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Re: the edited comment: it baffles me that you perceive that sentence as not only rude, but so rude that it could only be intentional—given that I chose my words carefully, to avoid explicit abuse or impoliteness! How could I have phrased my comment instead, in your opinion, that would’ve upgraded it at least to the level of “unintentionally rude” (“actually polite” is probably too much to hope for), without losing the meaning?
I am dismayed by the discourse norms that such comments imply. :(
I am surprised at 2, and want to retract my comment and make this whole subthread not able to hurt me any more. I’m feeling a lot of social disapproval at my having posted the comment, and my update from it is to just not make comments like that, which I think is a good outcome for your preferences about discourse norms. I can’t stand social disapproval like this, and I feel an urgent need to change however will make it go away the fastest—on most sites, that’s “delete my comment, never post another one like it”.
Though actually, I have 4 points now. But I still acutely feel your disapproval of my having expressed disapproval at you, and want to just take it back and let you talk how you want.
(meta: it’s quite scary for me to try to be honest about this. I feel urge to reply with my actual feelings in the interest of truth seeking, but normally would just be silent.)
Upvoted. I regret that my comments had this effect on you (though do not regret making them). I hope that you will continue to comment no less earnestly than you’ve done so far, and encourage you to do so.
which I think is a good outcome for your preferences about discourse norms
My discourse norms are honesty, integrity, and truth.
I regret that my comments had this effect on you (though do not regret making them).
I like this. My approval drives would lead to a chilling effect on truth-seeking if everyone tried to white-box optimize them when having conversations, and I don’t endorse that; I’d rather people hurt me a bit than fail at truth-seeking. I wish I had a better way to defend myself from the hurt of social disapproval, though; eg, disowning a comment.
My discourse norms are honesty, integrity, and truth.
Strongly agree on #1 (with obvious exceptions if the original wording reveals trade secrets, libels people likely to bring legal action, etc; but in thoses cases you should still describe what used to be there even if you can’t preserve it).
On #2, I can’t share SA’s bafflement. What isn’t rude about saying that a particular organization is so useless that when, attempting to do its job, it recommends doing a thing, that’s evidence against the value of doing it?
I guess it’s not rude if you know there’s no one around who belongs to, or identifies strongly with, that institution. But that’s not very likely in these parts. Otherwise: what baffles me is how anyone would expect that not to be rude.
(To be clear: “Rude” is not the same thing as “bad” or “wrong”. Sometimes being rude is a good thing. Sometimes it is a necessary evil. I am not claiming that no one should ever be rude.)
You seem to be using “rude” in such a way that the property of rudeness can attach to claims on the basis of their propositional content only. That, to me, is a very strange usage.
It seems to me that either you must think that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being rude; or, you must think that certain claims simply cannot be made, certain propositions simply cannot be expressed—regardless of their truth value (if they are not trade secrets or so on).
I disagree with the latter, and prefer a word usage that makes the former false (else the word “rude” becomes largely useless.)
It’s too late to accomplish this by this point, but the response I had planned for your CFAR comment (I actually had it planned before lahwren responded), which I didn’t have time to write before going to bed, was something like:
”I had an initial negative reaction and urge to downvote when I saw the CFAR comment, but I quickly noticed that most of that was coming from a place of tribal emotions (i.e. ‘must defend my people!’) which I didn’t endorse. I briefly considered trying to respond in a more careful way that got to the heart of the issue, but it seemed like the “yay CFAR? / boo CFAR?” was basically a distraction. There may be a time/place for it but this isn’t it.
I’d prefer if people didn’t end up having a giant discussion about “is CFAR good/bad?” and instead stuck to discussion of Double Crux as a technique.”
Having said that, in light of your other comment about wanting to see a public Double Crux, “should CFAR be positive or negative evidence of a technique’s validity” is precisely the sort of question that Double Crux is for, and I’d be interested in doing a public DC on it with you if you’re up for it (normally I’d suggest skype but since part of the point is to produce something easy for others to consume, chatlog could be fine)
(that said, I’m fairly busy in the next 30 hours or so. I might be up for it Friday night or over the weekend though)
(Edit: it looks like some other people also offered something like this, I don’t think it’s especially important I be involved, but think it’d probably be valuable in any case)
I agree with you re: the grandparent, and I appreciate the offer re: the Double Crux.
