Speaking somewhat in my mod voice, I do basically also want to say “yes, Zack, I also would like you to stop lying by exaggeration/overconfidence”.
My hesitation about speaking-in-mod voice is that I don’t think it’s “overconfidence as deceit” has really graduated to site norm (I know other LW team members who expressly don’t agree with it, or have qualms about it). I think I feel kinda okay applying some amount of moderator force behind it, but not enough to attach a particular warning of moderator action at this point.
(I don’t endorse Duncan’s entire frame here, and I think I don’t endorse the amount of upset he is. I honestly think this thread has a number of good points on both sides which I don’t expect Duncan to agree (much?) with right now. But, when evaluating this complaint at Zack-in-particular I do think Zack should acknowledge his judgment here has not been good and the result is not living up to the standards that flow fairly naturally from the sequences)
Er, sorry, can you clarify—what, exactly, has Zack said that constitutes “lying by exaggeration/overconfidence”? Is it just that one “this is insane” comment, or are we talking about something else…?
Thinking a bit more, while I do have at least one more example of Zack doing this thing in mind, and am fairly confident I would find more (and think they are add up to being bad), I’m not confident that if I were writing this comment for myself without replying to Duncan, I’d have ended up wording the notice the same way (which in this case I think was fairly overshadowed by Duncan’s specific critique).
I’m fairly confident there are a collection of behaviors that add up to something Zack’s stated values should consider a persistent problem, but not sure I have a lot of examples of any-particular-pattern that I can easily articulate offhand.
I do think Zack fairly frequently does a “Write a reply to a person’s post as if it’s a rebuttal to the post, which mostly goes off and talks about an unrelated problem/frame that Zack cares about without engaging with what the original author was really talking about.” In this particular post, I think there’s a particular sleight-of-hand about word definitions I can point to as feeling particularly misleading. In Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think, I don’t think there’s a concrete thing that’s deceptive, but something about it does feel slightly off.
while I do have at least one more example of Zack doing this thing in mind
Did you mean to link to this comment? Or another of his comments on that post…? It is not clear to me, on a skim of the comments, which specific thing that Zack wrote there might be an example of “lying by exaggeration/overconfidence” (but I could easily have missed it; there’s a good number of comments on that post).
I do think Zack fairly frequently does a “Write a reply to a person’s post as if it’s a rebuttal to the post, which mostly goes off and talks about an unrelated problem/frame that Zack cares about without engaging with what the original author was really talking about.”
Hmm. Certainly the first part of that is true, but I’m not convinced of the second part (“without engaging with what the original author was really talking about”). For example, you mention the post “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think”. I found that said post expressed objections and thoughts that I had when reading Eliezer’s “Meta-Honesty” post, so it seems strange to say that Zack’s post didn’t engage with what Eliezer wrote! (Unless you take the view that what Eliezer was “really talking about” was something different than anything that either Zack or I took from his post? But then it seems to me that it’s hardly fair to blame Zack / me / any other reader of the post; surely the reply to complaints should be “well, you failed to get across what you had in mind, clearly; unfortunate, but perhaps try again”.)
Of course, you do say that you “don’t think there’s a concrete thing that’s deceptive” about Zack’s “Firming Up Not Lying” post. Alright, then is there some non-concrete thing that’s deceptive? Is there any way in which the post can be said to be “deceptive”, such that a reasonable person would agree with the usage of the word, and that it’s a bad thing? The accusation can’t just be “it feels slightly off”. That’s not anything.
In this particular post, I think there’s a particular sleight-of-hand about word definitions I can point to as feeling particularly misleading.
This seems like exactly the sort of problem that’s addressed by writing a critical comment in the post’s comments section! (Which comment can then be replied to, by the post’s author and by other commenters, by means of which discussion we might all—or so one hopes—become less wrong.)
fairly frequently does a “Write a reply to a person’s post as if it’s a rebuttal to the post, which mostly goes off and talks about an unrelated problem/frame that Zack cares about
Would it help if we distinguished between a “reply” (in which a commentator explains the thoughts that they had in reaction to a post, often critical or otherwise negative thoughts) and a “rebuttal” (in which the commentator directly contradicts the original post, such that the original post and the rebuttal can’t “both be right”)? I often write replies that are not rebuttals, but I think this is fine.
