So, there are a number of things I want to say to this. It might first be meaningful to establish the following, however:
Asking yourself “would I be responding similar to how I’m responding now if I was, in fact, in a cult” seems potentially useful.
I don’t think I’m in a cult. (Separately, I don’t think the MIRI/CFAR associated social circle is a cult.)
The reason I include the qualifier “separately” is because, in my case, these are very much two separate claims: I do not live in the Bay Area or any other rationalist community “hot spot”, I have had (to my knowledge) no physical contact with any member of the rationalist community, “core” or otherwise, and the surrounding social fabric I’m embedded in is about as far from cult-like as you can get. So even if MIRI/CFAR were a cult—that is to say, even if the second of my claims were false—they could not have transmitted their “cultishness” to me except by means of writing stuff on the Internet… and at that point I very much dispute that “cultishness” is even the right framing to be using.
(Yes, memes are proof that ideas can propagate without a supporting social fabric. However, I have seen little evidence that the idea cluster associated with MIRI is particularly “memetically fit”, except in the entirely ordinary sense that the ideas they peddle seemingly make sense to quite a lot of people who aren’t physically part of the rationalist community—which you would also observe if they were just, y’know, true.)
There’s more I want to say about your framing; I think it misses the mark in several other ways, the most prominent of which is the amount of emphasis you give to the meta level as opposed to the object level (and in fact the comment I just linked is also downthread of a reply to you). But I think it’s best to circumscribe different topics of discussion to different threads, so if you have anything to say about that topic, I’d ask that you reply to the linked comment instead of this one.
As far as the topic of this comment thread is concerned… no, I don’t think your impression was mistaken. That is to say, the thing you sensed from me, which you described as
“we all agree my opponent is a clear norm violator”
is something I intended to convey with my comment… well, not really the part about Ilya being my “opponent” (and I’m also not sure what you mean by “slipping [it] into a larger argument”, mind you)--but the part about norm violations is absolutely a correct reading of my intentions. I think (and continue to think) that Ilya’s comment was in blatant violation of a bunch of norms, and I maintain that calling it out was the right thing to do. There is no plausible interpretation I can imagine under which calling somebody a “cult space monkey” can remotely be construed as non-norm-violating; to the extent that you disagree with this, I think you are simply, straightforwardly incorrect.
(It sounds like you view statements like the above as an expression of “aggressive conformism”. I could go on about how I disagree with that, but instead I’ll simply note that under a slight swap of priors, one could easily make the argument that it was the original comment by Ilya that’s an example of “aggressive conformism”. And yet I note that for some reason your perception of aggressive conformism was only triggered in response to a comment attacking a position with which you happen to agree, rather than by the initial comment itself. I think it’s quite fair to call this a worrisome flag—by your own standards, no less.)
To be absolutely clear: it sounds as though you are under the impression that I criticized Ilya’s comment because he called MIRI/CFAR a cult, and since I disagreed with that, I tried to label him a “norm violator” in order to invalidate his assertion. (This would make sense of your use of the word “opponent”, and also nails down the “larger argument” I presume you presumed I was insinuating.) This is not the case. I criticized Ilya’s comment because (not to put too fine a point on it) it was a fucking terrible comment, and because I don’t visit LW so I can see people compare each other to characters from Rick and Morty (or call people fascists, or accuse people of health fraud, or whatever the hell this is). Contrary to what you may be inclined to think, not everyone here selectively levels criticism at things they disagree with.
Separately, I don’t think the MIRI/CFAR associated social circle is a cult.
Nor do I. (I’ve donated money to at least one of those organizations.) [Edit: I think they might be too tribal for their own good—many groups are—but the word “cult” seems too strong.]
I do think MIRI/CFAR is to some degree an “internet tribe”. You’ve probably noticed that those can be pathological.
Anyway, you’re writing a lot of words here. There’s plenty of space to propose or cite a specific norm, explain why you think it’s a generally good norm, and explain why Ilya violated it. I think if you did that, and left off the rest of the rhetoric, it would read as more transparent and less manipulative to me. A norm against “people [comparing] each other to characters from Rick and Morty” seems suspiciously specific to this case (and also not necessarily a great norm in general).
Basically I’m getting more of an “ostracize him!” vibe than a “how can we keep the garden clean?” vibe—you were pretending to do the second one in your earlier comment, but I think the cursing here makes it clear that your true intention is more like the first. I don’t like mob justice, even if the person is guilty. (BTW, proposing specific norms also helps keep you honest, e.g. if your proposed norm was “don’t be crass”, cursing would violate that norm.)
