That’s understandable, but I hope it’s also understandable that I find it unpleasant that our standard Bayesian philosophy-of-language somehow got politicized (!?), such that my attempts to do correct epistemology are perceived as attacking people?!
Like, imagine an alternate universe where posts about the minimum description length principle were perceived as an attack on Christians (because atheists often argue that Occam’s razor implies that theories about God are unnecessarily complex), and therefore somewhat unseemly (because politics is the mind-killer, and criticizing a popular religion has inextricable political consequences).
I can see how it would be really annoying if someone on your favorite rationality forum wrote a post about minimum description length, if you knew that their work about MDL was partially derived from other work (on a separate website, under a pseudonym) about atheism, and you happened to think that Occam’s razor actually doesn’t favor atheism.
Or maybe that analogy is going to be perceived as unfair because we live in a subculture that pattern-matches religion as “the bad guys” and atheism as the “good guys”? (I could try to protest, “But, but, you could imagine as part of the thought experiment that maybe Occam’s razor really doesn’t favor atheism”, but maybe that wouldn’t be perceived as credible.)
Fine. We can do better. Imagine instead some crank racist psuedoscientist who, in the process of pursuing their blatantly ideologically-motiviated fake “science”, happens to get really interested in the statistics of the normal distribution, and writes a post on your favorite rationality forum about the ratio of areas in the right tails of normal distributions with different means.
I can see how that would be really annoying—maybe even threatening! Which might make it all the more gratifying if you can find a mistake in the racist bastard’s math: then you could call out the mistake in the comments and bask in moral victory as the OP gets downvoted to oblivion for the sin of bad math.
But if you can’t find a mistake—if, in fact, the post is on-topic for the forum and correct in the literal things that it literally says, then complaining about the author’s motive for being interested in the normal distribution doesn’t seem like an obviously positive contribution to the discourse?—even if you’re correct about the author’s motive. (Although, you might not be correct.)
Like, maybe statistics is part of the common interest of many causes, such that, as a matter of local validity, you should assess arguments about statistics on their own merits in the context that those arguments are presented, without worrying about how those arguments might or might not be applied in other contexts?
What, realistically, do you expect the atheist—or the racist, or me—to do? Am I supposed to just passively accept that all of my thoughts about epistemology are tainted and unfit for this forum, because I happen to be interested in applying epistemology to other topics (on a separate website, under a pseudonym)?
I think the grandparent is an on-topic response to the OP, relating the theme of the OP (about how if you don’t have negative feedback or “No”s, then that makes positive feedback or “Yes”es less significant) to both a hypothetical example about social network voting mechanisms, and, separately, to another philosophy topic (about the cognitive function of categories) that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately! That’s generally what happens when people comment on posts: they think about the post in the context of their own knowledge and their own priorities, and then write a comment explaining their actual thoughts!
Leave a critical comment explaining what I got wrong (if you have time).
Those actions are unambiguously prosocial, because downvotes help other users decide what’s worth their time to read, and criticism of bad reasoning helps everyone reading get better at reasoning! But criticizing me because of what you know about my personal psychological motives for making otherwise-not-known-to-be-negative contributions seems … maybe less obviously prosocial?
Like, what happens if you apply this standard consistently? Did you know that Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writings that are ostensibly about human rationality, were actually mostly conceived in the context of his plans to build a superintelligence to literally take over the world?! (Although he denies it, of course.) That’s politics! Should we find it unpleasant that Yudkowsky always brings his hobbyhorse in, but in an “abstract” way that doesn’t allow discussing the actual object-level political question about whether he should rule the world?
Am I wrong here? Like, I see your concern! I really do! I’m sorry if we happen to be trapped in a zero-sum game whereby my attempts to think seriously in public about things I’m interested in ends up imposing negative externalities on you! But what, realistically, do you expect me to do? Happy to talk privately sometime if you’d like. (In a few weeks; I mostly want to focus on group theory and my dayjob for the rest of May.)
I’m not sure what your hobby horse is, but I do take objection to the assumption in this post that decoupling norms are the obvious and only correct way to deal with things. The problem with this is that if you actually care about the world, you can’t take arguments in isolation, but have to consider the context in which they are made.
1. It can be perfectly OK for the environment to bring up a topic once, but can make people less likely to want to visit the forum if someone brings it up all the time and tries to twist other people’s posts towards a discussion of their thing. It would be perfectly alright for moderators who didn’t want to drive away their visitors to ask this person to stop.
2. It can be perfectly OK to kick out someone who has a bad reputation that makes important posters unable to post on your website because they don’t want to associate with that person, even IF that person has good behavior.
3. It can be perfectly OK to downvote posts that are well-reasoned, on topic, and not misleading, because you’re worried about the incentives of those posts being highly upvoted.
All of these things are tradeoffs with decoupled conversation obviously, which has its’ own benefits. The website has to decide what values it stands for and will fight for, vs. what it will be flexible on depending on context. What I don’t think is OK is just to ignore context and assume that decoupling is always unambiguously the right call.
I do take objection to the assumption in this post that decoupling norms are the obvious and only correct way to deal with things.
Zack didn’t say this. What he said was:
Like, maybe statistics is part of the common interest of many causes, such that, as a matter of local validity, you should assess arguments about statistics on their own merits in the context that those arguments are presented, without worrying about how those arguments might or might not be applied in other contexts?
Which is compatible with thinking more details should be taken into account when the statistical arguments are applied in other contexts (in fact, I’m pretty sure this is what Zack thinks).
Discussion of abstract epistemology principles, which generalize across different contexts, is perhaps most of the point of this website...
Your points 1,2,3 have nothing to do with the epistemic problem of decoupling vs contextualizing, they have to do with political tradeoffs in moderating a forum; they apply to people doing contextualization in their analysis, too. I hate that the phrase “contextualizing norms” is being used to conflate between “all sufficiently relevant information should be used” and “everything should be about politics”.
Your points 1,2,3 have noting to do with the epistemic problem of decoupling vs contextualizing,
This is probably because I don’t know what the epistemic problem is. I only know about the linked post, which defines things like this:
Decoupling norms: It is considered eminently reasonable to require your claims to be considered in isolation—free of any context or potential implications. Attempts to raise these issues are often seen as sloppy thinking or attempts to deflect.
Contextualising norms: It is considered eminently reasonable to expect certain contextual factors or implications to be addressed. Not addressing these factors is often seen as sloppy or even an intentional evasion.
… To a contextualiser, decouplers’ ability to fence off any threatening implications looks like a lack of empathy for those threatened, while to a decoupler the contextualiser’s insistence that this isn’t possible looks like naked bias and an inability to think straight”
I sometimes round this off in my head to something like “pure decouplers think arguments should be considered only on their epistemic merits, and pure contextualizers think arguments should be considered only on their instrumental merits”.
There might be another use of decoupling and contextualizing that applies to an epistemic problem, but if so it’s not defined in the canonical article on the site.
My basic read of Zack’s entire post was him saying over and over “Well there might be really bad instrumental effects of these arguments, but you have to ignore that if their epistemics are good.” And my immediate reaction to that was “No I don’t, and that’s a bad norm.”
I sometimes round this off in my head to something like “pure decouplers think arguments should be considered only on their epistemic merits, and pure contextualizers think arguments should be considered only on their instrumental merits”.
The proper words for that aren’t decoupling vs contextualizing, it’s denotative vs enactive language. An orthogonal axis to how many relevant contextual factors are supposed to be taken into account. You can require lots of contextual factors to be taken into account in epistemic analysis, or require certain enactments to be made independent of context.
Note, the original post makes the conflation I’m complaining about here too!
It might just make more sense to give this one up to word inflation and come up with new words. I’ll happily use the denotative vs. enactive language to point to this thing in the future, but I’ll probably have to put a footnote that says something like (what most people in the community refer to as decoupling vs. contextualizing.
My basic read of Zack’s entire post was him saying over and over “Well there might be really bad instrumental effects of these arguments, but you have to ignore that if their epistemics are good.” And my immediate reaction to that was “No I don’t, and that’s a bad norm.”
It really looks like you’re defending the “appeal to consequences” as a reasonable way to think, and a respectable approach to public epistemology. But that seems so plainly absurd that I have to assume that I’ve misunderstood. What am I missing?
It really looks like you’re defending the “appeal to consequences” as a reasonable way to think, and a respectable approach to public epistemology. But that seems so plainly absurd that I have to assume that I’ve misunderstood. What am I missing?
It might be that we just have different definitions of absurd and you’re not missing anything, or it could be that you’re taking an extreme version of what I’m saying.
To wit, my stance is that to ignore the consequences of what you say is just obviously wrong. Even if you hold truth as a very high value, you have to value it insanely more than any other value to never encounter a situation where you’re not compromising other things you value by ignoring the difference you could make by not saying something/lying/being careful about how to phrase things, etc.
Now obviously, you also have to consider the effect this type of thinking/communication has on discourse and the public ability to seek the truth—and once you’ve done that you’re ALREADY thinking about the consequences of what you say and what you allow others to say, and the task at that point is to simply weigh them against each other.
It’s important to distinguish the question of whether, in your own personal decisionmaking, you should ever do things that aren’t maximally epistemically good (obviously, yes); from the question of whether the discourse norms of this website should tolerate appeals to consequences (obviously, no).
It might be morally right, in some circumstances, to pass off a false mathematical proof as a true one (e.g. in a situation where it is useful to obscure some mathematical facts related to engineering weapons of mass destruction). It’s still a violation of the norms of mathematics, with good reason. And it would be very wrong to argue that the norms of mathematics should change to accommodate people making this (by assumption, morally right) choice.
To summarize: you’re destroying the substrate. Stop it.