Everyone sometimes issues replies that are not rebuttals, but there is an expectation that replies will meet some threshold of relevance. Injecting “your comment reminds me of the medieval poet Dante Alighieri” into a random conversation would generally be considered off-topic, even if the speaker genuinely was reminded of him. Other participants in the conversation might suspect this speaker of being obsessed with Alighieri, and they might worry that he was trying to subvert the conversation by changing it to a topic no one but him was interested in. They might think-but-be-too-polite-to-say “Dude, no one cares, stop distracting from the topic at hand”.
The behaviour Raemon was trying to highlight is that you soapbox. If it is line with your values to do so, it still seems like choosing to defect rather than cooperate in the game of conversation.
I mean, I agree that I have soapbox-like tendencies (I often have an agenda, and my contributions to our discourse often reflect my agenda), but I thought I’ve been meeting the commonsense relevance standard—being an Alighieri scholar who only brings it up when there happens to be a legitimate Alighieri angle on the topic, and not just randomly derailing other people’s discussions.
I could be persuaded that I’ve been getting this wrong, but, again, I’m going to need more specific examples (of how some particular post I made misses the relevance standard) before I repent or change anything.
I do think Zack should acknowledge his judgment here has not been good and the result is not living up to the standards that flow fairly naturally from the sequences
Sorry, I’m going to need more specific examples of me allegedly “lying by exaggeration/overconfidence” before I acknowledge such a thing. I’m eager to admit my mistakes, when I’ve been persuaded that I’ve made a mistake. If we’re talking specifically about my 4 December 2021 comment that started with “This is insane”, I agree that it was a very bad comment that I regret very much. If we’re talking about a more general tendency to “lie by exaggeration/overconfidence”, I’m not persuaded yet.
(I have more thoughts about things people have said in this thread, but they’ll be delayed a few days, partially because I have other things to do, and partially because I’m curious to see whether Duncan will accept my new apology for the “This is insane” comment.)
The previous example I had onhand was in a private conversation where you described someone as “blatantly lying” (you’re anonymized in the linked post), and we argued a bit and (I recall) you eventually agreeing that ‘blatantly lying’ was not an accurate characterization of ‘not-particularly-blatantly-rationalizing’ (even if there was something really important about that rationalizing that people should notice). I think I recall you using pretty similar phrasing a couple weeks later, which seemed like there was something sticky about your process that generated the objection in the first place. I don’t remember this second part very clearly though.
(I agree this is probably still not enough examples for you to update strongly at the moment if you’re going entirely off my stated examples, and they don’t trigger an ‘oh yeah’ feeling that prompts you to notice more examples on your own)
I think it’s significant that the “blantant lying” example was an in-person conversation, rather than a published blog post. I think I’m much more prone to exaggerate in real-time conversations (especially emotionally-heated conversations) than I am in published writing that I have time to edit.
(I’m not sure I quite endorse my level of anger either, but there really is something quite rich about the combination of:
Zack having been so cavalier and rude that I blocked him because he was singlehandedly making LessWrong a miserable place to be, and making “publishing an essay” feel like touching an electric fence
Zack then strawmanning exactly the part of my post that points out “hey, it’s nice when people don’t do that”
Zack, rather than just making his arguments on their own merit, and pointing out the goodness of good things and the badness of bad things, instead painting a caricature of me (and later Rob) as the opposition and thus inextricably tying his stuff to mine/making it impossible to just get away from him
(I do in fact think that his post anchored and lodestoned people toward his interpretation of that guideline; I recall you saying that after you read his summary/description you nodded and said to yourself “seems about right” but I’d bet $100 to somebody’s $1 that if we had a time machine you wouldn’t have produced that interpretation on your own; I think you got verbal overshadow’d into it and I think Zack optimizes his writing to verbally overshadow people/cast a spell of confusion in this way; he often relentlessly says “X is Y” in a dozen different ways in his pieces until people lose track of the ways in which X is not Y.)
(Which confusion Zack then magnanimously welcomed me to burn hours of my life laboriously cleaning up.)
Zack then being really smug about how he’d never block anybody and how he’d never try to force anybody to change (never mind that I tried to insulate myself from him in lieu of forcing him to change, and would’ve happily let him be shitty off in his own shitty corner forever)
… it really is quite infuriating. I don’t know a better term for it than “rich;” it seems to be a central example of the sort of thing people mean when they say “that’s rich.”)