(It sounds like you view statements like the above as an expression of “aggressive conformism”. I could go on about how I disagree with that, but instead I’ll simply note that under a slight swap of priors, one could easily make the argument that it was the original comment by Ilya that’s an example of “aggressive conformism”. And yet I note that for some reason your perception of aggressive conformism was only triggered in response to a comment attacking a position with which you happen to agree, rather than by the initial comment itself. I think it’s quite fair to call this a worrisome flag—by your own standards, no less.)
Ilya’s position is not one I agree with.
I’m annoyed by aggressive conformism wherever I see it. When it comes to MIRI/CFAR, my instinct is to defend them in venues where everyone criticizes them, and criticize them in venues where everyone defends them.
I’ll let you have the last word in this thread. Hopefully that will cut down on unwanted meta-level discussion.
Basically I’m getting more of an “ostracize him!” vibe than a “how can we keep the garden clean?” vibe—you were pretending to do the second one in your earlier comment, but I think the cursing here makes it clear that your true intention is more like the first.
I didn’t respond to this earlier, but I think I’d also like to flag here that I don’t appreciate this (inaccurate) attempt to impute my intentions. I will state it outright: your reading of my intention is incorrect, and also seems to me to be based on a very flimsy reasoning process.
(To expand on that last part: I don’t believe “cursing” acts a valid item of evidence in favor of any assertion in particular. Certainly I intended my words to have a certain rhetorical effect there, else I would not have chosen the words I did—but the part where you immediately draw from that some conclusion about my “true intention” seems to me invalid, both in general and in this specific case.)
META: I debated with myself for a while about whether to post the parent comment, and—if I posted it—whether to adjust the wording to come across as less sharp. In the end, I judged that posting the comment I did was the best option given the circumstances, but I’d like to offer some further commentary on my thought process here.
From my perspective, conversations that occur under an adversarial framing are (mostly) not productive, and it was (and remains) quite obvious to me that my reply above is largely adversarial. I mostly view this as an inescapable cost of replying in this case; when someone alleges that your comments have some nefarious intention behind them, the adversarial framing is pretty much baked in, and if you want to defuse that framing there’s really no way to do it outside of ignoring the allegation entirely… which I did contemplate doing. (Which is why my other, earlier reply was was short, and addressed only what I saw as the main concern.)
I ultimately decided against remaining silent here because I judged that the impact of allowing such an allegation to stand would be to weaken the impact of all of my other comments in this subthread, including ones that make points I think are important. I am nonetheless saddened that there is no way to address such a claim without shifting the conversation at least somewhat back towards the adversarial frame, and thusly I am annoyed and frustrated that such a conversational move was rendered necessary. (If anyone has suggestions for how to better navigate this tradeoff in the future, I am open to hearing them.)
Separately: I suspect a large part of the adversarial interpretation here in fact arises directly from the role of the person posting the comment. When I wrote the parent comment, I attempted to include some neutral observations on the reasoning of the grandparent (e.g. “I don’t believe ‘cursing’ acts as a valid item of evidence in favor of any assertion in particular”). And I’m quite confident that, had this remark been made by a third party, it would be interpreted for the most part as a neutral observation. But I anticipate that, because the remark in question was made by me (the person against whom the initial allegation was leveled), it will acquire a subtext that it would not otherwise possess.
I currently also see this as a mostly unavoidable consequence of the framing here. I don’t see a good way to circumvent this, but at the same time I find myself rather keenly aware (and, if I’m to be honest, slightly resentful) of the way in which this prevents otherwise ordinary commentary from having the same effect it normally would. The net effect of this dynamic, I expect, is to discourage people from posting “neutral observations” in situations where they might reasonably expect that those observations will come across as adversarially coded.
Again: I don’t have a good model of how to mitigate this effect (ideally while retaining the benefits of the heuristic in question); it’s plausible to me that this may be intractable as long as we’re dealing with humans. It nonetheless feels particularly salient to me at the moment, so I think I want to draw attention to it.
When I wrote the parent comment, I attempted to include some neutral observations on the reasoning of the grandparent (e.g. “I don’t believe ‘cursing’ acts as a valid item of evidence in favor of any assertion in particular”). And I’m quite confident that, had this remark been made by a third party, it would be interpreted for the most part as a neutral observation.
I’m happy to endorse the content of the parent comment. I’m a fan of (constructive, gentle-but-firm) pushback against people making large assertions about the contents of other people’s thoughts and intentions, without much more substantial evidence.
