I just realized I totally failed to put this comment in spot I meant to, which presumably made this seem quite weird / out-of-place / bad-form.
I think this was actually a duplicate version of this comment here, and I must have forgotten I had already posted a version of it. The section I meant to be responding to here your statement that “discussing your emotional state is off-topic”.
(Responding briefly to Vlad elsethread: this seemed like a cultural claim to me – it’s making a claim about what is on and off topic for lesswrong and for particular types of discussion.)
I agree there are important problems and failure modes you run into if you let people take offense and use that offense to limit what discussion can happen. But I think if you taboo all statements of emotional state you also limit discussion in important ways.
(much of the subtext of this conversation has to do with a year-ago-comment of yours about people’s inner-works not being relevant, the only thing being relevant being the API with which they communicate. I think a large chunk of rationality has to do with understanding and improving your inner workings, and a LessWrong that doesn’t have a good way of incorporating that into the conversation seems at least partially doomed to me)
I agree that it’s possible for feelings to be relevant (or for factual beliefs to be relevant). But discouragement of discussion shouldn’t be enacted through feelings, feelings should just be info that prompts further activity, which might have nothing to do with discouragement of discussion. So there is no issue with Vanessa’s first comment and parts of the rest of the discussion that clarified the situation. A lot of the rest of it though wasn’t constructive in building any sort of valid argument that rests on the foundation of info about feelings.
I just realized I totally failed to put this comment in spot I meant to, which presumably made this seem quite weird / out-of-place / bad-form.
I think this was actually a duplicate version of this comment here, and I must have forgotten I had already posted a version of it. The section I meant to be responding to here your statement that “discussing your emotional state is off-topic”.
(Responding briefly to Vlad elsethread: this seemed like a cultural claim to me – it’s making a claim about what is on and off topic for lesswrong and for particular types of discussion.)
I agree there are important problems and failure modes you run into if you let people take offense and use that offense to limit what discussion can happen. But I think if you taboo all statements of emotional state you also limit discussion in important ways.
(much of the subtext of this conversation has to do with a year-ago-comment of yours about people’s inner-works not being relevant, the only thing being relevant being the API with which they communicate. I think a large chunk of rationality has to do with understanding and improving your inner workings, and a LessWrong that doesn’t have a good way of incorporating that into the conversation seems at least partially doomed to me)
I agree that it’s possible for feelings to be relevant (or for factual beliefs to be relevant). But discouragement of discussion shouldn’t be enacted through feelings, feelings should just be info that prompts further activity, which might have nothing to do with discouragement of discussion. So there is no issue with Vanessa’s first comment and parts of the rest of the discussion that clarified the situation. A lot of the rest of it though wasn’t constructive in building any sort of valid argument that rests on the foundation of info about feelings.
I roughly agree with this take.