Over the past year or two, I’ve come to believe that I’m doing a fair bit of “freeloading off others who are willing to punish”. But, because the dynamics you describe here, I’m still unsure what the right course of action is.
My sense is that most people doing the punishment are
a) off enough in their targets (relative to my preferences), that I don’t feel good endorsing them straight away, often actively disendorsing them, and
b) similar to what you note in this post, I think most of the effect of judgment is general reluctance to speak publicly at all, for fear of being randomly judged in an unpredictable fashion (while slightly tweaking people’s predictive weights about what they’re likely to be punished for)
So I see a lot of the punishment as anti-social rather than pro-social, and much of my default impulse is to punish the punishers.
But, by now I’ve seen enough examples of me benefiting from something like “good cop / bad cop”, or from pendulum swings where one person is trying to drag the norms way off in a direction that seems too far to me, but that (as you say) “maybe slightly improves the average punishment function”.
Meanwhile, it is suspicious if I think the status quo is “okay” enough not to spend any social capital pushing it in some direction.
Nonetheless…
...it’s pretty unclear to me which directions are actually helpful, and whether strategies of judgment or punishment are the way to go.
Seems to me like punishment might not accomplish what it claims to & might be harmful on net. I have a future post planned to explain that point more fully though.
(My current background strategy is something like “positive reinforcement is a better strategy than punishment”, but I’m not that confident. I notice that your Oops Prize didn’t amount to much. There’s a chance that it could just use More Dakka. Upping the prize and doing more advertisement might be worthwhile, and think it is likely that I’d want to contribute to that.
It runs the risk of Goodharting on Looking Like You’re Not Goodharting, but maybe that’s a problem to worry about when you have more than one submission)
Maybe you’re not freeloading on them, you’re honoring their and your comparative advantages. They’re willing to take more risks than you in who and how much to punish, and the fact that you don’t want to correct them in either direction indicates you’d rather accept their choices than to try to calculate the proper amount yourself. Or maybe you _should_ be supervising more closely because they’re wrong.
How to determine which model (freeloading vs division of labor vs dereliction of duty) fits the situation is the tricky part.
Over the past year or two, I’ve come to believe that I’m doing a fair bit of “freeloading off others who are willing to punish”. But, because the dynamics you describe here, I’m still unsure what the right course of action is.
My sense is that most people doing the punishment are
a) off enough in their targets (relative to my preferences), that I don’t feel good endorsing them straight away, often actively disendorsing them, and
b) similar to what you note in this post, I think most of the effect of judgment is general reluctance to speak publicly at all, for fear of being randomly judged in an unpredictable fashion (while slightly tweaking people’s predictive weights about what they’re likely to be punished for)
So I see a lot of the punishment as anti-social rather than pro-social, and much of my default impulse is to punish the punishers.
But, by now I’ve seen enough examples of me benefiting from something like “good cop / bad cop”, or from pendulum swings where one person is trying to drag the norms way off in a direction that seems too far to me, but that (as you say) “maybe slightly improves the average punishment function”.
Meanwhile, it is suspicious if I think the status quo is “okay” enough not to spend any social capital pushing it in some direction.
Nonetheless…
...it’s pretty unclear to me which directions are actually helpful, and whether strategies of judgment or punishment are the way to go.
Seems to me like punishment might not accomplish what it claims to & might be harmful on net. I have a future post planned to explain that point more fully though.
Nod. That’s been my past default assumption, just noting that my overall opinion here is in flux. Looking forward to further thoughts.
(My current background strategy is something like “positive reinforcement is a better strategy than punishment”, but I’m not that confident. I notice that your Oops Prize didn’t amount to much. There’s a chance that it could just use More Dakka. Upping the prize and doing more advertisement might be worthwhile, and think it is likely that I’d want to contribute to that.
It runs the risk of Goodharting on Looking Like You’re Not Goodharting, but maybe that’s a problem to worry about when you have more than one submission)
Maybe you’re not freeloading on them, you’re honoring their and your comparative advantages. They’re willing to take more risks than you in who and how much to punish, and the fact that you don’t want to correct them in either direction indicates you’d rather accept their choices than to try to calculate the proper amount yourself. Or maybe you _should_ be supervising more closely because they’re wrong.
How to determine which model (freeloading vs division of labor vs dereliction of duty) fits the situation is the tricky part.
A motivator here is that the judgers seem to feel unhappy and frustrated. Something something melting gold.