I don’t see us all as in clear agreement; I think we’re at least somewhat in nominal agreement but I have found Zack to be … I don’t mean this as a contentless insult, I mean it as a literal attempt-to-model … irrationally fixated on being anti-polite, and desperately fending off attempts to validate or encode any kind of standard or minimum bar of politeness.
By “irrationally” I mean that he seems to me to do so by irresistible reflex, with substantial compulsion/motive force, even when the resulting outcome is unambiguously contra his explicitly stated goals or principles.
To put things in Zack’s terminology, you could say that he’s (apparently) got some kind of self-reinforcing algorithmic intent to be abrasive and off-putting and over-emphatic. Even where more reserved language would be genuinely truer, less misleading to the audience, and more in line with clear and precise word usage (all goals which Zack ostensibly ranks pretty high in the priority list), there’s (apparently) some kind of deep psychological pressure that reliably steers him in the other direction, and makes him vehemently object to putting forth the (often pretty minimal) effort required.
Similarly, even where marginally more polite language would be predictably and substantially more effective at persuading his audience of the truth of some point, or updating social consensus in his preferred direction, he (apparently) cannot help himself; cannot bear to do it; responds with a fervor that resembles the fervor of people trying to repel actual oppression. It is as if Zack sees, in the claim “hey, ‘this seems insane to me’ is both truer and more effective than ‘this is insane’, you should consider updating your overall language heuristics to account for this delta across all sorts of utterances” an attempt to imprison or brainwash him, much like the more stringent objections to pronoun preferences (“you can’t MAKE ME SEE A WOMAN WHERE I SEE A MAN, GTFO OF MY HEAD, THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!”). On the surface, it has a lot in common with a trauma-response type overreaction.
This aspect of Zack’s behavior seems to me to be beyond his control; it has enough motive force that e.g. he has now been inspired to write two separate essays taking [the dumbest and least-charitable interpretations of me and Rob recommending “maybe don’t be a total dick?”] and then railing against those strawmen, at length.
(I would have a different reaction if either of Zack’s so-called responses were self-aware about it, e.g. if they explicitly claimed “what Rob/Duncan recommends will degrade to this in practice, and thus discussing the strawman is material,” or something like that. Zack does give a little lip-service to the idea that he might not have properly caught our points, saying stuff like ~”I mean, maybe they meant something not megadumb, but if so I’m utterly incapable of figuring out what” but does not evince any kind of Actual Effort to think along lines of “okay okay but if it were me who was missing something, and they had a real point, what might it be?” This lack of any willingness to put forth such effort is a major part of why I don’t bother with effortfully and patiently deconfusing him anymore; if someone’s just really lost then I’m often willing to help but if they’re really lost and insisting that what I’m saying is badwrongdumbcrazy then I tend to lose interest in helping them connect the dots.)
Even in Zack’s apology above, he’s basically saying “I won’t do this to you, Duncan, anymore, because you’ll push back enough to make me regret it, but I refuse to entertain the possibility that maybe there’s a generally applicable lesson for me, here.” He’s digging in his heels on this one; his mistakes repeat themselves and resist correction and reliably steer him in a consistent direction. There’s something here that uses Zack as its puppet and mouthpiece, as opposed to some source of motive energy which Zack uses in pursuit of his CEV.
FYI, having recently stated “man I think Duncan and Zack should be seeing themselves more as allies”, I do want to note I agree pretty strongly with this characterization. I think Zack probably also agrees with the above during his more self-aware moments, but often not in the middle of a realtime discussion.
I do think Zack should see this fact about himself as a fairly major flaw according to his own standards, although it’s not obvious to me that the correct priority for him should be “fixing the surface-visible-part of the flaw”, and I don’t know what would actually be helpful.
My reasoning for still thinking it’s sad for Zack/Duncan to not see each other more as allies routes primarily through what I think ‘allyship’ should mean, given the practicalities of the resources available in the world. I think the people who are capable of advancing the art of rationality are weird and spiky and often come with weird baggage, and… man, sorry those are the only people around, it’s a very short list, if you wanna advance the art of rationality you need to figure out some way of dealing with that (When I reflect a bit, I don’t actually think Duncan should necessarily be doing anything different here, I think not engaging with people who are obnoxious to deal with is fine. Upon reflection I’m mostly sad about the The Relational Stance here, and idk, maybe that just doesn’t matter)
...
(Also, I think the crux Zack lists in his other recent reply is probably also pretty close to a real crux between him and Duncan, although not as much of a crux between Zack and me)
I also think it’s sad that Duncan and I apparently can’t be allies (for my part, I like a lot of Duncan’s work and am happy to talk with him), but I think there’s a relevant asymmetry.
When my weird baggage leaks into my attempted rationality lessons, I think there’s a corrective mechanism insofar as my weird baggage pushes me to engage with my critics even when I think they’re being motivatedly dumb: if I get something wrong, gjm will probably tell you about it. Sometimes I don’thave time to reply, but I will never, ever ban gjm from commenting on my posts, or insist that he pre-emptively exert effort trying to think of reasons that he’s the one who’s missing something, or complain that interacting with him doesn’t feel cooperative or collaborative.
When Duncan’s weird baggage leaks into his attempted rationality lessons, I think there’s much less of a corrective mechanism insofar as Duncan feels free to ban critics that he thinks are being motivatedly dumb. If Duncan’s judgements about this are correct, he saves a lot of time and emotional energy that he can spend doing other things. (I’m a bit jealous.) But if his judgements are ever wrong, he loses a chance to discover his mistakes.
Of course, I would say that! (The two paragraphs I just typed were clearly generated from my ideology; someone else with a different way of thinking might be able to think of reasons why I’m wrong, that I can’t see by myself.)
If you do, I hope you’ll let me know in the comments!
This whole comment is a psy-op. It was a mistake for me to leave a comment up above in the first place, and I came to my senses and deleted it literally less than a minute after I hit “enter,” but that didn’t stop Zack from replying twenty minutes later and now we have a thread so fine, whatever.
When Zack’s weird baggage leaks into his attempted rationality lessons, he calls people insane and then writes multi-thousand-word screeds based on his flawed interpretations, which he magnanimously says the other person is perfectly welcome to correct! leaving people the following options:
Spend hours and hours of their scant remaining lifetimes laboriously correcting the thousand-yard sprint he already took down the wrong trailhead, or
Leave his uncanny valley misinterpretation there, unaddressed, where it will forever anchor subsequent interpretations, pulling them toward an attractor, and also make the author seem churlish or suspiciously unable-to-rebut (which lends his interpretation further apparent strength)
… which makes being here exhausting and intolerable.
Zack could, of course, just not do this. It’s entirely within his power! He could (for instance), when he forms a knee-jerk interpretation of someone else’s statement that he finds crazy or upsetting, simply ask whether that was the interpretation the author intended, before charging full-steam ahead with a preemptive critique or rebuttal.
(You know, the way you would if you were here to collaborate, and had a shred of respect for your interlocutors.)
This is even easier! It requires less effort! It doesn’t require e.g. being charitable, which for some reason Zack would rather die than do.
But Zack does not do this, because, for whatever reason, Zack values [preserving his god-given right to be a jump-to-conclusions asshole] over things like that. He’ll claim to be sad about our inability to communicate well, but he’s not actually sad enough to cut it out, or even just cut back a little.
(I think it’s wise to be suspicious of people who claim to feel an emotion like sorrow or regret, but do not behave in the ways that someone-feeling-sorrow or someone-feeling-regret would behave; often they have mislabeled something in their experience.)
After cutting him more slack than I cut anybody else for months, the essay where I finally gave up was clearly a partial draft posted by mistake (it petered out after two sections into random fragments and bullet points and scraps of unconnected paragraphs), and it literally said, at the top, sentences to the effect of “these initial short summaries allow for multiple interpretations, some of which I do not intend; please do not shoot off an objection before reading the expansion below, where that interpretation might already have been addressed.”
But within mere minutes, Zack, willfully ignoring that straightforward request, ignoring the obvious incomplete nature of the essay, and ignoring the text wherein his objection was, in fact, addressed, shot off a comment saying that what I was recommending was insane, and then knocking over a strawman.
This was not an aberrant event. It was typical. It was one more straw on the camel’s back. The most parsimonious explanation for why Zack does this instead of any number of more productive moves is that Zack wants his interlocutors to be wrong, so that Zack can be the one to go “look! Look!” and everyone will appreciate how clever he was in pointing out the hole in the argument. He wants me to be wrong badly enough that he’ll distort my point however far he needs to in order to justify writing an essay allegedly “in response.”
(I’m perfectly free to correct him! All I have to do is let him take my hours and my spoons hostage!)
And given that, and given that I eventually could not stand his counterproductive anti-epistemic soul-sucking time wastery any longer, he has the temerity to insinuate that he’s morally superior because he’d never block anyone, no, sir. Or that it’s my fault that we don’t have a line of communication, because he’s happy to talk with me.
FUCK.
