It identifies places where people abandon their principles in pursuit of some goal or other, and says “please don’t, even if this leads to local victory.”
It’s the one that I laid out in my post. If you find it confusing, you can ask a clarifying question. If one of the examples seems wrong or backwards, you can challenge it. I appreciate the fact that you hedged your statement by saying that you have a hard time imagining, which is better than in the previous sentence, where you simply declared that I was doing a thing (which I wasn’t), rather than saying that it seemed to you like X or felt like X or you thought it was X for Y and Z reasons.
The standard is: don’t violate the straightforward list of rationality 101 principles and practices that we have a giant canon of knowledge and agreement upon. There’s a separate substandard that goes something like “don’t use dark-artsy persuasion; don’t yank people around by their emotions in ways they can’t see and interact with; don’t deceive them by saying technically true things which you know will result in a false interpretation, etc.”
I’m adhering to that standard, above.
There’s fallacy-of-the-grey in your rounding-off of “here’s a post where the author acknowledged in their end notes that they weren’t quite up to the standard they are advocating” and “you’re fighting fire with fire.” There’s also fallacy-of-the-grey in pretending that there’s only one kind of “fire.”
I strongly claim that I am, in general, not frequently in violation of any of the principles that I have explicitly endorsed, and that if it seems I’m holding others to a higher standard than I’m holding myself, it’s likely that the standard I’m holding has been misunderstood. I also believe that people who are trying to catch me when I’m actually failing to live up are on my side and doing me a favor, and though I’m not perfect and sometimes it takes me a second to get past the flinch and access the gratitude, I think I’m credible about acting in accordance with that overall.
I did not “use exhortatory rhetoric and pull social strings.” I should walk back my mild “yeah fair” in response to the earlier comment, since you’re taking it and adversarially running with it.
If you read the OP and do not choose to let your brain project all over it, what you see is, straightforwardly, a mass of claims about how I feel, how I think, what I believe, and what I think should be the case.
I explicitly underscore that I think little details matter, and second-to-second stuff counts, so if you’re going to dismiss all of the “I” statements as being mere window dressing or something (I’m not sure that’s what you’re doing, but it seems like something like that is necessary, to pretend that they weren’t omnipresent in what I wrote), you need to do so explicitly. You need to argue for them not-mattering; you can’t just jump straight to ignoring them, and pretending that I was propagandizing.
I also did not complain about other people using exhortatory rhetoric and pulling social strings. That’s a strawman of my point. I complained about people a) letting their standards on what’s sufficiently justified to say slip, when it was convenient, and b) en-masse upvoting and otherwise tolerating other people doing so.
I gave specifics; I gave a model. Where that model wasn’t clear, I offered to go in-depth on more examples (an offer that I haven’t yet seen anyone take me up on, though I’m postponing looking at some other comments while I reply to this one).
I thoroughly and categorically reject (3) as being anywhere near a summary of what I’m doing above, and (4) is … well, I would say “you’re being an uncharitable asshole, here,” except that what’s actually true and defensible and prosocial is to note that I am having a strongly negative emotional reaction to it, and to separately note that you’re not passing my ITT and you’re impugning my motives and in general you’re hand-waving away the part where you have actual reasons for the attempt to delegitimize and undermine both me and my points.
No. You’ve failed to pass my ITT, you’ve failed to understand my point, and as you drift further and further from what I was actually trying to say, it gets harder and harder to address it line-by-line because I keep being unable to bring things back around.
I’m not trying to cause appeals-to-emotion to disappear. I’m not trying to cause strong feelings oriented on one’s values to be outlawed. I’m trying to cause people to run checks, and to not sacrifice their long-term goals for the sake of short-term point-scoring.
I definitely do not believe that this post, as written, would not survive or belong on the better version of LessWrong I’m envisioning (setting aside the fact that it wouldn’t be necessary there). I’m not trying to effect a site culture where the tactic of the OP self-destructs, and I’m not sure where that belief came from. I just believe that, in the steel LW, this post would qualify as mediocre, instead of decent.
The place where I’m most able to engage with you is:
Here, you assert some things that are, in fact, only hypotheses. They’re certainly valid hypotheses, to be clear. But it seems to me that you’re trying to shift the conversation onto the level of competing stories, as if what’s true is either “Duncan’s optimistic frame, in which the bad people leave and the good people stay” or “the pessimistic frame, in which the optimistic frame is naive and the site just dies.”
This is an antisocial move, on my post where I’m specifically trying to get people to stop pulling this kind of crap.
Raise your hypothesis. Argue that it’s another possible outcome. Propose tests or lines of reasoning that help us to start figuring out which model is a better match for the territory, and what each is made of, and how we might synthesize them.
I wrote several hundred words on a model of evaporative cooling, and how it drives social change. Your response boils down to “no u.” It’s full of bald assertions. It’s lacking in epistemic humility. It’s exhausting in all the ways that you seem to be referring to when you point at “frustrated by nitpicks, and stop participating.” The only reason I engaged with it to this degree is that it’s an excellent example of the problem.
I would like to register that I think this is an excellent comment, and in fact caused me to downvote the grandparent where I would otherwise have neutral or upvoted. (This is not the sort of observation I would ordinarily feel the need to point out, but in this case it seemed rather appropriate to do so, given the context.)
Huh. Interesting.
