I think it’s important to have public, common-knowledge deterrence of that sort of behavior. I think that part of what allowed it to flourish on LessWrong 1.0 is the absence of comments like my parenthetical, making it clear that that sort of thing is outside the Overton window
There is a very important distinction to be made here, between criticism of an online project like LessWrong itself or even LessWrong 2, where the natural focus is on loosely coordinating useful work to be performed “IRL” (the ‘think globally, act locally’ strategy) and people ‘criticizing’ a real-world, physical community where people are naturally defending against shared threats of bodily harm, and striving to foster a nurturing ‘ecology’ or environment. To put it as pithily as possible, the somewhat uncomfortable reality is that, psychologically, a real-world, physical community is _always_ a “safe space”, no matter whether it is explicitly connoted as such or not, or whether its members intend it as such or not; and yes, this “safe space” characterization comes with all the usual ‘political’ implications about the acceptability of criticism—except that these implications are actually a lot more cogent here than in your average social club on Tumblr or whatever! I do apologize for resorting to contentious “political” or even “tribal” language which seems to be frowned upon by the new moderation guidelines, but no “guidelines” or rules of politeness could possibly help us escape the obvious fact that doing something physically, in the real world always comes with very real political consequences which, as such, need to be addressed via an attitude that’s properly mindful and inclined to basic values such as compromise and adaptability—no matter what the context!
By the time I got to the end of this, I realized I wasn’t quite sure what you were trying to say.
Given that, I’m sort of shooting-in-the-dark, and may not actually be responding to your point …
1) I don’t think the difference between “talking about internet stuff” and “talking about stuff that’s happening IRL” has any meaningful relevance when it comes to standards of discourse. I imagined you feeling sympathy for people’s panic and tribalism and irrationality because they were looking at a real-life project with commensurately higher stakes; I don’t feel such sympathy myself. I don’t want to carve out an exception that says “intellectual dishonesty and immature discourse are okay if it’s a situation where you really care about something important, tho.”
2) I’m uncertain what you’re pointing at with your references to political dynamics, except possibly the thing where people feel pressure to object or defend not only because of their own beliefs, but also because of second-order effects (wanting to be seen to object or defend, wanting to embolden other objectors or defenders, not wanting to be held accountable for failing to object or defend and thereby become vulnerable to accusations of tacit support).
I reiterate that there was a lot of excellent, productive, and useful discourse from people who were unambiguously opposed to the idea. There were people who raised cogent objections politely, with models to back those objections up and concrete suggestions for next actions to ameliorate them.
Then there were the rationalists-in-name-only (I can think of a few specific ones in the Charter thread, and a few on Tumblr whose rants were forwarded to me) whose whole way of approaching intellectual disagreement is fundamentally wrong and corrosive and should be consistently, firmly, and unambiguously rejected. It’s like the thing where people say “we shouldn’t be so tolerant that we endorse wildly toxic and intolerant ranting that itself threatens the norm of tolerance,” only it’s even worse in this case because what’s at stake is whether our culture trends toward truthseeking at all.
I don’t think the difference between “talking about internet stuff” and “talking about stuff that’s happening IRL” has any meaningful relevance when it comes to standards of discourse.
Well, human psychology says that “stuff that’s happening IRL” kinda has to play by its own rules. Online social clubs simply aren’t treated the same by common sense ‘etiquette’ (much less common-sense morality!) as actual communities where people naturally have far higher stakes.
I don’t want to carve out an exception that says “intellectual dishonesty and immature discourse are okay if it’s a situation where you really care about something important,
If you think I’m advocating for willful dishonesty and immaturity, than you completely missed the point of what I was saying. Perhaps you are among those who intuitively associate “politics” or even “tribalism” with such vices (ignoring the obvious fact that a ‘group house’ itself is literally, inherently tribal—as in, defining a human “tribe”!) You may want to reference e.g. Bernard Crick’s short work In Defense of Politics (often assigned in intro poli-sci courses as required reading!) for a very different POV indeed of what “political” even means. Far beyond the usual ‘virtues of rationality’, other virtues such as adaptability, compromise, creativity etc. --even humor! are inherently political.
The flip side of this, though, is that people will often disagree about what’s intellectually dishonest or immature in the first place! Part of a productive attitude to contentious debate is an ability and inclination to look beyond these shallow attributions, to a more charitable view of even “very bad” arguments. Truth-seeking is OK and should always be a basic value, but it simply can’t be any sort of all-encompassing goal, when we’re dealing with real-world conmunities with all the attendant issues of those.
I still don’t follow what you’re actually advocating, though, or what specific thing you’re criticizing. Would you mind explaining to me like I’m five? Or, like, boiling it down into the kinds of short, concrete statements from which one could construct a symbolic logic argument?