Enjoy your sanctimony. You are choosing to make the world worse.
the essay where I finally gave up [...] This was not an aberrant event. [...] one more straw on the camel’s back
Yes, that December 2021 incident was over the line. I’m sorry. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t done that—but if I had taken a few more moments to think, I would have been able to see it without retrospect. That was really stupid of me, and it made things worse for both of us.
You’re also correct to notice that the bad behavior that I don’t endorse on reflection can be seen as a more extreme version of milder behavior that I do endorse on reflection. (Thus the idiom “over the line”, suggesting that things that don’t go over the line are OK.) I wish I had been smart enough to only do the mild version, and never overshoot into the extreme version.
ignoring the text wherein his objection was, in fact, addressed
Are you referring to the paragraph that begins, “If two people disagree, it’s tempting for them to attempt to converge with each other [...]”? In a comment to Phil H., I explained why that paragraph didn’t satisfy me. (Although, as I acknowledged to Phil, it’s plausible that I should have quoted and acknowledged that paragraph in my post, to make it clearer to readers what you weren’t saying; I’ll probably do so if I get around to revising the post.)
If you’re not referring to that paragraph, I’m not sure where you think my objection has been addressed.
(I think I would have noticed if that paragraph had been in the December 2021 version, but if you say it was, I’ll take your word for it—which would imply that my December 2021 behavior was even worse than I’ve already admitted; I owe you a much bigger apology in that case.)
leaving people the following options
I agree that this is an unpleasant dilemma for an author to face, but to me, it seems like an inextricable feature of intellectual life? Sometimes, other authors have a perspective contrary to yours that they argue for in public, and they might sometimes refer to your writings in the course of arguing for their perspective. I don’t see any “policy” solution here.
simply ask whether that was the interpretation the author intended
Why isn’t this relevantly similar to what Said does, though?
I’m worried that your preferred norms make it way too easy for an author to censor legitimate criticisms. If the critic does too little interpretive labor (just asking questions and expecting the author to be able to answer, like Said), the author can dismiss them for not trying hard enough. If the critic does too much interpretive labor (writing multi-thousand word posts explaining in detail what they think the problem is, without necessarily expecting the author to have time to reply, like me), the author can dismiss them for attacking a strawman.
I imagine you don’t agree with that characterization, but I hope you can see why it looks like a potential problem to me?
if you were here to collaborate
I’m not always here to collaborate. Sometimes I’m here to criticize. I endorse this on reflection.
had a shred of respect for your interlocutors.
I mean, I respect some of your work. For two concrete examples, I link to “In My Culture” sometimes, and I think “Split and Commit” is a useful reminder to try to live in multiple possible worlds instead of assuming that your “max likelihood” map is equal to the territory. (I think I need to practice this one more.)
But more generally, when people think they’re entitled to my respect rather than having to earn it, that does, actually, make me respect them less than I otherwise would. That might be what you’re picking up on when you perceive that I don’t have a shred of respect for my interlocutors?
suspicious of people who claim to feel an emotion like sorrow or regret, but do not behave in the ways that someone-feeling-sorrow or someone-feeling-regret would behave; often they have mislabeled something in their experience
That’s a good observation, thanks. I think the thing I initially labeled as “sad” is really just … wishing we weren’t in this slapfight?
Since you did try to hold me culpable, I had an interest in responding to that … and here we are. This seems like a bad possible world to live in. I think it’s unpleasant for both of us, and I think it’s wasting a lot of time that both of us could spend doing more productive things.
I could have avoided this outcome by not writing posts about my objections to your Fifth Guideline or Rob’s Ninth Element … but then the Fifth Guideline and the Ninth Element would have been accepted into the local culture unchallenged. That would be a problem for me. I think it was worth my effort try to prevent that outcome, even though it resulted in this outcome, which is unpleasant and expensive.
I think that’s what I meant by “sad”, in more words.
so that Zack can be the one to go “look! Look!” and everyone will appreciate how clever he was in pointing out the hole in the argument
… I think I’m going to bite this bullet? Yes, I sometimes take pride and pleasure in criticizing work that I think is importantly mistaken. The reason this sits okay with my conscience is because I think I apply it symmetrically (I think it’s fine if someone gets excited about poking holes in my arguments), and because I think the combination of me and the community is pretty good at distinguishing good criticisms from bad criticisms.
He wants me to be wrong badly enough
I don’t think it’s personal. As you’ve noticed, I’m hyper-sensitive to attempts to validate or encode any kind of standard or minimum bar of politeness, because I’m viscerally terrified of what I think they’ll degrade to in practice. You’ll notice that I also argued against Rob’s Ninth Element, not just your Fifth Guideline. It’s not about Rob. It’s not about you. It’s about protecting my interests.
You are choosing to make the world worse.
We’re definitely steering the world in different directions. It looks like some of the things I think are net-positive (having more good aspects than bad aspects) are things that you think are net-negative, which puts us in conflict sometimes. That’s unfortunate.
(I think I would have noticed if that paragraph had been in the December 2021 version, but if you say it was, I’ll take your word for it—which would imply that my December 2021 behavior was even worse than I’ve already admitted; I owe you a much bigger apology in that case.)
It was. That’s why I was (and remain) so furious with you (Edit: and also am by default highly mistrustful of your summaries of others’ positions).
Thanks for telling me (strong-upvoted). That makes sense as a reason for you to be furious with me. As the grandparent says, I owe you a bigger apology than my previous apology, which appears below.
I hereby apologize for my blog comment of 4 December 2021, on an earlier revision of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”. In addition to the reasons that it was a bad comment in context that I listed in my previous apology, it was also a bad comment for failing to acknowledge that the text of the post contained a paragraph addressing the comment’s main objection, which is a much more serious error. I am embarrassed at my negligence. To avoid such errors in the future, I will endeavor to take some time to emotionally cool down and read more carefully before posting a comment, when I notice that I’m tempted to post a comment while emotionally activated.
If you’d like me to post a variation of this in a more prominent location (like Facebook or Twitter), I’d be willing to do that. (I think I’d want to spend a few more minutes to rewrite the lesser reasons that the comment was bad in context as its own sentence, rather than linking to the previous apology.)
I don’t know what to say in response. Empirically, this apology did zero to reduce the extremely strong deterrent of “God dammit, if I try to post something on LessWrong, one way or another Zack and Said are going to find a way to make that experience miserable and net negative,” which, in combination with the energy that this thread burned up, has indeed resulted in me not posting, where counterfactually I would’ve posted three essays.
(I’m only here now because you’re bumping the threads.)
(Like, there are three specific, known essays that I have not posted, because of my expectations coming off of this thread and the chilling effect of “I’ll have to deal with Zack and Said’s responses.”)
(Also the reason my Basics post ended up being so long-winded was because, after my experience with the partial draft going up by mistake, I was trying quite hard to leave a future Zack no ways to make me regret publishing/no exposed surfaces upon which I could be attacked. I ended up putting in about 20 extra hours because of my past experience with you, which clearly did not end up paying off; I underestimated just how motivated you would be to adversarially interpret and twist things around.)
I tried blocking, and that wasn’t enough to get you to leave me alone.
I’m worried that your preferred norms make it way too easy for an author to censor legitimate criticisms. If the critic does too little interpretive labor (just asking questions and expecting the author to be able to answer, like Said), the author can dismiss them for not trying hard enough. If the critic does too much interpretive labor (writing multi-thousand word posts explaining in detail what they think the problem is, without necessarily expecting the author to have time to reply, like me), the author can dismiss them for attacking a strawman.
Literally only you and Said have these twin problems (among long-lasting prolific LW participants). This is you saying “but but but if you claim ZERO is too little and a BILLION is too much, then how is there any room for legitimate criticism to exist?”
It’s somewhere between zero and a billion, like every other person on LessWrong manages to do just fine all the time.
Late edit: we have a term for this thing; it’s called “fallacy of the grey.”
Literally only you and Said have these twin problems (among long-lasting prolific LW participants). This is you saying “but but but if you claim ZERO is too little and a BILLION is too much, then how is there any room for legitimate criticism to exist?”
It’s somewhere between zero and a billion, like every other person on LessWrong manages to do just fine all the time.
I think it’s important to note survivorship bias here; I think there are other people who used to post on LessWrong and do not anymore, and perhaps this was because of changes in norms like this one.[1] It also seems somewhat likely to me that Said and Zack think that there’s too little legitimate criticism on LW. (I often see critical points by Zack or Said that I haven’t yet seen made by others and which I agree with; are they just faster or are they counterfactual? I would guess the latter, at least some of the time.)
As well, Zack’s worry is that even if the guideline is written by people who have a sense that criticism should be between 4 and 12, establishing the rule with user-chosen values (like, for example, LW has done for a lot of post moderation) will mean there’s nothing stopping someone from deciding that criticism has to be above 8 and below 6; if it will be obvious to you when some other post author has adopted that standard, and you’ll call them out on it in a way that protects Zack’s ability to criticize them, that seems like relevant info from Zack’s perspective.
(From this comment I instead have a sense that your position is “look, we’re over here playing a game with everyone who understands these rules, and Zack and Said don’t, which means they should stop playing our game.”)
