(If you’re wondering why this is being voted down, it’s for a comment of the general form “Oh, how can you claim to be ‘less wrong’ and yet do X, which is wrong?” which will automatically get downvoted to oblivion. Someone else is welcome to explain why in more detail, I don’t feel like putting in that effort at the moment.)
Thanks for the explanation. I don’t think that any comment that fits that form should be “automatically [...] downvoted to oblivion”, however. If members of this community organized a LW meeting but restricted entrance to e.g. whites or men, a comment analogous to mine would be appropriate. Appropriate comments should not be downvoted.
I think the discussion has gone off the rails here by arguing about the content of your opinions. It’s almost certainly the signaling properties rather than the content that caused the initial downvotes. I predict that you’re perfectly capable of writing a well-received animal-rights post here, and that this would perhaps get a few people to change to vegetarianism. (Contra Eliezer, you could even begin such a post by stating that eating meat goes against the proper extrapolation of our rationalist values, and still get upvoted.)
What you did here (from my perspective) was to overtly signal your moral superiority to the rest of us, in a context that wasn’t devoted to this discussion. That behavior is characteristically downvoted to oblivion here (with a few exceptions- occasionally someone manages to do this wittily or trigger the right applause light; we’re still human!).
I approve of this group norm- it leads to discussions with more substance than signaling. I hope you understand that we don’t mean any disrespect to your ideas (well, most of us don’t), and we’d be open to hearing your case on the issue.
What you did here (from my perspective) was to overtly signal your moral superiority to the rest of us, in a context that wasn’t devoted to this discussion.
It was not my intention to signal my moral superiority to members of this community, many of whom I highly respect both morally and intellectually. Instead, I wanted to reflect on the fact that “even a community built around the goal of overcoming bias—and composed of members abnormally smart and truth-oriented—can be quite blatantly biased towards certain classes of beings,” as I put it in a rejoinder to the original comment. I fully endorse what Kazuo Thow said in a (sympathetic) comment to David Pearce’s Facebook wall:
Rather than taking this as an opportunity to feel like I’m better than much of the LW community, I’ll instead reflect on ways that I could be doing that same kind of compartmentalization. Because if a whole community of people dedicated to rationality and self-improvement are suffering a belief-propagation-fail of that magnitude, I’m almost certainly missing something of comparable importance.
Of course, none of this was present in my original comment, so although I still believe a charitable reading of it should not have elicited such a hostile reaction, I am aware that I made things easier for those antecedently disinclined to reconsider their attitudes to non-human beings, by giving them an opportunity to dismiss my comments as coming from a self-righteous prig.
Well, unfortunately bad karma can sort of snowball on Less Wrong; when I see a comment in the negative numbers, I instinctively read it (and downthread comments) in a “possibly trolling” light. I’m not sure what might be a good fix for this.
Anyway, I think that people would have given it the benefit of the doubt had it not appeared in a meetup thread. It’s a general rule of etiquette that you don’t start an intellectual argument where people are trying to set up a social gathering- it throws a monkey wrench in the works. Thus, when someone violates the norm, the first assumption is that they’re intending to throw a monkey wrench.
(Yes, the beauty of threaded conversations is that something like this won’t necessarily derail the social gathering. But the norm exists, and while it does it’s smart to be aware of it.)
OK, this is enough meta discussion for me. I hope you make a top-level post so we can actually discuss the issues...
For the record, here’s what I originally commented on David’s wall. My comment here on LW was an excerpt from that comment:
Remember when Eliezer Yudkowsky claimed on that website [LW] that frogs are not subjects of moral concern? What ought one to think of a community that intends to be “less wrong” and yet succumbs to such obvious forms of anthropocentric bias?
(I ask this as a big fan of LW, and as someone puzzled by the fact that this community is composed of individuals who are abnormally intelligent and truth-oriented.)
Again, we should find somewhere else to discuss this- but (if that’s indeed Eliezer’s quote) it couldn’t be unthinking bias; the idea of moral concern universalized to all sentients was a big theme with Young Eliezer, if I recall correctly. Some further argument changed his mind, at least in the context of some pertinent query.
And I’m not among them, but there are a fair number of Less Wrongers who are vegetarians for ethical reasons.
