Ilya, I respect your expertise in causal modeling, and I appreciate when you make contributions to the site sharing things you’ve learned and helping others see the parts of the world you understand, like this and this and this. In contrast your last 5 comments on the site have net negative karma scores, getting into politics and substance-less snark on the community. A number of your comments are just short and snarky and political (example, example) or gossiping about the site (many of your comments are just complaining about Eliezer and rationalists).
I’m pretty excited about your contributions to the site when they’re substantive Ilya, but this comment is a warning that if you continue to have a string of net negative comments without contributing a lot of great stuff too, the most likely outcome is that I’ll ban you.
1. Thank you for all your effort to make LW valuable.
2. I think there’s something pretty valuable about this particular comment of Ilya’s. I’m not tracking all the tradeoffs, thinking through what it would be like if every comment this rude and judgemental were allowed, etc.; so I’ll just try to say what I think is valuable about it, without trying to make an overall judgement. It’s something like, from inside [the thing Ilya is calling a cult, insofar as it’s a thing at all], we’re at risk of feedback loopy dynamics. For example, (mis)information cascades, where people keep updating on each other’s judgements (which are only discretized summaries of previous evidence), rather than updating on each other’s observations exactly once (which would be harder). For example, narrative pyramid schemes, where stories about where a group will put its effort gain political capital in a way disconnected from object-level evaluations of consequences of plans. For example, fear of retribution materializing out of nothing, by people seeing each other act as though they’re afraid of retribution and inferring that they themselves have something to fear.
So, these feedback dynamics are bad, and also very natural. It seems valuable to have some Ilyas, who are rightly viewed as having some weight by our own supposed values, and who will break all frames of political “respect”. Frames of political respect sometimes become mechanisms for propagating pyramid schemes, and sometimes cause people to infer that those around them are deferring out of fear and so the leaders are to be feared rather than reasoned about. So, political frames contribute to mostly bad feedback dynamics, and Ilyas break political frames.
Speaking more phenomenally and less theoretically: sometimes an Ilya says something that gives me a “jolt”, and then I seem to suddenly have more access to peeking behind certain things, or being able to occupy, maybe temporarily, an outlook that’s like “a different Normal”. And this feels basically good to me, like it seems less like I’m being tugged around, and more like I’ve jumped to another spot and now I can get triangulation / parallax on more things.
Strong-upvoted for raising this consideration to mind; this is exactly the sort of object-level analysis I hoped to see more of on this topic.
My sense here is that the thing you’re talking about is quite valuable; I think the main source of divergence is likely to be located in considerations like: (1) how effectively comments like Ilya’s actually provide [the thing], and (2) how possible it is to get [the thing] without the corresponding negatives associated with comments like Ilya’s. I recognize that these points may be part of the “tradeoffs” you explicitly said you weren’t trying to track in your comment, so I don’t intend this as a request that you pivot to discussing said points (though naturally I would be thrilled if somebody did).
The thing that comes to mind, that might get us a bit of insight into (1) and (2) simultaneously, is in attempting to craft a comment that serves a similar purpose as that described in your comment, preserving the positives while (ideally) mitigating the negatives. I admit to not having a strong sense of how to create the “jolt” effect you describe, but I’ll start anyway. (I have a strong expectation that whatever I come up with be imperfect along many axes, so I welcome feedback.)
For reference, Ilya’s original comment:
“MIRI/CFAR is not a cult.”
What does being a cult space monkey feel like from the inside?
This entire depressing thread is reminding me a little of how long it took folks who watch Rick and Morty to realize Rick is an awful abusive person, because he’s the show’s main character, and isn’t “coded” as a villain.
My model is that there are two components here that are critical to creating a sufficiently sharp “jolt”: the short, pithy nature of the comment, and the obvious way in which it disregards what you (TekhneMakre) characterized as “political frames of respect”. I think these are obviously tied to, but not identical with, the norm-violating aspects of the comment that I perceived as problematic; here is my attempt at a similar comment that preserves both components without the norm-violating aspects:
“MIRI/CFAR is not a cult.”
Saying this does not make it true.
I think this comment scores approximately as well as Ilya’s on the “ignoring political frames” axis, and actually scores quite a bit better on the “shorty and pithy” axis, all while being significantly less norm-violating than his original comment.
(To be clear, I would still expect such a comment to receive negative karma, but I would expect it to receive substantially less negative karma, and also would likely not have prompted me to initiate a discussion of potential moderator action. (Though that second part would also depend heavily on whether Ilya’s counterfactual comment history were substantially different, since my decision to call him out was based [in part] on multiple past observed norm violations.))