[1] To be clear, I don’t miss everyone who has stopped posting on LW; the hope with rules and guidelines like this is that you filter well. I think that, to the extent you’re trying to make the case that Said and Zack should shape their behavior or leave / not comment on your posts (and other people should feel social cover to block them from commenting as well), you should expect them to take exception to the rules that would cause them to change the most, and it’s not particularly fair to request that they hold the debate over what rules should apply under your rules instead of neutral rules.
I think that, to the extent you’re trying to make the case that Said and Zack should shape their behavior or leave / not comment on your posts (and other people should feel social cover to block them from commenting as well), you should expect them to take exception to the rules that would cause them to change the most, and it’s not particularly fair to request that they hold the debate over what rules should apply under your rules instead of neutral rules.
I don’t think I am making this request.
I do strongly predict that if I made free to verbally abuse Zack in the same fashion Zack verbally abuses others, I would be punished more for it, in part because people would be like “well, yeah, but Zack just kinda is like that; you should do better, Duncan” and in part because people would be like “DUDE, Zack had a traumatic experience with the medical system, you calling him insane is WAY WORSE than calling someone else insane” and “well, if you’re not gonna follow your own discourse rules, doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?”
It’s an asymmetric situation that favors the assholes; people tend not to notice “oh, Duncan rearmed with these weapons he advocates disarming because his interlocutors refused to join the peace treaty.”
Sure, I buy that any functional garden doesn’t just punish hypocrisy, but also failing to follow the rules of the garden, which I’m imputing as a motivation for your second and third paragraphs. (I also buy that lots of “let people choose how to be” approaches favor assholes.)
But… I think there’s some other message in them, that I can’t construct correctly? It seems to me like we’re in a broader cultural environment where postmodern dissolution of moral standards means the only reliable vice to attack others for is hypocrisy. I see your second and third paragraphs as, like, a mixture of disagreeing with this (‘I should not be criticized for hypocrisy as strongly as I predict I would be if I were hypocritical’) and maybe making a counteraccusation of hypocrisy (‘if there were evenly applied standards of conduct, I would be protected from Zack’s misbehavior, but as is I am prevented from attacking Zack but the reverse is not true’).
But I don’t think I really agree with either of those points, as I understand them. I do think hypocrisy is a pretty strong argument against the proposed rules, and also that double standards can make sense (certainly I try to hold LW moderators to higher standards than LW users).
“I’d like for us to not have a culture wherein it’s considered perfectly kosher to walk around responding to other users’ posts with e.g. ‘This is insane’ without clearing a pretty high bar of, y’know, the thing actually being insane. To the extent that Zack is saying ‘hey, it’s fine, you can verbally abuse me, too!’ this is not a viable solution.”
Fortunately, it seems that LessWrong generally agrees; both my suggested norms and Robbie’s suggested norms were substantially more popular than either of Zack’s weirdly impassioned defenses-of-being-a-jerk.
I guess I don’t know what you mean by “neutral norms” if you don’t mean either “the norms Duncan’s proposing, that are in line with what Julia Galef and Scott Alexander and Dan Keys and Eric Rogstad and Oliver Habryka and Vaniver and so on and so forth would do by default,” or “the norms Zack is proposing, in which you act like a dick and defend it by saying ‘it’s important to me that I be able to speak plainly and directly.’”
I think that, to the extent you’re trying to make the case that Said and Zack should shape their behavior or leave / not comment on your posts (and other people should feel social cover to block them from commenting as well), you should expect them to take exception to the rules that would cause them to change the most, and it’s not particularly fair to request that they hold the debate over what rules should apply under your rules instead of neutral rules.
I instead have a sense that your position is “look, we’re over here playing a game with everyone who understands these rules, and Zack and Said don’t, which means they should stop playing our game.”
No, I’m not saying Zack and Said should stop playing the game, I’m saying they should stop being sanctimonious about their inability to do what the vast majority of people have a pretty easy time doing (“checking interpretations” and “sharing any of the interpretive labor at all”, respectively).
I would be surprised to hear you claim that the valid critical points that Zack and Said make are contingent on them continuing to do the shitty things of (respectively) leaping to conclusions about A definitely implying B, or refusing to believe that A implies A until someone logically proves A→A. The times I’ve seen Zack and Said being useful or perceptive were when they weren’t doing these useless and unproductive moves, but rather just saying what they thought.
When Zack says what he thinks, instead of going “hey, everybody, look how abhorrent my strawman of Rob’s position is!” and trying to trick everyone into thinking that was Rob’s position and that he is the sole bastion of epistemic virtue holding back the tides of evil, it’s often useful.
When Said says what he thinks, instead of demanding that people rigorously define “sky,” “blue,” and “is” before allowing the conversation to move on from the premise “the sky is blue today,” it’s often useful.
There’s absolutely nothing that Zack is currently accomplishing that couldn’t have been accomplished if he’d first written a comment to Rob saying “did you mean X?”
He could’ve even gone off and drafted his post while waiting on an answer; it needn’t have even delayed his longer rant, if Rob failed to reply.
Acting like a refusal to employ that bare minimum of social grace is a virtue is bullshit, and I think Zack acts like it is. If you’re that hostile to your fellow LWers, then I think you are making a mistake being here.
There’s absolutely nothing that Zack is currently accomplishing that couldn’t have been accomplished if he’d first written a comment to Rob saying “did you mean X?” [...] Acting like a refusal to employ that bare minimum of social grace is a virtue is bullshit
It’s not that I think refusing to employ the bare minimum of social grace is a virtue. It’s that I wasn’t aware—in fact, am still not aware—that confirming interpretations with the original author before publishing a critical essay constitutes the bare minimum of social grace. The idea that it’s somehow bad behavior for intellectuals to publish essays about other intellectuals’ essays without checking with the original author first is something I’ve never heard before; I think unilaterally publishing critical essays is a completely normal thing that intellectuals do all the time, and I see no particular reason for self-identified “rationalist” intellectuals to behave any differently.
For an arbitrary example from our local subculture, Yudkowsky once wrote “A Reply to Francois Chollet” criticizing Chollet’s essay on the purported impossibility of an intelligence explosion. Did Yudkowsky first write an email to Chollet saying “did you mean X”? I don’t know, but I would guess not; if Chollet stands by the text he published, and Yudkowsky doesn’t feel uncertain about how to interpret the text, it’s not clear how either of their interests would be served by Yudkowsky sending an email first rather than just publishing the post.
I didn’t check with Leong beforehand. I didn’t check with Yudkowsky beforehand. I didn’t check with Weatherall or O’Connor or Bostrom or Shulman beforehand. No one told me I should have checked with Leong or Yudkowsky or Weatherall or O’Connor or Bostrom or Shulman beforehand. It’s just never been brought up as a problem or an offense before, ever.
Most of these authors are much more important people than me who are probably very busy. If someone had told me I should have checked with the authors beforehand, I think I would have said, “Wouldn’t that be disrespectful of their time?”
I do often notify the author after I’ve published a reaction piece. In the case of the current post, I unfortunately neglected to do so, but after seeing your comment, I did reach out to Rob, and he left afewcomments. Notably, in response to my comment about my motivations for writing this post, Rob writes:
Seems great to me! I share your intuition that Goodwill seems a bit odd to include. I think it’s right to push back on proposed norms like these and talk about how justified they are, and I hope my list can be the start of a conversation like that rather than the end.
This would seem to be pretty strong counterevidence against the claim that I failed to employ the bare minimum of social grace (at least as that minimum is construed by Rob himself)?
… inability to do what the vast majority of people have a pretty easy time doing (“checking interpretations” and “sharing any of the interpretive labor at all”, respectively).
My objection to this sort of claim is basically the same as my objection to this, from an earlier comment of yours:
[Interacting with Said] has never once felt cooperative or collaborative; I can make twice the intellectual progress with half the effort with a randomly selected LWer
And similar to my objection in a much earlier discussion (which I can’t seem to find now, apologies) about Double Crux (I think), wherein (I am summarizing from memory) you said that you have usually been able to easily explain and apply the concept when teaching it to people in person, as a CFAR instructor; to which I asked how you could distinguish between your interlocutor/student really understanding you, vs. the social pressure of the situation (the student/teacher frame, your personal charisma, etc.) causing them, perhaps, to persuade themselves that they’ve understood, when in fact they have not.
In short, the problem is this:
If “sharing interpretive labor”, “making intellectual progress”, etc., just boils down to “agreeing with you, without necessarily getting any closer to (or perhaps even getting further away from) the truth”, then of course you would observe exactly what you say you observe, yes?
And yet it would, in this scenario, be very bad if you self-selected into discussions where everyone had (it would seem to you) an easy time “sharing interpretive labor”, where you routinely made (or so you would think) plenty of “intellectual progress”, etc.
No doubt you disagree with this view of things. But on what basis? How can you tell that this isn’t what’s happening?
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.”