It’s important to distinguish the question of whether, in your own personal decisionmaking, you should ever do things that aren’t maximally epistemically good (obviously, yes); from the question of whether the discourse norms of this website should tolerate appeals to consequences (obviously, no).
I agree it’s important to realize that these things are fundamentally different.
It might be morally right, in some circumstances, to pass off a false mathematical proof as a true one (e.g. in a situation where it is useful to obscure some mathematical facts related to engineering weapons of mass destruction). It’s still a violation of the norms of mathematics, with good reason. And it would be very wrong to argue that the norms of mathematics should change to accommodate people making this (by assumption, morally right) choice.
A better norm of mathematics might be to NOT publish proofs that have obvious negative consequences like enabling weapons of mass destruction, and have a norm that actively disincentivizes people who publish that sort of research.
In other words, a norm might be to basically be epistemically pure, UNLESS the local instrumental considerations outweigh the cost to epistemic climate. This can be rounded down to “have norms about epistemics and break them sometimes,” but only if when someone points at edge cases where the norms are actively harmful, they’re challenged that sometimes the breaking of those norms is perfectly OK.
IE, if someone is using the norms of the community as a weapon, it’s important to point at that the norms are a means to an end, and that the community won’t blindly allow itself to be taken advantage of.
I think my actual concern with this line of argumentation is: if you have a norm of “If ‘X’ and ‘X implies Y’ then ‘Y’, EXCEPT when it’s net bad to have concluded ‘Y’”, then the werewolves win.
The question of whether it’s net bad to have concluded ‘Y’, is much, much more complicated than the question of whether, logically, ‘Y’ is true under these assumptions (of course, it is). There are many, many more opportunities for werewolves to gum up the works of this process, making the calculation come out wrong.
If we’re having a discussion about X and Y, someone moves to propose ‘Y’ (because, as it has already been agreed, ‘X’ and ‘X implies Y’), and then someone else says “no, we can’t do that, that has negative consequences!”, that second person is probably playing a werewolf strategy, gumming up the works of the epistemic substrate.
If we are going to have the exception to the norm at all, then there has to be a pretty high standard of evidence to prove that adding ‘Y’ to the discourse, in fact, has bad consequences. And, to get the right answer, that discussion itself is going to have to be up to high epistemic standards. To be trustworthy, it’s going to have to make logical inferences much more complex than “if ‘X’ and ‘X implies Y’, then ‘Y’”. What if someone objects to those logical inference steps, on the basis that they would have negative consequences? Where does that discussion happen?
In practice, these questions aren’t actually answered. In practice, what happens is that social epistemology doesn’t happen, and instead everything becomes about coalitional politics. Saying ‘Y’ doesn’t mean ‘Y is literally true’, it means you’re part of the coalition of people who wants consequences related to (but not even necessarily directly implied by!) the statement ‘Y’ to be put into effect, and that makes you blameworthy if those consequences hurt someone sympathetic, or that coalition is bad. Under such conditions, it is a major challenge to re-establish epistemic discourse, because everything is about violence, including attempts to talk about the “we don’t have epistemology and everything is about violence” problem.
We have something approaching epistemic discourse here on LessWrong, but we have to defend it, or it, too, becomes all about coalitional politics.
If we are going to have the exception to the norm at all, then there has to be a pretty high standard of evidence to prove that adding ‘Y’ to the discourse, in fact, has bad consequences.
I want to note that LW definitely has exceptions to this norm, if only because of the boring, normal exceptions. (If we would get in trouble with law enforcement for hosting something you might put on LW, don’t put it on LW.) We’ve had in the works (for quite some time) a post explaining our position on less boring cases more clearly, but it runs into difficulty with the sort of issues that you discuss here; generally these questions are answered in private in a way that connects to the judgment calls being made and the particulars of the case, as opposed to through transparent principles that can be clearly understood and predicted in advance (in part because, to extend the analogy, this empowers the werewolves as well).
Another common werewolf move is to take advantage of strong norms like epistemic honesty, and use them to drive wedges in a community or push their agenda, while knowing they can’t be called out because doing so would be akin to attacking the community’s norms.
I’ve seen the meme elsewhere in the rationality community that strong and rigid epistemic norms are a good sociopath repellent, and it’s ALMOST right. The truth is that competent sociopaths (in the Venkat Rao sense) are actually great at using rigid norms for their own ends, and are great at using the truth for their own ends as well. The reason it might work well in the rationality community (besides the obvious fact that sociopaths are even better at using lies to their own ends than the truth) is that strong epistemics are very close to what we’re actually fighting for—and remembering and always orienting towards the mission is ACTUALLY an effective first line defense against sociopaths (necessary but not sufficient IMO).
99 times out of a 100, the correct way to remember what we’re fighting for is to push for stronger epistemics above other considerations. I knew that when I made the original post, and I made it knowing I would get pushback for attacking a core value of the community.
However, 1 time out of 100 the correct way to remember what you’re fighting for is to realize that you have to sacrifice a sacred value for the greater good. And when you see someone explicitly pushing the gray area by trying to get you to accept harmful situations by appealing to that sacred value, it’s important to make clear (mostly to other people in the community) that sacrificing that value is an option.
What specifically do you mean by “werewolf” here & how do you think it relates to the way Jessica was using it? I’m worried that we’re getting close to just redefining it as a generic term for “enemies of the community.”
By werewolf I meant something like “someone who is pretending be working for the community as a member, but is actually working for their own selfish ends”. I thought Jessica was using it in the same way.
That’s not what I meant. I meant specifically someone who is trying to prevent common knowledge from being created (and more generally, to gum up the works of “social decisionmaking based on correct information”), as in the Werewolf party game.
Worth noting: “werewolf” as a jargon term strikes me as something that is inevitably going to get collapsed into “generic bad actor” over time, if it gets used a lot. I’m assuming that you’re thinking of it sort of as in the “preformal” stage, where it doesn’t make sense to over-optimize the terminology. But if you’re going to keep using it I think it’d make sense to come up with a term that’s somewhat more robust against getting interpreted that way.
(random default suggestion: “obfuscator”. Other options I came up with required multiple words to get the point across and ended up too convoluted. There might be a fun shorthand for a type of animal or mythological figure that is a) a predator or parasite, b) relies on making things cloudy. So far I could just come up with “squid” due to ink jets, but it didn’t really have the right connotations)
That is a bit more specific than what I meant. In this case though, the second more broad meaning of “someone who’s trying to gum up the works of social decisionmaking” still works in the context of the comment.
And when you see someone explicitly pushing the gray area by trying to get you to accept harmful situations by appealing to that sacred value
Um, in context, this sounds to me like you’re arguing that by writing “Where to Draw the Boundaries?” and my secret (“secret”) blog, I’m trying to get people to accept harmful situations? Am I interpreting you correctly? If so, can you explain in detail what specific harm you think is being done?
Sorry, I was trying to be really careful as I was writing of not accusing you specifically of bad intentions, but obviously it’s hard in a conversation like this where you’re jumping between the meta and the object-level.
It’s important to distinguish a couple things.
1. Jessica and I were talking about people with negative intentions in the last two posts. I’m not claiming that you’re one of those people that is deliberately using this type of argument to cause harm.
2. I’m not claiming that it was the writing of those two posts that were harmful in the way we were talking about. I was claiming that the long post you wrote at the top of the thread where you made several analogies about your response, were exactly the sort of gray area situations where, depending on context, the community might decide to sacrifice it’s sacred value. At the same time, you were banking on the fact that it was a sacred value to say “even in this case, we would uphold the sacred value.” This has the same structure as the werewolf move mentioned above, and it was important for me to speak up, even if you’re not a werewolf.
people with negative intentions [...] deliberately
So, it’s actually not clear to me that deliberate negative intentions are particularly important, here or elsewhere? Almost no one thinks of themselves as deliberately causing avoidable harm, and yet avoidable harm gets done, probably by people following incentive gradients that predictably lead towards harm, against truth, &c. all while maintaining a perfectly sincere subjective conscious narrative about how they’re doing God’s work, on the right side of history, toiling for the greater good, doing what needs to be done, maximizing global utility, acting in accordance with the moral law, practicing a virtue which is nameless, &c.
it was important for me to speak up, even if you’re not a werewolf.
Agreed. If I’m causing harm, and you acquire evidence that I’m causing harm, then you should present that evidence in an appropriate venue in order to either persuade me to stop causing harm, or persuade other people to coördinate to stop me from causing harm.
I was claiming that the long post you wrote at the top of the thread where you made several analogies about your response, were exactly the sort of gray area situations where, depending on context, the community might decide to sacrifice it’s sacred value.
So, my current guess (which is only a guess and which I would have strongly disagreed with ten years ago) is that this is a suicidally terrible idea that will literally destroy the world. Sound like an unreflective appeal to sacred values? Well, maybe!—you shouldn’t take my word for this (or anything else) except to the exact extent that you think my word is Bayesian evidence. Unfortunately I’m going to need to defer supporting argumentation to future Less Wrong posts, because mental and financial health requirements force me to focus on my dayjob for at least the next few weeks. (Oh, and group theory.)
So, it’s actually not clear to me that deliberate negative intentions are particularly important, here or elsewhere?
(responding, and don’t expect another response back because you’re busy).
I used to think this, but I’ve since realized that intentions STRONGLY matter. It seems like a system is fractal, the goals of the subparts/subagents get reflected in the goal of the broader system. People with aligned intentions will tend to shift the incentive gradients, as well people with unaligned intentions (of course, this isn’t a one way relationship, the incentive gradients will also shift the intentions).
I deny that your approach ever has an advantage over recognizing that definitions are tools which have no truth values, and then digging into goals or desires.
