I think that smart people can hack LW norms and propagandize / pointscore / accumulate power with relative ease. I think this post is pretty much an example of that: - a lot of time is spent gesturing / sermoning about the importance of fighting biases etc. with no particularly informative or novel content (it is after all intended to “remind people of why they care”.). I personally find it difficult to engage critically with this kind of high volume and low density. - ultimately the intent seems to be an effort to coordinate power against types of posters that Duncan doesn’t like
I just don’t see how most of this post is supposed to help me be more rational. The droning on makes it harder to engage as an adversary, than if the post were just “here are my terrible ideas”, but it does so in an arational way.
I bring this up in part because Duncan seems to be advocating that his adherence to LW norms means he can’t just propagandize etc.
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.
If people here really think you can’t propagandize or bad-faith accumulate points/power while adhering to LW norms, well, I think that’s bad for rationality.
I am sure that Duncan will be dissatisfied with this response because it does not engage directly with his models or engage very thoroughly by providing examples from the text etc. I’m not doing this stuff because I just don’t actually think it serves rationality to do so.
While I’m at it:
Duncan:
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.
To me it seems really obvious that if I said to Duncan in response to something, “you are just sacrificing long-term goals for the sake of short-term point-scoring”, (if he chose to respond) he would write about how I am making a bald assertion and blah blah blah. How I should retract it and instead say “it feels to me you are [...]” and blah blah blah. But look, in this quote there is a very clear and “uncited” / non-evidentiated claim that people are sacrifiing their long-term goals for the sake of short-term point-scoring. I am not saying it’s bad to make such assertions, just saying that Duncan can and does make such assertions baldly while adhering to norms.
To zoom out, I feel in the OP and in this thread Duncan is enforcing norms that he is good at leveraging but that don’t actually protect rationality. But these norms seem to have buy in. Pooey!
I continuously add more to this stupid post in part because I feel the norms here require a lot of ink gets spilled and that I substantiate everything I say. It’s not enough to just say “you know it seems like you are doing [x thing I find obvious]”. Duncan is really good at enforcing this norm and adhering to it.
But the fact is that this post was a stupid usage of my time that I don’t actually value having written, completely independent of how right I am about anything I am saying or how persuasive.
Again I submit:
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.
Look, if I have to reply to every single attack on a certain premise, before I am allowed to use this premise, then I am not going to be allowed to use the premise ever. Because Duncan has more time than me allocated to this stuff, and seemingly more than most people who criticize this OP. But that seems like a really stupid norm.
I made this top level because, even though I think the norm is stupid, among other norms I have pointed out, I also think that Duncan is right that all of them are in fact the norm here.
If I’m reading you correctly, it sounds like there’s actually multiple disagreements you have here—a disagreement with Duncan, but also a disagreement with the current norms of LW.
My impression is primarily informed by these bits here:
I think that smart people can hack LW norms and propagandize / pointscore / accumulate power with relative ease. [...]
If people here really think you can’t propagandize or bad-faith accumulate points/power while adhering to LW norms, well, I think that’s bad for rationality.
Could you say more about this? In particular, assuming my reading is accurate, I’m interested in knowing (1) ways in which you think the existing norms are inadequate to the task of preventing bad-faith point-scoring, (2) whether you think it’s possible to patch those issues by introducing better norms. (Incidentally, if your answer to (2) is “yes”, then it’s actually possible your position and Duncan’s are less incompatible than it might first appear, since you might just have different solutions in mind for the same problem.)
(Of course, it’s also possible you think LW’s norms are irreparable, which is a fact that—if true—would still be worth drawing attention to, even if it is somewhat sad. Possibly this is all you were trying to do in the parent comment, in which case I could be reading more into what you said than is there. If that’s the case, though, I’d still like to see it confirmed.)
Maybe it is good to clarify: I’m not really convinced that LW norms are particularly conducive to bad faith or psychopathic behavior. Maybe there are some patches to apply. But mostly I am concerned about naivety. LW norms aren’t enough to make truth win and bullies / predators lose. If people think they are, that alone is a problem independent of possible improvements.
since you might just have different solutions in mind for the same problem.
I think that Duncan is concerned about prejudicial mobs being too effective and I am concerned about systematically preventing information about abuse from surfacing. To some extent I do just see this as a conflict based on interests—Duncan is concerned about the threat of being mobbed and advocating tradeoffs accordingly, I’m concerned about being abused / my friends being abused and advocating tradeoffs accordingly. But to me it doesn’t seem like LW is particularly afflicted by prejudicial mobs and is nonzero afflicted by abuse.
