Here are some places I disagree a bit, or want to caveat:
#10 feels new, and not well-argued-for yet.
I think point #10 is pointing in a good direction, and I think there are good reasons to tend-to-hold-yourself towards a higher standard when directly modeling or assessing other’s internal states. It seems at least considering to make this “a guideline.” But, whereas the other 9 points seem to basically follow from stuff stated in the sequences or otherwise widely agreed upon, #10 feels more like introducing a new rule. (I think “be a bit careful psychologizing people” is more like an agreed upon norm, but it’s very fuzzy, and the way everyone else implements it feels pretty different from how Duncan implements it.”
I do think that “better operationalize ‘be careful psychologizing’ is an important (and somewhat urgent) problem”, so I have it on my TODO list to write a post about it. It may or may not jive with Duncan’s operationalization.
I do think there is some amount of “Duncan just cares about this in a way that is relatively atypical, and I haven’t heard anyone else really argue for”. “Hold yourself to the absolute highest standard” feels like a phrasing I don’t expect anyone else to endorse. (Note: if you endorse that phrasing, do feel free to reply here and say so!).
(I do think the expansion-description of the norm is something I expect a fair number of LWers to endorse)
I think Zack Davis is onto something with point #5
Zack has a response post. I haven’t fully parsed the post and formed an all-things-considered opinion on it, but I think it’s articulating an important alternate frame on #5 and it’s one of the reasons I feel most like these are not “basics of rationalist discourse”, but, “basics on one type of rationalist discourse.”
I think it’s true that “aim for convergence on truth” isn’t (necessarily) in conflict with the sort of competitive debate style group-truthseeking that Zack prefers. But it seems to me much of the point of the stated phrasing is to create a particular vibe, that percolates through heated disagreement, and I think there are other vibes that accomplish other goals (even within the space of solving the particular set of problems here)
I think Habryka (my boss) also often prefers something similar to Zack’s conversational vibe, and I’ve come to find a value in it sometimes.
(Note: Duncan has blocked Zack from commenting on his posts, so Zack can’t respond here. I think this is a fine use of the author moderation tools we built (see my original reasoning), and Zack writing a response post in a separate thread is also a fine/intended response. But, seemed potentially important for people to be modeling)
I feel anxious about the difference between “these norms are good” and “the way Duncan would enforce these norms is good.”
I have some kind of longstanding disagreement with Duncan about how to approach norms, and I still don’t really know for sure what our disagreement is about, but I feel a bit anxious about the bridge between “maybe having these guidelines be an improvement over LW status quo” and “being excited about Duncan proactively pushing for them.”
Duncan reiterated in the comments here that these are not rules, they’re guidelines. He’s also used the word “norms”. IMO the word “norm” technically includes both rules and guidelines but connotationally feels more like “rules” and I think there’s a very strong slope towards this. (And people are correct to be wary of a strong slope towards this)
...
When I mentioned I was writing this comment, Vaniver said “I think it’d be better if you specifically addressed the part where Duncan’s enforcement approach is motivated strongly by protecting the Neville Longbottoms of the world.” Something about this [Vaniver’s suggestion of it] feels off to me, like, it’s not really my crux, and I’m not sure it even interfaces with my desire to flag it here (which is not really justifying myself to Duncan or trying to hash anything out, just noting to the LW community my overall position here, since I curated this post).
But, doesn’t seem wrong to do, so, noting:
I don’t really alieve that [the vague (conflict)-y?] style of moderation I expect Duncan to veer towards is as helpful as he thinks for helping the Neville Longbottoms of the world. I believe that some people message him about things like this. Maybe if I had read those messages I’d feel differently. But I… also expect Duncan-style moderation to have at least some kind of negative effect on some Neville Longbottoms, which isn’t as visible. (I personally find it very expensive to give Duncan negative feedback, have heard this is true from other people, and so don’t trust his assessment of his overall Neville Longbottom impact. Maybe also disagree on “who counts as a Neville Longbottom”)
Insofar as it was the best way to protect Nevilles, I do just think it’s super costly, and while I value protecting Nevilles I don’t think it’s near the top of my list of things worth burning this many resources for (both my personal resources, and communal “willingness to engage in conflict.”). I recognize that is sad for Nevilles.
