[Mod] I think they’re nice principles to aspire to and I appreciate it when people follow them. But I wouldn’t want to make them into rules of what LW comments should be like, if that’s what you mean.
Sure, but the OP is not suggesting making them into rules either, so on that point you clearly don’t disagree. But this part seems to run directly counter to what LW mods have said in the past, multiple times:
Put another way: a frequent refrain is “well, if I have to put forth that much effort, I’ll never say anything at all,” to which the response is often “correct, thank you.”
It’s analogous to a customer complaining “if Costco is going to require masks, then I’m boycotting Costco.” All else being equal, it would be nice for customers to not have to wear masks, and all else being equal, it would be nice to lower the barrier to communication such that more thoughts could be more easily included.
But all else is not equal; there are large swaths of common human behavior that are corrosive or destructive to the collaborative search for truth. No single contributor or contribution is worth sacrificing the overall structures which allow for high-quality conversation in the first place—if one genuinely does not have the energy required to e.g. put forth one’s thoughts while avoiding straightforwardly false statements, or while distinguishing inference from observation (etc.), then one should simply disengage.
I’d probably agree with it in some contexts, but not in general. E.g. this article has some nice examples of situations where “do the effortful thing or do nothing at all” is a bad rule:
Different people have different levels of social skills. In particular, different levels of fluency or dexterity at getting people to satisfy their wants. (And of course, your dexterity varies based on context.) I think of these in four stages.
Stage 1: Paralysis. You don’t dare make the request. Or you’ve gotten to the point where you need the thing so badly that you’re too overwhelmed to communicate clearly at all. You may not even be consciously aware that you need the thing, you’re just suffering for the lack of it.
Stage 2: Rude request. You make it clear that you want something, but you express it inappropriately. You come across as boorish, pushy, childish, or desperate.
Stage 3: Polite request. You express your desire calmly, pleasantly, and in an appropriate context. You come across as reasonable and respectful.
Stage 4: Automatic abundance. You don’t even have to ask. Either through luck, planning, subtly guiding the social situation, or very high status, you automatically get what you desire without ever having to make it explicitly known.
For example, let’s say you’re exhausted; you want to excuse yourself from the group and take a nap.
In stage 1, you don’t dare ask. Or you don’t understand why you feel shitty, you don’t recognize it as fatigue. You just get more and more upset until you collapse in a heap. In stage 2, you rudely interrupt people in the middle of something important and announce that you’re tired and you’re leaving. In stage 3, you find a convenient moment, apologize for cutting things short, but explain that you’ve got to get some rest. In stage 4, you manage to subtly wrap things up so you can get some rest, without making anyone feel rushed. [...]
Advice about social skills is always “Be Stage 3, not Stage 2.” Which is fine, as far as it goes. Stage 3 really is better than Stage 2. It’s more considerate, more empathetic. And it works better.
But sometimes Stage 2 is better than Stage 1. The person who can only ask rudely is often perceived as having worse social skills, worse manners, than the person who can’t ask at all. But the stage 1 person is paralyzed, not polite. Her ‘social skills’ only go as far as acquiescence. She can’t use them to steer. [...]
The second thing is that the stages relate quite directly to urgency of need. If you aren’t hungry, or you know you can get food any time, you’re in Stage 4. If you’re getting hungry, you may interrupt your friends to ask if you can stop for lunch, putting you in Stage 3. If you’re famished, you begin losing self-control and becoming pushy and demanding about food, which puts you in Stage 2. And if you’re literally ill with hunger, you may lose the ability to be coherent, which puts you in Stage 1. So people who are more prone to sudden urgent needs are more likely to drop into earlier stages. (Disability blogs talk a lot about the danger of falling into Stage 1, and how rudeness is better than paralysis if those are the only choices.)
It does feel to me like allowing people to be Stage 2 is a requirement for helping them get away from Stage 1 and up to the higher stages. And this bit in particular
if one genuinely does not have the energy required to e.g. put forth one’s thoughts while avoiding straightforwardly false statements, or while distinguishing inference from observation (etc.), then one should simply disengage
sounds to me like the kind of a norm that would push people down to Stage 1 from Stage 2.
Right, that was my impression. The reason I asked was that regardless of how much we all agree about any given set of guidelines (such as those described in the OP), it’s all for naught if we disagree about what is to be done when the guidelines aren’t followed. (Indeed that seems to me to be the most important disagreement of this whole topic.)
