I agree that “Err on the side of ____” is technically worse than “Try to not err”, but I’d argue that it’s just a somewhat sloppy and non-literal way of conveying a valid point.
The way I’d say it if being more careful is to say that “Insufficient and excess stick are both problems, however there is a natural tendency to stick too much. Additionally, excess stick quickly begets excess stick, and if you allow things to go supercritical you can quickly destroy the whole thing, so before acting on an impulse to stick make really sure that you aren’t just succumbing to this bias.”.
Or in other words “Your sights are likely out of alignment, so aim higher than seems appropriate in order to not aim too low in expectation”.
Sometimes “try not to err” will result in predictably worse outcomes than “try to minimize the damage your erring causes, even if that means you are more likely or even certain to err”.
Agreed. You want to “try not to err” in expected value, not in “inches from the bullseye”. Sometimes this means you try to put the center of your distribution offset from the bullseye.
I didn’t see it as the primary point of contention so I didn’t mention it, but you’re right, it’s probably worth pointing out explicitly.
Ideally, I would arrive at my workplace exactly when my shift starts (zero error, zero loss). But if I’m ten minutes late, I get in trouble with my boss (small error, large loss), and if I’m ten minutes early, I read a magazine in the breakroom (small error, small loss). Therefore, I should “err on the side of” leaving early.
That is, the “err on the side of” idiom arises from the conflation of different but related optimization problems. The correct solution to the worker’s full problem (taking into account the asymmetrical costs of arriving early or late) is an incorrect solution to the “being (exactly) on time” problem.
Yes. If my comments are too mean, I might start an unpleasant and unproductive flame war (small error, large loss). If my comments are too nice, they might be slightly less clear than a less nice comment, but nothing dramatically bad like a flame war happens (small error, small loss). Therefore I (arguably) should “err on the side of carrots over sticks.”
If “Elements of Rationalist Discourse”’s Goodwill item had explicitly laid out the logic of asymmetric costs rather than taking “err on the side of” as a primitive, I’d still be skeptical, but this post’s discussion of it wouldn’t be written the same way (and it’s possible that I might not have bothered to write the post at all).
I think what’s more typically going on is that there’s a conflict between people who want to enforce politeness norms and people who want the freedom to be blunt. In venues where the polite faction has the upper hand (by karma voting weight, moderator seats, &c.), blunt people have an incentive to dishonestly claim that writing polite comments is more expensive than it actually is, because polite voters and moderators might be partially swayed by that argument, whereas the polite people would not be sympathetic if the blunt people said what they were actually thinking.
In venues where the polite faction has the upper hand (by karma voting weight, moderator seats, &c.), blunt people have an incentive to dishonestly claim that writing polite comments is more expensive than it actually is, because polite voters and moderators might be partially swayed by that argument, whereas the polite people would not be sympathetic if the blunt people said what they were actually thinking.
Of course this is true, but that doesn’t actually mean that there isn’t, in fact, a cost differential; it only means that claims of such constitute weaker evidence in favor than they would in the absence of such an incentive.
And there are good reasons to believe that the cost differential exists. We may presumably discount (alleged) evidence from introspection, as it’s unreliable for two reasons (unreliability of introspection in the presence of incentives for self-deception; unreliability of reports of introspection, in the presence of incentives for deception). But that’s not all we’ve got. For example, in the linked comment, you write:
Like, it didn’t actually take me very much time to generate the phrase “accountability for alleged harm from simplifications” rather than “pandering to idiots”
This, in the context of disclaiming (indeed, of arguing against) a “cost differential” argument! And yet even there, you didn’t go so far as to claim that it took you zero time to come up with the “nice” wording. (And no surprise there; that would’ve been a quite implausible claim!) Surely these things add up…?
But none of that constitutes the strongest reply to your argument, which is this:
Why do you assume that the only cost is to the comment-writer?
At the very least, “accountability for alleged harm from simplifications” is longer, and more complex, than “pandering to idiots”. It takes more time and effort to read and understand the former than the latter! And the complexity of the former means more chance of misunderstanding. (It’s a persistent delusion, in these parts, that taking more words to explain something, and choosing words more precisely, results in clearer communication.)
And these are only the obvious costs. There are also second-order costs imposed by upholding, rather than subverting, norms which dictate such “nicer” writing…
I’ll go on record as a counterexample here; I very much want politeness norms to be enforced here, and in my personal life I will pay great costs in order to preserve or create my freedom to be blunt. The requirement for me to be cautious of how I say things here is such a significant cost that I post here far less than I otherwise would. The cost is seriously non-insignificant.
The reason I don’t bitch about it is that I recognize that it’s necessary. Changing norms to allow people to be relatively more inconsiderate wouldn’t actually make things better. It’s not just that “pandering to idiots” calls for a euphemism, it’s that it probably calls for a mindset that is not so dismissive to people if they’re going to be in or close enough to your audience to be offended. Like, actually taking them into consideration and figuring out how to bridge that gap. It’s costly. It’s also necessary, and often pays off.
I would like to be able to say “Zack, you stupid twat” without having to worry about getting attacked for doing so, but until I’ve proven to you that I respect you enough that it’s to be taken as an affectionate insult between friends.… phrasing things that way wouldn’t actually accomplish the goals I’d have for “less polite” speech. If I can earn that recognition then there’s probably some flexibility in the norms, and if I can’t earn that recognition or haven’t earned that recognition, then that’s kinda on me.
There does have to be some level at which we stop bending over backwards to spare feelings and just say what’s true [to the best of our ability to tell] dammit, but it actually has to be calibrated to what pushes away only those we’d be happy to create friction with and lose. It’s one of those things where if you don’t actively work to broaden your scope of who you can get along with without poking at, you end up poking too indiscriminately, so I’m happy to see the politeness norms about where they are now.
(Worth noting that I used to spend a great deal of effort and energy on putting up with the headache of wading through Zack’s style, for the occasional worth-it nugget of insight; the moment when that constant expenditure of effort became clearly not worth it anymore was when Zack started off a(n also-otherwise-flawed) critique by just asserting “This is insane.”
Even if it had, in fact, been insane, Zack would’ve been more effective if he’d been willing to bother with even the tiniest of softenings (e.g. “this sounds insane to me,” which, in addition to being socially smoother is also literally more true, as a reflection of the actual state of affairs).
As it was, though, he was just so loudly + overconfidently + rudely wrong that it was enough to kill my last remaining willingness-to-tolerate his consistent lack-of-epistemic-hygiene-masquerading-as-a-preference-for-directness.)
Would it help if I apologized? I do, actually, regret that comment. (As you correctly point out here, it wasn’t effective; it didn’t achieve my goals at all.)