Speaking somewhat in my mod voice, I do basically also want to say “yes, Zack, I also would like you to stop lying by exaggeration/overconfidence”.
My hesitation about speaking-in-mod voice is that I don’t think it’s “overconfidence as deceit” has really graduated to site norm (I know other LW team members who expressly don’t agree with it, or have qualms about it). I think I feel kinda okay applying some amount of moderator force behind it, but not enough to attach a particular warning of moderator action at this point.
(I don’t endorse Duncan’s entire frame here, and I think I don’t endorse the amount of upset he is. I honestly think this thread has a number of good points on both sides which I don’t expect Duncan to agree (much?) with right now. But, when evaluating this complaint at Zack-in-particular I do think Zack should acknowledge his judgment here has not been good and the result is not living up to the standards that flow fairly naturally from the sequences)
Er, sorry, can you clarify—what, exactly, has Zack said that constitutes “lying by exaggeration/overconfidence”? Is it just that one “this is insane” comment, or are we talking about something else…?
Thinking a bit more, while I do have at least one more example of Zack doing this thing in mind, and am fairly confident I would find more (and think they are add up to being bad), I’m not confident that if I were writing this comment for myself without replying to Duncan, I’d have ended up wording the notice the same way (which in this case I think was fairly overshadowed by Duncan’s specific critique).
I’m fairly confident there are a collection of behaviors that add up to something Zack’s stated values should consider a persistent problem, but not sure I have a lot of examples of any-particular-pattern that I can easily articulate offhand.
I do think Zack fairly frequently does a “Write a reply to a person’s post as if it’s a rebuttal to the post, which mostly goes off and talks about an unrelated problem/frame that Zack cares about without engaging with what the original author was really talking about.” In this particular post, I think there’s a particular sleight-of-hand about word definitions I can point to as feeling particularly misleading. In Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think, I don’t think there’s a concrete thing that’s deceptive, but something about it does feel slightly off.
Did you mean to link to this comment? Or another of his comments on that post…? It is not clear to me, on a skim of the comments, which specific thing that Zack wrote there might be an example of “lying by exaggeration/overconfidence” (but I could easily have missed it; there’s a good number of comments on that post).
Hmm. Certainly the first part of that is true, but I’m not convinced of the second part (“without engaging with what the original author was really talking about”). For example, you mention the post “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think”. I found that said post expressed objections and thoughts that I had when reading Eliezer’s “Meta-Honesty” post, so it seems strange to say that Zack’s post didn’t engage with what Eliezer wrote! (Unless you take the view that what Eliezer was “really talking about” was something different than anything that either Zack or I took from his post? But then it seems to me that it’s hardly fair to blame Zack / me / any other reader of the post; surely the reply to complaints should be “well, you failed to get across what you had in mind, clearly; unfortunate, but perhaps try again”.)
Of course, you do say that you “don’t think there’s a concrete thing that’s deceptive” about Zack’s “Firming Up Not Lying” post. Alright, then is there some non-concrete thing that’s deceptive? Is there any way in which the post can be said to be “deceptive”, such that a reasonable person would agree with the usage of the word, and that it’s a bad thing? The accusation can’t just be “it feels slightly off”. That’s not anything.
This seems like exactly the sort of problem that’s addressed by writing a critical comment in the post’s comments section! (Which comment can then be replied to, by the post’s author and by other commenters, by means of which discussion we might all—or so one hopes—become less wrong.)
Would it help if we distinguished between a “reply” (in which a commentator explains the thoughts that they had in reaction to a post, often critical or otherwise negative thoughts) and a “rebuttal” (in which the commentator directly contradicts the original post, such that the original post and the rebuttal can’t “both be right”)? I often write replies that are not rebuttals, but I think this is fine.
Everyone sometimes issues replies that are not rebuttals, but there is an expectation that replies will meet some threshold of relevance. Injecting “your comment reminds me of the medieval poet Dante Alighieri” into a random conversation would generally be considered off-topic, even if the speaker genuinely was reminded of him. Other participants in the conversation might suspect this speaker of being obsessed with Alighieri, and they might worry that he was trying to subvert the conversation by changing it to a topic no one but him was interested in. They might think-but-be-too-polite-to-say “Dude, no one cares, stop distracting from the topic at hand”.