The explanation: you seem to be assuming that consuming meat is on the order of wrongness of racism or sexism. That assumption is not shared here on LessWrong to a large degree; if you wish to explore it and determine why it isn’t, and whether it should be, feel free. But simply assuming it is wrong, and gets downvoted as such. One should not assume the truth or falsity positions they wish to discuss, investigate, or instigate investigative discussion about.
In this way, assuming that anthropocentric bias should be corrected for with the cessation of meat consumption, and furthermore that the community as a whole has only anthropocentric bias to justify their meat-eating, and furthermore that this constitutes a failure to refine human rationality, is jumping the gun by leaps and bounds.
(I very nearly posted “What ought one to think of such a commenter that speaks bias yet labors under such misguided assumptions themselves?”).
The explanation: you seem to be assuming that consuming meat is on the order of wrongness of racism or sexism.
I’m assuming no such thing; I’m simply providing a counterexample to Eliezer’s claim that any “comment of the general form ‘Oh, how can you claim to be ‘less wrong’ and yet do X, which is wrong?′ [...] will automatically get downvoted to oblivion.”
The explanation, that Eliezer did not feel inclined to offer, for why comments like that get downvoted, was what is given in my post, tailored to fit the actual situation. If you want a general explanation, here:
“How can you claim to be less wrong and do X, which is wrong” is downvoted because it assumes X is wrong, it assumes supporters of X have no justification for their view and hold it merely out of bias, and it assumes that this constitutes a failure on part of the LessWrong community as a whole.
Your comment there still presumes that meat-eating is wrong. LessWrong is a community full of people who will not take it on faith that you’re right about this. We want to see some arguments laid out for this position, and as long as you keep restating it without said arguments, we will keep downvoting you.
I’m sorry, but I believe you keep misinterpreting my replies, perhaps due to a failure to understand the dialectical structure of this little exchange. So let me try to make that structure clear. Eliezer first claimed that comments of a certain form would be automatically downvoted here at LW, and that my original comment was downvoted because it had that form. I offered in reply a hypothetical situation that involved overt discrimination against certain groups of people, and argued that a comment analogous to mine in reaction to that situation would not and should not be automatically downvoted. You then accused me of morally equating discrimination against such groups of people with the use of non-human animals for human consumption. I then in turn replied that the function of that counterfactual situation had nothing to do with arguing for why meat-eating is wrong, but was instead meant to provide a counterexample to Eliezer’s generalization. Finally, in your most recent comment, you defend what you said in your previous post, stressing the fact that what you said was given as the explanation that Eliezer did not feel inclined to offer. But this is completely besides the point. The explanation that you gave took, as evidence that I was equating meat consumption with racism or sexism, the fact that I had used a situation involving racism and sexism as a reply to Eliezer, when as I have said already my having used that situation constitutes no such evidence.
The Wrong in Less Wrong (LW) is referring to the objective (“mind-independent” or intersubjectively verifiable) failure, error, inconsistency, illogical argumentation, irrational behavior. You are wrong if you take the wrong, or simply less effective, path to reach your goal. LW is trying to improve your map so that you’ll be able to find a better and more effective path. If you were perfectly aware of what you want, then with regard to your epistemic state, there would be the right thing to do. But LW does not claim to be right but merely less wrong. More importantly, LW does not tell you what you ought to want but rather how to figure out what you might actually want and how to obtain it. Therefore to ask how a group that claims to be less wrong can be doing X, which is wrong, implies that they not only claimed to be right, rather than just less wrong, but also that you know about their objectives and that X is the wrong way to reach them. It would be less wrong to argue that doing X is wrong given certain objectives but not that doing X is intrinsically wrong, that X is wrong in and of itself. After all people might simply want to do X or want to reach Z, X being the path leading up to Z.
I might call wedrifid morally bankrupt for eating meat simply because he likes bacon. But since I expect him to be aware of the consequences of eating meat I do not call him wrong. I’m only proclaiming that subjectively, from my point of view, he does have a poor taste. On the other hand, if I believed that he actually not only wanted to minimize suffering but that he also does assign more utility to reducing the death of beings than culinary considerations, I’d call him wrong for eating bacon just because it tastes good. I would call him wrong on the basis of failing to account for his true objectives in what he is actually doing. Yet I would not declare the activity of eating meat to be wrong itself but in the context of certain circumstances as a means to an end regarding his volition.