The reason I was reluctant to apologize earlier is because I want to be clear that the honest apology that I can offer has to be relatively narrowly-scoped: I can sincerely apologize specifically for that particular pointlessly rude blog comment, and I can sincerely make an effort to conform to your preferred norms when I’m writing a reply to you specifically (because I know that you specifically don’t like the punchy-attacky style I often use), but I’m not thereby agreeing to change my commenting behavior when talking to people who aren’t you, and I’m not thereby agreeing that your concept of epistemic hygiene is the correct one.
I’m worried that a narrowly-scoped apology will be perceived as insufficient, but I think being explicit about scope is important, because fake apologies don’t help anyone: I only want to say “I’m sorry; I won’t do it again” about the specific things that I’m actually sorry for and actually won’t do again.
So—if it helps—I hereby apologize for my comment of 4 December 2021 on an earlier draft of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”. In context (where the context includes the draft itself being about your preferred discourse norms, the fact that the draft appeared to have been posted prematurely, the fact that the draft had instructions about how readers should read carefully before reacting to any of the summary points, and our previous interactions), it was an unambiguously bad comment, and I should have known better. I’m sorry.
Even if it had, in fact, been insane, Zack would’ve been more effective if he’d been willing to bother with even the tiniest of softenings (e.g. “this sounds insane to me,” which, in addition to being socially smoother is also literally more true, as a reflection of the actual state of affairs).
Softening like this is one of those annoying things i wish we could do away with because it’s smurf naming. Saying that something is insane is literally a claim that I think it’s insane, and it’s only because of naive epistemology that we think some other meaning is possible.
I only started adding softening because Duncan wouldn’t shut up about the lack of smurfs in my comments.
But Duncan’s suggested softening was “this sounds insane to me”, not “I think this is insane”.
Like, consider the dress. We might imagine someone saying any of
“The dress is (white/blue).”
“I think the dress is (white/blue).”
“The dress looks (white/blue) to me.”
I think that in practice (1) and (2) mean different things; on a population level, they’ll be said by people whose internal experiences are different, and they’ll justly be interpreted differently by listeners.
But even if you disagree with that, surely you’d agree that (3) is different? Like, “I think the dress is white but it’s actually blue” is admittedly a kind of weird thing to say, but “the dress looks white to me but it’s actually blue” is perfectly normal, as is ”...but I think it’s actually blue”, or ”...but I don’t know what color it actually is”.
It may be that the dress looks blue to you and also you think it’s actually blue, but these are two importantly different claims!
I would further suggest that if the dress happens to look blue to you, but also you’re aware that it looks blue to a lot of people and white to a lot of people, and you don’t know what’s going on, and you nonetheless believe confidently that the dress is blue, you are doing something wrong. (Even though you happen to be correct, in this instance.)
When it comes to insanity, I think something similar happens. Whether or not something sounds insane to me is different from whether it actually is insane. Knowing that, I can hold in my head ideas like “this sounds insane to me, but I might be misinterpreting the idea, or I might be mistaken when I think some key premise that it rests on is obviously false, or or or… and so it might not be insane”.
And so we might stipulate that Zack’s “this is insane” was no more or less justifiable than “I think this is insane” would have been. But we should acknowledge the possibility that in thinking it insane, he was doing something wrong; and that thinking and saying “this sounds insane to me” while maintaining uncertainty about whether or not it was actually insane would have been more truth-tracking.
My point is that something cannot actually be insane, it can only be insane by some entity’s judgment. Insanity exists in the map, not the territory. In the territory there’s just stuff going on. We’re that ones that decide to call it insane. Maybe that’s because there’s some stable pattern about the world we want to put the label insanity on, and we develop some collective agreement about what things to call insane, but we’re still the ones that do it.
If you take this view, these statements don’t have much difference between them on a fundamental level because “The dress is X” means something like “I assess the dress to be X” since you’re the one speaking and are making this call. We do have things that mean something different, like “I think other people think the dress is X”, but that’s making a different type of claim than your 3 statements, which I see as making essentially the same fundamental claim with minor differences about how its expressed to try to convey something about the process by which you made the claim so that others can understand your epistemic state, which is sometimes useful but you can also just say this more directly with something like “I’m 80% sure the dress is X”.
A big part of what I’m often doing in my head is simulating a room of 100-1000 people listening, and thinking about what a supermajority of them are thinking or concluding.
When you go from e.g. “that sounds insane to me” or “I think that’s crazy” to “that is crazy,” most of what I think is happening is that you’re tapping into something like ”...and 70+ out of 100 neutral observers would agree.”
Ditto with word usage; one can use a word weirdly and that’s fine; it doesn’t become a wrong usage until it’s a usage that would reliably confuse 70+% of people/reliably cause 70+% of people to conclude the wrong thing, hearing it.
“Wrong in the territory” in this case being “wrong in the maps of a supermajority” + “it’s a socially constructed thing in the first place.”
I’m baffled by this, and kinda just going to throw a bunch of reactions out there without trying to build them into a single coherent reply.
If you take this view, these statements don’t have much difference between them on a fundamental level because “The dress is X” means something like “I assess the dress to be X” since you’re the one speaking and are making this call.
If someone says “the dress looks white to me, but I think it’s actually blue”… how would you analyze that? From this it sounds like you’d think they’re saying “I assess the dress to be white, but I assess it to be blue”?
To me it has a perfectly natural meaning, along the lines of “when I look at this picture my brain tells me that it’s white. But I’m reliably informed that it’s actually blue, and that the white appearance comes from such-and-such mental process combined with the lighting conditions of the photo”.
(e: actually, “along the lines of” isn’t quite what I mean there. It’s more like “this is the kind of thing that might cause someone to say those words”.)
It sounds to me like you’re trying to say there’s, on some level, no meaningful distinction between how something is and how we assess it to be? But how something appears to be and how we assess it to be are still very different!
I see as making essentially the same fundamental claim with minor differences about how its expressed to try to convey something about the process by which you made the claim so that others can understand your epistemic state, which is sometimes useful but you can also just say this more directly with something like “I’m 80% sure the dress is X”.
But “I’m 80% sure the dress is X” doesn’t convey anything about the process by which I came to believe it? It’s simply a conclusion with no supporting argument.
Meanwhile “the dress looks X” is an argument with no ultimate conclusion. If a person says that and nothing else, we might reasonably guess that they probably think the dress is X, similar to how someone who answers “is it going to rain?” with “the forecast says yes” probably doesn’t have any particular grounds to disbelieve the forcast. But even if we assume correctly that they think that, both the explicit and implicit information they’ve conveyed to us are still different versus “I’m _% confident the dress is X” or “I’m _% confident it’s going to rain”.
In practice, humans (en masse) assign genuinely different weights/strengths to “This is insane” and “This sounds insane to me.” The response shows that they are meaningfully different.