Thanks, these are some great points on some of the costs of decoupling norms! (As you’ve observed, I’m generally pretty strongly in favor of decoupling norms, but policy debates should not appear one-sided.)
someone brings it up all the time
I would want to distinguish “brings it up all the time” in the sense of “this user posts about this topic when it’s not relevant” (which I agree is bad and warrants moderator action) versus the sense of “this user posts about this topic a lot, and not on other topics” (which I think is generally OK).
If someone is obsessively focused on their narrow special interest—let’s say, algebraic topology—and occasionally comments specifically when they happen to think of an application of algebraic topology to the forum topic, I think that’s fine, because people reading that particular thread get the benefit of a relevant algebraic topology application—even if looking at that user’s posting history leaves one with an unsettling sense of, “Wow, this person is creepily obsessed with their hobbyhorse.”
tries to twist other people’s posts towards a discussion of their thing
I agree that this would be bad, but I think it’s usually possible to distinguish “twist[ing] other people’s posts towards a discussion of their thing” from a genuinely relevant mention of the thing that couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be reasonably expected to derail the discussion?
In the present case, my great-great-grandparent comment notes that the list-of-koans format lends itself to readers contributing their own examples in the comments, and I tried to give two such examples (trying to mimic the æsthetic of the OP by continuing the numbered list and Alice/Bob/Charlie/&c. character name sequence), one of which related the theme of the OP to the main point of one of my recent posts.
In retrospect, maybe I should’ve thought more carefully about how to phrase the proposed example in a way that makes the connection to the OP more explicit/obvious? (Probably-better version: “A meaningful ‘Yes’ answer to the question ‘Is G an H?’ requires a definition of H such that the answer could be ‘No’.”)
It’s true that, while composing the great-great-grandparent, I was kind of hoping that some readers would click through the link and read my earlier post, which I worked really hard on and which I think is filling in a gap in “A Human’s Guide to Words” that I’ve seen people be confused about. But I don’t see how this can reasonably be construed as an attempt to derail the discussion? Like, I ordinarily wouldn’t expect a brief comment of the form “Great post! Here’s a couple more examples that occurred to me, personally” to receive any replies in the median case.
(Although unfortunately, it empirically looks like the discussion did, in fact, get derailed. I feel bad for Scott G. that we’re cluttering up his comment section like this, but I can’t think of anything I wish I had done differently other than wording the great-great grandparent more clearly, as mentioned in the paragraph-before-last. GivenVanessa’s reply, I felt justified in writing my counterreply … and here we are.)
It would be perfectly alright for moderators who didn’t want to drive away their visitors to ask this person to stop.
Agreed, the moderators are God and their will must be obeyed.
kick out someone who has a bad reputation that makes important posters unable to post on your website because they don’t want to associate with that person, even IF that person has good behavior
So, the dynamic you describe here definitely exists, but I actually think it’s a pretty serious problem for our collective sanity: if some truths happen to lie outside of Society’s Overton window, then systematic truthseekers (who want to collect all the truths, not just the majority of them that are safely within the Overton window) will find themselves on the wrong side of Respectability, and if people who care about being Respectable (and thereby having power in Society) can’t even talk to people outside the Overton window (not even agree with—just talk to, using, for example, a website), then that could have negative instrumental consequences in the form of people with power in Society making bad policy decisions on account of having inaccurate beliefs.
I want to write more about this in the future (albeit not on Less Wrong), but in the meantime, maybe see the immortal Scott Alexander’s “Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning” for an expression of similar concerns:
Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?” Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won’t be very convincing. Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.
Regarding “Kolmogorov complicity”, I just want to make clear that I don’t want to censor your opinion on the political question. Such censorship would only serve to justify your notion that “we only refuse to believe X because it’s heresy, while any systematic truthseeker would believe X”, which is something I very much disagree with. I might be interested in discussing the political question if we were allowed to do it. It is the double bind of, not being able to allowed to argue with you on the political quesiton while having to listen to you constantly hinting at it, is what bugging me. Then again, I don’t really have a good solution.
I’ve read Zack’s blog (the one that is not under the name Zack M. Davis), and his hobbyhorse has to do with transgender issues and gender categories. However, even when he is writing directly about the matter on his own blog, I am unclear what he is actually saying about these issues. There is still a certain abstractness and distance from the object level.
It is nearly impossible for a human being to write a correct program just by thinking really hard. And that is a situation where everything is cut and dried, mathematically exact. Mathematicians do fairly well at proving theorems rigorously, but they have an easier task than programmers, for they only have to convince people, not machines. Outside of those domains, abstract argument on its own is nothing more than abstract art, unless it is continually compared with the object level and exposed to modus delens.
And the object level is what we’re all doing this for, or what’s the point?
And the object level is what we’re all doing this for, or what’s the point?
What’s the point of concrete ideas, compared to more abstract ideas? The reasons seem similar, just with different levels of grounding in experience, like with a filter bubble that you can only peer beyond with great difficulty. This situation is an argument against emphasis on the concrete, not for it.
(I think there’s a mixup between “meta” and “abstract” in this subthread. It’s meta that exists for the object level, not abstractions. Abstractions are themselves on object level when you consider them in their own right.)
Abstractions are a central example of things considered on the object level, so I don’t understand them as being in opposition to the object level. They can be in opposition to more concrete ideas, those closer to experience, but not to being considered on object level.
The point is the relationship between the levels of the ladder of abstraction. Outside of mathematics and programming, long arguments at high levels go wrong without being checked against experience. If experience contradicts, so much the worse for the argument.
Unsure of mathematics, but software development goes wrong in exactly the same way—designs and ideas too far removed from the silicon go wildly wrong and don’t match at all what actually gets built. Eventually, the code wins and the arguments lose (or more often, the code fails and everybody loses).
That’s understandable, but I hope it’s also understandable that I find it unpleasant that our standard Bayesian philosophy-of-language somehow got politicized (!?), such that my attempts to do correct epistemology are perceived as attacking people?!
Our philosophy of language did not “somehow” got politicized. You personally (Zack M. Davis) politicized it by abusing it in the context of a political issue.
...Which might make it all the more gratifying if you can find a mistake in the racist bastard’s math: then you could call out the mistake in the comments and bask in moral victory as the OP gets downvoted to oblivion for the sin of bad math.
If you had interesting new math or non-trivial novel insights, I would not complain. Of course that’s somewhat subjective: someone else might consider your insights valuable.
But what, realistically, do you expect me to do?
You’re right, I don’t have a good meta-level solution. So, if you want to keep doing that thing you’re doing, knock yourself out.
I had hard time to track down what is the refefrent to the abuse mentioned in the parent post.
It does seem that the concept was employed in a political context. To my brain politizing is a particular kind of use. I get that if you effectively employ any kind of argument towards a political end it becomes politically relevant. However it would be weird if any tool employed would automatically become part of politics.
If beliefs are to pay rent and this particular point is established / marketed to establish a specific another point I could get on board with a expectation to disclose such “financial ties”. Up to this point I know that this belief is sponsored by another belief but I do not know which belief and I don’t fully get why it would be troublesome to reveal this belief.
I don’t really have a dog in whatever fight this is, but looking at Zack’spostsandcomments recently, I see nothing but interesting and correct insights and analysis, devoid of any explicit politics (but perhaps yielding insights about such?). How can you call this “abuse”? The overwhelming majority of the content that gets posts to Less Wrong these days should aspire to the level of quality of the stuff I just linked!
The abuse did not happen on LW. However, because I happen to be somewhat familiar with Davis’ political writing, I am aware of a sinister context to what ey write in LW of which you are not aware. Now, you may say that this is not a fair objection to Davis writing whatever ey write here, and you might well be right. However, I thought I at least have the right to express my feelings on this matter so that Davis and others can take them into account (or not). If we are supposed to be a community, then it should be normal for us to consider each other’s feelings, even when there was no norm violation per se involved, not so?
I am, frankly, appalled to read this sort of thing on Less Wrong. You are, in all seriousness, attacking someone’s writings about abstract epistemology and Bayesian inference, on Less Wrong, of all places (!!), not because there is anything at all mistaken about them, but because of some alleged “sinister context” that you are bringing in from somewhere else. To call this “not a fair objection” would be a gross understatement. It is shameful.
If we are supposed to be a community, then it should be normal for us to consider each other’s feelings, even when there was no norm violation per se involved, not so?
Absolutely not.
This sort of attitude is tremendously corrosive to productive discussion and genuine truth-seeking. We have discussed this before… and am I genuinely disappointed that this sort of thing is happening again.
Ugh, because productive discussion happens between perfectly dispassionate robots in a vacuum, and if I’m not one then it is my fault and I should be ashamed? Specifically, I should be ashamed just for saying that something made me uncomfortable rather than suffering in silence? I mean, if that’s your vision, it’s fine, I understand. But I wonder whether that’s really the predominant opinion around here? What about all the stuff about “community” and “Village” etc?
Ugh, because productive discussion happens between perfectly dispassionate robots in a vacuum, and if I’m not one then it is my fault and I should be ashamed?
As discussed in the linked thread—it is none of my business, nor the business of any of your interlocutors, whether you are, or are not, a “perfectly dispassionate robot in a vacuum”, when it comes to discussions on subjects like the OP. That is not something which should enter into the discussion at all; it is simply off-topic.
If we permit the introduction of such questions as whether you feel uncomfortable (about the topic, or any on-topic claims) into discussions of abstract epistemology, or Bayesian inference, or logic, etc., when that discomfort in no way bears on the truth or falsity of the claims under discussion, then we might as well close up shop, because at that point, we have bid good-bye even to the pretense of “rationality”, much less the fact of it.