Thanks (strong-upvoted), this is a pretty good psychoanalysis of me; I really appreciate it. I have some thoughts about it which I will explain in the remainder of this comment, but I wouldn’t particularly expect you to read or reply to it unless it’s interesting to you; I agree that it makes sense for you to not expend patience and effort on people you don’t think are worth it.
fending off attempts to validate or encode any kind of standard or minimum bar of politeness [...] trauma-response type overreaction. [...] two separate essays
Given that my traumatic history makes me extremely wary that attempts to validate or encode any kind of standard or minimum bar of politeness will in practice be weaponized to shut down intellectually substantive discussions, I think it makes sense for me to write critical essays in response to such attempts? It’s true that someone without my traumatic history probably wouldn’t have thought of the particular arguments I did. But having thought of the arguments, they seemed like a legitimate response to the text that was published.
The reason this sits okay with my conscience is because I think I apply it symmetrically. If someone else’s traumatic history makes them motivated to come up with novel counterarguments to text that I published, I think that’s great: if the counterarguments are good, then I learn something, and if the counterarguments are bad, then that’s how I know I did a good job (that even someone motivated to find fault with my work, couldn’t come up with anything good).
The reason I keep saying “the text” rather than “my views” is because I don’t think my readers are under an obligation to assume that I’m not being megadumb, because sometimes I am being megadumb, and I think that insisting readers exert effort to think of reasons why I’m not, would be bad for my intellectual development.
Here, I think I have a very strong case that you were strawmanning me when you complained about “the implicit assertion [...] that because Zack can’t think of a way to make [two things] compatible, they simply aren’t.” You can’t seriously have thought that I would endorse “if Zack can’t think of a way, there is no way” as a statement of my views!
But it didn’t seem intellectually productive to try prosecute that as violation of anti-strawmanning norms.
In the next paragraph, you contest my claim that disagreements imply distrust of the other’s epistemic process, offering “because you think they’ve seen different evidence, or haven’t processed that evidence yet” as counterexamples.
And that’s a totally legitimate criticism of the text I published! Sometimes people just haven’t talked enough to resolve a disagreement, and my post was wrong to neglect that case as if it were unimportant or could go without saying. In my reply to you, I asked if inserting the word “persistent” (persistent disagreement) would suffice to address the objection, but on further thought, I don’t think that’s good enough; I think that whole section could use a rewrite to be clearer. I might not get around to it, but if I do, I’ll thank you in a footer note.
And just—this is how I think intellectual discourse works: I post things; people try to point out why the things I posted were megadumb; sometimes they’re right, and I learn things. Sometimes I think people are strawmanning me, and that’s annoying, but I usually don’t try to prosecute it except in the most egregious cases, because I don’t think it’s feasible to clamp down on strawmanning without shutting out legitimate objections that I just don’t understand yet.
if they explicitly claimed “what Rob/Duncan recommends will degrade to this in practice, and thus discussing the strawman is material,”
That sounds like a great idea for a third essay! (Talking about how I’m worried about how things like your Fifth Guideline or Rob’s ninth element will be degraded in practice, rather than arguing with the text of the guidelines themselves.) Thanks! I almost certainly won’t get around to writing this (having lots of more important things to do in 2023), but if I ever do, I’ll be sure to thank you for the idea in the footer.
He’s digging in his heels on this one
The reason I’m digging in my heels is because I perceive a legitimate interest in defending my socially-legitimized right to sometimes say, “That’s crazy” (as a claim about the territory) rather than “I think that’s crazy” (as a claim about my map). I don’t think I say this particularly often, and sometimes I say it in error, but I do think it needs to be sayable.
Again, the reason this sits okay with my conscience is because I think I apply it symmetrically: I also think people should have the socially-legitimized right to tell me “That’s crazy” when they think I’m being crazy, even though it can hurt to be on the receiving end of that.
An illustrative anecdote: Michael Vassar is even more abrasive than I am, in a way that has sometimes tested my ideal of being thick-skinned. I once told him that I might be better at taking his feedback if he could “try to be gentler sometimes, hopefully without sacrificing clarity.”
But in my worldview, it was important that that was me making a selfish request of him, asking him to accomodate my fragility. I wouldn’t claim that it was in his overall interests to update his overall language heuristics to suit me. Firstly, because how would I know that? And secondly, because even if I were in a position to know that, that wouldn’t be my real reason for telling him.
The reason I’m digging in my heels is because I perceive a legitimate interest in defending my socially-legitimized right to sometimes say, “That’s crazy” (as a claim about the territory) rather than “I think that’s crazy” (as a claim about my map). I don’t think I say this particularly often, and sometimes I say it in error, but I do think it needs to be sayable.
The problem is, you are an extremely untrustworthy judge of the difference between things being crazy in the actual territory versus them being crazy in your weird skewed triggered perceptions, and you should know this about yourself.
I agree 100% that sometimes things are crazy, and that when they are crazy it’s right and proper to label them as such. “This is crazy” and “this seems crazy to me” are different statements, with different levels of confidence attached, just as “you are lying” and “it seems like you’re lying” are different statements. This is how words work, in practice; if you expose similar populations to “X is lying” and “X seems like they’re lying” the two populations will come away with reliably different impressions.
Your speech, though, erodes and invalidates this distinction; you say “X is crazy” when the actual claim you’re justified to make is “X seems crazy to me.” You are sufficiently blind to the distinction that you even think that me saying “treat these statements differently” is me generically trying to forbid you from saying one of them.
I’m not asking you to stop saying true things, I’m asking you to stop lying, where by lying I mean making statements that are conveniently overconfident. When you shot from the hip with your “this is insane” comment at me, you were lying, or at the very least culpably negligent and failing to live up to local epistemic hygiene norms. “This sounds crazy to me” would have been true.
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.”)
I agree that it often makes sense to write “This seems X to me” rather than “This is X” to indicate uncertainty or that the people I’m talking to are likely to disagree.
you even think that me saying “treat these statements differently” is me generically trying to forbid you from saying one of them.
Thanks for clarifying that you’re not generically trying to forbid me from saying one of them. I appreciate it.
When you shot from the hip with your “this is insane” comment at me, you were [...] culpably negligent
I guess I meant “as it applies here, specifically”, given that Zack was already criticizing himself for that specific thing, and arguing for rather than against politeness norms in the specific place that I commented. I’m aware that you guys haven’t been getting along too well and wouldn’t expect agreement more generally, though I hadn’t been following closely.
It looks like you put some work and emotional energy into this comment so I don’t want to just not respond, but it also seems like this whole thing is upsetting enough that you don’t really want to be having these discussions. I’m going to err on the side of not getting into any object level response that you might not want, but if you want to know how to get along with Zach and not find it infuriating I think I do understand his perspective (having found myself in similar shoes) well enough to explain how you can do it.
It is as if Zack sees, in the claim “hey, ‘this seems insane to me’ is both truer and more effective than ‘this is insane’, you should consider updating your overall language heuristics to account for this delta across all sorts of utterances” an attempt to imprison or brainwash him, much like the more stringent objections to pronoun preferences …
Isn’t it, though?
Probabilistically speaking, I mean. Usually, when people say such things (“you should consider updating your overall language heuristics”, etc.) to you, they are in fact your enemies, and the game-theoretically correct response is disproportionate hostility.
Now, that’s “usually”, and not “always”; and such things are in any case a matter of degree; and there are different classes of “enemies”; and “disproportionate hostility” may have various downsides, dictated by circumstances; and there are other caveats besides.
But, at the very least, you cannot truthfully claim that the all-caps sort of hostile response is entirely irrational in such cases—that it can only be caused by “a trauma-response type overreaction” (or something similar).
There probably exists a word or phrase for the disingenuous maneuver Said is making, here, of pretending as if we’re not talking about interactions between me and Zack and Rob (or more broadly, interactions between individuals in the filtered bubble of LessWrong, with the explicit context of arguing about norms within that highly filtered bubble) and acting as if just straightforwardly importing priors and strategies from [the broader internet] or [people in general] is reasonable.
Probably, but I’m not calling it to mind as easily as I’m calling the word “strawmanning,” which is what’s happening in Said’s last paragraph, where he pretends as if I had claimed that the all-caps sort of hostile response was entirely irrational in such cases, so as to make it seem like his assertion to the contrary is pushing back on my point.
(Strawmanning being where you pretend that your interlocutor said something sillier than they did, or that what they said is tantamount to something silly, so that you can easily knock it down; in this case, he’s insinuating that I made a much bolder claim than I actually did, since that bolder claim is easier to object to than what I actually said.)
I gave Zack the courtesy of explicitly informing him that I was done interacting with him directly; I haven’t actually done that with Said so I’ll do it here:
I find that interacting with Said is overwhelmingly net negative; most of what he seems to me to do is sit back and demand that his conversational partners connect every single dot for him, doing no work himself while he nitpicks with the entitlement of a spoiled princeling. I think his mode of engagement is super unrewarding and makes a supermajority of the threads he participates in worse, by dint of draining away all the energy and recursively proliferating non-cruxy rabbitholes. It has never once felt cooperative or collaborative; I can make twice the intellectual progress with half the effort with a randomly selected LWer. I do not care to spend any more energy whatsoever correcting the misconceptions that he is extremely skilled at producing, ad infinitum, and I shan’t do so any longer; he’s welcome to carry on being however confused or wrong he wants to be about the points I’m making; I don’t find his confusion to be a proxy for any of the audiences whose understanding I care about.
