I assume by “very differently,” you mean “would not have included outright falsehoods.”
I don’t see the connection between:
(approximately) “I’m pretty smart and I am pretty conscientious and also I’ve hyperfocused on this domain for a long time, so I notice stuff in this domain a lot more often than most people”
and
[whatever claim you and deluks think I made that is tantamount to an assertion of perfection, or something]
Like, it seems that you’re asking me to defend some outlandish claim that I have not made. That’s the only situation in which “every bad decision I ever made” would be relevant—if I had claimed to always or overwhelmingly often be competent, or something. It sounds like “this guy claimed no white ravens! All we gotta do is find one!”
I clearly did not make that claim, as you can see by scrolling up and just reading. I claimed that I twitch over this stuff, and frequently observe fuckery that other people do not even notice.
But anyway, in addition to the-corpus-of-all-of-my-essays, such as the handful I’ve published this month and things like In Defense of Punch Bug and It’s Not What It Looks Like and Invalidating Imaginary Injury and Common Knowledge and Miasma and any number of my Admonymous answers, I also spent five minutes scrolling back through my most recent FB posts and here are the first twenty or so that seemed to be about noticing or caring about fuckery (not organized by impressiveness):
I was able to see 5-6 in firefox without incognito, and then it asked me to log in (both on ones I already saw and ones I didn’t). Seems like some sort of “You have 3 more articles this month” tactic but without telling you.
Are you opening them in incognito browsers? They seem to work straightforwardly for me in non-logged-in browsers and don’t know what might be different for you.
So far, this problem has replicated on every browser on every platform I’ve tried it on, in both regular and private windows. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, on Mac, Windows, Linux… I have not been able to view any of the given posts in any way at all.
I assume by “very differently,” you mean “would not have included outright falsehoods.”
The first of many differences, yes. I also would have emphasized the part where I thought the evidence something was wrong was obvious and you didn’t (in ways that were visible to me), not the part where you proactively coordinated evidence sharing when it was personally costly to you, which was a social good.
I did not think you were claiming perfection, but I think “It’s like being a native French speaker and dropping in on a high school French class in a South Carolina public school” is a very strong claim of superiority, far beyond “I notice stuff in this domain a lot more often than most people”. Native speakers can be wrong, but in a disagreement with a disengaged high schooler you will basically always take the word of the native speaker. I additionally think the problems in iteration I outlined in a sister thread really put a ceiling on your insights, although admittedly that affects analysis and improvements much more than noticing.
Also, re: evidence that something was wrong was obvious
I dunno. This sounds like an excuse, and an excuse is all that many people will hear, but:
My current model is that Brent, whether consciously or unconsciously/instinctively, did in fact do something resembling cultivating me as a shield, by never egregiously misbehaving in my sight. And many of the other people around me, seeing egregious misbehavior somewhat often, assumed (reasonably) that I must be seeing it, too, and not minding.
But after it all started to come out, there were something like a dozen fully dealbreaking anecdotes handed to me by not-necessarily-specifically-but-people-in-the-reference-class-of Rob, Oli, Nate, Logan, Nick, Val, etc., any one of which would have caused me to spring into action, except they just never mentioned it and I was never in the room to see it.
FWIW: I believe you that Brent cultivated you, and I think you talking about that has been really useful in educating people (including me) about how toxic people do that. I do think it had to be some damn strong cultivation to overcome the baseline expectations set by his FB posts, and I’d be interested in hearing you talk about what he did to overcome that baseline- not because I think you were especially susceptible, but because whatever he did worked on a lot of people, and that makes it useful to understand.
Well, for starters, I had unfollowed him on FB by about 2016 as a result of being just continually frustrated by his relentless pessimism. So I probably missed a whole lot of what others saw as red flags.
I think “It’s like being a native French speaker and dropping in on a high school French class in a South Carolina public school” is a very strong claim of superiority, far beyond “I notice stuff in this domain a lot more often than most people”.
I find this helpful, and I think it’s a fair and reasonable reading that I should have ruled out.
What I meant by choosing that example in particular was that French contains a lot of sounds which English speakers literally can’t perceive at first, until they practice and build up some other background knowledge. That’s … not entirely different from a claim of superiority, but I tried to defuse the sense of superiority by noting that a lot of it comes from just relentlessly attending to the domain—”it’s not that I’m doing anything magic here, many of the people I’m hanging out with are smarter or conscientiouser, it’s just that I happen to have put in more reps is all.”
Ah, this makes sense and is helpful, and now that you’ve spelled it out I can see how it connects to other things in the post in ways I didn’t before. It also makes cases of failure much less relevant, since no one has all phenomes.
Worth noting that I noticed the kerning example seemed very different than the native speaker example, but the “native speaker in a room full of bored teenagers” claim felt so strong I resolved in that direction.
I assume by “very differently,” you mean “would not have included outright falsehoods.”
I don’t see the connection between:
(approximately) “I’m pretty smart and I am pretty conscientious and also I’ve hyperfocused on this domain for a long time, so I notice stuff in this domain a lot more often than most people”
and
[whatever claim you and deluks think I made that is tantamount to an assertion of perfection, or something]
Like, it seems that you’re asking me to defend some outlandish claim that I have not made. That’s the only situation in which “every bad decision I ever made” would be relevant—if I had claimed to always or overwhelmingly often be competent, or something. It sounds like “this guy claimed no white ravens! All we gotta do is find one!”
