That’s not what I meant. I affirm Vaniver’s interpretation (“Zack’s worry is that [...] establishing the rule with user-chosen values [...] will mean there’s nothing stopping someone from deciding that criticism has to be above 8 and below 6”).
(In my culture, it’s important that I say “That’s not what I meant” rather than “That’s a strawman”, because the former is agnostic about who is “at fault”. In my culture, there’s a much stronger duty on writers to write clearly than there is on readers to maintain uncertainty about the author’s intent; if I’m unhappy that the text I wrote led someone to jump to the wrong conclusion, I more often think that I should have written better text, rather than that the reader shouldn’t have jumped.)
Another attempt to explain the concern (if Vaniver’s “above 8 and below 6” remark wasn’t sufficient): suppose there were a dishonest author named Mallory, who never, ever admitted she was wrong, even when she was obviously wrong. How can Less Wrong protect against Mallory polluting our shared map with bad ideas?
My preferred solution (it’s not perfect, but it’s the best I have) is to have a culture that values unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse. That is, if Mallory writes a post that I think is bad, I can write a comment (or even a top-level reply or reaction post, if I have a lot to say) explaining why I think the post is bad. The hope is that if my criticism is good, then people will upvote my criticism and downvote Mallory’s post, and if my criticism is bad—for example, by mischaracterizing the text of Mallory’s post—then Mallory or someone else can write a comment to me explaining why my reply mischaracterizes the text of Mallory’s post, and people will upvote the meta-criticism and downvote my reply.
It’s crucial to the functioning of this system that criticism does not require Mallory’s consent. If we instead had a culture that enthusiastically supported Mallory banning commenters who (in Mallory’s personal judgement) aren’t trying hard enough to see reasons why they’re the one that’s missing something and Mallory is in the right, or who don’t feel collaborative or cooperative to interact with (to Mallory), or who are anchoring readers with uncanny-valley interpretations (according to Mallory), I think that would be a problem, because there would be nothing to stop Mallory from motivatedly categorizing everyone who saw real errors in her thinking as un-collaborative and therefore unfit to speak.
The culture of unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse isn’t without its costs, but if someone wanted to persuade me to try something else, I would want to hear about how their culture reacts to Mallory.
This is ignoring the fact that you’re highly skilled at deluding and confusing your audience into thinking that what the original author wrote was X, when they actually wrote a much less stupid or much less bad Y.
(e.g. repeatedly asserting that Y is tantamount to X and underplaying or outright ignoring the ways in which Y is not X; if you vehemently shout “Carthage delenda est” enough times people do indeed start becoming more and more afraid of Carthage regardless of whether or nor this is justified.)
You basically extort effort from people, with your long-winded bad takes, leaving the author with a choice between:
a) allowing your demagoguery to take over everyone’s perceptions of their point, now that you’ve dragged it toward a nearby (usually terrible) attractor, such that even though it said Y everybody’s going to subsequently view it through the filter of your X-interpretation, or
b) effortfully rebutting every little bit of your flood of usually-motivated-by-antipathy words.
Eventually, this becomes exhausting enough that the correct move is to kick Mallory out of the garden, where they do not belong and are making everything worse far disproportionate to their contribution.
Mallory can go write their rebuttals in any of the other ten thousand places on the internet that aren’t specifically trying to collaborate on clear thinking, clear communication, and truth-seeking.
The garden of LessWrong is not particularly well-kept, though.
This is ignoring the fact that you’re highly skilled at deluding and confusing your audience into thinking that what the original author wrote was X, when they actually wrote a much less stupid or much less bad Y.
This does not seem like it should be possible for arbitrary X and Y, and so if Zack manages to pull it off in some cases, it seems likely that those cases are precisely those in which the original post’s claims were somewhat fuzzy or ill-characterized—
(not necessarily through the fault of the author! perhaps the subject matter itself is simply fuzzy and hard to characterize!)
—in which case it seems that devoting more cognitive effort (and words) to the topic might be a useful sort of thing to do, in general? I don’t think one needs to resort to a hypothesis of active malice or antipathy to explain this effect; I think people writing about confusing things is generally a good thing (and if that writing ends up being highly upvoted, I’m generally suspicious of explanations like “the author is really, really good at confusing people” when “the subject itself was confusing to begin with” seems like a strictly simpler explanation).
(Considering the general problem of how forum moderation should work, rather than my specific guilt or innocence in the dispute at hand) I think positing non-truth-tracking motivations (which can be more general than “malice or antipathy”) makes sense, and that there is a real problem here: namely, that what I called “the culture of unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse” in the great-grandparent grants a structural advantage to people who have more time to burn arguing on the internet, analogously to how adversarial court systems grant a structural advantage to litigants who can afford a better lawyer.
Unfortunately, I just don’t see any solutions to this problem that don’t themselves have much more serious problems? Realistically, I think just letting the debate or trial process play out (including the motivated efforts of slick commenters or lawyers) results in better shared maps than trusting a benevolent moderator or judge to decide who deserves to speak.
To the extent that Less Wrong has the potential to do better than other forums, I think it’s because our culture and userbase is analogous to a court with a savvier, more intelligent jury (that requires lawyers to make solid arguments, rather than just appealing to their prejudices), not because we’ve moved beyond the need for non-collaborative debate (even though idealized Bayesian reasoners would not need to debate).
(It’s not a hypothesis; Zack makes his antipathy in these cases fairly explicit, e.g. “this is the egregore I’m fighting against tooth and nail” or similar. Generally speaking, I have not found Zack’s writing to be confusion-inducing when it’s not coming from his being triggered or angry or defensive or what-have-you.)
Separately: I’m having a real hard time finding a coherently principled position that says “that’s a strawman” is off-limits because it’s too accusatory and reads too much into the mind of the author, but is fine with “this is insane.”