Eliezer first claimed that comments of a certain form would be automatically downvoted here at LW,
First you claimed there was bias involved in eating animals. It is eminently reasonable to interpret your responses as being connected to that claim.
If I was in error, and you have no care at all about eating animals, and you merely wish to discuss Eliezer’s claim, you are still wrong. Claims of that form should get automatically downvoted into oblivion because 99% of the time they are bullshit. The cost of rationally engaging with 99 bullshit claims of that form is higher than the loss of missing out on 1 correct claim.
That you can easily generate past examples of the 1% where they are not bullshit is not an argument for not downvoting such claims—any more than you easily generating examples of past lottery winners is an argument to play the lottery.
First you claimed there was bias involved in eating animals. It is eminently reasonable to interpret your responses as being connected to that claim.
No, it isn’t at all reasonable. My comment was a direct reply to Eliezer’s and was explicitly addressed as an answer to his rationale for downvoting my comment. You need to make an effort to keep the separate strands of the debate separate, otherwise you’ll misinterpret the structure of the different arguments.
If I was in error, and you have no care at all about eating animals
Wait, why does it follow from my saying you were in error that I had “no care at all about eating animals”?
That you can easily generate past examples of the 1% where they are not bullshit is not an argument for not downvoting such claims—any more than you easily generating examples of past lottery winners is an argument to play the lottery.
I didn’t claim in this context that my ability to generate such examples was an argument for not downvoting such claims. I claimed that my ability to generate such examples was an argument for concluding that Eliezer’s claim was false.
For my actual views on the appropriateness of downvoting such comments, see the other subthreads in this debate.
There is a prescriptive/descriptive divide here, and it does us no good to dance either side of it.
Descriptively:
Eliezer’s claim that comments of that form will get downvoted may be factually incorrect, given that it’s possible to, as you showed, create comments of that form that express sentiments most people would upvote.
The qualifier “almost” placed in front of his comment would suffice to cover these situations.
Prescriptively:
I don’t think that any comment that fits that form should be “automatically [...] downvoted to oblivion”
is a prescriptive statement, and one which I attempted to explain was wrong.
We are tripping over this divide, and several different meanings of ‘wrong’. Basically, we’re making different distinctions to each other, and probably ascribing incorrect intentions to each other. Are there any other possible mismatches I haven’t noticed?
LessWrong is a community full of people who will not take it on faith that you’re right about this. We want to see some arguments laid out for this position, and as long as you keep restating it without said arguments, we will keep downvoting you.
Although this is not necessarily something on which arguments should (in the rational sense) persuade me. The most such arguments can do to rationally persuade me is demonstrate how eating meat transgresses against my values in a way that I had not fully processed. If the disagreement is a matter of having different terminal preference then nothing that someone could say would be persuasive.
“Wrong” in “Less Wrong” means ‘incorrect’, not ‘morally objectionable’.
“Wrong” in “Less Wrong” means ‘incorrect’, not ‘morally objectionable’.
Yes, exactly. Eliezer characterized the form of my comment in a way that suggested I was exploiting the ambiguity of the term ‘wrong’, when in fact I was giving that term the same meaning it has in the locution ‘less wrong’. If the site’s name had been ‘Less Incorrect’, I would still have written
What ought one to think of a community that seeks to be “less incorrect” and yet succumbs to such obvious forms of anthropocentric bias?
I was under the impression the stated (by Eliezer) problem was that “X is wrong” is a simple assertion, which is almost certain to change no-one’s mind.
Q: “Why are you doing X, when X is obviously wrong?”
A: “Uh.. because it’s not? Why do you think X is wrong?”
Of course it also has connotations of “What are you, some kind of hypocrite?”, which isn’t exactly helpful either.
I was under the impression the stated (by Eliezer) problem was that “X is wrong” is a simple assertion, which is almost certain to change no-one’s mind.
Reconsider the comment to the hypothetical LW meeting I imagined. Do you really believe such a comment would be “downvoted to oblivion”? Yet that comment is also a simple assertion.