And if the “predominant opinion” disagrees—so much the worse for predominant opinion; and so much the sadder for Less Wrong.
Edit: And all this is, of course, not even mentioning your conflation of “I am uncomfortable” with insinuating comments about “sinister context”, and implications of wrongdoing on Zack’s part!
Alright, let’s suppose it’s off-topic in this thread, or even on this forum. But is there another place within the community’s “discussion space” where it is on-topic? Or you don’t think such a place should exist at all?
I’ve found /r/TheMotte (recently forked from /r/slatestarcodex) to be a good place to discuss politically-charged topics? (Again, also happy to talk privately sometime.)
I wasn’t referring to “where to discuss politically charged topics”, I was referring to “where to discuss the fact that something that happens on LessWrong.com makes me uncomfortable because [reasons]”.
To be honest I prefer to avoid politically charged topics, as long as they avoid me (which they didn’t, in this case).
I just want to chime in quickly to say that I disagree with Said here pretty heavily, but also don’t know that I agree with any other single person in the conversation, and articulating what I actually believe would require more time than I have right now.
I love that you’re willing to say that, but I’m a bit confused as to what purpose that comment serves. Without some indication of which parts you disagree with, and what things you DO believe, all this is saying is “I take no responsibility for what everyone is saying here”, which I assume is true for all of us.
Personally, I agree with Said on a number of aspects—a reader’s reaction to a topic, or to a poster, is not sufficient reason to do anything. This is especially true when the reader’s reaction is primarily based on non-LW information. I DISAGREE that this makes all discussion fair game, as long as it’s got a robe of abstraction which allows deniability that it relates to the painful topic.
I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone besides me claim that the abstraction seems too thin. It would take a discussion of when it applies and when it does not to get me to ignore my (limited) understanding of the participants’ positions on the related-but-not-on-LW topic.
Generally, if you want to talk about how LW is moderated or unpleasant behavior happening here, you should talk to me. [If you think I’m making mistakes, the person to talk to is probably Habryka.] We don’t have an official ombudsman, and perhaps it’s worth putting some effort into finding one.
I mean, the sum total of spaces that the rationalist community uses to hold discussions, propagate information, do collective decision making, (presumably) provide mutual support et cetera, to the extent these spaces are effective in fulfilling their functions. Anywhere where I can say something and people in the community will listen to me, and take this new information into account if it’s worth taking into account, or at least provide me with compassionate feedback even if it’s not.
Firstly, I have always said (and this incident has once again reinforced my view of this) that “we”, which is to say “rationalists”, should not be a “community”.
But, of course, things are what they are. Still, it is hardly any of my business, as a participant of Less Wrong, what discussions you have elsewhere, on some other forum. Why should it be?
Of course, it would be quite beyond the pale if the outcomes of those discussions were used in deciding (by those who have the authority to decide these things—basically, I mean the admins of Less Wrong) how to treat someone here!
In short, I am saying: in other places, discuss whatever you want to discuss (assuming your discussions are appropriate thereto… but, in any case—not my business). None of that should affect any discussions here. “I propose to treat <Less Wrong participant X> in such-and-such a way—why? because he said or did so-and-so, in another place entirely”—this ought not be acceptable or tolerated.
Firstly, I have always said (and this incident has once again reinforced my view of this) that “we”, which is to say “rationalists”, should not be a “community”.
Well, that is a legitimate opinion. I just want to point out that it did not appear to be the consensus so far. If it is the consensus (or becomes such) then it seems fair to ask to make it clear, in particular to inform’s people’s decisions about how and whether to interact with the forum.
I won’t go so far as to say there should be no community, but I do believe that it (or they; there are likely lots of involved communities of rationalists) is not synonymous with LessWrong. There is overlap in topics discussed, but there are good LW topics that are irrelevant to some or all communities, and there are LOTS of community topics that don’t do well on LW.
And that includes topics that, in a vacuum, would be appropriate to LW, but are deeply related to topics in a community which are NOT good for LW. Sorry, but that entanglement of ideas makes it impossible to discuss rationally in a large group.
The dispute in question isn’t about epistemology but ontology and I think it’s worth keeping the two apart mentally but I think your general point still stands.
I think it needs clarification. It’s clearly vague enough that it’s not a valid reason by itself. However it is reasonable to think that part of the “bad vibe” would be the type why political meshing is bad while part of it could be relevant.
For example it could be that there is worry that constantly mentioning a specific point goes for “mere exposure” where just being exposed to a viewpoint increases ones belief in it without actual argumentation for it. Zack_M_Davis could then argue that the posting doesn’t get exposure more than would have been gotten by legimate means.
But we can’t go that far because there is no clear image what is the worry and unpacking the whole context would probably derail into the political point or otherwise be out-of-scope for epistemology.
For example if some crazy scientist like a nazi-scientist was burning people (I am assuming that burning people is ethically very bad) to see what happens I would probably want to make sure that the results that he produces contains actual reusable information. Yet I would probably vote against burning people. If I just contain myself to the epistemological sphere I might know to advice that larger sample-sizes lead to more realiable results. However being acutely aware that the trivial way to increase the sample size would lead to significant activity I oppose (ie my advice burns more people) I would probably think a little harder whether there is a lives-spent efficient way to get reliability. Sure refusing any cooperation ensures that I don’t cause any burned people. But it is likely that left to their own devices they would end up burning more people than if they were supplied with basic statistics and how to get maximum data from each trial. On one hand value is fragile and small epistemology improvements might correspond to big dips in average well-being. On the other hand taking the ethical dimension effectively into account it will seemingly “corrupt” the cold-hearted data processing. From lives-saved ambivalent viewpoint those nudges are needless inefficiencies, “errors”. Now I don’t know whether the worry about this case is that big but I would in general be interested when small linkages are likely to have big impacts. I guess from a pure epistemological viewpoint it would be “value chaoticness” where small formulation differences have big or unpredictable implications for values.
Imagine instead some crank racist psuedoscientist who, in the process of pursuing their blatantly ideologically-motiviated fake “science”, happens to get really interested in the statistics of the normal distribution, and writes a post on your favorite rationality forum about the ratio of areas in the right tails of normal distributions with different means.
Can you say more about why you think La Griffe du Lion is a “crank racist psuedoscientist”? My impression (based on cursory familiarity with the HBD community) is that La Griffe du Lion seems to be respected/recommended by many.
Thanks for asking! So, a Straussian reading was actually intended there.
(Sorry, I know this is really obnoxious. My only defense is that, unlike some more cowardly authors, on the occasions when I stoop to esotericism, Iactually explain the Straussian reading when questioned.)
In context, I’m trying to defend the principle that we shouldn’t derail discussions about philosophy on account of the author’s private reason for being interested in that particular area of philosophy having to do with a contentious object-level topic. I first illustrated my point with an Occam’s-razor/atheism example, but, as I said, I was worried that that might come off as self-serving: I want my point to be accepted because the principle I’m advancing is a good one, not due to the rhetorical trick of associating my interlocutor with something locally considered low-status, like religion. So I tried to think of another illustration where my stance (in favor of local validity, or “decoupling norms”) would be associated with something low-status, and what I came up with was statistics-of-the-normal-distribution/human-biodiversity. Having chosen the illustration on the basis of the object-level topic being disreputable, it felt like effective rhetoric to link to an example and performatively “lean in” to the disrepute with a denunciation (“crank racist psuedoscientist”).
In effect, the function of denouncing du Lion was not to denounce du Lion (!), but as a “showpiece” while protecting the principle that we need the unrestricted right to talk about math on this website. Explicitly Glomarizing my views on the merits of HBD rather than simply denouncing would have left an opening for further derailing the conversation on that. This was arguably intellectually dishonest of me, but I felt comfortable doing it because I expected many readers to “get the joke.”
Not every line in 37 Ways is my “standard Bayesian philosophy,” nor do I believe much of what you say follows from anything standard.
This probably isn’t our central disagreement, but humans are Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers. Expecting humans to always use words for Naive Bayes alone seems manifestly irrational. I would go so far as to say you shouldn’t expect people to use them for Naive Bayes in every case, full stop. (This seems to border on subconsciously believing that evolution has a mind.) If you believe someone is making improper inferences, stop trying to change the subject and name an inference you think they’d agree with (that you consider false).
I find it unpleasant that you always bring your hobbyhorse in, but in an “abstract” way that doesn’t allow discussing the actual object level question.
...
That’s understandable, but I hope it’s also understandable that I find it unpleasant that our standard Bayesian philosophy-of-language somehow got politicized (!?), such that my attempts to do correct epistemology are perceived as attacking people?!
I note that this isn’t a denial of the accusation that you’re bringing up a hobbyhorse, disguised by abstraction. It sounds more like a defense of discussing a political specific by means of abstraction. I’ve noted in at least some of your posts that I don’t find your abstractions very compelling without examples, and I that I don’t much care for the examples I can think of to reify your abstractions.
It’s at times like this that I’m happy I’m not part of a “rationalist community” that includes repetitive indirection of political fights along with denial that that’s what they are. But I wish you’d keep it off less wrong.
On the next level down, your insistence that words have consistent meaning and categories are real and must be consistent across usages (including both context changes and internal reasoning vs external communication) seems a blind spot. I don’t know if it’s caused by the examples you’re choosing (and not sharing), or if the reverse is true.
It sounds more like a defense of discussing a political specific by means of abstraction.
Zack said:
Like, maybe statistics is part of the common interest of many causes, such that, as a matter of local validity, you should assess arguments about statistics on their own merits in the context that those arguments are presented, without worrying about how those arguments might or might not be applied in other contexts?