That’s not what I meant. I affirm Vaniver’s interpretation (“Zack’s worry is that [...] establishing the rule with user-chosen values [...] will mean there’s nothing stopping someone from deciding that criticism has to be above 8 and below 6”).
(In my culture, it’s important that I say “That’s not what I meant” rather than “That’s a strawman”, because the former is agnostic about who is “at fault”. In my culture, there’s a much stronger duty on writers to write clearly than there is on readers to maintain uncertainty about the author’s intent; if I’m unhappy that the text I wrote led someone to jump to the wrong conclusion, I more often think that I should have written better text, rather than that the reader shouldn’t have jumped.)
Another attempt to explain the concern (if Vaniver’s “above 8 and below 6” remark wasn’t sufficient): suppose there were a dishonest author named Mallory, who never, ever admitted she was wrong, even when she was obviously wrong. How can Less Wrong protect against Mallory polluting our shared map with bad ideas?
My preferred solution (it’s not perfect, but it’s the best I have) is to have a culture that values unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse. That is, if Mallory writes a post that I think is bad, I can write a comment (or even a top-level reply or reaction post, if I have a lot to say) explaining why I think the post is bad. The hope is that if my criticism is good, then people will upvote my criticism and downvote Mallory’s post, and if my criticism is bad—for example, by mischaracterizing the text of Mallory’s post—then Mallory or someone else can write a comment to me explaining why my reply mischaracterizes the text of Mallory’s post, and people will upvote the meta-criticism and downvote my reply.
It’s crucial to the functioning of this system that criticism does not require Mallory’s consent. If we instead had a culture that enthusiastically supported Mallory banning commenters who (in Mallory’s personal judgement) aren’t trying hard enough to see reasons why they’re the one that’s missing something and Mallory is in the right, or who don’t feel collaborative or cooperative to interact with (to Mallory), or who are anchoring readers with uncanny-valley interpretations (according to Mallory), I think that would be a problem, because there would be nothing to stop Mallory from motivatedly categorizing everyone who saw real errors in her thinking as un-collaborative and therefore unfit to speak.
The culture of unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse isn’t without its costs, but if someone wanted to persuade me to try something else, I would want to hear about how their culture reacts to Mallory.
This is ignoring the fact that you’re highly skilled at deluding and confusing your audience into thinking that what the original author wrote was X, when they actually wrote a much less stupid or much less bad Y.
(e.g. repeatedly asserting that Y is tantamount to X and underplaying or outright ignoring the ways in which Y is not X; if you vehemently shout “Carthage delenda est” enough times people do indeed start becoming more and more afraid of Carthage regardless of whether or nor this is justified.)
You basically extort effort from people, with your long-winded bad takes, leaving the author with a choice between:
a) allowing your demagoguery to take over everyone’s perceptions of their point, now that you’ve dragged it toward a nearby (usually terrible) attractor, such that even though it said Y everybody’s going to subsequently view it through the filter of your X-interpretation, or
b) effortfully rebutting every little bit of your flood of usually-motivated-by-antipathy words.
Eventually, this becomes exhausting enough that the correct move is to kick Mallory out of the garden, where they do not belong and are making everything worse far disproportionate to their contribution.
Mallory can go write their rebuttals in any of the other ten thousand places on the internet that aren’t specifically trying to collaborate on clear thinking, clear communication, and truth-seeking.
The garden of LessWrong is not particularly well-kept, though.
This does not seem like it should be possible for arbitrary X and Y, and so if Zack manages to pull it off in some cases, it seems likely that those cases are precisely those in which the original post’s claims were somewhat fuzzy or ill-characterized—
(not necessarily through the fault of the author! perhaps the subject matter itself is simply fuzzy and hard to characterize!)
—in which case it seems that devoting more cognitive effort (and words) to the topic might be a useful sort of thing to do, in general? I don’t think one needs to resort to a hypothesis of active malice or antipathy to explain this effect; I think people writing about confusing things is generally a good thing (and if that writing ends up being highly upvoted, I’m generally suspicious of explanations like “the author is really, really good at confusing people” when “the subject itself was confusing to begin with” seems like a strictly simpler explanation).
(Considering the general problem of how forum moderation should work, rather than my specific guilt or innocence in the dispute at hand) I think positing non-truth-tracking motivations (which can be more general than “malice or antipathy”) makes sense, and that there is a real problem here: namely, that what I called “the culture of unilateral criticism and many-to-many discourse” in the great-grandparent grants a structural advantage to people who have more time to burn arguing on the internet, analogously to how adversarial court systems grant a structural advantage to litigants who can afford a better lawyer.
Unfortunately, I just don’t see any solutions to this problem that don’t themselves have much more serious problems? Realistically, I think just letting the debate or trial process play out (including the motivated efforts of slick commenters or lawyers) results in better shared maps than trusting a benevolent moderator or judge to decide who deserves to speak.
To the extent that Less Wrong has the potential to do better than other forums, I think it’s because our culture and userbase is analogous to a court with a savvier, more intelligent jury (that requires lawyers to make solid arguments, rather than just appealing to their prejudices), not because we’ve moved beyond the need for non-collaborative debate (even though idealized Bayesian reasoners would not need to debate).
(It’s not a hypothesis; Zack makes his antipathy in these cases fairly explicit, e.g. “this is the egregore I’m fighting against tooth and nail” or similar. Generally speaking, I have not found Zack’s writing to be confusion-inducing when it’s not coming from his being triggered or angry or defensive or what-have-you.)
Separately: I’m having a real hard time finding a coherently principled position that says “that’s a strawman” is off-limits because it’s too accusatory and reads too much into the mind of the author, but is fine with “this is insane.”