I agree (?) with you (assuming you concur with the following) that it would be nice if we had better and more functional terminology, and could make clearer distinctions without spending words that do indeed feel extraneous.
But that’s not the world we live in, and given the world we live in, I disagree that it’s smurf naming.
I agree that people hearing Zack say “I think this is insane” will believe he has a lower P(this is insane) than people hearing him say “This is insane”, but I’m not sure that establishes the words mean that.
If Alice goes around saying “I’m kinda conservative” it would be wise to infer that she is probably conservative. If Bob goes around saying “That’s based” in the modern internet sense of the term, it would also be wise to infer that he is probably a conservative. But based doesn’t mean Bob is conservative, semantically it just means something like “cool”, and then it happens to be the case that this particular synonym for cool is used more often by conservatives than liberals.
If it turned out that Alice voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, one would have a reasonable case that she had used words wrong when she said she was kinda conservative, those words mean basically the opposite of her circumstances. If it turned out that Bob voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, then one might advise him “your word choice is causing people to form a false impression, you should maybe stop saying based”, but it would be weird to suggest this was about what based means. There’s just an observable regularity of our society that people who say based tend to be conservative, like how people who say “edema” tend to be doctors.
If Zack is interested in accurately conveying his level of confidence, he would do well to reserve “That’s insane” for cases where he is very confident and say “That seems insane” when he is less confident. If he instead decided to use “That’s insane” in all cases, that would be misleading. But I think it is significant that this would be a different kind of misleading than if he were to use the words “I am very confident that is insane”, even if the statements cause observers to make the exact same updates.
(My point in the comment above is merely “this is not contentless filler; these distinctions are real in practice; if adding them feels onerous or tedious it’s more likely because one is blind to, or does not care about, a real distinction, than because there’s no real difference and people want you to waste time adding meaningless words.” A lot of people act along lines that go something like “well these words SHOULD be taken to mean X, even though they predictably and reliably get interpreted to mean Y, so I’m going to keep saying them and when other people hear ‘Y’ I’ll blame them, and when other people ask me to say something different I will act put-upon.” <—That’s a caricature/extremer version of the actual position the actual Gordon takes; I’m not claiming Gordon’s saying or doing anything anywhere near that dumb, but it’s clear that there really are differences in how these different phrases are perceived, at the level of hundreds-of-readers.)
Is it wrong for Bob the Democrat to say “based” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a conservative? Is it wrong for Bob the plumber to say “edema” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a a doctor? If I told Bob to start saying “swelling” instead of “edema” then I feel like he would have some right to defend his word use: no one thinks edema literally means “swelling, and also I am a doctor” even if they update in a way that kind of looks like it does.
I don’t think we have a significant disagreement here, I was merely trying to highlight a distinction your comment didn’t dwell on, about different ways statements can be perceived differently. “There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
“There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly analogous, specifically because the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “swelling” and “edema” seems to me like it’s likely at least an order of magnitude smaller than the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “this is crazy” and “this sounds crazy to me.”
As for whether either of these usages are wrong, it depends entirely on whether you want to successfully communicate or not. If you reliably cause your listener to receive concepts that are different than those you were trying to transmit, and this is down to utterly predictable boring simple truths about your language usage, it’s certainly your call if you want to keep doing a thing you know will cause wrong beliefs in the people around you.
Separately, 100% of the people I’ve encountered using the word “based” are radical leftist transfolk, and there are like twelve of them?
I understood “based” to be a 4chan-ism but I didn’t think very hard about the example, it is possible I chose a word that does not actually work in the way I had meant to illustrate. Hopefully the intended meaning was still clear.
I think I should just add my own data point here, which is that Zack and I have been on polar opposites sites of a pretty emotional debate before, and I had zero complaints about their conduct. In fact ever since then, I think I’m more likely to click on a post if I see that Zack wrote it.
Thanks for chiming in; this is encouraging to hear. I’m imagining the pretty emotional debate you’re thinking of is the one on “My Dating Plan ala Geoffrey Miller” in July 2020? Interestingly, I think my behavior there was much ruder than anything Duncan’s objected to from me, so I think your reaction is evidence that there’s a lot of interpersonal variation in how much “softening” different people think is desirable or necessary.
It was that general debate about content moderation. Pretty sure it wasn’t all in the comments of that post (though that may have been the start); I don’t remember the details. It’s also possible that my recollection includes back and forth you had with [other people who defended my general position].
I’m confused. It seems to me that you, Zack, and I all have a similar takes on the example you bring up, but the fact that you say this here suggests that you don’t see us all as in clear agreement?
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 think Duncan and I are in clear agreement more generally (even if we agree that the particular comment I wrote that caused Duncan to give up on me was in fact a bad comment).
Here’s my quick attempt to pass Duncan’s Ideological Turing Test on what our feud is about: “one of the most important obstacles to having a culture of clear thinking and clear communication is the tendency for interlocutors to misrepresent one another, to jump to conclusions about what the other person is saying, and lash out at that strawman, instead of appropriately maintaining uncertainty, or split-and-committing pending further evidence. These skills are a prerequisite for being able to have a sane discussion. Empirically, Zack doesn’t seem to care about these skills much, if at all. As a result, his presence makes the discussion spaces he’s in worse.”
(I probably didn’t pass, but I tried.)
My response to my-attempt-to-pass-Duncan’s-ITT (which probably didn’t succeed at capturing Duncan’s real views) is that I strongly disagree that pro-actively modeling one’s interlocutors should be a prerequisite for being able to have a discussion. As an author, it’s often frustrating when critics don’t understand my words the way I hoped they would, but ultimately, I think it’s my responsibility to try to produce text that stands up to scrutiny. I would never tell a critic that they’re not passing my ITT, because in my view, passing my ITT isn’t their job; their job is to offer their real thoughts on the actual text I actually published. I don’t accuse critics of strawmanning unless I expect to be able to convince third parties with an explanation of how the text the critic published substantively misrepresents the text I published. I’m extremely wary that a culture that heavily penalizes not-sufficiently-modeling-one’s-interlocutor, interferes with the process of subjecting each other’s work to scrutiny.
Again, that’s my interpretation of what the feud is about. I’m not claiming to have accurately understood Duncan. If he happens to see this comment and wants to correct where my ITT is falling short, he’s welcome to. If not, that’s fine, too: people are busy; no one is under any obligation to spend time arguing on the internet when they have better things to do!
Yeah, I didn’t mean that I thought you two agreed in general, just on the specific thing he was commenting on. I didn’t mean to insert myself into this feud and I was kinda asking how I got here, but now that I’m here we might as well have fun with it. I think I have a pretty good feel for where you’re coming from, and actually agree with a lot of it. However, agreement isn’t where the fun is so I’m gonna push back where I see you as screwing up and you can let me know if it doesn’t fit.