What, realistically, do you expect the atheist—or the racist, or me—to do? Am I supposed to just passively accept that all of my thoughts about epistemology are tainted and unfit for this forum, because I happen to be interested in applying epistemology to other topics (on a separate website, under a pseudonym)?
Which isn’t saying specifics should be discussed by discussing abstracts, it says abstracts should be discussed, even when part of the motivation for discussing the abstract is specific. Like, people should be able to collaborate on statistics textbooks even if they don’t agree with their co-authors’ specific applications of statistics to their non-statistical domains. (It would be pretty useless to discuss abstracts if there we no specific motivations, after all...)
Right. At least some abstract topics should be discussed, and part of the discussion is which, if any, specifics might be exemplary of such abstractions. Other abstract topics should be avoided, if the relevant examples are politically-charged and the abstraction doesn’t easily encompass other points of view.
Choosing to discuss abstracts primarily which happen to support a specific position, without disclosing that tie, is not OK. It’s discussing the specific in the guise of the abstract. I can’t be sure that’s what Zack is doing, but that’s how it appears from my outsider viewpoint.
Other abstract topics should be avoided, if the relevant examples are politically-charged and the abstraction doesn’t easily encompass other points of view.
Why?
Choosing to discuss abstracts primarily which happen to support a specific position, without disclosing that tie, is not OK.
How exactly does this differ from, “if the truth is on the wrong side politically, so much the worse for the truth”? Should we limit ourselves to abstract discussions that don’tconstrain our anticipations on things we care about?
How exactly does this differ from, “if the truth is on the wrong side politically, so much the worse for the truth”?
It differs in that there is no truth involved. The entire conversation is about which models and ontologies are best, without specifying what purpose they’re serving. The abstraction is avoiding talking about any actual truth (what predictions will be made, and how the bets will be resolved), while asserting that it improves some abstract concept of truth.
I’ve noted in at least some of your posts that I don’t find your abstractions very compelling without examples, and I that I don’t much care for the examples I can think of to reify your abstractions.
I agree that it’s reasonable for readers to expect authors to provide examples, which is why I do in fact provide examples. What do you want from me, exactly??
That’s understandable, but I hope it’s also understandable that I find it unpleasant that our standard Bayesian philosophy-of-language somehow got politicized (!?), such that my attempts to do correct epistemology are perceived as attacking people?!
Like, imagine an alternate universe where posts about the minimum description length principle were perceived as an attack on Christians (because atheists often argue that Occam’s razor implies that theories about God are unnecessarily complex), and therefore somewhat unseemly (because politics is the mind-killer, and criticizing a popular religion has inextricable political consequences).
I can see how it would be really annoying if someone on your favorite rationality forum wrote a post about minimum description length, if you knew that their work about MDL was partially derived from other work (on a separate website, under a pseudonym) about atheism, and you happened to think that Occam’s razor actually doesn’t favor atheism.
Or maybe that analogy is going to be perceived as unfair because we live in a subculture that pattern-matches religion as “the bad guys” and atheism as the “good guys”? (I could try to protest, “But, but, you could imagine as part of the thought experiment that maybe Occam’s razor really doesn’t favor atheism”, but maybe that wouldn’t be perceived as credible.)
Fine. We can do better. Imagine instead some crank racist psuedoscientist who, in the process of pursuing their blatantly ideologically-motiviated fake “science”, happens to get really interested in the statistics of the normal distribution, and writes a post on your favorite rationality forum about the ratio of areas in the right tails of normal distributions with different means.
I can see how that would be really annoying—maybe even threatening! Which might make it all the more gratifying if you can find a mistake in the racist bastard’s math: then you could call out the mistake in the comments and bask in moral victory as the OP gets downvoted to oblivion for the sin of bad math.
But if you can’t find a mistake—if, in fact, the post is on-topic for the forum and correct in the literal things that it literally says, then complaining about the author’s motive for being interested in the normal distribution doesn’t seem like an obviously positive contribution to the discourse?—even if you’re correct about the author’s motive. (Although, you might not be correct.)
Like, maybe statistics is part of the common interest of many causes, such that, as a matter of local validity, you should assess arguments about statistics on their own merits in the context that those arguments are presented, without worrying about how those arguments might or might not be applied in other contexts?
What, realistically, do you expect the atheist—or the racist, or me—to do? Am I supposed to just passively accept that all of my thoughts about epistemology are tainted and unfit for this forum, because I happen to be interested in applying epistemology to other topics (on a separate website, under a pseudonym)?
I think the grandparent is an on-topic response to the OP, relating the theme of the OP (about how if you don’t have negative feedback or “No”s, then that makes positive feedback or “Yes”es less significant) to both a hypothetical example about social network voting mechanisms, and, separately, to another philosophy topic (about the cognitive function of categories) that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately! That’s generally what happens when people comment on posts: they think about the post in the context of their own knowledge and their own priorities, and then write a comment explaining their actual thoughts!
Like, if you think the actual text of anything I write on this website is off-topic, or poorly-reasoned, or misleading on account of omitting relevant considerations, then please:
Downvote it, and
Leave a critical comment explaining what I got wrong (if you have time).
Those actions are unambiguously prosocial, because downvotes help other users decide what’s worth their time to read, and criticism of bad reasoning helps everyone reading get better at reasoning! But criticizing me because of what you know about my personal psychological motives for making otherwise-not-known-to-be-negative contributions seems … maybe less obviously prosocial?
Like, what happens if you apply this standard consistently? Did you know that Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writings that are ostensibly about human rationality, were actually mostly conceived in the context of his plans to build a superintelligence to literally take over the world?! (Although he denies it, of course.) That’s politics! Should we find it unpleasant that Yudkowsky always brings his hobbyhorse in, but in an “abstract” way that doesn’t allow discussing the actual object-level political question about whether he should rule the world?
Am I wrong here? Like, I see your concern! I really do! I’m sorry if we happen to be trapped in a zero-sum game whereby my attempts to think seriously in public about things I’m interested in ends up imposing negative externalities on you! But what, realistically, do you expect me to do? Happy to talk privately sometime if you’d like. (In a few weeks; I mostly want to focus on group theory and my dayjob for the rest of May.)
I’m not sure what your hobby horse is, but I do take objection to the assumption in this post that decoupling norms are the obvious and only correct way to deal with things. The problem with this is that if you actually care about the world, you can’t take arguments in isolation, but have to consider the context in which they are made.
1. It can be perfectly OK for the environment to bring up a topic once, but can make people less likely to want to visit the forum if someone brings it up all the time and tries to twist other people’s posts towards a discussion of their thing. It would be perfectly alright for moderators who didn’t want to drive away their visitors to ask this person to stop.
2. It can be perfectly OK to kick out someone who has a bad reputation that makes important posters unable to post on your website because they don’t want to associate with that person, even IF that person has good behavior.
3. It can be perfectly OK to downvote posts that are well-reasoned, on topic, and not misleading, because you’re worried about the incentives of those posts being highly upvoted.
All of these things are tradeoffs with decoupled conversation obviously, which has its’ own benefits. The website has to decide what values it stands for and will fight for, vs. what it will be flexible on depending on context. What I don’t think is OK is just to ignore context and assume that decoupling is always unambiguously the right call.
Zack didn’t say this. What he said was:
Which is compatible with thinking more details should be taken into account when the statistical arguments are applied in other contexts (in fact, I’m pretty sure this is what Zack thinks).
Discussion of abstract epistemology principles, which generalize across different contexts, is perhaps most of the point of this website...
Your points 1,2,3 have nothing to do with the epistemic problem of decoupling vs contextualizing, they have to do with political tradeoffs in moderating a forum; they apply to people doing contextualization in their analysis, too. I hate that the phrase “contextualizing norms” is being used to conflate between “all sufficiently relevant information should be used” and “everything should be about politics”.
This is probably because I don’t know what the epistemic problem is. I only know about the linked post, which defines things like this:
I sometimes round this off in my head to something like “pure decouplers think arguments should be considered only on their epistemic merits, and pure contextualizers think arguments should be considered only on their instrumental merits”.
There might be another use of decoupling and contextualizing that applies to an epistemic problem, but if so it’s not defined in the canonical article on the site.
My basic read of Zack’s entire post was him saying over and over “Well there might be really bad instrumental effects of these arguments, but you have to ignore that if their epistemics are good.” And my immediate reaction to that was “No I don’t, and that’s a bad norm.”
The proper words for that aren’t decoupling vs contextualizing, it’s denotative vs enactive language. An orthogonal axis to how many relevant contextual factors are supposed to be taken into account. You can require lots of contextual factors to be taken into account in epistemic analysis, or require certain enactments to be made independent of context.
Note, the original post makes the conflation I’m complaining about here too!
It might just make more sense to give this one up to word inflation and come up with new words. I’ll happily use the denotative vs. enactive language to point to this thing in the future, but I’ll probably have to put a footnote that says something like (what most people in the community refer to as decoupling vs. contextualizing.
It really looks like you’re defending the “appeal to consequences” as a reasonable way to think, and a respectable approach to public epistemology. But that seems so plainly absurd that I have to assume that I’ve misunderstood. What am I missing?
It might be that we just have different definitions of absurd and you’re not missing anything, or it could be that you’re taking an extreme version of what I’m saying.
To wit, my stance is that to ignore the consequences of what you say is just obviously wrong. Even if you hold truth as a very high value, you have to value it insanely more than any other value to never encounter a situation where you’re not compromising other things you value by ignoring the difference you could make by not saying something/lying/being careful about how to phrase things, etc.
Now obviously, you also have to consider the effect this type of thinking/communication has on discourse and the public ability to seek the truth—and once you’ve done that you’re ALREADY thinking about the consequences of what you say and what you allow others to say, and the task at that point is to simply weigh them against each other.