(I will not consider it rude or offensive or culturally incorrect for people to downvote this comment! It’s not necessarily the-kind-of-comment I want to see more of on LW, either, but downvoted or not I feel it’s worth saying once.)
… pretending as if we’re not talking about interactions between me and Zack and Rob (or more broadly, interactions between individuals in the filtered bubble of LessWrong, with the explicit context of arguing about norms within that highly filtered bubble) and acting as if just straightforwardly importing priors and strategies from [the broader internet] or [people in general] is reasonable
But why do you say that I’m pretending this…? I don’t think that I’ve said anything like this—have I?
(Also, of course, I think you somewhat underestimate the degree to which importing priors from the broader internet and/or people in general is reasonable…)
… pretends as if I had claimed that the all-caps sort of hostile response was entirely irrational in such cases, so as to make it seem like his assertion to the contrary is pushing back on my point
Sorry, what? Were you not intending to suggest that such a response is irrational…? That was my understanding of what you wrote. On a reread, I don’t see what other interpretation might be reasonable.
[the dumbest and least-charitable interpretations of me and Rob recommending “maybe don’t be a total dick?”]
This is an extremely tendentious summary of the posts in question.
I find it very implausible to suppose that you’ve never encountered the sort of thing where someone says “all we’re saying is don’t be a dick, man”, but what they’re actually saying is something much more specific and also much more objectionable. Such things are a staple of modern political discourse on these here interwebs.
Well, now you’re doing it, and it’s no less dishonest when you do it than when random armchair feminists on Twitter do it. Surely this sort of distortion is not necessary.
I don’t see us all as in clear agreement; I think we’re at least somewhat in nominal agreement but I have found Zack to be … I don’t mean this as a contentless insult, I mean it as a literal attempt-to-model … irrationally fixated on being anti-polite, and desperately fending off attempts to validate or encode any kind of standard or minimum bar of politeness.
By “irrationally” I mean that he seems to me to do so by irresistible reflex, with substantial compulsion/motive force, even when the resulting outcome is unambiguously contra his explicitly stated goals or principles.
To put things in Zack’s terminology, you could say that he’s (apparently) got some kind of self-reinforcing algorithmic intent to be abrasive and off-putting and over-emphatic. Even where more reserved language would be genuinely truer, less misleading to the audience, and more in line with clear and precise word usage (all goals which Zack ostensibly ranks pretty high in the priority list), there’s (apparently) some kind of deep psychological pressure that reliably steers him in the other direction, and makes him vehemently object to putting forth the (often pretty minimal) effort required.
Similarly, even where marginally more polite language would be predictably and substantially more effective at persuading his audience of the truth of some point, or updating social consensus in his preferred direction, he (apparently) cannot help himself; cannot bear to do it; responds with a fervor that resembles the fervor of people trying to repel actual oppression. It is as if Zack sees, in the claim “hey, ‘this seems insane to me’ is both truer and more effective than ‘this is insane’, you should consider updating your overall language heuristics to account for this delta across all sorts of utterances” an attempt to imprison or brainwash him, much like the more stringent objections to pronoun preferences (“you can’t MAKE ME SEE A WOMAN WHERE I SEE A MAN, GTFO OF MY HEAD, THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!”). On the surface, it has a lot in common with a trauma-response type overreaction.
This aspect of Zack’s behavior seems to me to be beyond his control; it has enough motive force that e.g. he has now been inspired to write two separate essays taking [the dumbest and least-charitable interpretations of me and Rob recommending “maybe don’t be a total dick?”] and then railing against those strawmen, at length.
(I would have a different reaction if either of Zack’s so-called responses were self-aware about it, e.g. if they explicitly claimed “what Rob/Duncan recommends will degrade to this in practice, and thus discussing the strawman is material,” or something like that. Zack does give a little lip-service to the idea that he might not have properly caught our points, saying stuff like ~”I mean, maybe they meant something not megadumb, but if so I’m utterly incapable of figuring out what” but does not evince any kind of Actual Effort to think along lines of “okay okay but if it were me who was missing something, and they had a real point, what might it be?” This lack of any willingness to put forth such effort is a major part of why I don’t bother with effortfully and patiently deconfusing him anymore; if someone’s just really lost then I’m often willing to help but if they’re really lost and insisting that what I’m saying is badwrongdumbcrazy then I tend to lose interest in helping them connect the dots.)
Even in Zack’s apology above, he’s basically saying “I won’t do this to you, Duncan, anymore, because you’ll push back enough to make me regret it, but I refuse to entertain the possibility that maybe there’s a generally applicable lesson for me, here.” He’s digging in his heels on this one; his mistakes repeat themselves and resist correction and reliably steer him in a consistent direction. There’s something here that uses Zack as its puppet and mouthpiece, as opposed to some source of motive energy which Zack uses in pursuit of his CEV.
FYI, having recently stated “man I think Duncan and Zack should be seeing themselves more as allies”, I do want to note I agree pretty strongly with this characterization. I think Zack probably also agrees with the above during his more self-aware moments, but often not in the middle of a realtime discussion.
I do think Zack should see this fact about himself as a fairly major flaw according to his own standards, although it’s not obvious to me that the correct priority for him should be “fixing the surface-visible-part of the flaw”, and I don’t know what would actually be helpful.
My reasoning for still thinking it’s sad for Zack/Duncan to not see each other more as allies routes primarily through what I think ‘allyship’ should mean, given the practicalities of the resources available in the world. I think the people who are capable of advancing the art of rationality are weird and spiky and often come with weird baggage, and… man, sorry those are the only people around, it’s a very short list, if you wanna advance the art of rationality you need to figure out some way of dealing with that (When I reflect a bit, I don’t actually think Duncan should necessarily be doing anything different here, I think not engaging with people who are obnoxious to deal with is fine. Upon reflection I’m mostly sad about the The Relational Stance here, and idk, maybe that just doesn’t matter)
...
(Also, I think the crux Zack lists in his other recent reply is probably also pretty close to a real crux between him and Duncan, although not as much of a crux between Zack and me)
I also think it’s sad that Duncan and I apparently can’t be allies (for my part, I like a lot of Duncan’s work and am happy to talk with him), but I think there’s a relevant asymmetry.
When my weird baggage leaks into my attempted rationality lessons, I think there’s a corrective mechanism insofar as my weird baggage pushes me to engage with my critics even when I think they’re being motivatedly dumb: if I get something wrong, gjm will probably tell you about it. Sometimes I don’t have time to reply, but I will never, ever ban gjm from commenting on my posts, or insist that he pre-emptively exert effort trying to think of reasons that he’s the one who’s missing something, or complain that interacting with him doesn’t feel cooperative or collaborative.
When Duncan’s weird baggage leaks into his attempted rationality lessons, I think there’s much less of a corrective mechanism insofar as Duncan feels free to ban critics that he thinks are being motivatedly dumb. If Duncan’s judgements about this are correct, he saves a lot of time and emotional energy that he can spend doing other things. (I’m a bit jealous.) But if his judgements are ever wrong, he loses a chance to discover his mistakes.
Of course, I would say that! (The two paragraphs I just typed were clearly generated from my ideology; someone else with a different way of thinking might be able to think of reasons why I’m wrong, that I can’t see by myself.)
If you do, I hope you’ll let me know in the comments!
This whole comment is a psy-op. It was a mistake for me to leave a comment up above in the first place, and I came to my senses and deleted it literally less than a minute after I hit “enter,” but that didn’t stop Zack from replying twenty minutes later and now we have a thread so fine, whatever.
When Zack’s weird baggage leaks into his attempted rationality lessons, he calls people insane and then writes multi-thousand-word screeds based on his flawed interpretations, which he magnanimously says the other person is perfectly welcome to correct! leaving people the following options:
Spend hours and hours of their scant remaining lifetimes laboriously correcting the thousand-yard sprint he already took down the wrong trailhead, or
Leave his uncanny valley misinterpretation there, unaddressed, where it will forever anchor subsequent interpretations, pulling them toward an attractor, and also make the author seem churlish or suspiciously unable-to-rebut (which lends his interpretation further apparent strength)
… which makes being here exhausting and intolerable.
Zack could, of course, just not do this. It’s entirely within his power! He could (for instance), when he forms a knee-jerk interpretation of someone else’s statement that he finds crazy or upsetting, simply ask whether that was the interpretation the author intended, before charging full-steam ahead with a preemptive critique or rebuttal.
(You know, the way you would if you were here to collaborate, and had a shred of respect for your interlocutors.)
This is even easier! It requires less effort! It doesn’t require e.g. being charitable, which for some reason Zack would rather die than do.
But Zack does not do this, because, for whatever reason, Zack values [preserving his god-given right to be a jump-to-conclusions asshole] over things like that. He’ll claim to be sad about our inability to communicate well, but he’s not actually sad enough to cut it out, or even just cut back a little.
(I think it’s wise to be suspicious of people who claim to feel an emotion like sorrow or regret, but do not behave in the ways that someone-feeling-sorrow or someone-feeling-regret would behave; often they have mislabeled something in their experience.)