Of course it also has connotations of “What are you, some kind of hypocrite?”, which isn’t exactly helpful either.
These are the kinds of social rules that I was thinking of when I claimed such rules sometimes hinder moral progress. Users on this forum should not, I believe, refrain from calling people hypocrites if that accusation is relevant and supported by what they take to be the best evidence. Having said that, I wasn’t actually accusing anyone of hypocrisy—just inconsistency.
(If one does think that the breach of social rules should be downvoted and is also the target of the critique, one is more likely to misinterpret the critique as a breach of a social rule and downvote accordingly, as you just did. This is another reason for disregarding considerations of social etiquette altogether.)
Reconsider the comment to the hypothetical LW meeting I imagined. Do you really believe such a comment would be “downvoted to oblivion”?
If the prevailing belief was that whites/men are somehow inherently superior to everyone else, then yes. Otherwise it would be a simple assertion everyone happens to agree with, and hence probably less likely to attract their ire.
Users on this forum should not, I believe, refrain from calling people hypocrites if that accusation is relevant and supported by what they take to be the best evidence.
Well, your comment didn’t bother to provide any evidence.
Yes, exactly. Eliezer characterized the form of my comment in a way that suggested I was exploiting the ambiguity of the term ‘wrong’, when in fact I was giving that term the same meaning it has in the locution ‘less wrong’. If the site’s name had been ‘Less Incorrect’, I would still have written
Eliezer’s reply works either way. You would still be downvoted for the version given this time. Perhaps Shockwave’s answer would be helpful for you?
No, Eliezer’s reply would not work, because it falsely asserts that any comment of a form which he claimed my comment fitted would be downvoted, when in fact there are comments that have that form which would and should not be downvoted, as I think we would all agree.
Shockwave’s answer wasn’t helpful; see my latest reply to him.
If you wish to get a different response from your comments then identify something that you can change such that the response is more desirable. Any explanations you are provided with may or may not be useful for you but they are provided as a courtesy not an obligation.
Any explanations you are provided with may or may not be useful for you but they are provided as a courtesy not an obligation
I never said Eliezer’s reply wasn’t “useful” to me; I just claimed it was premised on a false generalization. I appreciate his comments, as I appreciate those of every other person who took the time to discuss things with me, but having this appreciation is no reason for me to abstain from pointing out factual or reasoning errors as I see them. The fact that such comments are not provided as a an obligation is neither here nor there; all comments in this forum are, in the relevant sense, “courtesy”.
The comment basically said “quibbling about the site name is annoying rhetoric, please don’t use it when arguing your point”. I don’t think it took a stance on your actual argument, and you seem to be responding to it as if it did.
This is getting a bit tedious, but I don’t think that was what Eliezer’s comment said; if it was, then it simply misdescribed my own comment. I wasn’t “quibbling about the site name”; I was—to repeat myself once more—noting the inconsistency between the purpose of the site and the practice of some of its members. The site could have any other name and my comment would still stand, mutatis mutandis.
And you went and conflated ethics, which you were talking about, with epistemics, which the site is mostly about, both of which “wrong” incidentally applies to in everyday speech. Which happens to be the sort of thing people are especially twitchy about here.
(If you’re wondering why this is being voted down, it’s for a comment of the general form “Oh, how can you claim to be ‘less wrong’ and yet do X, which is wrong?” which will automatically get downvoted to oblivion. Someone else is welcome to explain why in more detail, I don’t feel like putting in that effort at the moment.)
Thanks for the explanation. I don’t think that any comment that fits that form should be “automatically [...] downvoted to oblivion”, however. If members of this community organized a LW meeting but restricted entrance to e.g. whites or men, a comment analogous to mine would be appropriate. Appropriate comments should not be downvoted.
I think the discussion has gone off the rails here by arguing about the content of your opinions. It’s almost certainly the signaling properties rather than the content that caused the initial downvotes. I predict that you’re perfectly capable of writing a well-received animal-rights post here, and that this would perhaps get a few people to change to vegetarianism. (Contra Eliezer, you could even begin such a post by stating that eating meat goes against the proper extrapolation of our rationalist values, and still get upvoted.)