It’s important to distinguish the question of whether, in your own personal decisionmaking, you should ever do things that aren’t maximally epistemically good (obviously, yes); from the question of whether the discourse norms of this website should tolerate appeals to consequences (obviously, no).
It might be morally right, in some circumstances, to pass off a false mathematical proof as a true one (e.g. in a situation where it is useful to obscure some mathematical facts related to engineering weapons of mass destruction). It’s still a violation of the norms of mathematics, with good reason. And it would be very wrong to argue that the norms of mathematics should change to accommodate people making this (by assumption, morally right) choice.
To summarize: you’re destroying the substrate. Stop it.
I agree it’s important to realize that these things are fundamentally different.
A better norm of mathematics might be to NOT publish proofs that have obvious negative consequences like enabling weapons of mass destruction, and have a norm that actively disincentivizes people who publish that sort of research.
In other words, a norm might be to basically be epistemically pure, UNLESS the local instrumental considerations outweigh the cost to epistemic climate. This can be rounded down to “have norms about epistemics and break them sometimes,” but only if when someone points at edge cases where the norms are actively harmful, they’re challenged that sometimes the breaking of those norms is perfectly OK.
IE, if someone is using the norms of the community as a weapon, it’s important to point at that the norms are a means to an end, and that the community won’t blindly allow itself to be taken advantage of.
I think my actual concern with this line of argumentation is: if you have a norm of “If ‘X’ and ‘X implies Y’ then ‘Y’, EXCEPT when it’s net bad to have concluded ‘Y’”, then the werewolves win.
The question of whether it’s net bad to have concluded ‘Y’, is much, much more complicated than the question of whether, logically, ‘Y’ is true under these assumptions (of course, it is). There are many, many more opportunities for werewolves to gum up the works of this process, making the calculation come out wrong.
If we’re having a discussion about X and Y, someone moves to propose ‘Y’ (because, as it has already been agreed, ‘X’ and ‘X implies Y’), and then someone else says “no, we can’t do that, that has negative consequences!”, that second person is probably playing a werewolf strategy, gumming up the works of the epistemic substrate.
If we are going to have the exception to the norm at all, then there has to be a pretty high standard of evidence to prove that adding ‘Y’ to the discourse, in fact, has bad consequences. And, to get the right answer, that discussion itself is going to have to be up to high epistemic standards. To be trustworthy, it’s going to have to make logical inferences much more complex than “if ‘X’ and ‘X implies Y’, then ‘Y’”. What if someone objects to those logical inference steps, on the basis that they would have negative consequences? Where does that discussion happen?
In practice, these questions aren’t actually answered. In practice, what happens is that social epistemology doesn’t happen, and instead everything becomes about coalitional politics. Saying ‘Y’ doesn’t mean ‘Y is literally true’, it means you’re part of the coalition of people who wants consequences related to (but not even necessarily directly implied by!) the statement ‘Y’ to be put into effect, and that makes you blameworthy if those consequences hurt someone sympathetic, or that coalition is bad. Under such conditions, it is a major challenge to re-establish epistemic discourse, because everything is about violence, including attempts to talk about the “we don’t have epistemology and everything is about violence” problem.
We have something approaching epistemic discourse here on LessWrong, but we have to defend it, or it, too, becomes all about coalitional politics.
I want to note that LW definitely has exceptions to this norm, if only because of the boring, normal exceptions. (If we would get in trouble with law enforcement for hosting something you might put on LW, don’t put it on LW.) We’ve had in the works (for quite some time) a post explaining our position on less boring cases more clearly, but it runs into difficulty with the sort of issues that you discuss here; generally these questions are answered in private in a way that connects to the judgment calls being made and the particulars of the case, as opposed to through transparent principles that can be clearly understood and predicted in advance (in part because, to extend the analogy, this empowers the werewolves as well).
Another common werewolf move is to take advantage of strong norms like epistemic honesty, and use them to drive wedges in a community or push their agenda, while knowing they can’t be called out because doing so would be akin to attacking the community’s norms.
I’ve seen the meme elsewhere in the rationality community that strong and rigid epistemic norms are a good sociopath repellent, and it’s ALMOST right. The truth is that competent sociopaths (in the Venkat Rao sense) are actually great at using rigid norms for their own ends, and are great at using the truth for their own ends as well. The reason it might work well in the rationality community (besides the obvious fact that sociopaths are even better at using lies to their own ends than the truth) is that strong epistemics are very close to what we’re actually fighting for—and remembering and always orienting towards the mission is ACTUALLY an effective first line defense against sociopaths (necessary but not sufficient IMO).
99 times out of a 100, the correct way to remember what we’re fighting for is to push for stronger epistemics above other considerations. I knew that when I made the original post, and I made it knowing I would get pushback for attacking a core value of the community.
However, 1 time out of 100 the correct way to remember what you’re fighting for is to realize that you have to sacrifice a sacred value for the greater good. And when you see someone explicitly pushing the gray area by trying to get you to accept harmful situations by appealing to that sacred value, it’s important to make clear (mostly to other people in the community) that sacrificing that value is an option.
What specifically do you mean by “werewolf” here & how do you think it relates to the way Jessica was using it? I’m worried that we’re getting close to just redefining it as a generic term for “enemies of the community.”
By werewolf I meant something like “someone who is pretending be working for the community as a member, but is actually working for their own selfish ends”. I thought Jessica was using it in the same way.
That’s not what I meant. I meant specifically someone who is trying to prevent common knowledge from being created (and more generally, to gum up the works of “social decisionmaking based on correct information”), as in the Werewolf party game.
Worth noting: “werewolf” as a jargon term strikes me as something that is inevitably going to get collapsed into “generic bad actor” over time, if it gets used a lot. I’m assuming that you’re thinking of it sort of as in the “preformal” stage, where it doesn’t make sense to over-optimize the terminology. But if you’re going to keep using it I think it’d make sense to come up with a term that’s somewhat more robust against getting interpreted that way.
(random default suggestion: “obfuscator”. Other options I came up with required multiple words to get the point across and ended up too convoluted. There might be a fun shorthand for a type of animal or mythological figure that is a) a predator or parasite, b) relies on making things cloudy. So far I could just come up with “squid” due to ink jets, but it didn’t really have the right connotations)
That is a bit more specific than what I meant. In this case though, the second more broad meaning of “someone who’s trying to gum up the works of social decisionmaking” still works in the context of the comment.
Um, in context, this sounds to me like you’re arguing that by writing “Where to Draw the Boundaries?” and my secret (“secret”) blog, I’m trying to get people to accept harmful situations? Am I interpreting you correctly? If so, can you explain in detail what specific harm you think is being done?
Sorry, I was trying to be really careful as I was writing of not accusing you specifically of bad intentions, but obviously it’s hard in a conversation like this where you’re jumping between the meta and the object-level.
It’s important to distinguish a couple things.
1. Jessica and I were talking about people with negative intentions in the last two posts. I’m not claiming that you’re one of those people that is deliberately using this type of argument to cause harm.
2. I’m not claiming that it was the writing of those two posts that were harmful in the way we were talking about. I was claiming that the long post you wrote at the top of the thread where you made several analogies about your response, were exactly the sort of gray area situations where, depending on context, the community might decide to sacrifice it’s sacred value. At the same time, you were banking on the fact that it was a sacred value to say “even in this case, we would uphold the sacred value.” This has the same structure as the werewolf move mentioned above, and it was important for me to speak up, even if you’re not a werewolf.
Thanks for clarifying!
So, it’s actually not clear to me that deliberate negative intentions are particularly important, here or elsewhere? Almost no one thinks of themselves as deliberately causing avoidable harm, and yet avoidable harm gets done, probably by people following incentive gradients that predictably lead towards harm, against truth, &c. all while maintaining a perfectly sincere subjective conscious narrative about how they’re doing God’s work, on the right side of history, toiling for the greater good, doing what needs to be done, maximizing global utility, acting in accordance with the moral law, practicing a virtue which is nameless, &c.
Agreed. If I’m causing harm, and you acquire evidence that I’m causing harm, then you should present that evidence in an appropriate venue in order to either persuade me to stop causing harm, or persuade other people to coördinate to stop me from causing harm.
So, my current guess (which is only a guess and which I would have strongly disagreed with ten years ago) is that this is a suicidally terrible idea that will literally destroy the world. Sound like an unreflective appeal to sacred values? Well, maybe!—you shouldn’t take my word for this (or anything else) except to the exact extent that you think my word is Bayesian evidence. Unfortunately I’m going to need to defer supporting argumentation to future Less Wrong posts, because mental and financial health requirements force me to focus on my dayjob for at least the next few weeks. (Oh, and group theory.)
(End of thread for me.)
(responding, and don’t expect another response back because you’re busy).
I used to think this, but I’ve since realized that intentions STRONGLY matter. It seems like a system is fractal, the goals of the subparts/subagents get reflected in the goal of the broader system. People with aligned intentions will tend to shift the incentive gradients, as well people with unaligned intentions (of course, this isn’t a one way relationship, the incentive gradients will also shift the intentions).
I deny that your approach ever has an advantage over recognizing that definitions are tools which have no truth values, and then digging into goals or desires.
Thanks, these are some great points on some of the costs of decoupling norms! (As you’ve observed, I’m generally pretty strongly in favor of decoupling norms, but policy debates should not appear one-sided.)
I would want to distinguish “brings it up all the time” in the sense of “this user posts about this topic when it’s not relevant” (which I agree is bad and warrants moderator action) versus the sense of “this user posts about this topic a lot, and not on other topics” (which I think is generally OK).