Not quite Neville-specific but relevant: a central crux of mine re: Duncan is that his norm-enforcement approach doesn’t feel compatible with the other people who seem, to me, like they should be his closest allies. Norm Innovation and Theory of Mind is my elaboration on this.
i.e. the fact that Duncan is somehow blocking Zack Davis instead of figuring out how to work with him, when I think I’ve probably learned/updated more from Zack Davis on many topics that Duncan cares strongly about than I have from Duncan, feels like something has gone pretty wrong somewhere. (Also, I think I’d probably count Zack specifically as a Neville? When Duncan objects to many of Zack’s phrasings of things [which I agree with Duncan are misleading/bad-some-way], I parse the situation more like Neville trying to stand up for something while not quite having the skills to do it, where my primary impulse is to try and shelter/protect that so it feels safe enough to pursue it in a more healthy way)
(I feel a bit awkward using this example where Zack can’t directly reply, and might move some of this onto Zack’s thread if it feels appropriate. Sorry Zack. My vague model of you endorses me saying things without worrying overmuch about how you feel about it in the moment, but, uh, sorry if wrong)
Note: Duncan has blocked Zack from commenting on his posts, so Zack can’t respond here.
I’m almost certain that I’ve commented on this before, and I really don’t mean to start that conversation again… but since you’ve mentioned, elsethread, my potential disagreements with Duncan on rule/norm enforcement, etc., I will note for the record that I think this facility of the forum (authors blocking individual members from commenting on their posts) is maybe the single worst-for-rational-discussion feature of Less Wrong. (I haven’t done an exhaustive survey of the forum software’s features and ranked them on this axis, hence “maybe”; but I can’t easily think of a worse one.)
Maybe placing a button that leads to a list of blocked users under each post (with a Karma threshold to avoid mentioning blocked users that could be spammers or something, with links to optional explanations for individual decisions) would get the best of both worlds? Something you don’t need to search for. (I’d also add mandatory bounds on durations of bans. Banning indefinitely is unnecessarily Azkaban.) Right now AFAIK this information is private, so even moderators shouldn’t discretionally reveal it, unless it’s retelling of public info already available elsewhere. (Edit: It’s not private, thanks to Said Achmiz for pointing this out.)
Being able to protect your posts seems important to some people, and an occasional feud makes it a valuable alternative to involvement of moderators. But not seeing the filtering acting on a debate hurts clarity of its perception.
So it is, thanks for pointing this out. I’ve even seen this before, but since forgot to the point of not being aware of this existing when writing my comment. From the way Duncan phrased his reply he either also wasn’t aware of this, or there is a way of banning users privately as opposed to publicly, so that these decisions don’t show up on that page.
This is exactly the kind of situation I meant to rule out by saying that the list of banned users should be directly accessible from each affected post, as something you don’t need to search for.
Yes, sure, if you’re going to allow people to ban users from their posts, the list of these banned users should be prominently displayed on each post. But this is a fairly weak mitigation. Much better to not have the feature in the first place.
If we instead had a culture that would ban Zack for confidently, emphatically, and with-no-hedges calling other users insane when he hasn’t even finished reading their claim, it would be less necessary. I have very few users blocked in this way.
But such a culture would be bad, so it is good that we don’t have it.
I haven’t seen this comment you refer to (I gather it’s been deleted or edited), so I will refrain from opining on whether perhaps some mild censure would be warranted for such. Certainly this is not out of the question.
I have very few users blocked in this way.
This hardly makes it better, and I think you can probably see why.
I (tentatively, since we haven’t had a real discussion and it would be silly to be confident) think the culture you are envisioning is made of fabricated options.
(Link is to a specific section discussing block lists in particular.)
In particular, I think you underestimate the corrosive power of a flood of bullshit, and how motivated some people are to produce that flood. Concentration of Force also feels relevant here (and yes, I see the irony).
I (tentatively, since we haven’t had a real discussion and it would be silly to be confident) think the culture you are envisioning is made of fabricated options.
(Link is to a specific section discussing block lists in particular.)
