Thanks for engaging :) My upset part feels much calmer now that it has been spoken for, so I’m actually pretty chill about this right now. You’ve had a lot of stuff that I’ve gotten value from, too.
But note also that that post contains a lengthy excerpt about how the “Dark Side” descends into cultishness and insanity in situations where the word of leaders is accepted without question. That was clearly also depicted as the opposite failure mode.
I agree that rationalists don’t cooperate enough, and that often just offer criticism when it’s not warranted. But… it feels like a Fully General Counterargument if you take to that the point of “no coordination may be criticized, ever, including situation where people are arguably being shamed for having good epistemics”. That sounds like this bit from the post:
How do things work on the Dark Side?
The respected leader speaks, and there comes a chorus of pure agreement: if there are any who harbor inward doubts, they keep them to themselves. So all the individual members of the audience see this atmosphere of pure agreement, and they feel more confident in the ideas presented—even if they, personally, harbored inward doubts, why, everyone else seems to agree with it.
If anyone is still unpersuaded after that, they leave the group (or in some places, are executed)—and the remainder are more in agreement, and reinforce each other with less interference.
Re: Well-Kept Gardens—again, that feels like a Fully General Counterargument. Yes, certainly there should be moderator action when necessary… like, I am on the mod team, I have seen discussions about banning users etc. and all of that’s been fine to me.
But we’re not even talking about banning users here. This isn’t about keeping the garden, it’s about one particular ritual being picked to be important. Does Well-Kept Gardens imply that everything the admins do should be treated as correct?
Likewise, pushing back against “shaming people whose main sin is that they aren’t particularly persuaded by this ritual actually being significant” — isn’t that actually both good and necessary if we want to be able to coordinate and actually solve problems?
Back when I banned Eugine Nier, there were people who disagreed with that decision… but if they didn’t find my argument for the ban to be particularly persuasive, it never even crossed my mind that I should shame them because I had made an argument that didn’t compel them. They disagreed, the coordination necessary for saving the site still happened, no reason not to let them disagree.
So I read this to be a central premise that much of the rest of your comment builds on:
For Ben at least, the button thing was a symbolic exercise analogous to not nuking another country and he specifically asked you not to and said he’s trusting you.
Which to me feels like it’s assuming thing that I was asking someone to prove. Yes, Ben feels that the button was symbolic and analogous to not nuking another country. But it does not feel at all analogous to me; I feel like the ritual is picking a surface-level aspect of what happened to Petrov (something like the general idea of “you should not push the red button, doing so would have bad consequences”), and that’s about it when it comes to having a resemblance to it. The outcome matrix and psychological situation for the users is something completely different than what it was for Petrov. If the ritual actually did have a clear structural resemblance to Petrov’s dilemma, then I would have much less of a problem with it. But as it is, it does not feel like it’s training the site’s users in the thing that it claims to be training them in.
I’ll review and think more carefully later — out at dinner with a friend now — but my quick thought is that the proper venue, time, and place for expressing discontent with a cooperative community project is probably afterwards, possibly beforehand, and certainly not during… I don’t believe in immunity from criticism, obviously, but I am against defection when one doesn’t agree with a choice of norms.
That’s the quick take, will review more closely later.
Thanks for engaging :) My upset part feels much calmer now that it has been spoken for, so I’m actually pretty chill about this right now. You’ve had a lot of stuff that I’ve gotten value from, too.
But note also that that post contains a lengthy excerpt about how the “Dark Side” descends into cultishness and insanity in situations where the word of leaders is accepted without question. That was clearly also depicted as the opposite failure mode.
I agree that rationalists don’t cooperate enough, and that often just offer criticism when it’s not warranted. But… it feels like a Fully General Counterargument if you take to that the point of “no coordination may be criticized, ever, including situation where people are arguably being shamed for having good epistemics”. That sounds like this bit from the post:
Re: Well-Kept Gardens—again, that feels like a Fully General Counterargument. Yes, certainly there should be moderator action when necessary… like, I am on the mod team, I have seen discussions about banning users etc. and all of that’s been fine to me.
But we’re not even talking about banning users here. This isn’t about keeping the garden, it’s about one particular ritual being picked to be important. Does Well-Kept Gardens imply that everything the admins do should be treated as correct?
Back when I banned Eugine Nier, there were people who disagreed with that decision… but if they didn’t find my argument for the ban to be particularly persuasive, it never even crossed my mind that I should shame them because I had made an argument that didn’t compel them. They disagreed, the coordination necessary for saving the site still happened, no reason not to let them disagree.
So I read this to be a central premise that much of the rest of your comment builds on:
Which to me feels like it’s assuming thing that I was asking someone to prove. Yes, Ben feels that the button was symbolic and analogous to not nuking another country. But it does not feel at all analogous to me; I feel like the ritual is picking a surface-level aspect of what happened to Petrov (something like the general idea of “you should not push the red button, doing so would have bad consequences”), and that’s about it when it comes to having a resemblance to it. The outcome matrix and psychological situation for the users is something completely different than what it was for Petrov. If the ritual actually did have a clear structural resemblance to Petrov’s dilemma, then I would have much less of a problem with it. But as it is, it does not feel like it’s training the site’s users in the thing that it claims to be training them in.
Good points.
I’ll review and think more carefully later — out at dinner with a friend now — but my quick thought is that the proper venue, time, and place for expressing discontent with a cooperative community project is probably afterwards, possibly beforehand, and certainly not during… I don’t believe in immunity from criticism, obviously, but I am against defection when one doesn’t agree with a choice of norms.
That’s the quick take, will review more closely later.