If someone is obsessively focused on their narrow special interest—let’s say, algebraic topology—and occasionally comments specifically when they happen to think of an application of algebraic topology to the forum topic, I think that’s fine, because people reading that particular thread get the benefit of a relevant algebraic topology application—even if looking at that user’s posting history leaves one with an unsettling sense of, “Wow, this person is creepily obsessed with their hobbyhorse.”
I agree that this would be bad, but I think it’s usually possible to distinguish “twist[ing] other people’s posts towards a discussion of their thing” from a genuinely relevant mention of the thing that couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be reasonably expected to derail the discussion?
In the present case, my great-great-grandparent comment notes that the list-of-koans format lends itself to readers contributing their own examples in the comments, and I tried to give two such examples (trying to mimic the æsthetic of the OP by continuing the numbered list and Alice/Bob/Charlie/&c. character name sequence), one of which related the theme of the OP to the main point of one of my recent posts.
In retrospect, maybe I should’ve thought more carefully about how to phrase the proposed example in a way that makes the connection to the OP more explicit/obvious? (Probably-better version: “A meaningful ‘Yes’ answer to the question ‘Is G an H?’ requires a definition of H such that the answer could be ‘No’.”)
It’s true that, while composing the great-great-grandparent, I was kind of hoping that some readers would click through the link and read my earlier post, which I worked really hard on and which I think is filling in a gap in “A Human’s Guide to Words” that I’ve seen people be confused about. But I don’t see how this can reasonably be construed as an attempt to derail the discussion? Like, I ordinarily wouldn’t expect a brief comment of the form “Great post! Here’s a couple more examples that occurred to me, personally” to receive any replies in the median case.
(Although unfortunately, it empirically looks like the discussion did, in fact, get derailed. I feel bad for Scott G. that we’re cluttering up his comment section like this, but I can’t think of anything I wish I had done differently other than wording the great-great grandparent more clearly, as mentioned in the paragraph-before-last. Given Vanessa’s reply, I felt justified in writing my counterreply … and here we are.)
Agreed, the moderators are God and their will must be obeyed.
So, the dynamic you describe here definitely exists, but I actually think it’s a pretty serious problem for our collective sanity: if some truths happen to lie outside of Society’s Overton window, then systematic truthseekers (who want to collect all the truths, not just the majority of them that are safely within the Overton window) will find themselves on the wrong side of Respectability, and if people who care about being Respectable (and thereby having power in Society) can’t even talk to people outside the Overton window (not even agree with—just talk to, using, for example, a website), then that could have negative instrumental consequences in the form of people with power in Society making bad policy decisions on account of having inaccurate beliefs.
I want to write more about this in the future (albeit not on Less Wrong), but in the meantime, maybe see the immortal Scott Alexander’s “Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning” for an expression of similar concerns:
Regarding “Kolmogorov complicity”, I just want to make clear that I don’t want to censor your opinion on the political question. Such censorship would only serve to justify your notion that “we only refuse to believe X because it’s heresy, while any systematic truthseeker would believe X”, which is something I very much disagree with. I might be interested in discussing the political question if we were allowed to do it. It is the double bind of, not being able to allowed to argue with you on the political quesiton while having to listen to you constantly hinting at it, is what bugging me. Then again, I don’t really have a good solution.
I’ve read Zack’s blog (the one that is not under the name Zack M. Davis), and his hobbyhorse has to do with transgender issues and gender categories. However, even when he is writing directly about the matter on his own blog, I am unclear what he is actually saying about these issues. There is still a certain abstractness and distance from the object level.
Just FYI.
(I had originally strong-downvoted the parent because I don’t think it’s relevant, but alas, it looks like the voting population disagreed.)
Wait, really? Am I that bad of a writer??
Well, yes. I’m a rationalist. What do you expect?
Engagement with the object level.
It is nearly impossible for a human being to write a correct program just by thinking really hard. And that is a situation where everything is cut and dried, mathematically exact. Mathematicians do fairly well at proving theorems rigorously, but they have an easier task than programmers, for they only have to convince people, not machines. Outside of those domains, abstract argument on its own is nothing more than abstract art, unless it is continually compared with the object level and exposed to modus delens.
And the object level is what we’re all doing this for, or what’s the point?
What’s the point of concrete ideas, compared to more abstract ideas? The reasons seem similar, just with different levels of grounding in experience, like with a filter bubble that you can only peer beyond with great difficulty. This situation is an argument against emphasis on the concrete, not for it.
(I think there’s a mixup between “meta” and “abstract” in this subthread. It’s meta that exists for the object level, not abstractions. Abstractions are themselves on object level when you consider them in their own right.)
Everything is on the object level when considered in its own right.
Abstractions are a central example of things considered on the object level, so I don’t understand them as being in opposition to the object level. They can be in opposition to more concrete ideas, those closer to experience, but not to being considered on object level.
The point is the relationship between the levels of the ladder of abstraction. Outside of mathematics and programming, long arguments at high levels go wrong without being checked against experience. If experience contradicts, so much the worse for the argument.
Unsure of mathematics, but software development goes wrong in exactly the same way—designs and ideas too far removed from the silicon go wildly wrong and don’t match at all what actually gets built. Eventually, the code wins and the arguments lose (or more often, the code fails and everybody loses).
Our philosophy of language did not “somehow” got politicized. You personally (Zack M. Davis) politicized it by abusing it in the context of a political issue.
If you had interesting new math or non-trivial novel insights, I would not complain. Of course that’s somewhat subjective: someone else might consider your insights valuable.
You’re right, I don’t have a good meta-level solution. So, if you want to keep doing that thing you’re doing, knock yourself out.
I had hard time to track down what is the refefrent to the abuse mentioned in the parent post.
It does seem that the concept was employed in a political context. To my brain politizing is a particular kind of use. I get that if you effectively employ any kind of argument towards a political end it becomes politically relevant. However it would be weird if any tool employed would automatically become part of politics.
If beliefs are to pay rent and this particular point is established / marketed to establish a specific another point I could get on board with a expectation to disclose such “financial ties”. Up to this point I know that this belief is sponsored by another belief but I do not know which belief and I don’t fully get why it would be troublesome to reveal this belief.
See my reply to Said Achmiz.
I don’t really have a dog in whatever fight this is, but looking at Zack’s posts and comments recently, I see nothing but interesting and correct insights and analysis, devoid of any explicit politics (but perhaps yielding insights about such?). How can you call this “abuse”? The overwhelming majority of the content that gets posts to Less Wrong these days should aspire to the level of quality of the stuff I just linked!
The abuse did not happen on LW. However, because I happen to be somewhat familiar with Davis’ political writing, I am aware of a sinister context to what ey write in LW of which you are not aware. Now, you may say that this is not a fair objection to Davis writing whatever ey write here, and you might well be right. However, I thought I at least have the right to express my feelings on this matter so that Davis and others can take them into account (or not). If we are supposed to be a community, then it should be normal for us to consider each other’s feelings, even when there was no norm violation per se involved, not so?
… a “sinister context”?!
I am, frankly, appalled to read this sort of thing on Less Wrong. You are, in all seriousness, attacking someone’s writings about abstract epistemology and Bayesian inference, on Less Wrong, of all places (!!), not because there is anything at all mistaken about them, but because of some alleged “sinister context” that you are bringing in from somewhere else. To call this “not a fair objection” would be a gross understatement. It is shameful.
Absolutely not.
This sort of attitude is tremendously corrosive to productive discussion and genuine truth-seeking. We have discussed this before… and am I genuinely disappointed that this sort of thing is happening again.
Ugh, because productive discussion happens between perfectly dispassionate robots in a vacuum, and if I’m not one then it is my fault and I should be ashamed? Specifically, I should be ashamed just for saying that something made me uncomfortable rather than suffering in silence? I mean, if that’s your vision, it’s fine, I understand. But I wonder whether that’s really the predominant opinion around here? What about all the stuff about “community” and “Village” etc?
As discussed in the linked thread—it is none of my business, nor the business of any of your interlocutors, whether you are, or are not, a “perfectly dispassionate robot in a vacuum”, when it comes to discussions on subjects like the OP. That is not something which should enter into the discussion at all; it is simply off-topic.
If we permit the introduction of such questions as whether you feel uncomfortable (about the topic, or any on-topic claims) into discussions of abstract epistemology, or Bayesian inference, or logic, etc., when that discomfort in no way bears on the truth or falsity of the claims under discussion, then we might as well close up shop, because at that point, we have bid good-bye even to the pretense of “rationality”, much less the fact of it.
And if the “predominant opinion” disagrees—so much the worse for predominant opinion; and so much the sadder for Less Wrong.
Edit: And all this is, of course, not even mentioning your conflation of “I am uncomfortable” with insinuating comments about “sinister context”, and implications of wrongdoing on Zack’s part!
Alright, let’s suppose it’s off-topic in this thread, or even on this forum. But is there another place within the community’s “discussion space” where it is on-topic? Or you don’t think such a place should exist at all?
I’ve found /r/TheMotte (recently forked from /r/slatestarcodex) to be a good place to discuss politically-charged topics? (Again, also happy to talk privately sometime.)
I wasn’t referring to “where to discuss politically charged topics”, I was referring to “where to discuss the fact that something that happens on LessWrong.com makes me uncomfortable because [reasons]”.
To be honest I prefer to avoid politically charged topics, as long as they avoid me (which they didn’t, in this case).
I just want to chime in quickly to say that I disagree with Said here pretty heavily, but also don’t know that I agree with any other single person in the conversation, and articulating what I actually believe would require more time than I have right now.
I love that you’re willing to say that, but I’m a bit confused as to what purpose that comment serves. Without some indication of which parts you disagree with, and what things you DO believe, all this is saying is “I take no responsibility for what everyone is saying here”, which I assume is true for all of us.