I am, sadly, unlikely to be able to take you up on it; my “commenting on or about an internet forum” time budget is already taken up by this flurry of activity here on LW 2.0.
Instead, I’d just like to reiterate my request / suggestion that you folks find some way to be able to point readers to pre-existing, publicly viewable examples of the technique being used. I think much hinges on that, at this point. Offering, when questioned, to demonstrate Double Crux, by way of trying to debate whether Double Crux is any good, is all very well, but—it simply doesn’t scale!
Doesn’t scale, but seems like it should happen at least once. (tongue sort of but not entirely in cheek). Then you can just link to it the second time.
The problem is that Double Crux is best conducted in ways that aren’t very amenable to publicizing (i.e. a private walk where people feel free-er), so there needs to be some attempts to do a public one at a time when:
- it’s high enough stakes that it matters so you can see people using the technique for real —it’s low enough stakes that it’s okay to publicly share it without you having to worry about “looking good” during the discussion —it’s convenient to record in some way
I agree, which is why I think noticing that there’s an opportunity to do a public one (i.e. now) is something that should be treated as a valuable opportunity that’s worth treating differently than arguing-on-the-internet-qua-arguing-on-the-internet.
(I also think arguing “should ‘created by CFAR’ be positive or negative evidence” is at least slightly less meta-sturbatory than “let’s double crux about double crux”)
Strong agree that it’s both true that “the lack of an example to point to produces justified skepticism” and that “that’s partly unfair because that skepticism and other ‘too busys’ keep feeding into no one taking the time to create said example.”
Yes, I think things can be rude on the basis of their propositional content. (But not only their propositional content.) If I state that you are very unintelligent, and I say it in the presence of you or of your friends, then I am being rude. I can do it in extra-rude ways (“Said is a total fucking moron”) or in less-rude ways (“I have reason to think that Said’s IQ is probably below 90″) but however you slice it it’ll be rude.
(For the avoidance of doubt, of course I do not in fact think any such thing.)
I do, indeed, think there is nothing necessarily wrong with being rude. As I said: Sometimes being rude is a good thing, and sometimes it’s a necessary evil. All else being equal, being rude is usually worse than not being rude, but many other things may outweigh the rudeness.
I don’t see that this makes the word “rude” largely useless, and I’m not sure why it should. If you mean it makes it meaningless then I strongly disagree (I take it to mean something like “predictably likely to make people upset”, though for various reasons that isn’t exactly right). If you mean it makes it unactionable then again I disagree; it just means that acting on the knowledge that something is rude is more complicated than just Not Doing It. (If you want to upset someone, which there may be good reasons for though usually there aren’t, then rudeness is beneficial. If you don’t but other things are higher-priority for you than not upsetting people, then you weigh up the benefits and harms, as always.) If you mean something other than those and the above hasn’t convinced you that my way of using “rude” isn’t useless, then you might want to explain further.
Indeed I meant “meaningless”, or perhaps “encompassing many disparate meanings under the umbrella of one word; attempting to refer to unrelated concepts as if they are the same or closely clustered; failing to cleave reality at the joints”.
I find it quite unnatural to apply the word “rude” as you do, and, to be extra clear, will certainly never mean anything like this when I use the word.
My takeaway here is that if you tell me that something is “rude”, I have not really gained any information about what you think of the thing, nor will I take you to have made any kind of definite claim about the thing, nor even do I know whether you’re attempting to ascribe positive valence to it or negative. (This is, to my mind, an unfortunate consequence of using words in strange ways, though of course you are free to use words as you please.)
I suppose I will have to remember, should you ever describe my comments as “rude” henceforth, to reply with something like—“Ok, now, what actually do you mean by this? ‘Rude’, yes, which means what…?”.
I am confused. (And also, apparently, confusing, which I regret.)
If I say something is rude then you learn that in my opinion it is likely to upset or offend a nontrivial fraction of people who read it. (Context will usually indicate roughly which people I think are likely to be upset or offended.)
How is that no information? How have I made no definite claim?
(It is true that merely from the fact that I call something rude you cannot with certainty tell whether I am being positive about it or negative. The same is true if I call something large, ingenious, conservative, wooden, complex, etc., etc., etc. I don’t see how this is a problem. For the avoidance of doubt, though, most of the time when I call something rude I am being negative about it, even if I think that the rudeness was a necessary evil.)