That entire argument (which I’d read before, but re-read now) seems to me to be wrongheaded in so many different ways that I’d have to write a response at least twice as long to untangle it. Certainly the sort of (indeed straw) view you describe has almost nothing in common with my view on the matter; and it also entirely fails to mention what I consider the most important aspect of the question. There are also background assumptions which I consider to be totally wrong, implied values which seem to me to be thoroughly undesirable, etc.
In particular, I think you underestimate the corrosive power of a flood of bullshit, and how motivated some people are to produce that flood.
I think I’d have to see some examples of what you’re thinking of here before I could have any opinion on whatever this is.
Concentration of Force also feels relevant here (and yes, I see the irony).
Could you elaborate? What exactly is the relevance?
That entire argument (which I’d read before, but re-read now) seems to me to be wrongheaded in so many different ways that I’d have to write a response at least twice as long to untangle it.
Just giving you an opportunity to hang “this is wrongheaded” on something more legible than “Said opaquely asserts that it is so.” Perfectly fine for you not to feel like taking it.
>”Hold yourself to the absolute highest standard” feels like a phrasing I don’t expect anyone else to endorse. (Note: if you endorse that phrasing, do feel free to reply here and say so!).
I agree with this phrasing, as I understand it. It seems important to note that by “hold yourself to the absolute highest standard” in this context, what I mean is “make the very best effort you’re capable of to follow the rest of these guidelines, taking no shortcuts and slowing down however much is necessary to accomplish this”, as opposed to something more like “consider yourself a terrible person if you fail to uphold any virtue whatsoever while modeling or assessing others’ internal states”.
I agree, that’s a very strange interpretation of “hold yourself to the absolute highest standard”, to the point where I’d say “no, that’s just not what it means to hold someone to some standard”.
Er. Are you intentionally conflating [holding yourself to a standard] with [holding someone else/someone else holding you]? Because those are very different mental and social motions and I’m not sure why you just elided the distinction.
I believe the burden of proof/burden of explanation here is on “how are these two obviously different things the same?”
I’ll be happy to ELI5 if you genuinely try to figure out how they’re different and genuinely fail, but I have a hard time believing that this will be necessary.
I don’t understand how they aren’t the same. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to make this distinction before you said anything, and it’s still not occurring to me now.
Holding someone else to some standard: if they perform below the standard, consider them to have failed, act accordingly.
Holding yourself to some standard: if you perform below the standard, consider yourself to have failed, act accordingly.
What’s the difference? It can’t be that you don’t have to “act accordingly”, that’s true in both cases. It can’t be the matter of who knows the person failed—in both cases, that’s (a) the person who failed, (b) the person doing the standard-to-holding, (c) any onlookers. (In the latter case, (a) and (b) are the same person.)
So what is the important difference you’re seeing?
This does not yet seem to me like a genuine attempt to figure it out; this reads to me like what you actually attempted to do was confirm in your own head that you were correct.
Come on. Why am I the one who needs to be making a “genuine attempt to figure it out”? Have you given me any reason to believe that you know something that I don’t, that you’re more right about this? You disagreed with something I said, and that’s fine. Tell me why. I explained my view (even though it seemed obvious to me), but you’ve explained nothing, and only claimed that your view was obvious. I think the ball is clearly in your court, and the “instructor” posture is, to put it mildly, unhelpful.
Because the claim you’re making is “two completely different things are effectively the same.”
So you say. But I say that that the claim you are making is “two things that are effectively the same are completely different”.
Thus by the same token, it’s you who should be making a genuine attempt to figure out what I mean!
But of course this is silly. Again: you disagree with a thing I said, and that’s fine. Tell me why. This shouldn’t be hard. What, in brief, is the difference you see between these two (allegedly) obviously different things?
Also, I must note that I did, in fact, “genuinely try to figure out how they’re different”, and failed (genuinely, one assumes?). I have no idea why you would suggest otherwise. I can’t read your mind, so I have no idea even what sort of objection you are thinking of. Short of that, analyzing the apparently relevant aspects of the question is all I can do, and is what I did. (Indeed even doing this, for what seems to me to be an obvious point, was motivated by an unusually high degree of trust that my interlocutor had some non-stupid reason for disagreeing, so it seems quite absurd to have it met with a suggestion that it was somehow insufficient.)
