Me: I have some questions regarding your motivation for the wording and timing of some of the things you said. We can do this publicly or privately—your choice.
You: I’m inclined to keep it public for now, for the benefit of curious onlookers.
Great.
I think you were trying to deliberately draw criticism
That is something I never do. I am terrified of criticism and social disapproval generally...
Ok, if that is true, then it is very likely that I am going to be proven wrong. So the only substantive question I want to ask in this comment is this: Can you provide any evidence that you are terrified of criticism? For example, a link to a comment or posting on LW or some other forum where you confided that fear. Something prior to this blow-up.
Here is how I would like to proceed. Tomorrow morning (here) - roughly 12 hrs from now—I will post a list of (~20) short questions. Most will take simple yes or no answers; a few may ask you to state your motivation for doing X. The style of the questions may be something like what happens in the taking of a deposition in an American legal case. Not particularly friendly questions, but not particularly hostile either. I doubt that I will be asking anything that would force you to break that vow not to further discuss sexual politics.
After receiving your answers, I may ask a much smaller number of follow-up questions in a second posting. After this I will do one of two things.
One possibility is that I may announce that I still don’t believe you and explain why. At this point, it is your turn to question me. When you are done, I’m sure other people will want a shot at me.
The other possibility is that I will sincerely apologize for having impugned your integrity. I will ask that you, or some member of the community, “penalize” me to the amount of 100 karma points. If you wish, you can question me in this case too. And then when that is done, I’m sure other people will have things to say to me as well.
Can you provide any evidence that you are terrified of criticism? For example, a link to a comment or posting on LW or some other forum where you confided that fear. Something prior to this blow-up.
Here is how I would like to proceed....Are these ground rules satisfactory?
I’m willing to give it a try; but please keep in mind what you’re asking here: you, who have been here for (as you say) little over a month, are asking me to demonstrate my good faith to you. If I can do this easily, I’m willing to, but you should realize that there is a limit on the extent of my obligations in this regard.
I will ask that you, or some member of the community, “penalize” me to the amount of 100 karma points.
This is unnecessary, it seems to me, and I’m not sure how it would be implemented anyway.
Can you provide any evidence that you are terrified of criticism? For example, a link to a comment or posting on LW or some other forum where you confided that fear. Something prior to this blow-up.
See here, here, here, and here. No claim of exhaustiveness.
Ok, it certainly looks at this stage that I am going to owe you, and the community, an apology. But before I do that, I wonder if you could remove any lingering doubts by answering these questions, as I had originally proposed. The overwhelming majority are simple yes-or-no questions. I see them as pretty low-stress. If they don’t seem that way to you, decline to answer.
Yes or no answers are fine, but feel free to provide a line or two of explanation where it seems appropriate. Refusing to answer is acceptable too, but a short explanation of the reason for the refusal would be helpful.
The first three questions deal with conspiracy theories (mine). For this group of questions, to “privately discuss” means to communicate with any LW commenter by email, personal contact, telephone, or internet forums other than this one.
-- Within the day or so before the incident, did you privately discuss your intention to make an LW comment on the topics touched on in the opening comment?
-- During the course of the incident, did you privately discuss the incident?
-- Since the incident, have you privately discussed the incident with anyone other than participants in the public discussion related to the incident?
Your opening comment begins by criticizing SarahC’s comment “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down”. Later in the comment, you segue into your “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion”.
The following questions deal with your motivation in the opening comment.
-- Had you already formed the intention to make the “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion” at some point before seeing SarahC’s comment?
-- When you saw SarahC’s comment, did it immediately occur to you that this was a good opportunity to make the “suggestion”?
-- Did you decide to make the “suggestion” only after you had already begun writing your criticism of SarahC’s comment?
-- Prior to the incident, had you read any novels (“Stranger in a Strange Land” might be an example) which includes the premise of a world or subculture in which women are less “conservative when it comes to granting sexual favors”? If so, what did you think about the desirability of the situation and the realism of the depiction of the situation?
-- Prior to the incident, had you heard of or read the book “Against our Will”?
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding feminism?