These two lines stand out to me as carrying all the weight:
I strongly disagree that pro-actively modeling one’s interlocutors should be a prerequisite for being able to have a discussion.
I’m extremely wary that a culture that heavily penalizes not-sufficiently-modeling-one’s-interlocutor, interferes with the process of subjecting each other’s work to scrutiny.
These two lines seem to go hand in hand in your mind, but my initial response to the two is very different.
To the latter, I simply agree that there’s a failure mode there and don’t fault you for being extremely wary of it. To the former though.… “I disagree that this thing should be necessary” is kinda a “Tough?”. Either it’s necessary or it isn’t, and if you’re focusing on what “should” be you’re neglecting what is.
I don’t think I have to make the case that things aren’t going well as is. And I’m not going to try to convince you that you should drop the “should” and attend to the “is” so that things run more smoothly—that one is up to you to decide, and as much as “should” intentionally looks away from “is” and is in a sense fundamentally irrational in that way, it’s sometimes computationally necessary or prudent given constraints.
But I will point out that this “should” is a sure sign that you’re looking away from truth, and that it fits Duncan’s accusations of what you’re doing to a T. “I shouldn’t have to do this in order to be able to have a discussion” sounds reasonable enough if you feel able to back up the idea that your norms are better, and it has a strong tendency to lead towards not doing the thing you “shouldn’t have to” do. But when you look back at reality, that combination is “I actually do have to do this in order to have a (productive) discussion, and I’m gonna not do it, and I’m going to engage anyway”. When you’re essentially telling someone “Yeah, know what I’m doing is going to piss you off, and not only am I going to do it anyway I am going to show that pissing you off doesn’t even weigh into my decisions because your feelings are wrong”, then that’s pretty sure to piss someone off.
It’s clear that you’re willing to weigh those considerations as a favor to Duncan, the way you recount asking Michael Vassar for such a favor, and that in your mind if Duncan wants you to accommodate his fragility, he should admit that this is what he’s asking for and that it’s a favor not an obligation—you know, play by your rules.
And it’s clear that by just accommodating everyone in this way without having the costs acknowledged (i.e. playing by his rules), you’d be giving up something you’re unwilling to give up. I don’t fault you there.
I agree with your framing that this is actually a conflict. And there are inherent reasons why that isn’t trivially avoidable, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a path towards genuine cooperation—just that you can’t declare same sidedness by fiat.
Elsewhere in the comments you gave an example of “stealing bread” as a conflict that causes “disagreements” and lying. The solution here isn’t to “cooperatively” pursue conflicting goals, it’s to step back and look at how to align goals. Specifically, notice that everyone is better off if there’s less thieving, and cooperate on not-thieving and punishing theft. And if you’ve already screwed up, cooperate towards norms that make confession and rehabilitation more appealing than lying but less appealing than not-thieving in the first place.
I don’t think our problems are that big here. There are conflicts of values, sure, but I don’t think the attempts to push ones values over others is generally so deliberately antisocial. In this case, for example, I think you and Duncan both more or less genuinely believe that it is the other party who is doing the antisocial acts. And so rather than “One person is knowingly trying to get away with being antisocial, so of course they’re not going to cooperate”, I think it’s better modeled as an actual disagreement that isn’t able to be trivially resolved because people are resorting to trying to use conflict rather than cooperation to advance their (perceived as righteous) goals, and then missing the fact that they’re doing this because they’re so open to cooperating (within the norms which are objectively correct, according to themselves) and which the other person irrationally and antisocially isn’t (by rules they don’t agree with)!
I don’t agree with the way that he used it, but Duncan is spot on calling your behavior “trauma response”. I don’t mean it as a big-T “Trauma” like “abused as a child”, but trauma in the “1 grain is a ‘heap’” sense is at is at the core of this kind of conflict and many many other things—and it is more or less necessary for trauma response to exist on both sides for these things to not fizzle out. The analogy I like to give is that psychological trauma is like plutonium and hostile acts are like neutrons.
As a toy example to illustrate the point, imagine someone steps on your toes; how do you respond? If it’s a barefoot little kid, you might say “Hey kid, you’re standing on my toes” and they might say “Didn’t mean to, sorry!” and step off. No trauma no problem. If it’s a 300lb dude with cleats, you might shove him as hard as you can because the damage incurred from letting him stand on your toes until you can get his attention is less acceptable. And if he’s sensitive enough, he might get pissed at you for shoving him and deck you. If it becomes a verbal argument, he might say “your toes shouldn’t have been there”, and now it’s an explicit conflict about where you get to put your toes and whether he as a right to step on them anyway if they are where you put them.
In order to not allow things to degenerate into conflict as the less-than-perfectly-secure cleat wearing giant steps on your toes, you have to be able to withstand that neutron blast without retaliating with your own so much that it turns into a fight instead of a “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize your toes were there. I’ll step off them for now because I care about your toes, but we need to have a conversation about where your feet are okay to be”.
This means:
1) orienting to the truth that your toes are going to take damage whether you like it or not, and that “should” can’t make this untrue or unimportant.
2) maintaining connection with the larger perspective that tracks what is likely to cause conflict, what isn’t, and how to cause the minimal conflict and maximum cooperation possible so that you best succeed at your goals with least sacrifice of your formerly-sacred-and-still-instrumentally-important values.
In some cases, the most truth-oriented and most effective response is going to be politely tapping the big guy on the shoulder while your feet bleed, and having a conversation after the fact about whether he needs to be more careful where he’s stepping—because acting like shoving this guy makes sense is willful irrationality.
In other cases he’s smaller and more shove-able and it doesn’t make sense to accept the damage, but instead of coming off like “I’m totally happy to apologize for anything I actually did wrong. I’m sorry I called you a jerk while shoving you; that was unnecessary and inappropriate [but I will conspicuously not even address the fact that you didn’t like being shoved or that you spilled your drink, because #notmyproblem. I’ll explain why I’m right to not give a fuck if you care to ask]”, you’ll at least be more able to see the value in saying things like “I’m sorry I had to shove you. I know you don’t like being shoved, and I don’t like doing it. You even spilled your drink, and that sucks. I wish I saw another way to protect our communities ability to receive criticism without shoving you”.
This shouldn’t need to be said but probably does (for others, probably not for you), so I’ll say it. This very much is not me taking sides on the whole thing. It’s not a “Zach is in the wrong for not doing this” or a “I endorse Duncan’s norms relatively more”—nor is it the opposite. It’s just a “I see Zach as wanting me to argue that he’s screwing up in a way that might end up giving him actionable alternatives that might get him more of what he wants, so I will”.