I skimmed some of Crick and read some commentary on him, and Crick seems to take the Hobbesian “politics as a necessary compromise” viewpoint. (I wasn’t convinced by his definition of the word politics, which seemed not to point at what I would point at as politics.)
My best guess: I think they’re arguing not that immature discourse is okay, but that we need to be more polite toward people’s views in general for political reasons, as long as the people are acting somewhat in good faith (I suspect they think that you’re not being sufficiently polite toward those you’re trying to throw out of the overton window). As a result, we need to engage less in harsh criticism when it might be seen as threatening.
That being said, I also suspect that Duncan would agree that we need to be charitable. I suspect the actual disagreement is whether the behavior of the critics Duncan is replying to are actually the sort of behavior we want/need to accept in our community.
(Personally, I think we need to be more willing to do real-life experiments, even if they risk going somewhat wrong. And I think some of the tumblr criticism definitely fell out of what I would want in the overton window. So I’m okay with Duncan’s paranthetical, though it would have been nicer if it was more explicit who it was responding to.)
I suspect they think that you’re not being sufficiently polite toward those you’re trying to throw out of the overton window
Actually, what I would say here is that “politeness” itself (and that’s actually a pretty misleading term since we’re dealing with fairly important issues of morality and ethics, not just shallow etiquette—but whatever, let’s go with it) entails that we should seek a clear understanding of what attitudes we’re throwing out of the Overton window, and why, or out of what sort of specific concerns. There’s nothing wrong whatsoever with considering “harsh criticism [that] might be seen as threatening” as being outside the Overton window, but whereas this makes a lot of sense when dealing with real-world based efforts like the Dragon Army group, or the various “rationalist Baugruppes” that seem to be springing up in some places, it feels quite silly to let the same attitude infect our response to “criticism” of Less Wrong as an online site, or of LessWrong 2 for that matter, or even of the “rationalist” community not as an actual community that might be physically manifested in some place, but as a general shared mindset.
When we say that “the behavior of the critics Duncan is replying to are [not] the sort of behavior we want/need to accept in our community”, what do we actually mean by “behavior” and “community” here? Are we actually pointing out the real-world concerns inherent in “criticizing” an effort like Dragon Army in a harsh, unpolite and perhaps even threatening (if perhaps only in a political sense, such as by ‘threatening’ a loss of valued real-world allies!) way? Or are we using these terms in a metaphorical sense that could in some sense encompass everything we might “do” on the Internet as folks with a rationalist mindset? I see the very fact that it’s not really “explicit who (or what) [we’re] responding to” as a problem that needs to be addressed in some way, at least wrt. its broadest plausible implications—even though I definitely understand the political benefits of understating such things!
There is a very important distinction to be made here, between criticism of an online project like LessWrong itself or even LessWrong 2, where the natural focus is on loosely coordinating useful work to be performed “IRL” (the ‘think globally, act locally’ strategy) and people ‘criticizing’ a real-world, physical community where people are naturally defending against shared threats of bodily harm, and striving to foster a nurturing ‘ecology’ or environment. To put it as pithily as possible, the somewhat uncomfortable reality is that, psychologically, a real-world, physical community is _always_ a “safe space”, no matter whether it is explicitly connoted as such or not, or whether its members intend it as such or not; and yes, this “safe space” characterization comes with all the usual ‘political’ implications about the acceptability of criticism—except that these implications are actually a lot more cogent here than in your average social club on Tumblr or whatever! I do apologize for resorting to contentious “political” or even “tribal” language which seems to be frowned upon by the new moderation guidelines, but no “guidelines” or rules of politeness could possibly help us escape the obvious fact that doing something physically, in the real world always comes with very real political consequences which, as such, need to be addressed via an attitude that’s properly mindful and inclined to basic values such as compromise and adaptability—no matter what the context!
By the time I got to the end of this, I realized I wasn’t quite sure what you were trying to say.
Given that, I’m sort of shooting-in-the-dark, and may not actually be responding to your point …
1) I don’t think the difference between “talking about internet stuff” and “talking about stuff that’s happening IRL” has any meaningful relevance when it comes to standards of discourse. I imagined you feeling sympathy for people’s panic and tribalism and irrationality because they were looking at a real-life project with commensurately higher stakes; I don’t feel such sympathy myself. I don’t want to carve out an exception that says “intellectual dishonesty and immature discourse are okay if it’s a situation where you really care about something important, tho.”
2) I’m uncertain what you’re pointing at with your references to political dynamics, except possibly the thing where people feel pressure to object or defend not only because of their own beliefs, but also because of second-order effects (wanting to be seen to object or defend, wanting to embolden other objectors or defenders, not wanting to be held accountable for failing to object or defend and thereby become vulnerable to accusations of tacit support).