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding an unwarranted obsession with rape in feminist discussion?
The following questions deal with the way the incident unfolded.
-- Did you notice that most of the strong criticism of the opening comment was coming from women?
-- If you can recall, at what point in incident did you become aware of this?
-- Had you expected, when you wrote the opening comment, that this gender pattern would occur?
-- Have you seen this gender pattern before, in responses to any of your previous LW comments prior to the incident?
-- During the incident, what significance, if any, did you attach to this gender pattern? I.e. what hypotheses did this pattern suggest?
-- During the incident, you expressed distress that your critics were making you out to be a bad person. However, an alternative interpretation might be that they were saying you had, perhaps by not fully understanding the implications, done a bad thing. Did you consider this alternative interpretation during the incident?
-- Do you think that these interpretations are different enough to be worth making the distinction?
The first three questions deal with conspiracy theories (mine). For this group of questions, to “privately discuss” means to communicate with any LW commenter by email, personal contact, telephone, or internet forums other than this one.
-- Within the day or so before the incident, did you privately discuss your intention to make an LW comment on the topics touched on in the opening comment?
No.
-- During the course of the incident, did you privately discuss the incident?
No
-- Since the incident, have you privately discussed the incident with anyone other than participants in the public discussion related to the incident?
Yes, with exactly one such person (i.e. someone not involved in the incident or the discussion). The person in question is a female who had/shared the impression that the second paragraph of my comment (the “controversial suggestion” part) subjected women-in-general to an unfair level of scrutiny, but agreed with the implication of the first paragraph (and disagreed with Alicorn) about the desirability of treating sex differently from other forms of interaction.
Your opening comment begins by criticizing SarahC’s comment “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down”. Later in the comment, you segue into your “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion”.
The following questions deal with your motivation in the opening comment.
-- Had you already formed the intention to make the “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion” at some point before seeing SarahC’s comment?
No, although the fact that SarahC’s comment (and the composition of my reply) so easily prompted me to make the suggestion implies that this was not the first time a thought of this sort had crossed my mind.
-- When you saw SarahC’s comment, did it immediately occur to you that this was a good opportunity to make the “suggestion”?
Not for any definition of “immediately” that is limited to the time period before I had begun composing my reply. (I should insert a caveat here about the reliability of memory with respect to distinctions like this.)
-- Did you decide to make the “suggestion” only after you had already begun writing your criticism of SarahC’s comment?
Yes (see above).
-- Prior to the incident, had you read any novels (“Stranger in a Strange Land” might be an example) which includes the premise of a world or subculture in which women are less “conservative when it comes to granting sexual favors”? If so, what did you think about the desirability of the situation and the realism of the depiction of the situation?
While I would not want to make a categorical denial stretching over my entire life, it is nevertheless almost certainly the case that I have significantly less familiarity with this type of literature than is typical among readers of LW.
-- Prior to the incident, had you heard of or read the book “Against our Will”?
No. My brain treated your mention of it as the first time I had heard of it.
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding feminism?
If the word “particular” in interpreted to mean “strong” (which I suspect is the intended meaning), and “feminism” is taken to mean a contemporary, as opposed to historical, stance (so that e.g. a strong belief that women should be allowed to vote in elections would not automatically require a “yes” answer), the answer is no.
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding an unwarranted obsession with rape in feminist discussion?
Subject to similar interpretive conventions, my answer to this question is logically entailed by my answer to the previous one.
The following questions deal with the way the incident unfolded.
-- Did you notice that most of the strong criticism of the opening comment was coming from women?
Without checking the record, my memory of the dialectic pattern (which will reveal my perception) was as follows: I received approval from wedrifid and SilasBarta (both males, as I understand), strong criticism from Alicorn (female) which developed into a vigorous argument, mild criticism from pjeby (male), feedback from SarahC (female) not concerning the most controversial part which led to the approximate reconciliation of our opinions on the main point, and some noticeable (though not especially severe) criticism from NancyLebovitz (female). HughRistik (male) provided helpful commentary from a position not specifically aligned with either me or my critics, but which I would expect my critics to regard as slightly closer to mine. At some point later in the discussion, I recall learning with mild surprise that datadataeverywhere is female, which seemed to occur at around the same time my mind began to identify her specifically as a critic.