Personally, I agree with Said on a number of aspects—a reader’s reaction to a topic, or to a poster, is not sufficient reason to do anything. This is especially true when the reader’s reaction is primarily based on non-LW information. I DISAGREE that this makes all discussion fair game, as long as it’s got a robe of abstraction which allows deniability that it relates to the painful topic.
I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone besides me claim that the abstraction seems too thin. It would take a discussion of when it applies and when it does not to get me to ignore my (limited) understanding of the participants’ positions on the related-but-not-on-LW topic.
Generally, if you want to talk about how LW is moderated or unpleasant behavior happening here, you should talk to me. [If you think I’m making mistakes, the person to talk to is probably Habryka.] We don’t have an official ombudsman, and perhaps it’s worth putting some effort into finding one.
This information should be publicly findable. And ideally anonymous information about reports received should also be published.
Alright, thank you!
What do you mean by ‘the community’s “discussion space”’? Are you referring to Less Wrong? Or something else?
I mean, the sum total of spaces that the rationalist community uses to hold discussions, propagate information, do collective decision making, (presumably) provide mutual support et cetera, to the extent these spaces are effective in fulfilling their functions. Anywhere where I can say something and people in the community will listen to me, and take this new information into account if it’s worth taking into account, or at least provide me with compassionate feedback even if it’s not.
Firstly, I have always said (and this incident has once again reinforced my view of this) that “we”, which is to say “rationalists”, should not be a “community”.
But, of course, things are what they are. Still, it is hardly any of my business, as a participant of Less Wrong, what discussions you have elsewhere, on some other forum. Why should it be?
Of course, it would be quite beyond the pale if the outcomes of those discussions were used in deciding (by those who have the authority to decide these things—basically, I mean the admins of Less Wrong) how to treat someone here!
In short, I am saying: in other places, discuss whatever you want to discuss (assuming your discussions are appropriate thereto… but, in any case—not my business). None of that should affect any discussions here. “I propose to treat <Less Wrong participant X> in such-and-such a way—why? because he said or did so-and-so, in another place entirely”—this ought not be acceptable or tolerated.
Well, that is a legitimate opinion. I just want to point out that it did not appear to be the consensus so far. If it is the consensus (or becomes such) then it seems fair to ask to make it clear, in particular to inform’s people’s decisions about how and whether to interact with the forum.
I think it is fairly clear that it’s not the consensus; I alluded to this in my comment (perhaps too obliquely?).
The rest of my comment should be read with the understanding that I’m aware of the above fact.
I won’t go so far as to say there should be no community, but I do believe that it (or they; there are likely lots of involved communities of rationalists) is not synonymous with LessWrong. There is overlap in topics discussed, but there are good LW topics that are irrelevant to some or all communities, and there are LOTS of community topics that don’t do well on LW.
And that includes topics that, in a vacuum, would be appropriate to LW, but are deeply related to topics in a community which are NOT good for LW. Sorry, but that entanglement of ideas makes it impossible to discuss rationally in a large group.
The dispute in question isn’t about epistemology but ontology and I think it’s worth keeping the two apart mentally but I think your general point still stands.
I think it needs clarification. It’s clearly vague enough that it’s not a valid reason by itself. However it is reasonable to think that part of the “bad vibe” would be the type why political meshing is bad while part of it could be relevant.
For example it could be that there is worry that constantly mentioning a specific point goes for “mere exposure” where just being exposed to a viewpoint increases ones belief in it without actual argumentation for it. Zack_M_Davis could then argue that the posting doesn’t get exposure more than would have been gotten by legimate means.
But we can’t go that far because there is no clear image what is the worry and unpacking the whole context would probably derail into the political point or otherwise be out-of-scope for epistemology.
For example if some crazy scientist like a nazi-scientist was burning people (I am assuming that burning people is ethically very bad) to see what happens I would probably want to make sure that the results that he produces contains actual reusable information. Yet I would probably vote against burning people. If I just contain myself to the epistemological sphere I might know to advice that larger sample-sizes lead to more realiable results. However being acutely aware that the trivial way to increase the sample size would lead to significant activity I oppose (ie my advice burns more people) I would probably think a little harder whether there is a lives-spent efficient way to get reliability. Sure refusing any cooperation ensures that I don’t cause any burned people. But it is likely that left to their own devices they would end up burning more people than if they were supplied with basic statistics and how to get maximum data from each trial. On one hand value is fragile and small epistemology improvements might correspond to big dips in average well-being. On the other hand taking the ethical dimension effectively into account it will seemingly “corrupt” the cold-hearted data processing. From lives-saved ambivalent viewpoint those nudges are needless inefficiencies, “errors”. Now I don’t know whether the worry about this case is that big but I would in general be interested when small linkages are likely to have big impacts. I guess from a pure epistemological viewpoint it would be “value chaoticness” where small formulation differences have big or unpredictable implications for values.
Can you say more about why you think La Griffe du Lion is a “crank racist psuedoscientist”? My impression (based on cursory familiarity with the HBD community) is that La Griffe du Lion seems to be respected/recommended by many.
The entire HBD community is seen as racist pseudoscientists by many.
Are the HBD community respected themselves?
Thanks for asking! So, a Straussian reading was actually intended there.
(Sorry, I know this is really obnoxious. My only defense is that, unlike some more cowardly authors, on the occasions when I stoop to esotericism, I actually explain the Straussian reading when questioned.)
In context, I’m trying to defend the principle that we shouldn’t derail discussions about philosophy on account of the author’s private reason for being interested in that particular area of philosophy having to do with a contentious object-level topic. I first illustrated my point with an Occam’s-razor/atheism example, but, as I said, I was worried that that might come off as self-serving: I want my point to be accepted because the principle I’m advancing is a good one, not due to the rhetorical trick of associating my interlocutor with something locally considered low-status, like religion. So I tried to think of another illustration where my stance (in favor of local validity, or “decoupling norms”) would be associated with something low-status, and what I came up with was statistics-of-the-normal-distribution/human-biodiversity. Having chosen the illustration on the basis of the object-level topic being disreputable, it felt like effective rhetoric to link to an example and performatively “lean in” to the disrepute with a denunciation (“crank racist psuedoscientist”).
In effect, the function of denouncing du Lion was not to denounce du Lion (!), but as a “showpiece” while protecting the principle that we need the unrestricted right to talk about math on this website. Explicitly Glomarizing my views on the merits of HBD rather than simply denouncing would have left an opening for further derailing the conversation on that. This was arguably intellectually dishonest of me, but I felt comfortable doing it because I expected many readers to “get the joke.”
Not every line in 37 Ways is my “standard Bayesian philosophy,” nor do I believe much of what you say follows from anything standard.
This probably isn’t our central disagreement, but humans are Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers. Expecting humans to always use words for Naive Bayes alone seems manifestly irrational. I would go so far as to say you shouldn’t expect people to use them for Naive Bayes in every case, full stop. (This seems to border on subconsciously believing that evolution has a mind.) If you believe someone is making improper inferences, stop trying to change the subject and name an inference you think they’d agree with (that you consider false).
...
I note that this isn’t a denial of the accusation that you’re bringing up a hobbyhorse, disguised by abstraction. It sounds more like a defense of discussing a political specific by means of abstraction. I’ve noted in at least some of your posts that I don’t find your abstractions very compelling without examples, and I that I don’t much care for the examples I can think of to reify your abstractions.
It’s at times like this that I’m happy I’m not part of a “rationalist community” that includes repetitive indirection of political fights along with denial that that’s what they are. But I wish you’d keep it off less wrong.
On the next level down, your insistence that words have consistent meaning and categories are real and must be consistent across usages (including both context changes and internal reasoning vs external communication) seems a blind spot. I don’t know if it’s caused by the examples you’re choosing (and not sharing), or if the reverse is true.
Zack said:
Which isn’t saying specifics should be discussed by discussing abstracts, it says abstracts should be discussed, even when part of the motivation for discussing the abstract is specific. Like, people should be able to collaborate on statistics textbooks even if they don’t agree with their co-authors’ specific applications of statistics to their non-statistical domains. (It would be pretty useless to discuss abstracts if there we no specific motivations, after all...)
Right. At least some abstract topics should be discussed, and part of the discussion is which, if any, specifics might be exemplary of such abstractions. Other abstract topics should be avoided, if the relevant examples are politically-charged and the abstraction doesn’t easily encompass other points of view.
Choosing to discuss abstracts primarily which happen to support a specific position, without disclosing that tie, is not OK. It’s discussing the specific in the guise of the abstract. I can’t be sure that’s what Zack is doing, but that’s how it appears from my outsider viewpoint.
Why?
How exactly does this differ from, “if the truth is on the wrong side politically, so much the worse for the truth”? Should we limit ourselves to abstract discussions that don’t constrain our anticipations on things we care about?
It differs in that there is no truth involved. The entire conversation is about which models and ontologies are best, without specifying what purpose they’re serving. The abstraction is avoiding talking about any actual truth (what predictions will be made, and how the bets will be resolved), while asserting that it improves some abstract concept of truth.
“Where to Draw the Boundaries?” includes examples about dolphins, geographic and political maps, poison, heaps of sand, and job titles. In the comment section, I gave more examples about Scott Alexander’s critique of neoreactionary authors, Müllerian mimickry in snakes, chronic fatigue syndrome, and accent recognition.
I agree that it’s reasonable for readers to expect authors to provide examples, which is why I do in fact provide examples. What do you want from me, exactly??
I have no idea what this is about, but it clearly doesn’t belong here. Can you have this discussion elsewhere?