My use of the word “rude” doesn’t seem to me particularly nonstandard or strange. It’s more or less the same as definition 5a in the OED, which is “Unmannerly, uncivil, impolite; offensively or deliberately discourteous”. (The OED has lots of definitions, because “rude” does in fact have lots of meanings. It can e.g. sometimes mean “unrefined” or “vigorous”.)
Clearly you are dissatisfied with my usage of the word “rude”. Perhaps you might tell me yours; it is still not clear to me either what it is or why it might be better than mine. From what you say above, it seems that you want it used in such a way that “X is rude” strictly implies “X is morally wrong”, but if that’s really so then I’m unable to think of any meaning that does this while coming anywhere near the specificity that “rude” usually has. (At least for those who have moral systems not entirely based around not giving offence, which I am pretty sure includes both of us.)
I admit that I’m puzzled by your comment. What is it that you think I might be hiding, or that I might wish to (plausibly) deny…? I thought I’d made myself reasonably clear, but if some part of my comment’s meaning seems obscure to you, I’d be glad to clarify…
(As a side note, and more generally, I’d like to note my very strong distaste for any community / site discourse norms that required commenters to hold to “prosocial wording” at all times. There is a difference between respectfulness and common decency, on the one hand, and on the other, this sort of stifling tone policing.)
I agree: it doesn’t read at all like an attack hidden behind plausible deniability, it reads like an attack that isn’t hidden at all.
But what’s it for?
Unless you think there are a lot of LW-adjacent people who regard “X comes from CFAR” as evidence against X being useful (my guess is that there are not, though there are probably a fair few who think “X comes from CFAR” is no evidence to speak of that it actually is useful), it’s not doing anything to resolve Raemon’s curiosity about why the technique hasn’t become popular. (I think the rest of what you wrote, however, does an admirable job of that, and I agree that it seems like a sufficient explanation.)
And, if in fact doublecruxing’s CFAR origins are a problem for any reason, it’s not like there’s much anyone can actually do about them.
The immediate impression I get from your remark about CFAR is this: “Said Achmiz really doesn’t like CFAR, and he wants everyone to know it, so much so that he puts anti-CFAR jabs into comments where they add nothing and probably serve only to antagonize people who might otherwise listen more willingly to what he’s saying”. It’s the same feeling I get from the similar jabs some people like to make at one another’s political or (ir)religious positions. I think they (and I am very much including yours here) tend to push discussions in the direction of tribal warfare (are you on Team CFAR-is-Good or Team CFAR-is-Bad?) and make them less productive.
There absolutely should not be any sort of obligation to be “prosocial” here. And if you wrote a post about why you think CFAR does more harm than good, I would read it with interest and probably upvote it. (My main reservation would be that communities like this tend to spend too much time discussing themselves and not enough time discussing actual issues, and this might be heading in the same direction.) But, while I’m not sure I can endorse the specific complaint lahwran made, I very much do endorse a slightly different one: your comment about CFAR was gratuitously rude and largely irrelevant, and what you wrote would have been better without it.
I am concerned about a fairly mild anti-CFAR comment getting this much criticism. I do think “part of the reason I haven’t adopted double crux is that I don’t trust CFAR” is a relevant comment. Even if it wasn’t, I worry that motivated reasoning will cause people to be far more upset about criticism of respected rationalist organizations than they are of other institutions, and for this to lead to a dynamic where people are quiet about their feelings about CFAR for fear of being dogpiled. This seems harmful both as a community norm and to CFAR itself.
To be clear, I am not complaining about SA’s comment because it’s anti-CFAR. I’m pretty skeptical about CFAR myself; I wouldn’t go as far as SA does, but the fact that CFAR recommends something doesn’t seem to me very good evidence for it.
I’m complaining about SA’s comment because it seems to me irrelevant, un-called-for, and likely to annoy or upset some readers (of whom I am not one) with no offsetting benefit to make it worth while.
But I very much hope that no one feels unable to criticize CFAR or MIRI or any other entity for fear of being dogpiled, and (as one alleged dog in the alleged pile) promise that if I see such dogpiling happening to someone for relevant criticism then I will be right there on the barricades defending them.
Here’s a more general comment re: the relevance of my aside—not about this issue in particular, but this general class of things.