I do not recall any female commenter who was as strongly critical as you (evidently male) were.
-- If you can recall, at what point in incident did you become aware of this?
I regard this question as superseded by my previous answer.
-- Had you expected, when you wrote the opening comment, that this gender pattern would occur?
If queried beforehand, I would have responded with an expectation that females would be more likely to be critical of my remarks than males. This isn’t to say that my brain performed this particular query.
-- Have you seen this gender pattern before, in responses to any of your previous LW comments prior to the incident?
No. Having participated only minimally in such threads prior to the incident, I considered myself neutral on LW’s gender controversies, and would have expected other readers to regard me this way also.
-- During the incident, what significance, if any, did you attach to this gender pattern? I.e. what hypotheses did this pattern suggest?
I did not devote any significant attention in my thoughts to the gender patterns of the discussion.
-- During the incident, you expressed distress that your critics were making you out to be a bad person. However, an alternative interpretation might be that they were saying you had, perhaps by not fully understanding the implications, done a bad thing. Did you consider this alternative interpretation during the incident?
I will omit this question due to the premise being false. It was others, intervening on my behalf (HughRistik in particular, as I recall) who characterized my critics in this way. I did not employ such a characterization until after the incident as you have defined it, and I did so with respect to only one critic: you.
-- Do you think that these interpretations are different enough to be worth making the distinction?
Instead of answering this question directly (which presupposes the coherence of the previous one), I will state my current point of view on my critics’ reactions. My critics have communicated to me that it is not socially acceptable (to a sufficient degree for my temperament), even on LW, to express a thought such as the “controversial suggestion” in my comment. I disagree with them about whether such expressions ought to be acceptable; however I do not desire their acceptability so strongly that I would be willing to sacrifice additional status in a likely-futile struggle to bring about that outcome. Sex and gender as such are not particular interests or priorities of mine here (or really, anywhere else I might happen to be). As a human, I have some nominal degree of interest in them, just as I have some nominal degree of interest in topics relating to food; however that interest pales in comparison to my interest in e.g. mathematics, music, or epistemic rationality in the abstract (or concrete).
Thank you for submitting to this interrogation. I realize that you had not placed yourself under any obligation to satisfy my curiosity on these points.
Ok, I have no follow up questions. Since you have given me no reason to doubt your veracity, I clearly owe both you, and the community, an apology.
I apologize to you, komponisto, and you all, Less Wrong, for publicly jumping to a conclusion based on hunch and intuition. That was simply a wrong thing to do, an unfair thing to do. That my conclusions were, not only unjustified, but also incorrect, is simply icing on the cake.
I apologize to komponisto for suggesting he was a devious person. I apologize if my overstated opinions that the “opening comment” deserved condemnation brought him distress.
I made several specific mistakes in the course of the incident, but mostly in the “post-mortem”. I have already admitted to some of them, others I have forgotten. If anyone wishes to bring them to my attention, I will be happy to do a mea culpa on them too, if I feel they warrant them.
Again, and in conclusion, I apologize.
Well, that felt good. I’m happy to have it (mostly) behind me. I also want to thank some of my critics who were very helpful to me in leading me to see the errors I had made. I will try to justify your efforts by trying not to repeat those errors.
If anyone has questions for me, or post mortem analysis, I will do my best to be accomodating.
Ok, it certainly looks at this stage that I am going to owe you, and the community, an apology. But before I do that, I wonder if you could remove any lingering doubts by answering these questions
You appear to be making your apology conditional on answering a questionnaire, which is both long enough that it represents a significant time commitment, and personal enough that it likely contain questions which he would prefer not to answer. Withholding an apology as leverage for anything comes across as very hostile and defeats the point of the apology if it’s eventually given. Additionally, a heuristic I can’t quite identify is telling me it smells like a trap, designed to elucidate answers which could be used out of context in an attack.