(Actually, I note that I was careful to only talk about my perceptions and not make claims about your internal state, because indeed I have no access to it)
—the reason that I stated that it did not seem to me to be the case that you had made a genuine effort is because your comment both:
a) bears hallmarks/markers that one would expect to find in someone rehearsing their preexisting belief, such as listing out justifications for that belief
b) conspicuously lacks hallmarks/markers that one would expect to find in someone making a serious attempt, such as offering up any hypotheses at all (even if tenuous; “the best I was able to come up with was X, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re thinking”), or making visible a thought process that contains (e.g.) “okay, but if this were true, what sorts of things might I expect to see? Hmmm...”
If you were to collect 1000 examples of people genuinely trying to squint their way across an inferential gap, very very few of them would look like yours.
If you were to collect 1000 examples of people who were mostly just paying lip service to the idea of entertaining an alternative hypothesis, and primarily spending their time rehearsing their own arguments, the vast majority of them would look a lot like yours.
(Additionally, though this is small/circumstantial, I’m pretty sure your comment came up much faster than even a five-minute timer’s worth of thought would have allowed, meaning that you spent less time trying to see the thing than it would have taken me to write out a comment that would have a good chance of making it clear to a five-year-old.)
Basically, it would be unreasonable for someone to conclude, based on looking at your comment, that you had probably put forth anything resembling a genuine effort. It’s certainly possible; the representativeness heuristic can lead us astray and it’s not always what it looks like. But the safe bet is clear.
(speaking loosely) This is such a weird conversation, wtf is happening.
(speaking not so loosely) I think I’m confused? I have some (mutually compatible) hypotheses:
H1) the concept “burden of proof” is doing a lot of STUFF here somehow, and I don’t quite understand how or why. (Apparently relevant questions: What is it doing? Why is it doing it? Does “burden of proof” mean something really different to Duncan than to Said? What does “burden of proof” mean to me and where exactly does my own model of it stumble in surprise while reading this?)
H2) Something about personal history between Duncan and Said? This is not at all gearsy but “things go all weird and bad when people have been mad at each other in the past” seems to be a thing. (Questions: Could it be that at least one of Duncan and Said has recognized they are not in a dynamic where following the rationalist discourse guidelines makes sense and so they are not doing so, but I’m expecting them to do so and this is the source of my dissonance? Are they perhaps failing to listen to each other because their past experiences have caused strong (accurate or not) caricatures to exist in the head of the other, such that each person is listening mainly to the caricature and hearing mainly what they expect to hear by default? What exactly is their past history? How much do which parts of it matter?)
H3) Duncan and Said have different beliefs about the correct order of operations for disagreements (or something like that). Perhaps Duncan emphasizes “getting structural discourse practices in proper order first”, while Said emphasizes “engaging primarily with the object level topic by whatever means feel natural in the moment, and only attending to more structural things when stuck”. (Questions: Is this true? Why the difference? Are there times when one order of operations is better than another? What are the times?)
FWIW, it’s not at all clear to me, before really thinking about, what the difference is between “holding oneself to a standard” and “holding someone else to a standard”. Here’s what happens when I try to guess at what the differences might be.
1) Maybe it has something to do with the points at which intervention is feasible. When holding yourself to a standard, you can intervene in your own mind before taking action, and you can also attempt to course-correct in the middle of acting. When holding someone else to a standard, you can only intervene after you have observed the action.
2) Like 1, except since you can also intervene after observing the action when holding yourself to a standard as well, “holding yourself to a standard” is an umbrella covering a wider range of thingies than “holding someone else to a standard”, but some of the thingies it covers are the same.
3) Perhaps the difference is a matter of degree, for some reason? Like perhaps there is something about holding other people to standards that makes the highest standard you can reasonably hold someone to much lower than the highest standard you can reasonably hold yourself to, or (less plausibly?) vise versa.
Of these, 2 certainly seems the closest to matching my observations of the world in general; but it does not help me make sense of Duncan’s words as much as 1 does.