I have, quite a few times in the past, had the experience of bringing up something like this, and having the responses of other participants or potential-participants in the discussion be split along lines as follows:
Some people: That was unnecessary! And irrelevant. No one else feels this way, why bring your grudge into this unrelated matter?
Other people: Thank you for saying that. I, too, feel this way, and agree that this is highly relevant, but didn’t want to say anything.
Those in the first category are usually oblivious to the existence and the prevalence of those in the second.
So yes, I think that it is not only absolutely permissible, but indeed mandatory, to insert just such asides into just such discussions. If there’s no uptake—well, then I simply drop the matter. Saying it once, or at least once in a long while, is sufficient; I have no problem changing the subject. But pervasive silence in such cases is how echo chambers form.
I can very well believe that remarks like this get exactly those sorts of comments, but I don’t think the existence of the Other People is good evidence that the remarks are a good idea. All it need show is that there are people who are cross about X (in this case X=CFAR) and feel that their views are underrepresented, which is not sufficient to make anti-X jabs helpful contributions to any given discussion.
If your opinion is that CFAR is a fraud or a scam or just inept and want to reassure others who hold similar views, then make a post actually about that explaining why you think that. It’ll be far more effective in showing those people that they have allies, it’ll provide a venue for others who agree to explain why (and for those who disagree to explain why, which should also be important if we’re trying to arrive at the truth), and it’ll have some chance of persuading others (which at-most-marginally-relevant jabs will not).
If going to the effort of writing a whole post about a concern is a prerequisite to ever mentioning the concern at all, then I think that’s an entirely unreasonable barrier, and certain to create a chilling effect on discussions of that concern. I oppose such a policy unreservedly.
All it need show is that there are people who are cross about X (in this case X=CFAR) and feel that their views are underrepresented, which is not sufficient to make anti-X jabs helpful contributions to any given discussion.
I thought that “and the concern in question is relevant to the current discussion” was implied. But consider it now stated outright! Append that, mentally, to what I said in the grandparent. (Certainly, as I made clear in the parallel thread, I think that the CFAR issue is relevant to this discussion.)
Perhaps I wasn’t clear: I don’t think you are, or should be, forbidden to mention your opinions of / attitude to CFAR if you aren’t willing to make a whole post explaining them. That would be crazy.
What I do think (which seems to me much less crazy) is this: 1. If, as you say three comments upthread from here, you feel that you have an obligation to say bad things about CFAR in public so that LW2 doesn’t become a pro-CFAR echo chamber, then what you’ve done here is not a very effective way of doing it, and writing something more substantial would be much more effective. And: 2. Dropping boo-to-CFAR asides into discussions of something else is likely to do more harm than good (even conditional on CFAR being bad in whatever ways you consider it bad; in fact, probably more so if it is) because its most likely effect is to make fans of CFAR defensive, people who dislike CFAR gloaty, and people who frankly don’t care much about CFAR annoyed at having what seem like political rivalries injected into otherwise-interesting discussions.
Of course, what’s ended up happening is that there’s been a ton of discussion and you may end up expending as much effort as if you’d written a whole post about why you are unimpressed by CFAR, but without the actual benefits of having done so. For the avoidance of doubt, that wasn’t my intention, and I doubt it was anyone else’s either, but it’s not exactly a surprising outcome either; gratuitously inflammatory asides tend to have such consequences...
Very enthusiastic +1 to this. I also don’t want to have a policy (that, empirically, I currently have, I guess?) of making people who say things like what you said, end up having to defend their views for hours in replies.
Unless you think there are a lot of LW-adjacent people who regard “X comes from CFAR” as evidence against X being useful
I do think that, in fact. (Caveat: I don’t know about “a lot”; I couldn’t speak to percentages of the user base or anything. Certainly not just me, though.)
If you took my comment as merely a political jab, feel free to ignore it. I am not certainly not interested in discussing CFAR-in-general in this thread (though would be happy to discuss it elsewhere). But that part of my comment was fully intended to be as substantive and on-point as the rest of it.
There absolutely should not be any sort of obligation to be “prosocial” here.
I think that it might be productive for the moderation team to comment on this point in particular. It seems like this might be a genuine difference in expectations between segments of the user base, and between the moderators and some of said segments.
(I think the rest of what you wrote, however, does an admirable job of that, and I agree that it seems like a sufficient explanation.)
this seems like intentionally rude wording to me.