I reiterate that there was a lot of excellent, productive, and useful discourse from people who were unambiguously opposed to the idea. There were people who raised cogent objections politely, with models to back those objections up and concrete suggestions for next actions to ameliorate them.
Then there were the rationalists-in-name-only (I can think of a few specific ones in the Charter thread, and a few on Tumblr whose rants were forwarded to me) whose whole way of approaching intellectual disagreement is fundamentally wrong and corrosive and should be consistently, firmly, and unambiguously rejected. It’s like the thing where people say “we shouldn’t be so tolerant that we endorse wildly toxic and intolerant ranting that itself threatens the norm of tolerance,” only it’s even worse in this case because what’s at stake is whether our culture trends toward truthseeking at all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would appreciate it if you’re willing to restate what you wanted to convey, as I don’t think I ended up catching it.
Well, human psychology says that “stuff that’s happening IRL” kinda has to play by its own rules. Online social clubs simply aren’t treated the same by common sense ‘etiquette’ (much less common-sense morality!) as actual communities where people naturally have far higher stakes.
If you think I’m advocating for willful dishonesty and immaturity, than you completely missed the point of what I was saying. Perhaps you are among those who intuitively associate “politics” or even “tribalism” with such vices (ignoring the obvious fact that a ‘group house’ itself is literally, inherently tribal—as in, defining a human “tribe”!) You may want to reference e.g. Bernard Crick’s short work In Defense of Politics (often assigned in intro poli-sci courses as required reading!) for a very different POV indeed of what “political” even means. Far beyond the usual ‘virtues of rationality’, other virtues such as adaptability, compromise, creativity etc. --even humor! are inherently political.
The flip side of this, though, is that people will often disagree about what’s intellectually dishonest or immature in the first place! Part of a productive attitude to contentious debate is an ability and inclination to look beyond these shallow attributions, to a more charitable view of even “very bad” arguments. Truth-seeking is OK and should always be a basic value, but it simply can’t be any sort of all-encompassing goal, when we’re dealing with real-world conmunities with all the attendant issues of those.
I still don’t follow what you’re actually advocating, though, or what specific thing you’re criticizing. Would you mind explaining to me like I’m five? Or, like, boiling it down into the kinds of short, concrete statements from which one could construct a symbolic logic argument?
I skimmed some of Crick and read some commentary on him, and Crick seems to take the Hobbesian “politics as a necessary compromise” viewpoint. (I wasn’t convinced by his definition of the word politics, which seemed not to point at what I would point at as politics.)
My best guess: I think they’re arguing not that immature discourse is okay, but that we need to be more polite toward people’s views in general for political reasons, as long as the people are acting somewhat in good faith (I suspect they think that you’re not being sufficiently polite toward those you’re trying to throw out of the overton window). As a result, we need to engage less in harsh criticism when it might be seen as threatening.
That being said, I also suspect that Duncan would agree that we need to be charitable. I suspect the actual disagreement is whether the behavior of the critics Duncan is replying to are actually the sort of behavior we want/need to accept in our community.
(Personally, I think we need to be more willing to do real-life experiments, even if they risk going somewhat wrong. And I think some of the tumblr criticism definitely fell out of what I would want in the overton window. So I’m okay with Duncan’s paranthetical, though it would have been nicer if it was more explicit who it was responding to.)
Actually, what I would say here is that “politeness” itself (and that’s actually a pretty misleading term since we’re dealing with fairly important issues of morality and ethics, not just shallow etiquette—but whatever, let’s go with it) entails that we should seek a clear understanding of what attitudes we’re throwing out of the Overton window, and why, or out of what sort of specific concerns. There’s nothing wrong whatsoever with considering “harsh criticism [that] might be seen as threatening” as being outside the Overton window, but whereas this makes a lot of sense when dealing with real-world based efforts like the Dragon Army group, or the various “rationalist Baugruppes” that seem to be springing up in some places, it feels quite silly to let the same attitude infect our response to “criticism” of Less Wrong as an online site, or of LessWrong 2 for that matter, or even of the “rationalist” community not as an actual community that might be physically manifested in some place, but as a general shared mindset.
When we say that “the behavior of the critics Duncan is replying to are [not] the sort of behavior we want/need to accept in our community”, what do we actually mean by “behavior” and “community” here? Are we actually pointing out the real-world concerns inherent in “criticizing” an effort like Dragon Army in a harsh, unpolite and perhaps even threatening (if perhaps only in a political sense, such as by ‘threatening’ a loss of valued real-world allies!) way? Or are we using these terms in a metaphorical sense that could in some sense encompass everything we might “do” on the Internet as folks with a rationalist mindset? I see the very fact that it’s not really “explicit who (or what) [we’re] responding to” as a problem that needs to be addressed in some way, at least wrt. its broadest plausible implications—even though I definitely understand the political benefits of understating such things!