There’s also a huge distinction between the set of standards it’s possible to try to hold oneself to, which is a set you will mostly feel on-board with or at worst conflicted about—
(Like, when you try to hold yourself to a standard you either think it’s good/correct to do so or at least a part of you thinks it’s good/correct to do so)
—versus the set of standards you could try to hold someone else to, which contains a lot of stuff that they might reject or disagree with or think stupid, etc.
The kinds of conflict that can emerge, internally, from trying to hold myself to some standard are very very different from the kinds of conflict that can emerge, interpersonally, from trying to hold someone else to some standard. The former has way fewer ways in which it can go explosively wrong in the broader social web.
Additionally, though this is small/circumstantial, I’m pretty sure your comment came up much faster than even a five-minute timer’s worth of thought would have allowed, meaning that you spent less time trying to see the thing than it would have taken me to write out a comment that would have a good chance of making it clear to a five-year-old.
Another possibility is that he did some of his thinking before he read the post he was replying to, right? On my priors that’s even likely; I think that when people post disagreement on LW it’s mostly after thinking about the thing they’re disagreeing with, and your immediate reply didn’t really add any new information for him to update on. Your inference isn’t valid.
Yes, that’s why I haven’t made any statements like that; I disagree that there’s any irony present unless you layer in a bunch of implication and interpretation over top of what I have actually said.
Can you explain what you mean by “the Neville Longbottoms of the world”? Who are these people, what are their defining characteristics? (I’ve read HPMOR, but some people—so I am told—have not; and even I don’t really understand what you mean here.) What is involved in “protecting” them…?
My only major disagreement with the above is that I don’t think Zack’s actually responding to my post, and wouldn’t characterize it as such. =P
I think Zack’s post has some interesting thoughts, and it’d be much easier to get at those thoughts if they weren’t [pretending to be in response to me but actually responding to a caricature of Zack’s invention]. If someone keeps saying things you agree with as if they are defeaters of your previous point, it’s … exhausting.
I have a post in the works about how things which seem to be quite close to each other (like me and Zack) are actually often VERY distant (it’s kind of trying to flip the valence on “the narcissism of small differences”), and their apparent closeness an artifact of something like a blind spot or colorblindness.
You raise some hypotheses where I take the other side, but I think the conversations are worth having and it’s not obviously dumb for you to have the preliminary positions you have.
Well, if Zack’s post isn’t properly understood as a response to yours, then there’s a disconnect somewhere. Obviously, if you say that you didn’t mean what Zack characterized you as saying, I believe you; but the question then is—what did you mean? I confess that I can’t see how to apply your point #5 either.
Er. If you’re actually saying “the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that Zack hasn’t properly characterized your point,” as opposed to “it’s on Zack to demonstrate that he has,” then I’m not sure how to productively begin.
You may not be saying that. But Zack’s post reads, to me, like someone who read the bullet point, leapt to a conclusion about several dumb things that it meant, refused to read the expansion, and is off to the races. (This accords with my previous experiences of Zack.)
If you’ve read the expansion on 5 and you’re still confused, I’m happy to answer questions.
Er. If you’re actually saying “the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that Zack hasn’t properly characterized your point,” as opposed to “it’s on Zack to demonstrate that he has,” then I’m not sure how to productively begin.
No, I am not saying that. All I meant was that I read your explanation, I had some thoughts about it; then I read Zack’s post, thought “yep, sounds about right”; then I read your comment on Zack’s post and was confused. Apparently, what I (and Zack?) understood you to be saying is not what you meant to say.
What you should do with this information is up to you, of course; I don’t say that you have any obligation here, as such. And, of course, there are some things that I could do: I could re-read that part of your post, I could ask specific questions, I could think more and harder, etc. Will I do some of those things? Maybe.
I don’t think that Zack’s reading is going to be especially representative; I think that a supermajority of people would not independently generate an understanding of 5 that matches his.
(Something different happens if people are given a Multiple Choice question where Zack’s interpretation is one of four or five possible interpretations; there I suspect it is an attractor that would drag more people in. This is most of why it’s important to me that he be understood to not actually be responding to me, rather than to his own strawman.)