I had literally the exact same experience before I read your comment dxu.
I imagine it’s likely that Duncan could sort of burn out on being able to do this [1] since it’s pretty thankless difficult cognitive work. [2]
But it’s really insightful to watch. I do think he could potentially tune up [3] the diplomatic savvy a bit [4] since I think while his arguments are quite sound [5] I think he probably is sometimes making people feel a little bit stupid via his tone. [6]
Nevertheless, it’s really fascinating to read and observe. I feel vaguely like I’m getting smarter.
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Rigor for the hell of it [7]:
[1] Hedged hypothesis.
[2] Two-premise assertion with a slightly subjective basis, but I think a true one.
[3] Elaborated on a slightly different but related point further in my comment below to him with an example.
[4] Vague but I think acceptably so. To elaborate, I mean making one’s ideas even when in disagreement with a person palatable to the person one is disagreeing with. Note: I’m aware it doesn’t acknowledge the cost of doing so and running that filter. Note also: I think, with skill and practice, this can be done without sacrificing the content of the message. It is almost always more time-consuming though, in my experience.
[5] There’s some subjective judgments and utility function stuff going on, which is subjective naturally, but his core factual arguments, premises, and analyses basically all look correct to me.
[6] Hedged hypothesis. Note: doesn’t make a judgment either way as to whether it’s worth it or not.
[7] Added after writing to double-check I’m playing by the rules and clear up ambiguity. “For the hell of it” is just random stylishness and can be safely mentally deleted.
(Or perhaps, if I introspect closely, a way to not be committed to this level of rigor all the time. As stated below though, minor stylistic details aside, I’m always grateful whenever a member of a community attempts to encourage raising and preserving high standards.)
Upvoted for the market analogy.
(Thanks for being specific; this is a micro-norm I want to applaud.)
Nope. False, and furthermore Kafkaesque; there is no defensible reading of either the post or my subsequent commentary that justifies this line, and that alone being up-front and framing the rest of what you have to say is extremely bad, and a straightforward example of the problem.
It is a nuance-destroying move, a rounding-off move, a making-it-harder-for-people-to-see-and-think-clearly move, an implanting-falsehoods move. Strong downvote as I compose a response to the rest.
Given that there is lots of “let’s comment on what things about a comment are good and which things are bad” going on in this thread, I will make more explicit a thing that I would have usually left implicit:
My current sense is that this comment maybe was better to write than no comment, given the dynamics of the situation, but I think the outcome would have been better if you had waited to write your long comment. This comment felt like it kicked up the heat a bunch, and while I think that was better than just leaving things unresponded, my sense is the discussion overall would have gone better if you had just written your longer comment.
In response to this, I’ll bow out (from this subthread) for a minimum period of 3 days. (This is in accordance with a generally wise policy I’m trying to adopt.)EDIT: I thought Oli was responding to a different thing (I replied to this from the sidebar). I was already planning not to add anything substantive here for a few days. I do note, though, that even if two people both unproductively turn up the heat, one after the other, in my culture it still makes a difference which one broke peace first.
Have you read “Metaphors We Live By” by Lakoff?
The first 20 pages or so are almost a must-read in my opinion.
Highly recommended, for you in particular.
A Google search with filetype:pdf will find you a copy. You can skim it fast — not needed to close read it — and you’ll get the gems.
Edit for exhortation: I think you’ll get a whole lot out of it such that I’d stake some “Sebastian has good judgment” points on it that you can subtract from my good judgment rep if I’m wrong. Seriously please check it out. It’s fast and worth it.
This response I would characterize as steps (3) and (4) of the 5-step tactic I described. You are using more firey rhetoric (“Kafkaesque,” “extremely bad,” “implanting falsehoods,”), while denying that this is what you are doing.
I am not going to up-vote or down-vote you. I will read and consider your next response here, but only that response, and only once. I will read no other comments on this post, and will not re-read the post itself unless it becomes necessary.
I infer from your response that from your perspective, my comment here, and me by extension, are in the bin of content and participants you’d like to see less or none of on this website. I want to assure you that your response here in no way will affect my participation on the rest of this website.
Your strategy of concentration of force only works if other people are impacted by that force. As far as your critical comment here, as the Black Knight said, I’ve known worse.
If you should continue this project and attack me outside of this post, I am precommitting now to simply ignoring you, while also not engaging in any sort of comment or attack on your character to others. I will evaluate your non-activist posts the same way I evaluate anything else on this website. So just be aware that from now on, any comment of yours that strikes me as having a tone similar to this one of yours will meet with stony silence from me. I will take steps to mitigate any effect it might have on my participation via its emotional effect. Once I notice that it has a similar rhetorical character, I will stop reading it. I am specifically neutralizing the effect of this particular activist campaign of yours on my thoughts and behavior.
Jumping in here in what i hope is a prosocial way. I assert as hypothesis that the two of you currently disagree about what level of meta the conversation is/should-be at, and each feels that the other has an obligation to meet them at their level, and this has turned up the heat a lot.
maybe there is a more oblique angle then this currently heated one?
It’s prosocial. For starters, AllAmericanBreakfast’s “let’s not engage,” though itself stated in a kind of hot way, is good advice for me, too. I’m going to step aside from this thread for at least three days, and if there’s something good to come back to, I will try to do so.