It’s not clear to me that there’s any more “lack of epistemic hygeine” in Zack’s posts than in anyone else’s, yours (and mine) included. If the claim here is that Zack exhibits significantly less epistemic hygeine than… who? You? The average Less Wrong commenter? Either way, it does not seem plausible to me. In most of the cases where you’ve claimed him to be something like “loudly + overconfidently + rudely wrong”, it has always seemed to me that, at best, there was nothing more than a case of “reasonable people might disagree on this one”.
I agree that “Err on the side of ____” is technically worse than “Try to not err”, but I’d argue that it’s just a somewhat sloppy and non-literal way of conveying a valid point.
The way I’d say it if being more careful is to say that “Insufficient and excess stick are both problems, however there is a natural tendency to stick too much. Additionally, excess stick quickly begets excess stick, and if you allow things to go supercritical you can quickly destroy the whole thing, so before acting on an impulse to stick make really sure that you aren’t just succumbing to this bias.”.
Or in other words “Your sights are likely out of alignment, so aim higher than seems appropriate in order to not aim too low in expectation”.
Sometimes “try not to err” will result in predictably worse outcomes than “try to minimize the damage your erring causes, even if that means you are more likely or even certain to err”.
Agreed. You want to “try not to err” in expected value, not in “inches from the bullseye”. Sometimes this means you try to put the center of your distribution offset from the bullseye.
I didn’t see it as the primary point of contention so I didn’t mention it, but you’re right, it’s probably worth pointing out explicitly.
What are some examples of this?
Ideally, I would arrive at my workplace exactly when my shift starts (zero error, zero loss). But if I’m ten minutes late, I get in trouble with my boss (small error, large loss), and if I’m ten minutes early, I read a magazine in the breakroom (small error, small loss). Therefore, I should “err on the side of” leaving early.
That is, the “err on the side of” idiom arises from the conflation of different but related optimization problems. The correct solution to the worker’s full problem (taking into account the asymmetrical costs of arriving early or late) is an incorrect solution to the “being (exactly) on time” problem.
I see, thanks.
Do you think that this dynamic appear in the problem which is the subject of the top-level discussion here?
Yes. If my comments are too mean, I might start an unpleasant and unproductive flame war (small error, large loss). If my comments are too nice, they might be slightly less clear than a less nice comment, but nothing dramatically bad like a flame war happens (small error, small loss). Therefore I (arguably) should “err on the side of carrots over sticks.”
If “Elements of Rationalist Discourse”’s Goodwill item had explicitly laid out the logic of asymmetric costs rather than taking “err on the side of” as a primitive, I’d still be skeptical, but this post’s discussion of it wouldn’t be written the same way (and it’s possible that I might not have bothered to write the post at all).
Doesn’t this assume that the cost of writing comments does not vary with “niceness” of the comments (e.g., because it is zero)?
That’s one reason someone might object to the asymmetrical-costs argument for niceness, but I’m skeptical that it’s the real reason.
I think what’s more typically going on is that there’s a conflict between people who want to enforce politeness norms and people who want the freedom to be blunt. In venues where the polite faction has the upper hand (by karma voting weight, moderator seats, &c.), blunt people have an incentive to dishonestly claim that writing polite comments is more expensive than it actually is, because polite voters and moderators might be partially swayed by that argument, whereas the polite people would not be sympathetic if the blunt people said what they were actually thinking.
Of course this is true, but that doesn’t actually mean that there isn’t, in fact, a cost differential; it only means that claims of such constitute weaker evidence in favor than they would in the absence of such an incentive.
And there are good reasons to believe that the cost differential exists. We may presumably discount (alleged) evidence from introspection, as it’s unreliable for two reasons (unreliability of introspection in the presence of incentives for self-deception; unreliability of reports of introspection, in the presence of incentives for deception). But that’s not all we’ve got. For example, in the linked comment, you write:
This, in the context of disclaiming (indeed, of arguing against) a “cost differential” argument! And yet even there, you didn’t go so far as to claim that it took you zero time to come up with the “nice” wording. (And no surprise there; that would’ve been a quite implausible claim!) Surely these things add up…?
But none of that constitutes the strongest reply to your argument, which is this:
Why do you assume that the only cost is to the comment-writer?
At the very least, “accountability for alleged harm from simplifications” is longer, and more complex, than “pandering to idiots”. It takes more time and effort to read and understand the former than the latter! And the complexity of the former means more chance of misunderstanding. (It’s a persistent delusion, in these parts, that taking more words to explain something, and choosing words more precisely, results in clearer communication.)
And these are only the obvious costs. There are also second-order costs imposed by upholding, rather than subverting, norms which dictate such “nicer” writing…
Not gonna lie, I lost track of the argument on this line of comments, but pushing back on word-bloat is good.
I’ll go on record as a counterexample here; I very much want politeness norms to be enforced here, and in my personal life I will pay great costs in order to preserve or create my freedom to be blunt. The requirement for me to be cautious of how I say things here is such a significant cost that I post here far less than I otherwise would. The cost is seriously non-insignificant.
The reason I don’t bitch about it is that I recognize that it’s necessary. Changing norms to allow people to be relatively more inconsiderate wouldn’t actually make things better. It’s not just that “pandering to idiots” calls for a euphemism, it’s that it probably calls for a mindset that is not so dismissive to people if they’re going to be in or close enough to your audience to be offended. Like, actually taking them into consideration and figuring out how to bridge that gap. It’s costly. It’s also necessary, and often pays off.
I would like to be able to say “Zack, you stupid twat” without having to worry about getting attacked for doing so, but until I’ve proven to you that I respect you enough that it’s to be taken as an affectionate insult between friends.… phrasing things that way wouldn’t actually accomplish the goals I’d have for “less polite” speech. If I can earn that recognition then there’s probably some flexibility in the norms, and if I can’t earn that recognition or haven’t earned that recognition, then that’s kinda on me.
There does have to be some level at which we stop bending over backwards to spare feelings and just say what’s true [to the best of our ability to tell] dammit, but it actually has to be calibrated to what pushes away only those we’d be happy to create friction with and lose. It’s one of those things where if you don’t actively work to broaden your scope of who you can get along with without poking at, you end up poking too indiscriminately, so I’m happy to see the politeness norms about where they are now.
(Worth noting that I used to spend a great deal of effort and energy on putting up with the headache of wading through Zack’s style, for the occasional worth-it nugget of insight; the moment when that constant expenditure of effort became clearly not worth it anymore was when Zack started off a(n also-otherwise-flawed) critique by just asserting “This is insane.”
Even if it had, in fact, been insane, Zack would’ve been more effective if he’d been willing to bother with even the tiniest of softenings (e.g. “this sounds insane to me,” which, in addition to being socially smoother is also literally more true, as a reflection of the actual state of affairs).