After cutting him more slack than I cut anybody else for months, the essay where I finally gave up was clearly a partial draft posted by mistake (it petered out after two sections into random fragments and bullet points and scraps of unconnected paragraphs), and it literally said, at the top, sentences to the effect of “these initial short summaries allow for multiple interpretations, some of which I do not intend; please do not shoot off an objection before reading the expansion below, where that interpretation might already have been addressed.”
But within mere minutes, Zack, willfully ignoring that straightforward request, ignoring the obvious incomplete nature of the essay, and ignoring the text wherein his objection was, in fact, addressed, shot off a comment saying that what I was recommending was insane, and then knocking over a strawman.
This was not an aberrant event. It was typical. It was one more straw on the camel’s back. The most parsimonious explanation for why Zack does this instead of any number of more productive moves is that Zack wants his interlocutors to be wrong, so that Zack can be the one to go “look! Look!” and everyone will appreciate how clever he was in pointing out the hole in the argument. He wants me to be wrong badly enough that he’ll distort my point however far he needs to in order to justify writing an essay allegedly “in response.”
(I’m perfectly free to correct him! All I have to do is let him take my hours and my spoons hostage!)
And given that, and given that I eventually could not stand his counterproductive anti-epistemic soul-sucking time wastery any longer, he has the temerity to insinuate that he’s morally superior because he’d never block anyone, no, sir. Or that it’s my fault that we don’t have a line of communication, because he’s happy to talk with me.
FUCK.
Enjoy your sanctimony. You are choosing to make the world worse.
Thanks for your thoughts. (Strong-upvoted.)
Yes, that December 2021 incident was over the line. I’m sorry. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t done that—but if I had taken a few more moments to think, I would have been able to see it without retrospect. That was really stupid of me, and it made things worse for both of us.
You’re also correct to notice that the bad behavior that I don’t endorse on reflection can be seen as a more extreme version of milder behavior that I do endorse on reflection. (Thus the idiom “over the line”, suggesting that things that don’t go over the line are OK.) I wish I had been smart enough to only do the mild version, and never overshoot into the extreme version.
Are you referring to the paragraph that begins, “If two people disagree, it’s tempting for them to attempt to converge with each other [...]”? In a comment to Phil H., I explained why that paragraph didn’t satisfy me. (Although, as I acknowledged to Phil, it’s plausible that I should have quoted and acknowledged that paragraph in my post, to make it clearer to readers what you weren’t saying; I’ll probably do so if I get around to revising the post.)
If you’re not referring to that paragraph, I’m not sure where you think my objection has been addressed.
(I think I would have noticed if that paragraph had been in the December 2021 version, but if you say it was, I’ll take your word for it—which would imply that my December 2021 behavior was even worse than I’ve already admitted; I owe you a much bigger apology in that case.)
I agree that this is an unpleasant dilemma for an author to face, but to me, it seems like an inextricable feature of intellectual life? Sometimes, other authors have a perspective contrary to yours that they argue for in public, and they might sometimes refer to your writings in the course of arguing for their perspective. I don’t see any “policy” solution here.
Why isn’t this relevantly similar to what Said does, though?
I’m worried that your preferred norms make it way too easy for an author to censor legitimate criticisms. If the critic does too little interpretive labor (just asking questions and expecting the author to be able to answer, like Said), the author can dismiss them for not trying hard enough. If the critic does too much interpretive labor (writing multi-thousand word posts explaining in detail what they think the problem is, without necessarily expecting the author to have time to reply, like me), the author can dismiss them for attacking a strawman.
I imagine you don’t agree with that characterization, but I hope you can see why it looks like a potential problem to me?
I’m not always here to collaborate. Sometimes I’m here to criticize. I endorse this on reflection.
I mean, I respect some of your work. For two concrete examples, I link to “In My Culture” sometimes, and I think “Split and Commit” is a useful reminder to try to live in multiple possible worlds instead of assuming that your “max likelihood” map is equal to the territory. (I think I need to practice this one more.)
But more generally, when people think they’re entitled to my respect rather than having to earn it, that does, actually, make me respect them less than I otherwise would. That might be what you’re picking up on when you perceive that I don’t have a shred of respect for my interlocutors?
That’s a good observation, thanks. I think the thing I initially labeled as “sad” is really just … wishing we weren’t in this slapfight?
I would prefer to live in one of the possible worlds where you either addressed my objections, or silently ignored my posts, or said that you thought my posts were bad in ways that you didn’t have the time to explain but without suggesting I’m culpable of strawmanning without specifically pointing to what I’m getting wrong.
Since you did try to hold me culpable, I had an interest in responding to that … and here we are. This seems like a bad possible world to live in. I think it’s unpleasant for both of us, and I think it’s wasting a lot of time that both of us could spend doing more productive things.
I could have avoided this outcome by not writing posts about my objections to your Fifth Guideline or Rob’s Ninth Element … but then the Fifth Guideline and the Ninth Element would have been accepted into the local culture unchallenged. That would be a problem for me. I think it was worth my effort try to prevent that outcome, even though it resulted in this outcome, which is unpleasant and expensive.
I think that’s what I meant by “sad”, in more words.
… I think I’m going to bite this bullet? Yes, I sometimes take pride and pleasure in criticizing work that I think is importantly mistaken. The reason this sits okay with my conscience is because I think I apply it symmetrically (I think it’s fine if someone gets excited about poking holes in my arguments), and because I think the combination of me and the community is pretty good at distinguishing good criticisms from bad criticisms.
I don’t think it’s personal. As you’ve noticed, I’m hyper-sensitive to attempts to validate or encode any kind of standard or minimum bar of politeness, because I’m viscerally terrified of what I think they’ll degrade to in practice. You’ll notice that I also argued against Rob’s Ninth Element, not just your Fifth Guideline. It’s not about Rob. It’s not about you. It’s about protecting my interests.
We’re definitely steering the world in different directions. It looks like some of the things I think are net-positive (having more good aspects than bad aspects) are things that you think are net-negative, which puts us in conflict sometimes. That’s unfortunate.
It was. That’s why I was (and remain) so furious with you (Edit: and also am by default highly mistrustful of your summaries of others’ positions).
Thanks for telling me (strong-upvoted). That makes sense as a reason for you to be furious with me. As the grandparent says, I owe you a bigger apology than my previous apology, which appears below.
I hereby apologize for my blog comment of 4 December 2021, on an earlier revision of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”. In addition to the reasons that it was a bad comment in context that I listed in my previous apology, it was also a bad comment for failing to acknowledge that the text of the post contained a paragraph addressing the comment’s main objection, which is a much more serious error. I am embarrassed at my negligence. To avoid such errors in the future, I will endeavor to take some time to emotionally cool down and read more carefully before posting a comment, when I notice that I’m tempted to post a comment while emotionally activated.
If you’d like me to post a variation of this in a more prominent location (like Facebook or Twitter), I’d be willing to do that. (I think I’d want to spend a few more minutes to rewrite the lesser reasons that the comment was bad in context as its own sentence, rather than linking to the previous apology.)
I don’t know what to say in response. Empirically, this apology did zero to reduce the extremely strong deterrent of “God dammit, if I try to post something on LessWrong, one way or another Zack and Said are going to find a way to make that experience miserable and net negative,” which, in combination with the energy that this thread burned up, has indeed resulted in me not posting, where counterfactually I would’ve posted three essays.
(I’m only here now because you’re bumping the threads.)
(Like, there are three specific, known essays that I have not posted, because of my expectations coming off of this thread and the chilling effect of “I’ll have to deal with Zack and Said’s responses.”)
(Also the reason my Basics post ended up being so long-winded was because, after my experience with the partial draft going up by mistake, I was trying quite hard to leave a future Zack no ways to make me regret publishing/no exposed surfaces upon which I could be attacked. I ended up putting in about 20 extra hours because of my past experience with you, which clearly did not end up paying off; I underestimated just how motivated you would be to adversarially interpret and twist things around.)
I tried blocking, and that wasn’t enough to get you to leave me alone.
Sounds like you win.
Literally only you and Said have these twin problems (among long-lasting prolific LW participants). This is you saying “but but but if you claim ZERO is too little and a BILLION is too much, then how is there any room for legitimate criticism to exist?”
It’s somewhere between zero and a billion, like every other person on LessWrong manages to do just fine all the time.
Late edit: we have a term for this thing; it’s called “fallacy of the grey.”
I think it’s important to note survivorship bias here; I think there are other people who used to post on LessWrong and do not anymore, and perhaps this was because of changes in norms like this one.[1] It also seems somewhat likely to me that Said and Zack think that there’s too little legitimate criticism on LW. (I often see critical points by Zack or Said that I haven’t yet seen made by others and which I agree with; are they just faster or are they counterfactual? I would guess the latter, at least some of the time.)
As well, Zack’s worry is that even if the guideline is written by people who have a sense that criticism should be between 4 and 12, establishing the rule with user-chosen values (like, for example, LW has done for a lot of post moderation) will mean there’s nothing stopping someone from deciding that criticism has to be above 8 and below 6; if it will be obvious to you when some other post author has adopted that standard, and you’ll call them out on it in a way that protects Zack’s ability to criticize them, that seems like relevant info from Zack’s perspective.