What you did here (from my perspective) was to overtly signal your moral superiority to the rest of us, in a context that wasn’t devoted to this discussion. That behavior is characteristically downvoted to oblivion here (with a few exceptions- occasionally someone manages to do this wittily or trigger the right applause light; we’re still human!).
I approve of this group norm- it leads to discussions with more substance than signaling. I hope you understand that we don’t mean any disrespect to your ideas (well, most of us don’t), and we’d be open to hearing your case on the issue.
Thanks for your comment. I really appreciate it.
It was not my intention to signal my moral superiority to members of this community, many of whom I highly respect both morally and intellectually. Instead, I wanted to reflect on the fact that “even a community built around the goal of overcoming bias—and composed of members abnormally smart and truth-oriented—can be quite blatantly biased towards certain classes of beings,” as I put it in a rejoinder to the original comment. I fully endorse what Kazuo Thow said in a (sympathetic) comment to David Pearce’s Facebook wall:
Of course, none of this was present in my original comment, so although I still believe a charitable reading of it should not have elicited such a hostile reaction, I am aware that I made things easier for those antecedently disinclined to reconsider their attitudes to non-human beings, by giving them an opportunity to dismiss my comments as coming from a self-righteous prig.
Well, unfortunately bad karma can sort of snowball on Less Wrong; when I see a comment in the negative numbers, I instinctively read it (and downthread comments) in a “possibly trolling” light. I’m not sure what might be a good fix for this.
Anyway, I think that people would have given it the benefit of the doubt had it not appeared in a meetup thread. It’s a general rule of etiquette that you don’t start an intellectual argument where people are trying to set up a social gathering- it throws a monkey wrench in the works. Thus, when someone violates the norm, the first assumption is that they’re intending to throw a monkey wrench.
(Yes, the beauty of threaded conversations is that something like this won’t necessarily derail the social gathering. But the norm exists, and while it does it’s smart to be aware of it.)
OK, this is enough meta discussion for me. I hope you make a top-level post so we can actually discuss the issues...
For the record, here’s what I originally commented on David’s wall. My comment here on LW was an excerpt from that comment:
Again, we should find somewhere else to discuss this- but (if that’s indeed Eliezer’s quote) it couldn’t be unthinking bias; the idea of moral concern universalized to all sentients was a big theme with Young Eliezer, if I recall correctly. Some further argument changed his mind, at least in the context of some pertinent query.
And I’m not among them, but there are a fair number of Less Wrongers who are vegetarians for ethical reasons.
The explanation: you seem to be assuming that consuming meat is on the order of wrongness of racism or sexism. That assumption is not shared here on LessWrong to a large degree; if you wish to explore it and determine why it isn’t, and whether it should be, feel free. But simply assuming it is wrong, and gets downvoted as such. One should not assume the truth or falsity positions they wish to discuss, investigate, or instigate investigative discussion about.
In this way, assuming that anthropocentric bias should be corrected for with the cessation of meat consumption, and furthermore that the community as a whole has only anthropocentric bias to justify their meat-eating, and furthermore that this constitutes a failure to refine human rationality, is jumping the gun by leaps and bounds.
(I very nearly posted “What ought one to think of such a commenter that speaks bias yet labors under such misguided assumptions themselves?”).
I’m assuming no such thing; I’m simply providing a counterexample to Eliezer’s claim that any “comment of the general form ‘Oh, how can you claim to be ‘less wrong’ and yet do X, which is wrong?′ [...] will automatically get downvoted to oblivion.”
The explanation, that Eliezer did not feel inclined to offer, for why comments like that get downvoted, was what is given in my post, tailored to fit the actual situation. If you want a general explanation, here:
Your comment there still presumes that meat-eating is wrong. LessWrong is a community full of people who will not take it on faith that you’re right about this. We want to see some arguments laid out for this position, and as long as you keep restating it without said arguments, we will keep downvoting you.