Anyway, you’re writing a lot of words here. There’s plenty of space to propose or cite a specific norm, explain why you think it’s a generally good norm, and explain why Ilya violated it. I think if you did that, and left off the rest of the rhetoric, it would read as more transparent and less manipulative to me. A norm against “people [comparing] each other to characters from Rick and Morty” seems suspiciously specific to this case (and also not necessarily a great norm in general).
Okay, sure. I think LW should (and for the most part, does) have a norm against personal attacks. I think LW should also (and again, for the most part, does) have a norm against low-effort sniping. I think Ilya’s comment[ing pattern] runs afoul of both of these norms (and does so rather obviously to boot), neither of which (I claim) is “suspiciously specific” in the way you describe.
So, there are a number of things I want to say to this. It might first be meaningful to establish the following, however:
I don’t think I’m in a cult. (Separately, I don’t think the MIRI/CFAR associated social circle is a cult.)
The reason I include the qualifier “separately” is because, in my case, these are very much two separate claims: I do not live in the Bay Area or any other rationalist community “hot spot”, I have had (to my knowledge) no physical contact with any member of the rationalist community, “core” or otherwise, and the surrounding social fabric I’m embedded in is about as far from cult-like as you can get. So even if MIRI/CFAR were a cult—that is to say, even if the second of my claims were false—they could not have transmitted their “cultishness” to me except by means of writing stuff on the Internet… and at that point I very much dispute that “cultishness” is even the right framing to be using.
(Yes, memes are proof that ideas can propagate without a supporting social fabric. However, I have seen little evidence that the idea cluster associated with MIRI is particularly “memetically fit”, except in the entirely ordinary sense that the ideas they peddle seemingly make sense to quite a lot of people who aren’t physically part of the rationalist community—which you would also observe if they were just, y’know, true.)
There’s more I want to say about your framing; I think it misses the mark in several other ways, the most prominent of which is the amount of emphasis you give to the meta level as opposed to the object level (and in fact the comment I just linked is also downthread of a reply to you). But I think it’s best to circumscribe different topics of discussion to different threads, so if you have anything to say about that topic, I’d ask that you reply to the linked comment instead of this one.
As far as the topic of this comment thread is concerned… no, I don’t think your impression was mistaken. That is to say, the thing you sensed from me, which you described as
is something I intended to convey with my comment… well, not really the part about Ilya being my “opponent” (and I’m also not sure what you mean by “slipping [it] into a larger argument”, mind you)--but the part about norm violations is absolutely a correct reading of my intentions. I think (and continue to think) that Ilya’s comment was in blatant violation of a bunch of norms, and I maintain that calling it out was the right thing to do. There is no plausible interpretation I can imagine under which calling somebody a “cult space monkey” can remotely be construed as non-norm-violating; to the extent that you disagree with this, I think you are simply, straightforwardly incorrect.
(It sounds like you view statements like the above as an expression of “aggressive conformism”. I could go on about how I disagree with that, but instead I’ll simply note that under a slight swap of priors, one could easily make the argument that it was the original comment by Ilya that’s an example of “aggressive conformism”. And yet I note that for some reason your perception of aggressive conformism was only triggered in response to a comment attacking a position with which you happen to agree, rather than by the initial comment itself. I think it’s quite fair to call this a worrisome flag—by your own standards, no less.)
To be absolutely clear: it sounds as though you are under the impression that I criticized Ilya’s comment because he called MIRI/CFAR a cult, and since I disagreed with that, I tried to label him a “norm violator” in order to invalidate his assertion. (This would make sense of your use of the word “opponent”, and also nails down the “larger argument” I presume you presumed I was insinuating.) This is not the case. I criticized Ilya’s comment because (not to put too fine a point on it) it was a fucking terrible comment, and because I don’t visit LW so I can see people compare each other to characters from Rick and Morty (or call people fascists, or accuse people of health fraud, or whatever the hell this is). Contrary to what you may be inclined to think, not everyone here selectively levels criticism at things they disagree with.
Nor do I. (I’ve donated money to at least one of those organizations.) [Edit: I think they might be too tribal for their own good—many groups are—but the word “cult” seems too strong.]
I do think MIRI/CFAR is to some degree an “internet tribe”. You’ve probably noticed that those can be pathological.