(From this comment I instead have a sense that your position is “look, we’re over here playing a game with everyone who understands these rules, and Zack and Said don’t, which means they should stop playing our game.”)
[1] To be clear, I don’t miss everyone who has stopped posting on LW; the hope with rules and guidelines like this is that you filter well. I think that, to the extent you’re trying to make the case that Said and Zack should shape their behavior or leave / not comment on your posts (and other people should feel social cover to block them from commenting as well), you should expect them to take exception to the rules that would cause them to change the most, and it’s not particularly fair to request that they hold the debate over what rules should apply under your rules instead of neutral rules.
I don’t think I am making this request.
I do strongly predict that if I made free to verbally abuse Zack in the same fashion Zack verbally abuses others, I would be punished more for it, in part because people would be like “well, yeah, but Zack just kinda is like that; you should do better, Duncan” and in part because people would be like “DUDE, Zack had a traumatic experience with the medical system, you calling him insane is WAY WORSE than calling someone else insane” and “well, if you’re not gonna follow your own discourse rules, doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?”
It’s an asymmetric situation that favors the assholes; people tend not to notice “oh, Duncan rearmed with these weapons he advocates disarming because his interlocutors refused to join the peace treaty.”
Sure, I buy that any functional garden doesn’t just punish hypocrisy, but also failing to follow the rules of the garden, which I’m imputing as a motivation for your second and third paragraphs. (I also buy that lots of “let people choose how to be” approaches favor assholes.)
But… I think there’s some other message in them, that I can’t construct correctly? It seems to me like we’re in a broader cultural environment where postmodern dissolution of moral standards means the only reliable vice to attack others for is hypocrisy. I see your second and third paragraphs as, like, a mixture of disagreeing with this (‘I should not be criticized for hypocrisy as strongly as I predict I would be if I were hypocritical’) and maybe making a counteraccusation of hypocrisy (‘if there were evenly applied standards of conduct, I would be protected from Zack’s misbehavior, but as is I am prevented from attacking Zack but the reverse is not true’).
But I don’t think I really agree with either of those points, as I understand them. I do think hypocrisy is a pretty strong argument against the proposed rules, and also that double standards can make sense (certainly I try to hold LW moderators to higher standards than LW users).
I’m saying:
“I’d like for us to not have a culture wherein it’s considered perfectly kosher to walk around responding to other users’ posts with e.g. ‘This is insane’ without clearing a pretty high bar of, y’know, the thing actually being insane. To the extent that Zack is saying ‘hey, it’s fine, you can verbally abuse me, too!’ this is not a viable solution.”
Fortunately, it seems that LessWrong generally agrees; both my suggested norms and Robbie’s suggested norms were substantially more popular than either of Zack’s weirdly impassioned defenses-of-being-a-jerk.
I guess I don’t know what you mean by “neutral norms” if you don’t mean either “the norms Duncan’s proposing, that are in line with what Julia Galef and Scott Alexander and Dan Keys and Eric Rogstad and Oliver Habryka and Vaniver and so on and so forth would do by default,” or “the norms Zack is proposing, in which you act like a dick and defend it by saying ‘it’s important to me that I be able to speak plainly and directly.’”
I endorse this observation.
No, I’m not saying Zack and Said should stop playing the game, I’m saying they should stop being sanctimonious about their inability to do what the vast majority of people have a pretty easy time doing (“checking interpretations” and “sharing any of the interpretive labor at all”, respectively).
I would be surprised to hear you claim that the valid critical points that Zack and Said make are contingent on them continuing to do the shitty things of (respectively) leaping to conclusions about A definitely implying B, or refusing to believe that A implies A until someone logically proves A→A. The times I’ve seen Zack and Said being useful or perceptive were when they weren’t doing these useless and unproductive moves, but rather just saying what they thought.
When Zack says what he thinks, instead of going “hey, everybody, look how abhorrent my strawman of Rob’s position is!” and trying to trick everyone into thinking that was Rob’s position and that he is the sole bastion of epistemic virtue holding back the tides of evil, it’s often useful.
When Said says what he thinks, instead of demanding that people rigorously define “sky,” “blue,” and “is” before allowing the conversation to move on from the premise “the sky is blue today,” it’s often useful.
There’s absolutely nothing that Zack is currently accomplishing that couldn’t have been accomplished if he’d first written a comment to Rob saying “did you mean X?”
He could’ve even gone off and drafted his post while waiting on an answer; it needn’t have even delayed his longer rant, if Rob failed to reply.
Acting like a refusal to employ that bare minimum of social grace is a virtue is bullshit, and I think Zack acts like it is. If you’re that hostile to your fellow LWers, then I think you are making a mistake being here.
It’s not that I think refusing to employ the bare minimum of social grace is a virtue. It’s that I wasn’t aware—in fact, am still not aware—that confirming interpretations with the original author before publishing a critical essay constitutes the bare minimum of social grace. The idea that it’s somehow bad behavior for intellectuals to publish essays about other intellectuals’ essays without checking with the original author first is something I’ve never heard before; I think unilaterally publishing critical essays is a completely normal thing that intellectuals do all the time, and I see no particular reason for self-identified “rationalist” intellectuals to behave any differently.
For an arbitrary example from our local subculture, Yudkowsky once wrote “A Reply to Francois Chollet” criticizing Chollet’s essay on the purported impossibility of an intelligence explosion. Did Yudkowsky first write an email to Chollet saying “did you mean X”? I don’t know, but I would guess not; if Chollet stands by the text he published, and Yudkowsky doesn’t feel uncertain about how to interpret the text, it’s not clear how either of their interests would be served by Yudkowsky sending an email first rather than just publishing the post.
As far as my own work goes, “Aiming for Convergence” and “‘Physicist Motors’” aren’t the first times I’ve written reaction posts to popular Less Wrong posts that I didn’t like. Previously, I wrote “Relevance Norms” in reaction to Chris Leong (following John Nerst) on contextualizing vs. decoupling norms, and “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think” in reaction to Yudkowsky on meta-honesty.
I’ve also written other commentary posts that said some critical things about an article, without being so negative overall, such as “Comment on ‘Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization’” (reacting to an article by University of California–Irvine professors James Weatherall and Cailin O’Connor) and “Comment on ‘Propositions Concerning Digital Minds and Society’” (reacting to an article by Nick Bostrom and Carl Shulman).
I didn’t check with Leong beforehand. I didn’t check with Yudkowsky beforehand. I didn’t check with Weatherall or O’Connor or Bostrom or Shulman beforehand. No one told me I should have checked with Leong or Yudkowsky or Weatherall or O’Connor or Bostrom or Shulman beforehand. It’s just never been brought up as a problem or an offense before, ever.
Most of these authors are much more important people than me who are probably very busy. If someone had told me I should have checked with the authors beforehand, I think I would have said, “Wouldn’t that be disrespectful of their time?”
I do often notify the author after I’ve published a reaction piece. In the case of the current post, I unfortunately neglected to do so, but after seeing your comment, I did reach out to Rob, and he left a few comments. Notably, in response to my comment about my motivations for writing this post, Rob writes:
This would seem to be pretty strong counterevidence against the claim that I failed to employ the bare minimum of social grace (at least as that minimum is construed by Rob himself)?
My objection to this sort of claim is basically the same as my objection to this, from an earlier comment of yours:
And similar to my objection in a much earlier discussion (which I can’t seem to find now, apologies) about Double Crux (I think), wherein (I am summarizing from memory) you said that you have usually been able to easily explain and apply the concept when teaching it to people in person, as a CFAR instructor; to which I asked how you could distinguish between your interlocutor/student really understanding you, vs. the social pressure of the situation (the student/teacher frame, your personal charisma, etc.) causing them, perhaps, to persuade themselves that they’ve understood, when in fact they have not.
In short, the problem is this:
If “sharing interpretive labor”, “making intellectual progress”, etc., just boils down to “agreeing with you, without necessarily getting any closer to (or perhaps even getting further away from) the truth”, then of course you would observe exactly what you say you observe, yes?
And yet it would, in this scenario, be very bad if you self-selected into discussions where everyone had (it would seem to you) an easy time “sharing interpretive labor”, where you routinely made (or so you would think) plenty of “intellectual progress”, etc.
No doubt you disagree with this view of things. But on what basis? How can you tell that this isn’t what’s happening?
I object to this characterization, which is inaccurate and tendentious.
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.”
Thanks (strong-upvoted), this is a pretty good psychoanalysis of me; I really appreciate it. I have some thoughts about it which I will explain in the remainder of this comment, but I wouldn’t particularly expect you to read or reply to it unless it’s interesting to you; I agree that it makes sense for you to not expend patience and effort on people you don’t think are worth it.
Given that my traumatic history makes me extremely wary that attempts to validate or encode any kind of standard or minimum bar of politeness will in practice be weaponized to shut down intellectually substantive discussions, I think it makes sense for me to write critical essays in response to such attempts? It’s true that someone without my traumatic history probably wouldn’t have thought of the particular arguments I did. But having thought of the arguments, they seemed like a legitimate response to the text that was published.