I’m sorry, but I believe you keep misinterpreting my replies, perhaps due to a failure to understand the dialectical structure of this little exchange. So let me try to make that structure clear. Eliezer first claimed that comments of a certain form would be automatically downvoted here at LW, and that my original comment was downvoted because it had that form. I offered in reply a hypothetical situation that involved overt discrimination against certain groups of people, and argued that a comment analogous to mine in reaction to that situation would not and should not be automatically downvoted. You then accused me of morally equating discrimination against such groups of people with the use of non-human animals for human consumption. I then in turn replied that the function of that counterfactual situation had nothing to do with arguing for why meat-eating is wrong, but was instead meant to provide a counterexample to Eliezer’s generalization. Finally, in your most recent comment, you defend what you said in your previous post, stressing the fact that what you said was given as the explanation that Eliezer did not feel inclined to offer. But this is completely besides the point. The explanation that you gave took, as evidence that I was equating meat consumption with racism or sexism, the fact that I had used a situation involving racism and sexism as a reply to Eliezer, when as I have said already my having used that situation constitutes no such evidence.
The Wrong in Less Wrong (LW) is referring to the objective (“mind-independent” or intersubjectively verifiable) failure, error, inconsistency, illogical argumentation, irrational behavior. You are wrong if you take the wrong, or simply less effective, path to reach your goal. LW is trying to improve your map so that you’ll be able to find a better and more effective path. If you were perfectly aware of what you want, then with regard to your epistemic state, there would be the right thing to do. But LW does not claim to be right but merely less wrong. More importantly, LW does not tell you what you ought to want but rather how to figure out what you might actually want and how to obtain it. Therefore to ask how a group that claims to be less wrong can be doing X, which is wrong, implies that they not only claimed to be right, rather than just less wrong, but also that you know about their objectives and that X is the wrong way to reach them. It would be less wrong to argue that doing X is wrong given certain objectives but not that doing X is intrinsically wrong, that X is wrong in and of itself. After all people might simply want to do X or want to reach Z, X being the path leading up to Z.
I might call wedrifid morally bankrupt for eating meat simply because he likes bacon. But since I expect him to be aware of the consequences of eating meat I do not call him wrong. I’m only proclaiming that subjectively, from my point of view, he does have a poor taste. On the other hand, if I believed that he actually not only wanted to minimize suffering but that he also does assign more utility to reducing the death of beings than culinary considerations, I’d call him wrong for eating bacon just because it tastes good. I would call him wrong on the basis of failing to account for his true objectives in what he is actually doing. Yet I would not declare the activity of eating meat to be wrong itself but in the context of certain circumstances as a means to an end regarding his volition.
That is a brilliant explanation; It’s a shame that it is buried here so deeply in a neg-filtered branch.
It’s possible to rescue a buried comment by quoting it in a new branch.
First you claimed there was bias involved in eating animals. It is eminently reasonable to interpret your responses as being connected to that claim.
If I was in error, and you have no care at all about eating animals, and you merely wish to discuss Eliezer’s claim, you are still wrong. Claims of that form should get automatically downvoted into oblivion because 99% of the time they are bullshit. The cost of rationally engaging with 99 bullshit claims of that form is higher than the loss of missing out on 1 correct claim.
That you can easily generate past examples of the 1% where they are not bullshit is not an argument for not downvoting such claims—any more than you easily generating examples of past lottery winners is an argument to play the lottery.
No, it isn’t at all reasonable. My comment was a direct reply to Eliezer’s and was explicitly addressed as an answer to his rationale for downvoting my comment. You need to make an effort to keep the separate strands of the debate separate, otherwise you’ll misinterpret the structure of the different arguments.
Wait, why does it follow from my saying you were in error that I had “no care at all about eating animals”?
I didn’t claim in this context that my ability to generate such examples was an argument for not downvoting such claims. I claimed that my ability to generate such examples was an argument for concluding that Eliezer’s claim was false.
For my actual views on the appropriateness of downvoting such comments, see the other subthreads in this debate.
There is a prescriptive/descriptive divide here, and it does us no good to dance either side of it.
Descriptively:
Eliezer’s claim that comments of that form will get downvoted may be factually incorrect, given that it’s possible to, as you showed, create comments of that form that express sentiments most people would upvote.
The qualifier “almost” placed in front of his comment would suffice to cover these situations.
Prescriptively:
is a prescriptive statement, and one which I attempted to explain was wrong.