(edited—this is all I ever meant.)
Replying to your edit:
General request to all commenters: when editing a post to change wording or conrent, please retain the original wording / content, if existing replies to your comment reference it or depend on it in any way. Doing otherwise destroys the coherence of comment threads, and makes them less useful to later readers.
Re: the edited comment: it baffles me that you perceive that sentence as not only rude, but so rude that it could only be intentional—given that I chose my words carefully, to avoid explicit abuse or impoliteness! How could I have phrased my comment instead, in your opinion, that would’ve upgraded it at least to the level of “unintentionally rude” (“actually polite” is probably too much to hope for), without losing the meaning?
I am dismayed by the discourse norms that such comments imply. :(
I am surprised at 2, and want to retract my comment and make this whole subthread not able to hurt me any more. I’m feeling a lot of social disapproval at my having posted the comment, and my update from it is to just not make comments like that, which I think is a good outcome for your preferences about discourse norms. I can’t stand social disapproval like this, and I feel an urgent need to change however will make it go away the fastest—on most sites, that’s “delete my comment, never post another one like it”.
Though actually, I have 4 points now. But I still acutely feel your disapproval of my having expressed disapproval at you, and want to just take it back and let you talk how you want.
(meta: it’s quite scary for me to try to be honest about this. I feel urge to reply with my actual feelings in the interest of truth seeking, but normally would just be silent.)
Upvoted. I regret that my comments had this effect on you (though do not regret making them). I hope that you will continue to comment no less earnestly than you’ve done so far, and encourage you to do so.
My discourse norms are honesty, integrity, and truth.
I like this. My approval drives would lead to a chilling effect on truth-seeking if everyone tried to white-box optimize them when having conversations, and I don’t endorse that; I’d rather people hurt me a bit than fail at truth-seeking. I wish I had a better way to defend myself from the hurt of social disapproval, though; eg, disowning a comment.
I endorse those.
Strongly agree on #1 (with obvious exceptions if the original wording reveals trade secrets, libels people likely to bring legal action, etc; but in thoses cases you should still describe what used to be there even if you can’t preserve it).
On #2, I can’t share SA’s bafflement. What isn’t rude about saying that a particular organization is so useless that when, attempting to do its job, it recommends doing a thing, that’s evidence against the value of doing it?
I guess it’s not rude if you know there’s no one around who belongs to, or identifies strongly with, that institution. But that’s not very likely in these parts. Otherwise: what baffles me is how anyone would expect that not to be rude.
(To be clear: “Rude” is not the same thing as “bad” or “wrong”. Sometimes being rude is a good thing. Sometimes it is a necessary evil. I am not claiming that no one should ever be rude.)
You seem to be using “rude” in such a way that the property of rudeness can attach to claims on the basis of their propositional content only. That, to me, is a very strange usage.
It seems to me that either you must think that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being rude; or, you must think that certain claims simply cannot be made, certain propositions simply cannot be expressed—regardless of their truth value (if they are not trade secrets or so on).
I disagree with the latter, and prefer a word usage that makes the former false (else the word “rude” becomes largely useless.)
It’s too late to accomplish this by this point, but the response I had planned for your CFAR comment (I actually had it planned before lahwren responded), which I didn’t have time to write before going to bed, was something like:
”I had an initial negative reaction and urge to downvote when I saw the CFAR comment, but I quickly noticed that most of that was coming from a place of tribal emotions (i.e. ‘must defend my people!’) which I didn’t endorse. I briefly considered trying to respond in a more careful way that got to the heart of the issue, but it seemed like the “yay CFAR? / boo CFAR?” was basically a distraction. There may be a time/place for it but this isn’t it.
I’d prefer if people didn’t end up having a giant discussion about “is CFAR good/bad?” and instead stuck to discussion of Double Crux as a technique.”
Having said that, in light of your other comment about wanting to see a public Double Crux, “should CFAR be positive or negative evidence of a technique’s validity” is precisely the sort of question that Double Crux is for, and I’d be interested in doing a public DC on it with you if you’re up for it (normally I’d suggest skype but since part of the point is to produce something easy for others to consume, chatlog could be fine)
(that said, I’m fairly busy in the next 30 hours or so. I might be up for it Friday night or over the weekend though)
(Edit: it looks like some other people also offered something like this, I don’t think it’s especially important I be involved, but think it’d probably be valuable in any case)
I agree with you re: the grandparent, and I appreciate the offer re: the Double Crux.