The behaviour Raemon was trying to highlight is that you soapbox. If it is line with your values to do so, it still seems like choosing to defect rather than cooperate in the game of conversation.
I mean, I agree that I have soapbox-like tendencies (I often have an agenda, and my contributions to our discourse often reflect my agenda), but I thought I’ve been meeting the commonsense relevance standard—being an Alighieri scholar who only brings it up when there happens to be a legitimate Alighieri angle on the topic, and not just randomly derailing other people’s discussions.
I could be persuaded that I’ve been getting this wrong, but, again, I’m going to need more specific examples (of how some particular post I made misses the relevance standard) before I repent or change anything.
We might distinguish between
Reaction: I read your post and these are the thoughts it generated in me
Reply: …and these thoughts seem relevant to what the post was talking about
Rebuttal: …and they contradict what you said.
I’ve sometimes received comments where I’d have found it helpful to know which of these was intended.
(Of course a single comment can be all of these in different places. Also a reaction should still not misrepresent the original post.)
Sorry, I’m going to need more specific examples of me allegedly “lying by exaggeration/overconfidence” before I acknowledge such a thing. I’m eager to admit my mistakes, when I’ve been persuaded that I’ve made a mistake. If we’re talking specifically about my 4 December 2021 comment that started with “This is insane”, I agree that it was a very bad comment that I regret very much. If we’re talking about a more general tendency to “lie by exaggeration/overconfidence”, I’m not persuaded yet.
(I have more thoughts about things people have said in this thread, but they’ll be delayed a few days, partially because I have other things to do, and partially because I’m curious to see whether Duncan will accept my new apology for the “This is insane” comment.)
The previous example I had onhand was in a private conversation where you described someone as “blatantly lying” (you’re anonymized in the linked post), and we argued a bit and (I recall) you eventually agreeing that ‘blatantly lying’ was not an accurate characterization of ‘not-particularly-blatantly-rationalizing’ (even if there was something really important about that rationalizing that people should notice). I think I recall you using pretty similar phrasing a couple weeks later, which seemed like there was something sticky about your process that generated the objection in the first place. I don’t remember this second part very clearly though.
(I agree this is probably still not enough examples for you to update strongly at the moment if you’re going entirely off my stated examples, and they don’t trigger an ‘oh yeah’ feeling that prompts you to notice more examples on your own)
I think it’s significant that the “blantant lying” example was an in-person conversation, rather than a published blog post. I think I’m much more prone to exaggerate in real-time conversations (especially emotionally-heated conversations) than I am in published writing that I have time to edit.
Yeah I do agree with that.
Here’s one imo
(I’m not sure I quite endorse my level of anger either, but there really is something quite rich about the combination of:
Zack having been so cavalier and rude that I blocked him because he was singlehandedly making LessWrong a miserable place to be, and making “publishing an essay” feel like touching an electric fence
Zack then strawmanning exactly the part of my post that points out “hey, it’s nice when people don’t do that”
Zack, rather than just making his arguments on their own merit, and pointing out the goodness of good things and the badness of bad things, instead painting a caricature of me (and later Rob) as the opposition and thus inextricably tying his stuff to mine/making it impossible to just get away from him
(I do in fact think that his post anchored and lodestoned people toward his interpretation of that guideline; I recall you saying that after you read his summary/description you nodded and said to yourself “seems about right” but I’d bet $100 to somebody’s $1 that if we had a time machine you wouldn’t have produced that interpretation on your own; I think you got verbal overshadow’d into it and I think Zack optimizes his writing to verbally overshadow people/cast a spell of confusion in this way; he often relentlessly says “X is Y” in a dozen different ways in his pieces until people lose track of the ways in which X is not Y.)
(Which confusion Zack then magnanimously welcomed me to burn hours of my life laboriously cleaning up.)
Zack then being really smug about how he’d never block anybody and how he’d never try to force anybody to change (never mind that I tried to insulate myself from him in lieu of forcing him to change, and would’ve happily let him be shitty off in his own shitty corner forever)
… it really is quite infuriating. I don’t know a better term for it than “rich;” it seems to be a central example of the sort of thing people mean when they say “that’s rich.”)