We are tripping over this divide, and several different meanings of ‘wrong’. Basically, we’re making different distinctions to each other, and probably ascribing incorrect intentions to each other. Are there any other possible mismatches I haven’t noticed?
Although this is not necessarily something on which arguments should (in the rational sense) persuade me. The most such arguments can do to rationally persuade me is demonstrate how eating meat transgresses against my values in a way that I had not fully processed. If the disagreement is a matter of having different terminal preference then nothing that someone could say would be persuasive.
“Wrong” in “Less Wrong” means ‘incorrect’, not ‘morally objectionable’.
Yes, exactly. Eliezer characterized the form of my comment in a way that suggested I was exploiting the ambiguity of the term ‘wrong’, when in fact I was giving that term the same meaning it has in the locution ‘less wrong’. If the site’s name had been ‘Less Incorrect’, I would still have written
I was under the impression the stated (by Eliezer) problem was that “X is wrong” is a simple assertion, which is almost certain to change no-one’s mind.
Q: “Why are you doing X, when X is obviously wrong?”
A: “Uh.. because it’s not? Why do you think X is wrong?”
Of course it also has connotations of “What are you, some kind of hypocrite?”, which isn’t exactly helpful either.
Reconsider the comment to the hypothetical LW meeting I imagined. Do you really believe such a comment would be “downvoted to oblivion”? Yet that comment is also a simple assertion.
These are the kinds of social rules that I was thinking of when I claimed such rules sometimes hinder moral progress. Users on this forum should not, I believe, refrain from calling people hypocrites if that accusation is relevant and supported by what they take to be the best evidence. Having said that, I wasn’t actually accusing anyone of hypocrisy—just inconsistency.
(If one does think that the breach of social rules should be downvoted and is also the target of the critique, one is more likely to misinterpret the critique as a breach of a social rule and downvote accordingly, as you just did. This is another reason for disregarding considerations of social etiquette altogether.)
If the prevailing belief was that whites/men are somehow inherently superior to everyone else, then yes. Otherwise it would be a simple assertion everyone happens to agree with, and hence probably less likely to attract their ire.
Then it wouldn’t be so downvoted, as Eliezer claimed comments of this form would.
Well, your comment didn’t bother to provide any evidence.
Why should it? As I said, “I wasn’t actually accusing anyone of hypocrisy—just inconsistency.”
I think you mean denotations, in this case.
Eliezer’s reply works either way. You would still be downvoted for the version given this time. Perhaps Shockwave’s answer would be helpful for you?
No, Eliezer’s reply would not work, because it falsely asserts that any comment of a form which he claimed my comment fitted would be downvoted, when in fact there are comments that have that form which would and should not be downvoted, as I think we would all agree.
Shockwave’s answer wasn’t helpful; see my latest reply to him.
If you wish to get a different response from your comments then identify something that you can change such that the response is more desirable. Any explanations you are provided with may or may not be useful for you but they are provided as a courtesy not an obligation.
I never said Eliezer’s reply wasn’t “useful” to me; I just claimed it was premised on a false generalization. I appreciate his comments, as I appreciate those of every other person who took the time to discuss things with me, but having this appreciation is no reason for me to abstain from pointing out factual or reasoning errors as I see them. The fact that such comments are not provided as a an obligation is neither here nor there; all comments in this forum are, in the relevant sense, “courtesy”.
The comment basically said “quibbling about the site name is annoying rhetoric, please don’t use it when arguing your point”. I don’t think it took a stance on your actual argument, and you seem to be responding to it as if it did.
This is getting a bit tedious, but I don’t think that was what Eliezer’s comment said; if it was, then it simply misdescribed my own comment. I wasn’t “quibbling about the site name”; I was—to repeat myself once more—noting the inconsistency between the purpose of the site and the practice of some of its members. The site could have any other name and my comment would still stand, mutatis mutandis.
And you went and conflated ethics, which you were talking about, with epistemics, which the site is mostly about, both of which “wrong” incidentally applies to in everyday speech. Which happens to be the sort of thing people are especially twitchy about here.
I’m sorry, but I did no such thing. My comment could have been restated as follows:
See what I said in reply to wedrifid for further clarification.
I’d still downvote you for making a controversial and inflammatory statement in a way that presumes it’s obvious without providing any evidence.