I am, sadly, unlikely to be able to take you up on it; my “commenting on or about an internet forum” time budget is already taken up by this flurry of activity here on LW 2.0.
Instead, I’d just like to reiterate my request / suggestion that you folks find some way to be able to point readers to pre-existing, publicly viewable examples of the technique being used. I think much hinges on that, at this point. Offering, when questioned, to demonstrate Double Crux, by way of trying to debate whether Double Crux is any good, is all very well, but—it simply doesn’t scale!
Doesn’t scale, but seems like it should happen at least once. (tongue sort of but not entirely in cheek). Then you can just link to it the second time.
The problem is that Double Crux is best conducted in ways that aren’t very amenable to publicizing (i.e. a private walk where people feel free-er), so there needs to be some attempts to do a public one at a time when:
- it’s high enough stakes that it matters so you can see people using the technique for real
—it’s low enough stakes that it’s okay to publicly share it without you having to worry about “looking good” during the discussion
—it’s convenient to record in some way
Well, as I say elsewhere in these comments—that does make it of rather limited utility to much of the LW readership!
I agree, which is why I think noticing that there’s an opportunity to do a public one (i.e. now) is something that should be treated as a valuable opportunity that’s worth treating differently than arguing-on-the-internet-qua-arguing-on-the-internet.
(I also think arguing “should ‘created by CFAR’ be positive or negative evidence” is at least slightly less meta-sturbatory than “let’s double crux about double crux”)
Strong agree that it’s both true that “the lack of an example to point to produces justified skepticism” and that “that’s partly unfair because that skepticism and other ‘too busys’ keep feeding into no one taking the time to create said example.”
Yes, I think things can be rude on the basis of their propositional content. (But not only their propositional content.) If I state that you are very unintelligent, and I say it in the presence of you or of your friends, then I am being rude. I can do it in extra-rude ways (“Said is a total fucking moron”) or in less-rude ways (“I have reason to think that Said’s IQ is probably below 90″) but however you slice it it’ll be rude.
(For the avoidance of doubt, of course I do not in fact think any such thing.)
I do, indeed, think there is nothing necessarily wrong with being rude. As I said: Sometimes being rude is a good thing, and sometimes it’s a necessary evil. All else being equal, being rude is usually worse than not being rude, but many other things may outweigh the rudeness.
I don’t see that this makes the word “rude” largely useless, and I’m not sure why it should. If you mean it makes it meaningless then I strongly disagree (I take it to mean something like “predictably likely to make people upset”, though for various reasons that isn’t exactly right). If you mean it makes it unactionable then again I disagree; it just means that acting on the knowledge that something is rude is more complicated than just Not Doing It. (If you want to upset someone, which there may be good reasons for though usually there aren’t, then rudeness is beneficial. If you don’t but other things are higher-priority for you than not upsetting people, then you weigh up the benefits and harms, as always.) If you mean something other than those and the above hasn’t convinced you that my way of using “rude” isn’t useless, then you might want to explain further.
Indeed I meant “meaningless”, or perhaps “encompassing many disparate meanings under the umbrella of one word; attempting to refer to unrelated concepts as if they are the same or closely clustered; failing to cleave reality at the joints”.
I find it quite unnatural to apply the word “rude” as you do, and, to be extra clear, will certainly never mean anything like this when I use the word.
My takeaway here is that if you tell me that something is “rude”, I have not really gained any information about what you think of the thing, nor will I take you to have made any kind of definite claim about the thing, nor even do I know whether you’re attempting to ascribe positive valence to it or negative. (This is, to my mind, an unfortunate consequence of using words in strange ways, though of course you are free to use words as you please.)
I suppose I will have to remember, should you ever describe my comments as “rude” henceforth, to reply with something like—“Ok, now, what actually do you mean by this? ‘Rude’, yes, which means what…?”.
I am confused. (And also, apparently, confusing, which I regret.)
If I say something is rude then you learn that in my opinion it is likely to upset or offend a nontrivial fraction of people who read it. (Context will usually indicate roughly which people I think are likely to be upset or offended.)
How is that no information? How have I made no definite claim?