As it was, though, he was just so loudly + overconfidently + rudely wrong that it was enough to kill my last remaining willingness-to-tolerate his consistent lack-of-epistemic-hygiene-masquerading-as-a-preference-for-directness.)
Would it help if I apologized? I do, actually, regret that comment. (As you correctly point out here, it wasn’t effective; it didn’t achieve my goals at all.)
The reason I was reluctant to apologize earlier is because I want to be clear that the honest apology that I can offer has to be relatively narrowly-scoped: I can sincerely apologize specifically for that particular pointlessly rude blog comment, and I can sincerely make an effort to conform to your preferred norms when I’m writing a reply to you specifically (because I know that you specifically don’t like the punchy-attacky style I often use), but I’m not thereby agreeing to change my commenting behavior when talking to people who aren’t you, and I’m not thereby agreeing that your concept of epistemic hygiene is the correct one.
I’m worried that a narrowly-scoped apology will be perceived as insufficient, but I think being explicit about scope is important, because fake apologies don’t help anyone: I only want to say “I’m sorry; I won’t do it again” about the specific things that I’m actually sorry for and actually won’t do again.
So—if it helps—I hereby apologize for my comment of 4 December 2021 on an earlier draft of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”. In context (where the context includes the draft itself being about your preferred discourse norms, the fact that the draft appeared to have been posted prematurely, the fact that the draft had instructions about how readers should read carefully before reacting to any of the summary points, and our previous interactions), it was an unambiguously bad comment, and I should have known better. I’m sorry.
Softening like this is one of those annoying things i wish we could do away with because it’s smurf naming. Saying that something is insane is literally a claim that I think it’s insane, and it’s only because of naive epistemology that we think some other meaning is possible.
I only started adding softening because Duncan wouldn’t shut up about the lack of smurfs in my comments.
But Duncan’s suggested softening was “this sounds insane to me”, not “I think this is insane”.
Like, consider the dress. We might imagine someone saying any of
“The dress is (white/blue).”
“I think the dress is (white/blue).”
“The dress looks (white/blue) to me.”
I think that in practice (1) and (2) mean different things; on a population level, they’ll be said by people whose internal experiences are different, and they’ll justly be interpreted differently by listeners.
But even if you disagree with that, surely you’d agree that (3) is different? Like, “I think the dress is white but it’s actually blue” is admittedly a kind of weird thing to say, but “the dress looks white to me but it’s actually blue” is perfectly normal, as is ”...but I think it’s actually blue”, or ”...but I don’t know what color it actually is”.
It may be that the dress looks blue to you and also you think it’s actually blue, but these are two importantly different claims!
I would further suggest that if the dress happens to look blue to you, but also you’re aware that it looks blue to a lot of people and white to a lot of people, and you don’t know what’s going on, and you nonetheless believe confidently that the dress is blue, you are doing something wrong. (Even though you happen to be correct, in this instance.)
When it comes to insanity, I think something similar happens. Whether or not something sounds insane to me is different from whether it actually is insane. Knowing that, I can hold in my head ideas like “this sounds insane to me, but I might be misinterpreting the idea, or I might be mistaken when I think some key premise that it rests on is obviously false, or or or… and so it might not be insane”.
And so we might stipulate that Zack’s “this is insane” was no more or less justifiable than “I think this is insane” would have been. But we should acknowledge the possibility that in thinking it insane, he was doing something wrong; and that thinking and saying “this sounds insane to me” while maintaining uncertainty about whether or not it was actually insane would have been more truth-tracking.
My point is that something cannot actually be insane, it can only be insane by some entity’s judgment. Insanity exists in the map, not the territory. In the territory there’s just stuff going on. We’re that ones that decide to call it insane. Maybe that’s because there’s some stable pattern about the world we want to put the label insanity on, and we develop some collective agreement about what things to call insane, but we’re still the ones that do it.
If you take this view, these statements don’t have much difference between them on a fundamental level because “The dress is X” means something like “I assess the dress to be X” since you’re the one speaking and are making this call. We do have things that mean something different, like “I think other people think the dress is X”, but that’s making a different type of claim than your 3 statements, which I see as making essentially the same fundamental claim with minor differences about how its expressed to try to convey something about the process by which you made the claim so that others can understand your epistemic state, which is sometimes useful but you can also just say this more directly with something like “I’m 80% sure the dress is X”.
A big part of what I’m often doing in my head is simulating a room of 100-1000 people listening, and thinking about what a supermajority of them are thinking or concluding.
When you go from e.g. “that sounds insane to me” or “I think that’s crazy” to “that is crazy,” most of what I think is happening is that you’re tapping into something like ”...and 70+ out of 100 neutral observers would agree.”
Ditto with word usage; one can use a word weirdly and that’s fine; it doesn’t become a wrong usage until it’s a usage that would reliably confuse 70+% of people/reliably cause 70+% of people to conclude the wrong thing, hearing it.
“Wrong in the territory” in this case being “wrong in the maps of a supermajority” + “it’s a socially constructed thing in the first place.”
I’m baffled by this, and kinda just going to throw a bunch of reactions out there without trying to build them into a single coherent reply.
If someone says “the dress looks white to me, but I think it’s actually blue”… how would you analyze that? From this it sounds like you’d think they’re saying “I assess the dress to be white, but I assess it to be blue”?
To me it has a perfectly natural meaning, along the lines of “when I look at this picture my brain tells me that it’s white. But I’m reliably informed that it’s actually blue, and that the white appearance comes from such-and-such mental process combined with the lighting conditions of the photo”.
(e: actually, “along the lines of” isn’t quite what I mean there. It’s more like “this is the kind of thing that might cause someone to say those words”.)
It sounds to me like you’re trying to say there’s, on some level, no meaningful distinction between how something is and how we assess it to be? But how something appears to be and how we assess it to be are still very different!
But “I’m 80% sure the dress is X” doesn’t convey anything about the process by which I came to believe it? It’s simply a conclusion with no supporting argument.
Meanwhile “the dress looks X” is an argument with no ultimate conclusion. If a person says that and nothing else, we might reasonably guess that they probably think the dress is X, similar to how someone who answers “is it going to rain?” with “the forecast says yes” probably doesn’t have any particular grounds to disbelieve the forcast. But even if we assume correctly that they think that, both the explicit and implicit information they’ve conveyed to us are still different versus “I’m _% confident the dress is X” or “I’m _% confident it’s going to rain”.
Words mean what they mean, in practice.
In practice, humans (en masse) assign genuinely different weights/strengths to “This is insane” and “This sounds insane to me.” The response shows that they are meaningfully different.
I agree (?) with you (assuming you concur with the following) that it would be nice if we had better and more functional terminology, and could make clearer distinctions without spending words that do indeed feel extraneous.