Withholding an apology as leverage for anything comes across as very hostile and defeats the point of the apology if it’s eventually given.
It did cross my mind that apologizing first, and then saying “could you answer some questions to help me figure out how far off my initial intuitions about you were, and how they went wrong” might be more interpersonally effective. Perplexed could always resurrect a critical opinion after hearing komponisto’s answers.
Additionally, a heuristic I can’t quite identify is telling me it smells like a trap, designed to elucidate answers which could be used out of context in an attack.
Maybe, but I think a more parsimonious and charitable explanation is that Perplexed is trying to find a way to update in a phased way while still saving face. I think the first goal is laudable (and I hope I don’t jinx it by making this comment), but the means may still be a little frustrating for komponisto.
Veracity, mostly. I had a conspiracy theory in my mind. The “evil perpetrator” could get away with it, simply by lying. But he would have to be careful not to lie about anything that could be checked.
The questions really only make sense if my conspiracy theory is true. Since it is false, the questions look odd. He would have still “passed” with the same answers and less explanation.
The only reason I went through with it, even after the “fear of criticism” evidence, was that in my original conspiracy theory, the conspirators would (of course) want a front man with a publicly known sensitivity of this kind.
A real comedy of errors and I end up with well earned egg on my face.
Great.
Ok, if that is true, then it is very likely that I am going to be proven wrong. So the only substantive question I want to ask in this comment is this: Can you provide any evidence that you are terrified of criticism? For example, a link to a comment or posting on LW or some other forum where you confided that fear. Something prior to this blow-up.
Here is how I would like to proceed. Tomorrow morning (here) - roughly 12 hrs from now—I will post a list of (~20) short questions. Most will take simple yes or no answers; a few may ask you to state your motivation for doing X. The style of the questions may be something like what happens in the taking of a deposition in an American legal case. Not particularly friendly questions, but not particularly hostile either. I doubt that I will be asking anything that would force you to break that vow not to further discuss sexual politics.
After receiving your answers, I may ask a much smaller number of follow-up questions in a second posting. After this I will do one of two things.
One possibility is that I may announce that I still don’t believe you and explain why. At this point, it is your turn to question me. When you are done, I’m sure other people will want a shot at me.
The other possibility is that I will sincerely apologize for having impugned your integrity. I will ask that you, or some member of the community, “penalize” me to the amount of 100 karma points. If you wish, you can question me in this case too. And then when that is done, I’m sure other people will have things to say to me as well.
Are these ground rules satisfactory?
See here, here, here, and here. No claim of exhaustiveness.
I’m willing to give it a try; but please keep in mind what you’re asking here: you, who have been here for (as you say) little over a month, are asking me to demonstrate my good faith to you. If I can do this easily, I’m willing to, but you should realize that there is a limit on the extent of my obligations in this regard.
This is unnecessary, it seems to me, and I’m not sure how it would be implemented anyway.
Ok, it certainly looks at this stage that I am going to owe you, and the community, an apology. But before I do that, I wonder if you could remove any lingering doubts by answering these questions, as I had originally proposed. The overwhelming majority are simple yes-or-no questions. I see them as pretty low-stress. If they don’t seem that way to you, decline to answer.
For purposes of these questions, “The Incident” is defined as the LW discussion beginning with the opening comment and running up to the “officially finished”—“strychnine” comment.
Yes or no answers are fine, but feel free to provide a line or two of explanation where it seems appropriate. Refusing to answer is acceptable too, but a short explanation of the reason for the refusal would be helpful.
The first three questions deal with conspiracy theories (mine). For this group of questions, to “privately discuss” means to communicate with any LW commenter by email, personal contact, telephone, or internet forums other than this one.
-- Within the day or so before the incident, did you privately discuss your intention to make an LW comment on the topics touched on in the opening comment?
-- During the course of the incident, did you privately discuss the incident?
-- Since the incident, have you privately discussed the incident with anyone other than participants in the public discussion related to the incident?
Your opening comment begins by criticizing SarahC’s comment “It can get creepy when men think...that it’s unfair when they get turned down”. Later in the comment, you segue into your “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion”.