(It is true that merely from the fact that I call something rude you cannot with certainty tell whether I am being positive about it or negative. The same is true if I call something large, ingenious, conservative, wooden, complex, etc., etc., etc. I don’t see how this is a problem. For the avoidance of doubt, though, most of the time when I call something rude I am being negative about it, even if I think that the rudeness was a necessary evil.)
My use of the word “rude” doesn’t seem to me particularly nonstandard or strange. It’s more or less the same as definition 5a in the OED, which is “Unmannerly, uncivil, impolite; offensively or deliberately discourteous”. (The OED has lots of definitions, because “rude” does in fact have lots of meanings. It can e.g. sometimes mean “unrefined” or “vigorous”.)
Clearly you are dissatisfied with my usage of the word “rude”. Perhaps you might tell me yours; it is still not clear to me either what it is or why it might be better than mine. From what you say above, it seems that you want it used in such a way that “X is rude” strictly implies “X is morally wrong”, but if that’s really so then I’m unable to think of any meaning that does this while coming anywhere near the specificity that “rude” usually has. (At least for those who have moral systems not entirely based around not giving offence, which I am pretty sure includes both of us.)
I admit that I’m puzzled by your comment. What is it that you think I might be hiding, or that I might wish to (plausibly) deny…? I thought I’d made myself reasonably clear, but if some part of my comment’s meaning seems obscure to you, I’d be glad to clarify…
(As a side note, and more generally, I’d like to note my very strong distaste for any community / site discourse norms that required commenters to hold to “prosocial wording” at all times. There is a difference between respectfulness and common decency, on the one hand, and on the other, this sort of stifling tone policing.)
I agree: it doesn’t read at all like an attack hidden behind plausible deniability, it reads like an attack that isn’t hidden at all.
But what’s it for?
Unless you think there are a lot of LW-adjacent people who regard “X comes from CFAR” as evidence against X being useful (my guess is that there are not, though there are probably a fair few who think “X comes from CFAR” is no evidence to speak of that it actually is useful), it’s not doing anything to resolve Raemon’s curiosity about why the technique hasn’t become popular. (I think the rest of what you wrote, however, does an admirable job of that, and I agree that it seems like a sufficient explanation.)
And, if in fact doublecruxing’s CFAR origins are a problem for any reason, it’s not like there’s much anyone can actually do about them.
The immediate impression I get from your remark about CFAR is this: “Said Achmiz really doesn’t like CFAR, and he wants everyone to know it, so much so that he puts anti-CFAR jabs into comments where they add nothing and probably serve only to antagonize people who might otherwise listen more willingly to what he’s saying”. It’s the same feeling I get from the similar jabs some people like to make at one another’s political or (ir)religious positions. I think they (and I am very much including yours here) tend to push discussions in the direction of tribal warfare (are you on Team CFAR-is-Good or Team CFAR-is-Bad?) and make them less productive.
There absolutely should not be any sort of obligation to be “prosocial” here. And if you wrote a post about why you think CFAR does more harm than good, I would read it with interest and probably upvote it. (My main reservation would be that communities like this tend to spend too much time discussing themselves and not enough time discussing actual issues, and this might be heading in the same direction.) But, while I’m not sure I can endorse the specific complaint lahwran made, I very much do endorse a slightly different one: your comment about CFAR was gratuitously rude and largely irrelevant, and what you wrote would have been better without it.
I am concerned about a fairly mild anti-CFAR comment getting this much criticism. I do think “part of the reason I haven’t adopted double crux is that I don’t trust CFAR” is a relevant comment. Even if it wasn’t, I worry that motivated reasoning will cause people to be far more upset about criticism of respected rationalist organizations than they are of other institutions, and for this to lead to a dynamic where people are quiet about their feelings about CFAR for fear of being dogpiled. This seems harmful both as a community norm and to CFAR itself.
To be clear, I am not complaining about SA’s comment because it’s anti-CFAR. I’m pretty skeptical about CFAR myself; I wouldn’t go as far as SA does, but the fact that CFAR recommends something doesn’t seem to me very good evidence for it.
I’m complaining about SA’s comment because it seems to me irrelevant, un-called-for, and likely to annoy or upset some readers (of whom I am not one) with no offsetting benefit to make it worth while.
But I very much hope that no one feels unable to criticize CFAR or MIRI or any other entity for fear of being dogpiled, and (as one alleged dog in the alleged pile) promise that if I see such dogpiling happening to someone for relevant criticism then I will be right there on the barricades defending them.