The reason this sits okay with my conscience is because I think I apply it symmetrically. If someone else’s traumatic history makes them motivated to come up with novel counterarguments to text that I published, I think that’s great: if the counterarguments are good, then I learn something, and if the counterarguments are bad, then that’s how I know I did a good job (that even someone motivated to find fault with my work, couldn’t come up with anything good).
The reason I keep saying “the text” rather than “my views” is because I don’t think my readers are under an obligation to assume that I’m not being megadumb, because sometimes I am being megadumb, and I think that insisting readers exert effort to think of reasons why I’m not, would be bad for my intellectual development.
As a concrete example of how I react to readers thinking I’m being megadumb, let’s consider your reply to “Aiming for Convergence Is Like Discouraging Betting”.
Here, I think I have a very strong case that you were strawmanning me when you complained about “the implicit assertion [...] that because Zack can’t think of a way to make [two things] compatible, they simply aren’t.” You can’t seriously have thought that I would endorse “if Zack can’t think of a way, there is no way” as a statement of my views!
But it didn’t seem intellectually productive to try prosecute that as violation of anti-strawmanning norms.
In the next paragraph, you contest my claim that disagreements imply distrust of the other’s epistemic process, offering “because you think they’ve seen different evidence, or haven’t processed that evidence yet” as counterexamples.
And that’s a totally legitimate criticism of the text I published! Sometimes people just haven’t talked enough to resolve a disagreement, and my post was wrong to neglect that case as if it were unimportant or could go without saying. In my reply to you, I asked if inserting the word “persistent” (persistent disagreement) would suffice to address the objection, but on further thought, I don’t think that’s good enough; I think that whole section could use a rewrite to be clearer. I might not get around to it, but if I do, I’ll thank you in a footer note.
And just—this is how I think intellectual discourse works: I post things; people try to point out why the things I posted were megadumb; sometimes they’re right, and I learn things. Sometimes I think people are strawmanning me, and that’s annoying, but I usually don’t try to prosecute it except in the most egregious cases, because I don’t think it’s feasible to clamp down on strawmanning without shutting out legitimate objections that I just don’t understand yet.
That sounds like a great idea for a third essay! (Talking about how I’m worried about how things like your Fifth Guideline or Rob’s ninth element will be degraded in practice, rather than arguing with the text of the guidelines themselves.) Thanks! I almost certainly won’t get around to writing this (having lots of more important things to do in 2023), but if I ever do, I’ll be sure to thank you for the idea in the footer.
The reason I’m digging in my heels is because I perceive a legitimate interest in defending my socially-legitimized right to sometimes say, “That’s crazy” (as a claim about the territory) rather than “I think that’s crazy” (as a claim about my map). I don’t think I say this particularly often, and sometimes I say it in error, but I do think it needs to be sayable.
Again, the reason this sits okay with my conscience is because I think I apply it symmetrically: I also think people should have the socially-legitimized right to tell me “That’s crazy” when they think I’m being crazy, even though it can hurt to be on the receiving end of that.
An illustrative anecdote: Michael Vassar is even more abrasive than I am, in a way that has sometimes tested my ideal of being thick-skinned. I once told him that I might be better at taking his feedback if he could “try to be gentler sometimes, hopefully without sacrificing clarity.”
But in my worldview, it was important that that was me making a selfish request of him, asking him to accomodate my fragility. I wouldn’t claim that it was in his overall interests to update his overall language heuristics to suit me. Firstly, because how would I know that? And secondly, because even if I were in a position to know that, that wouldn’t be my real reason for telling him.
The problem is, you are an extremely untrustworthy judge of the difference between things being crazy in the actual territory versus them being crazy in your weird skewed triggered perceptions, and you should know this about yourself.
I agree 100% that sometimes things are crazy, and that when they are crazy it’s right and proper to label them as such. “This is crazy” and “this seems crazy to me” are different statements, with different levels of confidence attached, just as “you are lying” and “it seems like you’re lying” are different statements. This is how words work, in practice; if you expose similar populations to “X is lying” and “X seems like they’re lying” the two populations will come away with reliably different impressions.
Your speech, though, erodes and invalidates this distinction; you say “X is crazy” when the actual claim you’re justified to make is “X seems crazy to me.” You are sufficiently blind to the distinction that you even think that me saying “treat these statements differently” is me generically trying to forbid you from saying one of them.
I’m not asking you to stop saying true things, I’m asking you to stop lying, where by lying I mean making statements that are conveniently overconfident. When you shot from the hip with your “this is insane” comment at me, you were lying, or at the very least culpably negligent and failing to live up to local epistemic hygiene norms. “This sounds crazy to me” would have been true.
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.”)
I agree that it often makes sense to write “This seems X to me” rather than “This is X” to indicate uncertainty or that the people I’m talking to are likely to disagree.
Thanks for clarifying that you’re not generically trying to forbid me from saying one of them. I appreciate it.
Yes, I again agree that that was a bad comment on my part, which I regret.
(Thanks to Vaniver for feedback on an earlier draft of this comment.)
I guess I meant “as it applies here, specifically”, given that Zack was already criticizing himself for that specific thing, and arguing for rather than against politeness norms in the specific place that I commented. I’m aware that you guys haven’t been getting along too well and wouldn’t expect agreement more generally, though I hadn’t been following closely.
It looks like you put some work and emotional energy into this comment so I don’t want to just not respond, but it also seems like this whole thing is upsetting enough that you don’t really want to be having these discussions. I’m going to err on the side of not getting into any object level response that you might not want, but if you want to know how to get along with Zach and not find it infuriating I think I do understand his perspective (having found myself in similar shoes) well enough to explain how you can do it.
Isn’t it, though?
Probabilistically speaking, I mean. Usually, when people say such things (“you should consider updating your overall language heuristics”, etc.) to you, they are in fact your enemies, and the game-theoretically correct response is disproportionate hostility.
Now, that’s “usually”, and not “always”; and such things are in any case a matter of degree; and there are different classes of “enemies”; and “disproportionate hostility” may have various downsides, dictated by circumstances; and there are other caveats besides.
But, at the very least, you cannot truthfully claim that the all-caps sort of hostile response is entirely irrational in such cases—that it can only be caused by “a trauma-response type overreaction” (or something similar).
There probably exists a word or phrase for the disingenuous maneuver Said is making, here, of pretending as if we’re not talking about interactions between me and Zack and Rob (or more broadly, interactions between individuals in the filtered bubble of LessWrong, with the explicit context of arguing about norms within that highly filtered bubble) and acting as if just straightforwardly importing priors and strategies from [the broader internet] or [people in general] is reasonable.
Probably, but I’m not calling it to mind as easily as I’m calling the word “strawmanning,” which is what’s happening in Said’s last paragraph, where he pretends as if I had claimed that the all-caps sort of hostile response was entirely irrational in such cases, so as to make it seem like his assertion to the contrary is pushing back on my point.
(Strawmanning being where you pretend that your interlocutor said something sillier than they did, or that what they said is tantamount to something silly, so that you can easily knock it down; in this case, he’s insinuating that I made a much bolder claim than I actually did, since that bolder claim is easier to object to than what I actually said.)
I gave Zack the courtesy of explicitly informing him that I was done interacting with him directly; I haven’t actually done that with Said so I’ll do it here:
I find that interacting with Said is overwhelmingly net negative; most of what he seems to me to do is sit back and demand that his conversational partners connect every single dot for him, doing no work himself while he nitpicks with the entitlement of a spoiled princeling. I think his mode of engagement is super unrewarding and makes a supermajority of the threads he participates in worse, by dint of draining away all the energy and recursively proliferating non-cruxy rabbitholes. It has never once felt cooperative or collaborative; I can make twice the intellectual progress with half the effort with a randomly selected LWer. I do not care to spend any more energy whatsoever correcting the misconceptions that he is extremely skilled at producing, ad infinitum, and I shan’t do so any longer; he’s welcome to carry on being however confused or wrong he wants to be about the points I’m making; I don’t find his confusion to be a proxy for any of the audiences whose understanding I care about.
(I will not consider it rude or offensive or culturally incorrect for people to downvote this comment! It’s not necessarily the-kind-of-comment I want to see more of on LW, either, but downvoted or not I feel it’s worth saying once.)
But why do you say that I’m pretending this…? I don’t think that I’ve said anything like this—have I?
(Also, of course, I think you somewhat underestimate the degree to which importing priors from the broader internet and/or people in general is reasonable…)
Sorry, what? Were you not intending to suggest that such a response is irrational…? That was my understanding of what you wrote. On a reread, I don’t see what other interpretation might be reasonable.
If you meant something else—clarify?
Thank you for such a crisp, concise demonstration of exactly the dynamic. Goodbye, Said.
This is an extremely tendentious summary of the posts in question.
I find it very implausible to suppose that you’ve never encountered the sort of thing where someone says “all we’re saying is don’t be a dick, man”, but what they’re actually saying is something much more specific and also much more objectionable. Such things are a staple of modern political discourse on these here interwebs.
Well, now you’re doing it, and it’s no less dishonest when you do it than when random armchair feminists on Twitter do it. Surely this sort of distortion is not necessary.