The following questions deal with your motivation in the opening comment.
-- Had you already formed the intention to make the “bound-to-be-controversial suggestion” at some point before seeing SarahC’s comment?
-- When you saw SarahC’s comment, did it immediately occur to you that this was a good opportunity to make the “suggestion”?
-- Did you decide to make the “suggestion” only after you had already begun writing your criticism of SarahC’s comment?
-- Prior to the incident, had you read any novels (“Stranger in a Strange Land” might be an example) which includes the premise of a world or subculture in which women are less “conservative when it comes to granting sexual favors”? If so, what did you think about the desirability of the situation and the realism of the depiction of the situation?
-- Prior to the incident, had you heard of or read the book “Against our Will”?
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding feminism?
-- Prior to the incident, did you have any particular opinions regarding an unwarranted obsession with rape in feminist discussion?
The following questions deal with the way the incident unfolded.
-- Did you notice that most of the strong criticism of the opening comment was coming from women?
-- If you can recall, at what point in incident did you become aware of this?
-- Had you expected, when you wrote the opening comment, that this gender pattern would occur?
-- Have you seen this gender pattern before, in responses to any of your previous LW comments prior to the incident?
-- During the incident, what significance, if any, did you attach to this gender pattern? I.e. what hypotheses did this pattern suggest?
-- During the incident, you expressed distress that your critics were making you out to be a bad person. However, an alternative interpretation might be that they were saying you had, perhaps by not fully understanding the implications, done a bad thing. Did you consider this alternative interpretation during the incident?
-- Do you think that these interpretations are different enough to be worth making the distinction?
That’s it.
No.
No
Yes, with exactly one such person (i.e. someone not involved in the incident or the discussion). The person in question is a female who had/shared the impression that the second paragraph of my comment (the “controversial suggestion” part) subjected women-in-general to an unfair level of scrutiny, but agreed with the implication of the first paragraph (and disagreed with Alicorn) about the desirability of treating sex differently from other forms of interaction.
No, although the fact that SarahC’s comment (and the composition of my reply) so easily prompted me to make the suggestion implies that this was not the first time a thought of this sort had crossed my mind.
Not for any definition of “immediately” that is limited to the time period before I had begun composing my reply. (I should insert a caveat here about the reliability of memory with respect to distinctions like this.)
Yes (see above).
While I would not want to make a categorical denial stretching over my entire life, it is nevertheless almost certainly the case that I have significantly less familiarity with this type of literature than is typical among readers of LW.
No. My brain treated your mention of it as the first time I had heard of it.
If the word “particular” in interpreted to mean “strong” (which I suspect is the intended meaning), and “feminism” is taken to mean a contemporary, as opposed to historical, stance (so that e.g. a strong belief that women should be allowed to vote in elections would not automatically require a “yes” answer), the answer is no.
Subject to similar interpretive conventions, my answer to this question is logically entailed by my answer to the previous one.
Without checking the record, my memory of the dialectic pattern (which will reveal my perception) was as follows: I received approval from wedrifid and SilasBarta (both males, as I understand), strong criticism from Alicorn (female) which developed into a vigorous argument, mild criticism from pjeby (male), feedback from SarahC (female) not concerning the most controversial part which led to the approximate reconciliation of our opinions on the main point, and some noticeable (though not especially severe) criticism from NancyLebovitz (female). HughRistik (male) provided helpful commentary from a position not specifically aligned with either me or my critics, but which I would expect my critics to regard as slightly closer to mine. At some point later in the discussion, I recall learning with mild surprise that datadataeverywhere is female, which seemed to occur at around the same time my mind began to identify her specifically as a critic.
I do not recall any female commenter who was as strongly critical as you (evidently male) were.
I regard this question as superseded by my previous answer.
If queried beforehand, I would have responded with an expectation that females would be more likely to be critical of my remarks than males. This isn’t to say that my brain performed this particular query.
No. Having participated only minimally in such threads prior to the incident, I considered myself neutral on LW’s gender controversies, and would have expected other readers to regard me this way also.
I did not devote any significant attention in my thoughts to the gender patterns of the discussion.