I’d be interested in learning whether my version of the comment hits the same note for you (or other users who shared your original sense that Ilya’s comment was doing something valuable). I think there’s strong potential for updates here, especially since (as I mentioned) I don’t have a strong model of [the thing].
(Note that this exercise is not intended as a suggestion that Ilya or likeminded commenters try to post fewer things like Ilya’s original comment, and more things like mine. Not only do I expect such a suggestion to be ineffective, my model of Ilya is unlikely to be moved by the concerns outlined here; this is because I expect that [the thing] TekhneMakre was pointing to was not in fact a deliberate aim of Ilya’s comment—to the extent that it produced a positive reaction from at least some users, I expect that to be largely coincidental. The exercise is really not about Ilya, and much more about the [potentially valuable] reactions that his comment produced, intentional or otherwise.)
That phrase annoys me in general. “Saying this does not make it true” can be a reply to just about any descriptive claim someone can make? Taken at face value, it suggests the previous speaker was being dumb in a weirdly specific way that in this case (and IME usually when the phrase is used) we have no reason to think they were. Like, Villiam might be wrong about MIRI/CFAR being a cult, but he’s probably not wrong because he thinks saying they’re not a cult makes them not a cult.
My sense is that it’s mostly used to just mean “[citation needed]” but it comes across more condescending than that?
But “[citation needed]” isn’t as good either, because Ilya’s original comment was pointing at a specific possible failure mode, that I’d put in long form as something like: “people who are in cults think they’re not in cults too, so this is the kind of thing we should be especially careful about not simply believing on the strength of the normal sorts of evidence that make people believe things”. I do think this is in general good to remember. (But just because Villiam didn’t specifically acknowledge it doesn’t mean he’d forgotten it. Also, some people might go full “well I guess I’ll never know if my monthly casual D&D meet is a cult, it doesn’t feel like one but” and that would be a mistake.)
To compress again, my suggested replacement for Ilya’s comment would be simply: “what does being in a cult feel like from the inside?” Which, yeah, I still wouldn’t like as a comment, it’s still dismissive and I think not very insightful. But I think it’s at least less aggressive, and still gets across what value I think is there.
(Possibly relevant: I don’t recognize the term “space monkey” and don’t know what it means either denotatively or connotatively, except that the connotation is clearly negative. Something drug related?)
(Possibly relevant: I don’t recognize the term “space monkey” and don’t know what it means either denotatively or connotatively, except that the connotation is clearly negative. Something drug related?)
Thanks for this comment, upvote. Currently just writing a short comment, with some hope to reply more this weekend. Agree there’s strong positive from having commenters who will break all frames of “political respect”.
Ilya, I respect your expertise in causal modeling, and I appreciate when you make contributions to the site sharing things you’ve learned and helping others see the parts of the world you understand, like this and this and this. In contrast your last 5 comments on the site have net negative karma scores, getting into politics and substance-less snark on the community. A number of your comments are just short and snarky and political (example, example) or gossiping about the site (many of your comments are just complaining about Eliezer and rationalists).
I’m pretty excited about your contributions to the site when they’re substantive Ilya, but this comment is a warning that if you continue to have a string of net negative comments without contributing a lot of great stuff too, the most likely outcome is that I’ll ban you.
1. Thank you for all your effort to make LW valuable.
2. I think there’s something pretty valuable about this particular comment of Ilya’s. I’m not tracking all the tradeoffs, thinking through what it would be like if every comment this rude and judgemental were allowed, etc.; so I’ll just try to say what I think is valuable about it, without trying to make an overall judgement. It’s something like, from inside [the thing Ilya is calling a cult, insofar as it’s a thing at all], we’re at risk of feedback loopy dynamics. For example, (mis)information cascades, where people keep updating on each other’s judgements (which are only discretized summaries of previous evidence), rather than updating on each other’s observations exactly once (which would be harder). For example, narrative pyramid schemes, where stories about where a group will put its effort gain political capital in a way disconnected from object-level evaluations of consequences of plans. For example, fear of retribution materializing out of nothing, by people seeing each other act as though they’re afraid of retribution and inferring that they themselves have something to fear.
So, these feedback dynamics are bad, and also very natural. It seems valuable to have some Ilyas, who are rightly viewed as having some weight by our own supposed values, and who will break all frames of political “respect”. Frames of political respect sometimes become mechanisms for propagating pyramid schemes, and sometimes cause people to infer that those around them are deferring out of fear and so the leaders are to be feared rather than reasoned about. So, political frames contribute to mostly bad feedback dynamics, and Ilyas break political frames.
Speaking more phenomenally and less theoretically: sometimes an Ilya says something that gives me a “jolt”, and then I seem to suddenly have more access to peeking behind certain things, or being able to occupy, maybe temporarily, an outlook that’s like “a different Normal”. And this feels basically good to me, like it seems less like I’m being tugged around, and more like I’ve jumped to another spot and now I can get triangulation / parallax on more things.