Anyway, you’re writing a lot of words here. There’s plenty of space to propose or cite a specific norm, explain why you think it’s a generally good norm, and explain why Ilya violated it. I think if you did that, and left off the rest of the rhetoric, it would read as more transparent and less manipulative to me. A norm against “people [comparing] each other to characters from Rick and Morty” seems suspiciously specific to this case (and also not necessarily a great norm in general).
Basically I’m getting more of an “ostracize him!” vibe than a “how can we keep the garden clean?” vibe—you were pretending to do the second one in your earlier comment, but I think the cursing here makes it clear that your true intention is more like the first. I don’t like mob justice, even if the person is guilty. (BTW, proposing specific norms also helps keep you honest, e.g. if your proposed norm was “don’t be crass”, cursing would violate that norm.)
Ilya’s position is not one I agree with.
I’m annoyed by aggressive conformism wherever I see it. When it comes to MIRI/CFAR, my instinct is to defend them in venues where everyone criticizes them, and criticize them in venues where everyone defends them.
I’ll let you have the last word in this thread. Hopefully that will cut down on unwanted meta-level discussion.
I didn’t respond to this earlier, but I think I’d also like to flag here that I don’t appreciate this (inaccurate) attempt to impute my intentions. I will state it outright: your reading of my intention is incorrect, and also seems to me to be based on a very flimsy reasoning process.
(To expand on that last part: I don’t believe “cursing” acts a valid item of evidence in favor of any assertion in particular. Certainly I intended my words to have a certain rhetorical effect there, else I would not have chosen the words I did—but the part where you immediately draw from that some conclusion about my “true intention” seems to me invalid, both in general and in this specific case.)
META: I debated with myself for a while about whether to post the parent comment, and—if I posted it—whether to adjust the wording to come across as less sharp. In the end, I judged that posting the comment I did was the best option given the circumstances, but I’d like to offer some further commentary on my thought process here.
From my perspective, conversations that occur under an adversarial framing are (mostly) not productive, and it was (and remains) quite obvious to me that my reply above is largely adversarial. I mostly view this as an inescapable cost of replying in this case; when someone alleges that your comments have some nefarious intention behind them, the adversarial framing is pretty much baked in, and if you want to defuse that framing there’s really no way to do it outside of ignoring the allegation entirely… which I did contemplate doing. (Which is why my other, earlier reply was was short, and addressed only what I saw as the main concern.)
I ultimately decided against remaining silent here because I judged that the impact of allowing such an allegation to stand would be to weaken the impact of all of my other comments in this subthread, including ones that make points I think are important. I am nonetheless saddened that there is no way to address such a claim without shifting the conversation at least somewhat back towards the adversarial frame, and thusly I am annoyed and frustrated that such a conversational move was rendered necessary. (If anyone has suggestions for how to better navigate this tradeoff in the future, I am open to hearing them.)
Separately: I suspect a large part of the adversarial interpretation here in fact arises directly from the role of the person posting the comment. When I wrote the parent comment, I attempted to include some neutral observations on the reasoning of the grandparent (e.g. “I don’t believe ‘cursing’ acts as a valid item of evidence in favor of any assertion in particular”). And I’m quite confident that, had this remark been made by a third party, it would be interpreted for the most part as a neutral observation. But I anticipate that, because the remark in question was made by me (the person against whom the initial allegation was leveled), it will acquire a subtext that it would not otherwise possess.
I currently also see this as a mostly unavoidable consequence of the framing here. I don’t see a good way to circumvent this, but at the same time I find myself rather keenly aware (and, if I’m to be honest, slightly resentful) of the way in which this prevents otherwise ordinary commentary from having the same effect it normally would. The net effect of this dynamic, I expect, is to discourage people from posting “neutral observations” in situations where they might reasonably expect that those observations will come across as adversarially coded.
Again: I don’t have a good model of how to mitigate this effect (ideally while retaining the benefits of the heuristic in question); it’s plausible to me that this may be intractable as long as we’re dealing with humans. It nonetheless feels particularly salient to me at the moment, so I think I want to draw attention to it.
I’m happy to endorse the content of the parent comment. I’m a fan of (constructive, gentle-but-firm) pushback against people making large assertions about the contents of other people’s thoughts and intentions, without much more substantial evidence.
Okay, sure. I think LW should (and for the most part, does) have a norm against personal attacks. I think LW should also (and again, for the most part, does) have a norm against low-effort sniping. I think Ilya’s comment[ing pattern] runs afoul of both of these norms (and does so rather obviously to boot), neither of which (I claim) is “suspiciously specific” in the way you describe.