I don’t think Duncan acknowledges the presence of tradeoffs here but IMO there absolutely have to be tradeoffs. To me the generally upvoted and accepted responses to jessicata’s post are making a tradeoff to protect MIRI against mudslinging, disinformation, mobbing while also making it scarier to try to speak up about abuse. Maybe the right tradeoff is being made and we have to really come down on jessicata for being too vague and equivocating too much, or being a fake victim of some kind. But I also think we should not take advocacy regarding these tradeoffs at face value, which yeah LW norms seem to really encourage.
I like this highlighting of the tradeoffs, and have upvoted it. But:
But to me it doesn’t seem like LW is particularly afflicted by prejudicial mobs and is nonzero afflicted by abuse.
… I think this is easier to say when one has never been the target of a prejudicial mob on LessWrong, and/or when one agrees with the mob and therefore doesn’t think of it as prejudicial.
I’ve been the target of prejudicial mobbing on LessWrong. Direct experience. And yes, it impacted work and funding and life and friendships outside of the site.
I was not aware of any examples of anything anyone would refer to as prejudicial mobbing with consequences. I’d be curious to hear about your prejudicial mobbing experience.
I think it’s better (for the moment at least) to let Oliver speak to the most salient one, and I can say more later if need be. I suspect Oliver would provide a more neutral POV.
propagandize / pointscore / accumulate power with relative ease
There’s a way in which this is correct denotatively, even though the connotation is something I disagree with. Like, I am in fact arguing for increasing a status differential between some behaviors that I think are more appropriate for LW and others that I think are less appropriate. I’m trying at least to be up front about what those behaviors are, so that people can disagree. e.g. if you think that it’s actually not a big deal to distinguish between observation and inference, because people already do a good job teasing those apart.
But yes: I wouldn’t use the “power” frame, but there’s a way in which, in a dance studio, there’s “power” to be had in conforming to the activity of dance and dance instruction, and “less power” in the hands of people not doing those things.
an effort to coordinate power against types of posters that Duncan doesn’t like
I don’t think this is the case; I want to coordinate power against a class of actions. I am agnostic as to who is taking those actions, and even specifically called out that if there are people who are above the local law we should be candid about that fact.
I am not saying it’s bad to make such assertions, just saying that Duncan can and does make such assertions baldly while adhering to norms.
The example you cite seems pretty fair! I think that’s a place where I’m failing to live up, and it’s good that you highlighted it.
Duncan is enforcing norms that he is good at leveraging but that don’t actually protect rationality. But these norms seem to have buy in. Pooey!
If you do happen to feel like listing a couple of underappreciated norms that you think do protect rationality, I would like that.
(I think the norms I’m pulling for increase brevity; more consistent standards mean less need to bend over backwards ruling out everything else in each individual case.)
Your OP is way too long (or not sufficiently indexed) for me to, without considerable strain, determine how much or how meaningfully I think this claim is true. Relatedly I don’t know what you are referring to here.
I think that smart people can hack LW norms and propagandize / pointscore / accumulate power with relative ease. I think this post is pretty much an example of that:
- a lot of time is spent gesturing / sermoning about the importance of fighting biases etc. with no particularly informative or novel content (it is after all intended to “remind people of why they care”.). I personally find it difficult to engage critically with this kind of high volume and low density.
- ultimately the intent seems to be an effort to coordinate power against types of posters that Duncan doesn’t like
I just don’t see how most of this post is supposed to help me be more rational. The droning on makes it harder to engage as an adversary, than if the post were just “here are my terrible ideas”, but it does so in an arational way.
I bring this up in part because Duncan seems to be advocating that his adherence to LW norms means he can’t just propagandize etc.
If people here really think you can’t propagandize or bad-faith accumulate points/power while adhering to LW norms, well, I think that’s bad for rationality.
I am sure that Duncan will be dissatisfied with this response because it does not engage directly with his models or engage very thoroughly by providing examples from the text etc. I’m not doing this stuff because I just don’t actually think it serves rationality to do so.
While I’m at it:
Duncan:
To me it seems really obvious that if I said to Duncan in response to something, “you are just sacrificing long-term goals for the sake of short-term point-scoring”, (if he chose to respond) he would write about how I am making a bald assertion and blah blah blah. How I should retract it and instead say “it feels to me you are [...]” and blah blah blah. But look, in this quote there is a very clear and “uncited” / non-evidentiated claim that people are sacrifiing their long-term goals for the sake of short-term point-scoring. I am not saying it’s bad to make such assertions, just saying that Duncan can and does make such assertions baldly while adhering to norms.
To zoom out, I feel in the OP and in this thread Duncan is enforcing norms that he is good at leveraging but that don’t actually protect rationality. But these norms seem to have buy in. Pooey!
I continuously add more to this stupid post in part because I feel the norms here require a lot of ink gets spilled and that I substantiate everything I say. It’s not enough to just say “you know it seems like you are doing [x thing I find obvious]”. Duncan is really good at enforcing this norm and adhering to it.