Strong-upvoted for raising this consideration to mind; this is exactly the sort of object-level analysis I hoped to see more of on this topic.
My sense here is that the thing you’re talking about is quite valuable; I think the main source of divergence is likely to be located in considerations like: (1) how effectively comments like Ilya’s actually provide [the thing], and (2) how possible it is to get [the thing] without the corresponding negatives associated with comments like Ilya’s. I recognize that these points may be part of the “tradeoffs” you explicitly said you weren’t trying to track in your comment, so I don’t intend this as a request that you pivot to discussing said points (though naturally I would be thrilled if somebody did).
The thing that comes to mind, that might get us a bit of insight into (1) and (2) simultaneously, is in attempting to craft a comment that serves a similar purpose as that described in your comment, preserving the positives while (ideally) mitigating the negatives. I admit to not having a strong sense of how to create the “jolt” effect you describe, but I’ll start anyway. (I have a strong expectation that whatever I come up with be imperfect along many axes, so I welcome feedback.)
For reference, Ilya’s original comment:
My model is that there are two components here that are critical to creating a sufficiently sharp “jolt”: the short, pithy nature of the comment, and the obvious way in which it disregards what you (TekhneMakre) characterized as “political frames of respect”. I think these are obviously tied to, but not identical with, the norm-violating aspects of the comment that I perceived as problematic; here is my attempt at a similar comment that preserves both components without the norm-violating aspects:
I think this comment scores approximately as well as Ilya’s on the “ignoring political frames” axis, and actually scores quite a bit better on the “shorty and pithy” axis, all while being significantly less norm-violating than his original comment.
(To be clear, I would still expect such a comment to receive negative karma, but I would expect it to receive substantially less negative karma, and also would likely not have prompted me to initiate a discussion of potential moderator action. (Though that second part would also depend heavily on whether Ilya’s counterfactual comment history were substantially different, since my decision to call him out was based [in part] on multiple past observed norm violations.))
I’d be interested in learning whether my version of the comment hits the same note for you (or other users who shared your original sense that Ilya’s comment was doing something valuable). I think there’s strong potential for updates here, especially since (as I mentioned) I don’t have a strong model of [the thing].
(Note that this exercise is not intended as a suggestion that Ilya or likeminded commenters try to post fewer things like Ilya’s original comment, and more things like mine. Not only do I expect such a suggestion to be ineffective, my model of Ilya is unlikely to be moved by the concerns outlined here; this is because I expect that [the thing] TekhneMakre was pointing to was not in fact a deliberate aim of Ilya’s comment—to the extent that it produced a positive reaction from at least some users, I expect that to be largely coincidental. The exercise is really not about Ilya, and much more about the [potentially valuable] reactions that his comment produced, intentional or otherwise.)
I think your suggestion doesn’t work as well.
That phrase annoys me in general. “Saying this does not make it true” can be a reply to just about any descriptive claim someone can make? Taken at face value, it suggests the previous speaker was being dumb in a weirdly specific way that in this case (and IME usually when the phrase is used) we have no reason to think they were. Like, Villiam might be wrong about MIRI/CFAR being a cult, but he’s probably not wrong because he thinks saying they’re not a cult makes them not a cult.
My sense is that it’s mostly used to just mean “[citation needed]” but it comes across more condescending than that?
But “[citation needed]” isn’t as good either, because Ilya’s original comment was pointing at a specific possible failure mode, that I’d put in long form as something like: “people who are in cults think they’re not in cults too, so this is the kind of thing we should be especially careful about not simply believing on the strength of the normal sorts of evidence that make people believe things”. I do think this is in general good to remember. (But just because Villiam didn’t specifically acknowledge it doesn’t mean he’d forgotten it. Also, some people might go full “well I guess I’ll never know if my monthly casual D&D meet is a cult, it doesn’t feel like one but” and that would be a mistake.)
To compress again, my suggested replacement for Ilya’s comment would be simply: “what does being in a cult feel like from the inside?” Which, yeah, I still wouldn’t like as a comment, it’s still dismissive and I think not very insightful. But I think it’s at least less aggressive, and still gets across what value I think is there.
(Possibly relevant: I don’t recognize the term “space monkey” and don’t know what it means either denotatively or connotatively, except that the connotation is clearly negative. Something drug related?)
I would guess it’s a reference to the movie Fight Club.
Thanks for this comment, upvote. Currently just writing a short comment, with some hope to reply more this weekend. Agree there’s strong positive from having commenters who will break all frames of “political respect”.