I’m actually confused that you think my comment was bad—I was thinking the same thing you ended up saying.
I’m confused too. I don’t think your comment was bad, though as I wrote I’m not sure I could quite endorse the exact complaint it originally made.
Here’s a more general comment re: the relevance of my aside—not about this issue in particular, but this general class of things.
I have, quite a few times in the past, had the experience of bringing up something like this, and having the responses of other participants or potential-participants in the discussion be split along lines as follows:
Some people: That was unnecessary! And irrelevant. No one else feels this way, why bring your grudge into this unrelated matter?
Other people: Thank you for saying that. I, too, feel this way, and agree that this is highly relevant, but didn’t want to say anything.
Those in the first category are usually oblivious to the existence and the prevalence of those in the second.
So yes, I think that it is not only absolutely permissible, but indeed mandatory, to insert just such asides into just such discussions. If there’s no uptake—well, then I simply drop the matter. Saying it once, or at least once in a long while, is sufficient; I have no problem changing the subject. But pervasive silence in such cases is how echo chambers form.
I can very well believe that remarks like this get exactly those sorts of comments, but I don’t think the existence of the Other People is good evidence that the remarks are a good idea. All it need show is that there are people who are cross about X (in this case X=CFAR) and feel that their views are underrepresented, which is not sufficient to make anti-X jabs helpful contributions to any given discussion.
If your opinion is that CFAR is a fraud or a scam or just inept and want to reassure others who hold similar views, then make a post actually about that explaining why you think that. It’ll be far more effective in showing those people that they have allies, it’ll provide a venue for others who agree to explain why (and for those who disagree to explain why, which should also be important if we’re trying to arrive at the truth), and it’ll have some chance of persuading others (which at-most-marginally-relevant jabs will not).
If going to the effort of writing a whole post about a concern is a prerequisite to ever mentioning the concern at all, then I think that’s an entirely unreasonable barrier, and certain to create a chilling effect on discussions of that concern. I oppose such a policy unreservedly.
I thought that “and the concern in question is relevant to the current discussion” was implied. But consider it now stated outright! Append that, mentally, to what I said in the grandparent. (Certainly, as I made clear in the parallel thread, I think that the CFAR issue is relevant to this discussion.)
Perhaps I wasn’t clear: I don’t think you are, or should be, forbidden to mention your opinions of / attitude to CFAR if you aren’t willing to make a whole post explaining them. That would be crazy.
What I do think (which seems to me much less crazy) is this: 1. If, as you say three comments upthread from here, you feel that you have an obligation to say bad things about CFAR in public so that LW2 doesn’t become a pro-CFAR echo chamber, then what you’ve done here is not a very effective way of doing it, and writing something more substantial would be much more effective. And: 2. Dropping boo-to-CFAR asides into discussions of something else is likely to do more harm than good (even conditional on CFAR being bad in whatever ways you consider it bad; in fact, probably more so if it is) because its most likely effect is to make fans of CFAR defensive, people who dislike CFAR gloaty, and people who frankly don’t care much about CFAR annoyed at having what seem like political rivalries injected into otherwise-interesting discussions.
Of course, what’s ended up happening is that there’s been a ton of discussion and you may end up expending as much effort as if you’d written a whole post about why you are unimpressed by CFAR, but without the actual benefits of having done so. For the avoidance of doubt, that wasn’t my intention, and I doubt it was anyone else’s either, but it’s not exactly a surprising outcome either; gratuitously inflammatory asides tend to have such consequences...
Very enthusiastic +1 to this. I also don’t want to have a policy (that, empirically, I currently have, I guess?) of making people who say things like what you said, end up having to defend their views for hours in replies.
I do think that, in fact. (Caveat: I don’t know about “a lot”; I couldn’t speak to percentages of the user base or anything. Certainly not just me, though.)
If you took my comment as merely a political jab, feel free to ignore it. I am not certainly not interested in discussing CFAR-in-general in this thread (though would be happy to discuss it elsewhere). But that part of my comment was fully intended to be as substantive and on-point as the rest of it.
I think that it might be productive for the moderation team to comment on this point in particular. It seems like this might be a genuine difference in expectations between segments of the user base, and between the moderators and some of said segments.
Thank you.