But that’s not the world we live in, and given the world we live in, I disagree that it’s smurf naming.
I agree that people hearing Zack say “I think this is insane” will believe he has a lower P(this is insane) than people hearing him say “This is insane”, but I’m not sure that establishes the words mean that.
If Alice goes around saying “I’m kinda conservative” it would be wise to infer that she is probably conservative. If Bob goes around saying “That’s based” in the modern internet sense of the term, it would also be wise to infer that he is probably a conservative. But based doesn’t mean Bob is conservative, semantically it just means something like “cool”, and then it happens to be the case that this particular synonym for cool is used more often by conservatives than liberals.
If it turned out that Alice voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, one would have a reasonable case that she had used words wrong when she said she was kinda conservative, those words mean basically the opposite of her circumstances. If it turned out that Bob voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, then one might advise him “your word choice is causing people to form a false impression, you should maybe stop saying based”, but it would be weird to suggest this was about what based means. There’s just an observable regularity of our society that people who say based tend to be conservative, like how people who say “edema” tend to be doctors.
If Zack is interested in accurately conveying his level of confidence, he would do well to reserve “That’s insane” for cases where he is very confident and say “That seems insane” when he is less confident. If he instead decided to use “That’s insane” in all cases, that would be misleading. But I think it is significant that this would be a different kind of misleading than if he were to use the words “I am very confident that is insane”, even if the statements cause observers to make the exact same updates.
(My point in the comment above is merely “this is not contentless filler; these distinctions are real in practice; if adding them feels onerous or tedious it’s more likely because one is blind to, or does not care about, a real distinction, than because there’s no real difference and people want you to waste time adding meaningless words.” A lot of people act along lines that go something like “well these words SHOULD be taken to mean X, even though they predictably and reliably get interpreted to mean Y, so I’m going to keep saying them and when other people hear ‘Y’ I’ll blame them, and when other people ask me to say something different I will act put-upon.” <—That’s a caricature/extremer version of the actual position the actual Gordon takes; I’m not claiming Gordon’s saying or doing anything anywhere near that dumb, but it’s clear that there really are differences in how these different phrases are perceived, at the level of hundreds-of-readers.)
Is it wrong for Bob the Democrat to say “based” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a conservative? Is it wrong for Bob the plumber to say “edema” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a a doctor? If I told Bob to start saying “swelling” instead of “edema” then I feel like he would have some right to defend his word use: no one thinks edema literally means “swelling, and also I am a doctor” even if they update in a way that kind of looks like it does.
I don’t think we have a significant disagreement here, I was merely trying to highlight a distinction your comment didn’t dwell on, about different ways statements can be perceived differently. “There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly analogous, specifically because the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “swelling” and “edema” seems to me like it’s likely at least an order of magnitude smaller than the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “this is crazy” and “this sounds crazy to me.”
As for whether either of these usages are wrong, it depends entirely on whether you want to successfully communicate or not. If you reliably cause your listener to receive concepts that are different than those you were trying to transmit, and this is down to utterly predictable boring simple truths about your language usage, it’s certainly your call if you want to keep doing a thing you know will cause wrong beliefs in the people around you.
Separately, 100% of the people I’ve encountered using the word “based” are radical leftist transfolk, and there are like twelve of them?
I understood “based” to be a 4chan-ism but I didn’t think very hard about the example, it is possible I chose a word that does not actually work in the way I had meant to illustrate. Hopefully the intended meaning was still clear.
I think I should just add my own data point here, which is that Zack and I have been on polar opposites sites of a pretty emotional debate before, and I had zero complaints about their conduct. In fact ever since then, I think I’m more likely to click on a post if I see that Zack wrote it.
Thanks for chiming in; this is encouraging to hear. I’m imagining the pretty emotional debate you’re thinking of is the one on “My Dating Plan ala Geoffrey Miller” in July 2020? Interestingly, I think my behavior there was much ruder than anything Duncan’s objected to from me, so I think your reaction is evidence that there’s a lot of interpersonal variation in how much “softening” different people think is desirable or necessary.
It was that general debate about content moderation. Pretty sure it wasn’t all in the comments of that post (though that may have been the start); I don’t remember the details. It’s also possible that my recollection includes back and forth you had with [other people who defended my general position].
I’m confused. It seems to me that you, Zack, and I all have a similar takes on the example you bring up, but the fact that you say this here suggests that you don’t see us all as in clear agreement?
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.
I don’t think Duncan and I are in clear agreement more generally (even if we agree that the particular comment I wrote that caused Duncan to give up on me was in fact a bad comment).
Here’s my quick attempt to pass Duncan’s Ideological Turing Test on what our feud is about: “one of the most important obstacles to having a culture of clear thinking and clear communication is the tendency for interlocutors to misrepresent one another, to jump to conclusions about what the other person is saying, and lash out at that strawman, instead of appropriately maintaining uncertainty, or split-and-committing pending further evidence. These skills are a prerequisite for being able to have a sane discussion. Empirically, Zack doesn’t seem to care about these skills much, if at all. As a result, his presence makes the discussion spaces he’s in worse.”
(I probably didn’t pass, but I tried.)
My response to my-attempt-to-pass-Duncan’s-ITT (which probably didn’t succeed at capturing Duncan’s real views) is that I strongly disagree that pro-actively modeling one’s interlocutors should be a prerequisite for being able to have a discussion. As an author, it’s often frustrating when critics don’t understand my words the way I hoped they would, but ultimately, I think it’s my responsibility to try to produce text that stands up to scrutiny. I would never tell a critic that they’re not passing my ITT, because in my view, passing my ITT isn’t their job; their job is to offer their real thoughts on the actual text I actually published. I don’t accuse critics of strawmanning unless I expect to be able to convince third parties with an explanation of how the text the critic published substantively misrepresents the text I published. I’m extremely wary that a culture that heavily penalizes not-sufficiently-modeling-one’s-interlocutor, interferes with the process of subjecting each other’s work to scrutiny.
Again, that’s my interpretation of what the feud is about. I’m not claiming to have accurately understood Duncan. If he happens to see this comment and wants to correct where my ITT is falling short, he’s welcome to. If not, that’s fine, too: people are busy; no one is under any obligation to spend time arguing on the internet when they have better things to do!
Yeah, I didn’t mean that I thought you two agreed in general, just on the specific thing he was commenting on. I didn’t mean to insert myself into this feud and I was kinda asking how I got here, but now that I’m here we might as well have fun with it. I think I have a pretty good feel for where you’re coming from, and actually agree with a lot of it. However, agreement isn’t where the fun is so I’m gonna push back where I see you as screwing up and you can let me know if it doesn’t fit.
These two lines stand out to me as carrying all the weight:
These two lines seem to go hand in hand in your mind, but my initial response to the two is very different.