I will omit this question due to the premise being false. It was others, intervening on my behalf (HughRistik in particular, as I recall) who characterized my critics in this way. I did not employ such a characterization until after the incident as you have defined it, and I did so with respect to only one critic: you.
Instead of answering this question directly (which presupposes the coherence of the previous one), I will state my current point of view on my critics’ reactions. My critics have communicated to me that it is not socially acceptable (to a sufficient degree for my temperament), even on LW, to express a thought such as the “controversial suggestion” in my comment. I disagree with them about whether such expressions ought to be acceptable; however I do not desire their acceptability so strongly that I would be willing to sacrifice additional status in a likely-futile struggle to bring about that outcome. Sex and gender as such are not particular interests or priorities of mine here (or really, anywhere else I might happen to be). As a human, I have some nominal degree of interest in them, just as I have some nominal degree of interest in topics relating to food; however that interest pales in comparison to my interest in e.g. mathematics, music, or epistemic rationality in the abstract (or concrete).
Thank you for submitting to this interrogation. I realize that you had not placed yourself under any obligation to satisfy my curiosity on these points.
Ok, I have no follow up questions. Since you have given me no reason to doubt your veracity, I clearly owe both you, and the community, an apology.
I apologize to you, komponisto, and you all, Less Wrong, for publicly jumping to a conclusion based on hunch and intuition. That was simply a wrong thing to do, an unfair thing to do. That my conclusions were, not only unjustified, but also incorrect, is simply icing on the cake.
I apologize to komponisto for suggesting he was a devious person. I apologize if my overstated opinions that the “opening comment” deserved condemnation brought him distress.
I made several specific mistakes in the course of the incident, but mostly in the “post-mortem”. I have already admitted to some of them, others I have forgotten. If anyone wishes to bring them to my attention, I will be happy to do a mea culpa on them too, if I feel they warrant them.
Again, and in conclusion, I apologize.
Well, that felt good. I’m happy to have it (mostly) behind me. I also want to thank some of my critics who were very helpful to me in leading me to see the errors I had made. I will try to justify your efforts by trying not to repeat those errors.
If anyone has questions for me, or post mortem analysis, I will do my best to be accomodating.
komponisto, I applaud your honesty. It’s very impressive—a new standard to measure my own introspection by.
You appear to be making your apology conditional on answering a questionnaire, which is both long enough that it represents a significant time commitment, and personal enough that it likely contain questions which he would prefer not to answer. Withholding an apology as leverage for anything comes across as very hostile and defeats the point of the apology if it’s eventually given. Additionally, a heuristic I can’t quite identify is telling me it smells like a trap, designed to elucidate answers which could be used out of context in an attack.
jimrandomh said:
It did cross my mind that apologizing first, and then saying “could you answer some questions to help me figure out how far off my initial intuitions about you were, and how they went wrong” might be more interpersonally effective. Perplexed could always resurrect a critical opinion after hearing komponisto’s answers.
Maybe, but I think a more parsimonious and charitable explanation is that Perplexed is trying to find a way to update in a phased way while still saving face. I think the first goal is laudable (and I hope I don’t jinx it by making this comment), but the means may still be a little frustrating for komponisto.
It seemed to me that there was something “off” about the questionaire—I think it was mostly that I couldn’t tell what it was intended to discover.
Veracity, mostly. I had a conspiracy theory in my mind. The “evil perpetrator” could get away with it, simply by lying. But he would have to be careful not to lie about anything that could be checked.
The questions really only make sense if my conspiracy theory is true. Since it is false, the questions look odd. He would have still “passed” with the same answers and less explanation.
The only reason I went through with it, even after the “fear of criticism” evidence, was that in my original conspiracy theory, the conspirators would (of course) want a front man with a publicly known sensitivity of this kind.
A real comedy of errors and I end up with well earned egg on my face.
Hey, I like that phrasing. I’ll try to use it the next time I feel the urge to do something stupid. :)
More seriously, are you dissatisfied with the outcome?
It seems to have turned out pretty well. Looks like that heuristic was a misfire.