Does Said have his equivalent of a Moderating LessWrong post? I do indeed feel like I’ve had norms-level disagreements with him in the past, but Said: I don’t actually have a clear sense of your position such that I could try to pass an ITT.
Hmm, I’m not sure that I have a unitary “position” here beyond agreement with the principle discussed in this comment thread. I have opinions on various aspects and details of the matter, of course, but I’d hesitate to give a summary or state an organizing principle without a good deal of thought (and perhaps not even then).
One thing that I would say is that in many cases, it seems like have “anti-rules” may be more productive than having “rules”. What I mean by that is: if Alice says X, and X is perhaps undesirable, it may not be necessary to have a rule “don’t say X”, if instead you have a rule “when Bob observes disapprovingly that Alice says X, and suggests that she’d better explain why she said X, consider this a helpful and good act on Bob’s part (for the purposes of determining what rules apply to the interaction)”.
Another way to look at this is that one doesn’t need to institute a plan to build something, if one can instead guarantee that those who wish to build that thing be allowed to do so, and not interfered with. (Here we can see parallels with community-building efforts “in the real world”, and legal obstacles thereto.)
Going up a meta level, I’ll say that I prefer to go down a meta level. In other words, I prefer to assemble general principles of this sort from object-level questions. For this reason, asking about an overall “my position” may not necessarily be fruitful.
Not that I know of, although he’s written a bunch of comments touching on it.
I’m thinking less of “high level principles” and more like “what things do you consider edge cases, or how to balance other principles when they’re in conflict.”
[Mod] I think they’re nice principles to aspire to and I appreciate it when people follow them. But I wouldn’t want to make them into rules of what LW comments should be like, if that’s what you mean.
Sure, but the OP is not suggesting making them into rules either, so on that point you clearly don’t disagree. But this part seems to run directly counter to what LW mods have said in the past, multiple times:
Right?
I’d probably agree with it in some contexts, but not in general. E.g. this article has some nice examples of situations where “do the effortful thing or do nothing at all” is a bad rule:
It does feel to me like allowing people to be Stage 2 is a requirement for helping them get away from Stage 1 and up to the higher stages. And this bit in particular
sounds to me like the kind of a norm that would push people down to Stage 1 from Stage 2.
I think this has been one of the sources of conflict between Duncan and the mod team, yes.
Right, that was my impression. The reason I asked was that regardless of how much we all agree about any given set of guidelines (such as those described in the OP), it’s all for naught if we disagree about what is to be done when the guidelines aren’t followed. (Indeed that seems to me to be the most important disagreement of this whole topic.)
I also… predict that you and Duncan would get into conflict/disagreement about the operationalization of when/how to apply this particular norm.
Does Said have his equivalent of a Moderating LessWrong post? I do indeed feel like I’ve had norms-level disagreements with him in the past, but Said: I don’t actually have a clear sense of your position such that I could try to pass an ITT.
Hmm, I’m not sure that I have a unitary “position” here beyond agreement with the principle discussed in this comment thread. I have opinions on various aspects and details of the matter, of course, but I’d hesitate to give a summary or state an organizing principle without a good deal of thought (and perhaps not even then).
One thing that I would say is that in many cases, it seems like have “anti-rules” may be more productive than having “rules”. What I mean by that is: if Alice says X, and X is perhaps undesirable, it may not be necessary to have a rule “don’t say X”, if instead you have a rule “when Bob observes disapprovingly that Alice says X, and suggests that she’d better explain why she said X, consider this a helpful and good act on Bob’s part (for the purposes of determining what rules apply to the interaction)”.
Another way to look at this is that one doesn’t need to institute a plan to build something, if one can instead guarantee that those who wish to build that thing be allowed to do so, and not interfered with. (Here we can see parallels with community-building efforts “in the real world”, and legal obstacles thereto.)
Going up a meta level, I’ll say that I prefer to go down a meta level. In other words, I prefer to assemble general principles of this sort from object-level questions. For this reason, asking about an overall “my position” may not necessarily be fruitful.
Not that I know of, although he’s written a bunch of comments touching on it.
I’m thinking less of “high level principles” and more like “what things do you consider edge cases, or how to balance other principles when they’re in conflict.”
Yes, that seems almost certain.