But the fact is that this post was a stupid usage of my time that I don’t actually value having written, completely independent of how right I am about anything I am saying or how persuasive.
Again I submit:
Look, if I have to reply to every single attack on a certain premise, before I am allowed to use this premise, then I am not going to be allowed to use the premise ever. Because Duncan has more time than me allocated to this stuff, and seemingly more than most people who criticize this OP. But that seems like a really stupid norm.
I made this top level because, even though I think the norm is stupid, among other norms I have pointed out, I also think that Duncan is right that all of them are in fact the norm here.
If I’m reading you correctly, it sounds like there’s actually multiple disagreements you have here—a disagreement with Duncan, but also a disagreement with the current norms of LW.
My impression is primarily informed by these bits here:
Could you say more about this? In particular, assuming my reading is accurate, I’m interested in knowing (1) ways in which you think the existing norms are inadequate to the task of preventing bad-faith point-scoring, (2) whether you think it’s possible to patch those issues by introducing better norms. (Incidentally, if your answer to (2) is “yes”, then it’s actually possible your position and Duncan’s are less incompatible than it might first appear, since you might just have different solutions in mind for the same problem.)
(Of course, it’s also possible you think LW’s norms are irreparable, which is a fact that—if true—would still be worth drawing attention to, even if it is somewhat sad. Possibly this is all you were trying to do in the parent comment, in which case I could be reading more into what you said than is there. If that’s the case, though, I’d still like to see it confirmed.)
Maybe it is good to clarify: I’m not really convinced that LW norms are particularly conducive to bad faith or psychopathic behavior. Maybe there are some patches to apply. But mostly I am concerned about naivety. LW norms aren’t enough to make truth win and bullies / predators lose. If people think they are, that alone is a problem independent of possible improvements.
I think that Duncan is concerned about prejudicial mobs being too effective and I am concerned about systematically preventing information about abuse from surfacing. To some extent I do just see this as a conflict based on interests—Duncan is concerned about the threat of being mobbed and advocating tradeoffs accordingly, I’m concerned about being abused / my friends being abused and advocating tradeoffs accordingly. But to me it doesn’t seem like LW is particularly afflicted by prejudicial mobs and is nonzero afflicted by abuse.
I don’t think Duncan acknowledges the presence of tradeoffs here but IMO there absolutely have to be tradeoffs. To me the generally upvoted and accepted responses to jessicata’s post are making a tradeoff to protect MIRI against mudslinging, disinformation, mobbing while also making it scarier to try to speak up about abuse. Maybe the right tradeoff is being made and we have to really come down on jessicata for being too vague and equivocating too much, or being a fake victim of some kind. But I also think we should not take advocacy regarding these tradeoffs at face value, which yeah LW norms seem to really encourage.
I like this highlighting of the tradeoffs, and have upvoted it. But:
… I think this is easier to say when one has never been the target of a prejudicial mob on LessWrong, and/or when one agrees with the mob and therefore doesn’t think of it as prejudicial.
I’ve been the target of prejudicial mobbing on LessWrong. Direct experience. And yes, it impacted work and funding and life and friendships outside of the site.
I was not aware of any examples of anything anyone would refer to as prejudicial mobbing with consequences. I’d be curious to hear about your prejudicial mobbing experience.
I think it’s better (for the moment at least) to let Oliver speak to the most salient one, and I can say more later if need be. I suspect Oliver would provide a more neutral POV.
There’s a way in which this is correct denotatively, even though the connotation is something I disagree with. Like, I am in fact arguing for increasing a status differential between some behaviors that I think are more appropriate for LW and others that I think are less appropriate. I’m trying at least to be up front about what those behaviors are, so that people can disagree. e.g. if you think that it’s actually not a big deal to distinguish between observation and inference, because people already do a good job teasing those apart.
But yes: I wouldn’t use the “power” frame, but there’s a way in which, in a dance studio, there’s “power” to be had in conforming to the activity of dance and dance instruction, and “less power” in the hands of people not doing those things.
I don’t think this is the case; I want to coordinate power against a class of actions. I am agnostic as to who is taking those actions, and even specifically called out that if there are people who are above the local law we should be candid about that fact.
The example you cite seems pretty fair! I think that’s a place where I’m failing to live up, and it’s good that you highlighted it.
If you do happen to feel like listing a couple of underappreciated norms that you think do protect rationality, I would like that.
Brevity
Strong upvote.
(I think the norms I’m pulling for increase brevity; more consistent standards mean less need to bend over backwards ruling out everything else in each individual case.)
Your OP is way too long (or not sufficiently indexed) for me to, without considerable strain, determine how much or how meaningfully I think this claim is true. Relatedly I don’t know what you are referring to here.