I clearly did not make that claim, as you can see by scrolling up and just reading. I claimed that I twitch over this stuff, and frequently observe fuckery that other people do not even notice.
But anyway, in addition to the-corpus-of-all-of-my-essays, such as the handful I’ve published this month and things like In Defense of Punch Bug and It’s Not What It Looks Like and Invalidating Imaginary Injury and Common Knowledge and Miasma and any number of my Admonymous answers, I also spent five minutes scrolling back through my most recent FB posts and here are the first twenty or so that seemed to be about noticing or caring about fuckery (not organized by impressiveness):
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4946318165402861
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4924756570892354
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4920978771270134
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4918223831545628
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4918136751554336
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4911478975553447
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4907166399318038
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4907029615998383
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4889568061077872
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4888310204536991?comment_id=4888448571189821
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4877212198980125?comment_id=4877320285635983
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4874111979290147
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4859938947374117
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4855597157808296
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4840078599360152
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4834628186571860
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4832098550158157
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4825568070811205
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4822568564444489
https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/4821518481216164
… and I note that those twenty are all just within the past six weeks. A six-week period in which I also wrote six LW essays about social dynamics.
FYI, every single one of these posts (yes, I tested all the links) is inaccessible to me, because they require logging into Facebook.
(I’m posting this to note that this isn’t a problem specific to that one other post, but seems to be a general problem.)
I was able to see 5-6 in firefox without incognito, and then it asked me to log in (both on ones I already saw and ones I didn’t). Seems like some sort of “You have 3 more articles this month” tactic but without telling you.
Are you opening them in incognito browsers? They seem to work straightforwardly for me in non-logged-in browsers and don’t know what might be different for you.
This is groundhog day Ray; we just found out that it doesn’t work on Opera and Firefox.
(And apparently Chrome Incognito on Windows? I’m confused about the exact line there, because it works on my Chrome Incognito on Mac.)
So far, this problem has replicated on every browser on every platform I’ve tried it on, in both regular and private windows. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, on Mac, Windows, Linux… I have not been able to view any of the given posts in any way at all.
The first of many differences, yes. I also would have emphasized the part where I thought the evidence something was wrong was obvious and you didn’t (in ways that were visible to me), not the part where you proactively coordinated evidence sharing when it was personally costly to you, which was a social good.
I did not think you were claiming perfection, but I think “It’s like being a native French speaker and dropping in on a high school French class in a South Carolina public school” is a very strong claim of superiority, far beyond “I notice stuff in this domain a lot more often than most people”. Native speakers can be wrong, but in a disagreement with a disengaged high schooler you will basically always take the word of the native speaker. I additionally think the problems in iteration I outlined in a sister thread really put a ceiling on your insights, although admittedly that affects analysis and improvements much more than noticing.
Also, re: evidence that something was wrong was obvious
I dunno. This sounds like an excuse, and an excuse is all that many people will hear, but:
My current model is that Brent, whether consciously or unconsciously/instinctively, did in fact do something resembling cultivating me as a shield, by never egregiously misbehaving in my sight. And many of the other people around me, seeing egregious misbehavior somewhat often, assumed (reasonably) that I must be seeing it, too, and not minding.
But after it all started to come out, there were something like a dozen fully dealbreaking anecdotes handed to me by not-necessarily-specifically-but-people-in-the-reference-class-of Rob, Oli, Nate, Logan, Nick, Val, etc., any one of which would have caused me to spring into action, except they just never mentioned it and I was never in the room to see it.
FWIW: I believe you that Brent cultivated you, and I think you talking about that has been really useful in educating people (including me) about how toxic people do that. I do think it had to be some damn strong cultivation to overcome the baseline expectations set by his FB posts, and I’d be interested in hearing you talk about what he did to overcome that baseline- not because I think you were especially susceptible, but because whatever he did worked on a lot of people, and that makes it useful to understand.
Well, for starters, I had unfollowed him on FB by about 2016 as a result of being just continually frustrated by his relentless pessimism. So I probably missed a whole lot of what others saw as red flags.
This indeed changes my opinion a fair bit, and I should have had it as a more active hypothesis.
I find this helpful, and I think it’s a fair and reasonable reading that I should have ruled out.
What I meant by choosing that example in particular was that French contains a lot of sounds which English speakers literally can’t perceive at first, until they practice and build up some other background knowledge. That’s … not entirely different from a claim of superiority, but I tried to defuse the sense of superiority by noting that a lot of it comes from just relentlessly attending to the domain—”it’s not that I’m doing anything magic here, many of the people I’m hanging out with are smarter or conscientiouser, it’s just that I happen to have put in more reps is all.”
It didn’t work.
Ah, this makes sense and is helpful, and now that you’ve spelled it out I can see how it connects to other things in the post in ways I didn’t before. It also makes cases of failure much less relevant, since no one has all phenomes.
Worth noting that I noticed the kerning example seemed very different than the native speaker example, but the “native speaker in a room full of bored teenagers” claim felt so strong I resolved in that direction.