To the latter, I simply agree that there’s a failure mode there and don’t fault you for being extremely wary of it. To the former though.… “I disagree that this thing should be necessary” is kinda a “Tough?”. Either it’s necessary or it isn’t, and if you’re focusing on what “should” be you’re neglecting what is.
I don’t think I have to make the case that things aren’t going well as is. And I’m not going to try to convince you that you should drop the “should” and attend to the “is” so that things run more smoothly—that one is up to you to decide, and as much as “should” intentionally looks away from “is” and is in a sense fundamentally irrational in that way, it’s sometimes computationally necessary or prudent given constraints.
But I will point out that this “should” is a sure sign that you’re looking away from truth, and that it fits Duncan’s accusations of what you’re doing to a T. “I shouldn’t have to do this in order to be able to have a discussion” sounds reasonable enough if you feel able to back up the idea that your norms are better, and it has a strong tendency to lead towards not doing the thing you “shouldn’t have to” do. But when you look back at reality, that combination is “I actually do have to do this in order to have a (productive) discussion, and I’m gonna not do it, and I’m going to engage anyway”. When you’re essentially telling someone “Yeah, know what I’m doing is going to piss you off, and not only am I going to do it anyway I am going to show that pissing you off doesn’t even weigh into my decisions because your feelings are wrong”, then that’s pretty sure to piss someone off.
It’s clear that you’re willing to weigh those considerations as a favor to Duncan, the way you recount asking Michael Vassar for such a favor, and that in your mind if Duncan wants you to accommodate his fragility, he should admit that this is what he’s asking for and that it’s a favor not an obligation—you know, play by your rules.
And it’s clear that by just accommodating everyone in this way without having the costs acknowledged (i.e. playing by his rules), you’d be giving up something you’re unwilling to give up. I don’t fault you there.
I agree with your framing that this is actually a conflict. And there are inherent reasons why that isn’t trivially avoidable, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a path towards genuine cooperation—just that you can’t declare same sidedness by fiat.
Elsewhere in the comments you gave an example of “stealing bread” as a conflict that causes “disagreements” and lying. The solution here isn’t to “cooperatively” pursue conflicting goals, it’s to step back and look at how to align goals. Specifically, notice that everyone is better off if there’s less thieving, and cooperate on not-thieving and punishing theft. And if you’ve already screwed up, cooperate towards norms that make confession and rehabilitation more appealing than lying but less appealing than not-thieving in the first place.
I don’t think our problems are that big here. There are conflicts of values, sure, but I don’t think the attempts to push ones values over others is generally so deliberately antisocial. In this case, for example, I think you and Duncan both more or less genuinely believe that it is the other party who is doing the antisocial acts. And so rather than “One person is knowingly trying to get away with being antisocial, so of course they’re not going to cooperate”, I think it’s better modeled as an actual disagreement that isn’t able to be trivially resolved because people are resorting to trying to use conflict rather than cooperation to advance their (perceived as righteous) goals, and then missing the fact that they’re doing this because they’re so open to cooperating (within the norms which are objectively correct, according to themselves) and which the other person irrationally and antisocially isn’t (by rules they don’t agree with)!
I don’t agree with the way that he used it, but Duncan is spot on calling your behavior “trauma response”. I don’t mean it as a big-T “Trauma” like “abused as a child”, but trauma in the “1 grain is a ‘heap’” sense is at is at the core of this kind of conflict and many many other things—and it is more or less necessary for trauma response to exist on both sides for these things to not fizzle out. The analogy I like to give is that psychological trauma is like plutonium and hostile acts are like neutrons.
As a toy example to illustrate the point, imagine someone steps on your toes; how do you respond? If it’s a barefoot little kid, you might say “Hey kid, you’re standing on my toes” and they might say “Didn’t mean to, sorry!” and step off. No trauma no problem. If it’s a 300lb dude with cleats, you might shove him as hard as you can because the damage incurred from letting him stand on your toes until you can get his attention is less acceptable. And if he’s sensitive enough, he might get pissed at you for shoving him and deck you. If it becomes a verbal argument, he might say “your toes shouldn’t have been there”, and now it’s an explicit conflict about where you get to put your toes and whether he as a right to step on them anyway if they are where you put them.
In order to not allow things to degenerate into conflict as the less-than-perfectly-secure cleat wearing giant steps on your toes, you have to be able to withstand that neutron blast without retaliating with your own so much that it turns into a fight instead of a “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize your toes were there. I’ll step off them for now because I care about your toes, but we need to have a conversation about where your feet are okay to be”.
This means:
1) orienting to the truth that your toes are going to take damage whether you like it or not, and that “should” can’t make this untrue or unimportant.
2) maintaining connection with the larger perspective that tracks what is likely to cause conflict, what isn’t, and how to cause the minimal conflict and maximum cooperation possible so that you best succeed at your goals with least sacrifice of your formerly-sacred-and-still-instrumentally-important values.
In some cases, the most truth-oriented and most effective response is going to be politely tapping the big guy on the shoulder while your feet bleed, and having a conversation after the fact about whether he needs to be more careful where he’s stepping—because acting like shoving this guy makes sense is willful irrationality.
In other cases he’s smaller and more shove-able and it doesn’t make sense to accept the damage, but instead of coming off like “I’m totally happy to apologize for anything I actually did wrong. I’m sorry I called you a jerk while shoving you; that was unnecessary and inappropriate [but I will conspicuously not even address the fact that you didn’t like being shoved or that you spilled your drink, because #notmyproblem. I’ll explain why I’m right to not give a fuck if you care to ask]”, you’ll at least be more able to see the value in saying things like “I’m sorry I had to shove you. I know you don’t like being shoved, and I don’t like doing it. You even spilled your drink, and that sucks. I wish I saw another way to protect our communities ability to receive criticism without shoving you”.
This shouldn’t need to be said but probably does (for others, probably not for you), so I’ll say it. This very much is not me taking sides on the whole thing. It’s not a “Zach is in the wrong for not doing this” or a “I endorse Duncan’s norms relatively more”—nor is it the opposite. It’s just a “I see Zach as wanting me to argue that he’s screwing up in a way that might end up giving him actionable alternatives that might get him more of what he wants, so I will”.
It’s not clear to me that there’s any more “lack of epistemic hygeine” in Zack’s posts than in anyone else’s, yours (and mine) included. If the claim here is that Zack exhibits significantly less epistemic hygeine than… who? You? The average Less Wrong commenter? Either way, it does not seem plausible to me. In most of the cases where you’ve claimed him to be something like “loudly + overconfidently + rudely wrong”, it has always seemed to me that, at best, there was nothing more than a case of “reasonable people might disagree on this one”.
Do you disagree with this characterization?