Thanks for writing this. I think the bullets under “things I learned” is a reasonable description of the points I was trying to make.
I would describe my current overall position somewhat differently—it’s not that I think people can’t be poorly calibrated in this direction, but I do think “intuition designed for Dunbar numbers therefore useless in the modern world” is way too big of a pendulum swing. My model here—Benquo was saying this in the original demon thread post and I agree—is that the social intuitions relevant to demon threads are mostly about what is or is not entering common knowledge, and my sense is that these intuitions actually scale reasonably well with the size of a social group.
Because while it’s true that modern social groups can be much larger than Dunbar it’s also correspondingly true that we have much better social technologies designed to produce common knowledge among these larger groups, such as highly visible blog posts, community events and speeches given at them, etc. People have a lot of experience with these social technologies and basically understand their effects on common knowledge, e.g. most people can basically keep track of what their local social norms are, what they are and aren’t allowed to say and wear, etc. and are sensitive to changes in these things.
I agree that the weirder your goals are the more you need to think about other things in addition to social reality, but that by no means allows you to just forget about social reality.
When I was reading Raemon’s post and reached the line “I haven’t run this by Qiaochu yet (I think getting formal permission/endorsement adds an ‘significant trivial inconvenience’ that might disrupt the process too much), but I expect him to endorse the following, and I’ll update/clarify if I got anything wrong” I started to slightly suspect something might have gone awry, because that seemed a useful step for forging agreement moving forward and because if there was a dialogue between two people asking “is this summary of our positions accurate?” prior to posting that summary seems like it adds at most one or two steps to the process.
That you are glad this was written assuages much of that suspicion, but since you would describe your position differently I’d like to ask; do you think checking the summary against the other person in this process is an important step, or is skipping it for speed and convenience a good tradeoff?
(Not attempting to speak for Qiaochu who I do hope answers for himself)
I think checking in with the person in question is indeed valuable, and you should especially do it when you’re not sure you understand, or if the issue is delicate (i.e. summarizing it wrong publicly is likely to cause things to spiral out of control worse or create bad feelings), or if your and your partner don’t trust each other.
But, I’m currently much more worried about people not trying this new norm at all because it’s new, unfamiliar, requires both people to put effort in, etc. So I’d more worried about trivial inconveniences prevent it from happening at all than about people summarizing each other wrong or unfairly.
I’m somewhat confused about this specific point of yours, because in the article itself, you write
Step 3. They write a short summary of whatever progress they were able to make (and any major outstanding disagreements that remain). They must both endorse the summary. Writing such a summary needs to get you as much kudos / feel-good as winning an argument does.
which I interpreted to mean “both participants must give explicit verbal endorsement of the summary before it gets posted”. It’s possible that my interpretation is mistaken, but right now it’s not entirely obvious to me how one is supposed to make sure that “they [...] both endorse the summary” without asking first.
It’s also possible that what you’re saying is that we should omit this part of the procedure for the time being, in order to make sure the procedure doesn’t present too much of a trivial inconvenience for people to try it. If so, however, I think it’s worth making this explicit in your summary of the procedure itself, perhaps with a simple edit like the following:
Step 3. They write a short summary of whatever progress they were able to make (and any major outstanding disagreements that remain). Ideally, both participants should endorse the summary before it is published, although I think this particular requirement should remain optional for the time being. Writing such a summary needs to get you as much kudos / feel-good as winning an argument does.
Yes, I basically endorse this interpretation (I admit I haven’t been very clear or consistent on this point, but yes this is what I meant and I’ll edit it to reflect that, both here and in the original post)
I think checking the summary against the other person is a good idea in general. I don’t feel particularly defected on in this instance, but I can imagine feeling more defected on if I was more invested in this issue in particular and/or if my position was more misrepresented.
Thanks for writing this. I think the bullets under “things I learned” is a reasonable description of the points I was trying to make.
I would describe my current overall position somewhat differently—it’s not that I think people can’t be poorly calibrated in this direction, but I do think “intuition designed for Dunbar numbers therefore useless in the modern world” is way too big of a pendulum swing. My model here—Benquo was saying this in the original demon thread post and I agree—is that the social intuitions relevant to demon threads are mostly about what is or is not entering common knowledge, and my sense is that these intuitions actually scale reasonably well with the size of a social group.
Because while it’s true that modern social groups can be much larger than Dunbar it’s also correspondingly true that we have much better social technologies designed to produce common knowledge among these larger groups, such as highly visible blog posts, community events and speeches given at them, etc. People have a lot of experience with these social technologies and basically understand their effects on common knowledge, e.g. most people can basically keep track of what their local social norms are, what they are and aren’t allowed to say and wear, etc. and are sensitive to changes in these things.
I agree that the weirder your goals are the more you need to think about other things in addition to social reality, but that by no means allows you to just forget about social reality.
When I was reading Raemon’s post and reached the line “I haven’t run this by Qiaochu yet (I think getting formal permission/endorsement adds an ‘significant trivial inconvenience’ that might disrupt the process too much), but I expect him to endorse the following, and I’ll update/clarify if I got anything wrong” I started to slightly suspect something might have gone awry, because that seemed a useful step for forging agreement moving forward and because if there was a dialogue between two people asking “is this summary of our positions accurate?” prior to posting that summary seems like it adds at most one or two steps to the process.
That you are glad this was written assuages much of that suspicion, but since you would describe your position differently I’d like to ask; do you think checking the summary against the other person in this process is an important step, or is skipping it for speed and convenience a good tradeoff?
(Not attempting to speak for Qiaochu who I do hope answers for himself)
I think checking in with the person in question is indeed valuable, and you should especially do it when you’re not sure you understand, or if the issue is delicate (i.e. summarizing it wrong publicly is likely to cause things to spiral out of control worse or create bad feelings), or if your and your partner don’t trust each other.
But, I’m currently much more worried about people not trying this new norm at all because it’s new, unfamiliar, requires both people to put effort in, etc. So I’d more worried about trivial inconveniences prevent it from happening at all than about people summarizing each other wrong or unfairly.
I’m somewhat confused about this specific point of yours, because in the article itself, you write
which I interpreted to mean “both participants must give explicit verbal endorsement of the summary before it gets posted”. It’s possible that my interpretation is mistaken, but right now it’s not entirely obvious to me how one is supposed to make sure that “they [...] both endorse the summary” without asking first.
It’s also possible that what you’re saying is that we should omit this part of the procedure for the time being, in order to make sure the procedure doesn’t present too much of a trivial inconvenience for people to try it. If so, however, I think it’s worth making this explicit in your summary of the procedure itself, perhaps with a simple edit like the following:
Yes, I basically endorse this interpretation (I admit I haven’t been very clear or consistent on this point, but yes this is what I meant and I’ll edit it to reflect that, both here and in the original post)
I think checking the summary against the other person is a good idea in general. I don’t feel particularly defected on in this instance, but I can imagine feeling more defected on if I was more invested in this issue in particular and/or if my position was more misrepresented.