If I were to discover that e.g. half of readers interpreted me the way Zack did, this would mean that I urgently needed to rewrite the post to head off those misunderstandings at the pass.
FYI I generated an understanding of 5 that was similar enough to Zack’s understanding to also nod along with his post and think “yup, sounds about right”(ish).
5 and 10 do feel like the weakest ones/the ones most likely to earn a rewrite that manages to strengthen them substantially.
But, like. It is specifically because of an anticipation that users like Zack would immediately and enthusiastically leap to recalcitrant strawmanning that I felt I had to post this wholesale as a complete list rather than ask “hey, I’ve got like eight of these I feel good about and two more I need help with; whaddyathink, LW?”
Like, what would’ve allowed a discussion on the merits of 5 and 10 to productively proceed is the prereq of enough-of-something-like-5-and-10 already being in the water (plus maybe a healthy dose of 8 and 9), and I was not at all confident we have that.
I for sure think that a conversation with Julia and Vaniver and Scott, etc., on how to create the better thing that 5 and 10 were trying to point to, would be lovely, and would work.
I feel like you’re not doing the mirror of guideline 8, here? Like, you’re being asked to restate or clarify your point, and your response looks to me like “well, until you show that you got it the first time around, I’m not going to clarify it.” If they got it the first time around, why would they need clarification?
Here and in one other notable place in this larger back-and-forth, I wasn’t asking him to show me that he understood it; I was asking him to share the labor of getting him across this inferential gap.
This was written when I thought Vaniver’s question was in the other place, so it’s a smidge odd as an answer here, but:
If someone asks me to explain why I think the sky is blue, especially if it’s someone who’s historically been a mixture of hostile, dismissive, and personally critical, I am suspicious that anything worthwhile will come from me putting forth effort.
(Here I’m basically claiming “I would have answered this question differently if it had come from Vaniver, or RandomLWUser420.”)
If they demonstrate that they’re really actually curious, by e.g. showing a little of their own attempt to figure out why I might have this belief, I am reassured, and more willing to give them the effort.
But of course, they’re welcome to say “not gonna jump through a hoop,” and in my world we have then achieved cooperation (in the form of each of us noting what we’re not interested in doing, and not doing it).
(I’m not super motivated to correct misunderstandings in the heads of Said or Zack particularly, so I didn’t have a want, myself, along the lines of “please let me try again.”)
Neither Said (who was actually present in the conversation) nor Zack (who was spiritually present and being invoked and very much at the forefront of my mind) seems to me to ever bother with the sixth guideline/split-and-commit, and more locally Zack was not bothering with it in his post in any genuinely substantive way, and Said was similarly not bothering with it in his back-and-forth with me.
“My conversational partner is willing to flex their sixth guideline muscles from time to time” is a prerequisite for my sustained/enthusiastic participation in a conversation.
In my experience, Said is pretty good at not jumping to conclusions in the ‘putting words in their mouth’ sense, tho in the opposite direction from how your guideline 6 suggests. Like, my model of Said tries to have a hole where the confusions are, instead of filling it with a distribution over lots of guesses.
I remember at one point pressing him on the “but why don’t you just guess and get it right tho” point, but couldn’t quickly find it; I think I might have been thinking of this thread on Zetetic Explanation. I don’t use his style, but it does seem coherent to me and I’m reluctant to declare it outside the bounds of rational conversation, and more than once have used Said as the target audience for a post.
“My conversational partner is willing to flex their sixth guideline muscles from time to time” is a prerequisite for my sustained/enthusiastic participation in a conversation.
This seems right and fair to me, and I think you and others feeling this way is a huge force behind the “we’re going to try to make LW fun again” moderation push of the last ~5 years.
Here are some places I disagree a bit, or want to caveat:
#10 feels new, and not well-argued-for yet.
I think point #10 is pointing in a good direction, and I think there are good reasons to tend-to-hold-yourself towards a higher standard when directly modeling or assessing other’s internal states. It seems at least considering to make this “a guideline.” But, whereas the other 9 points seem to basically follow from stuff stated in the sequences or otherwise widely agreed upon, #10 feels more like introducing a new rule. (I think “be a bit careful psychologizing people” is more like an agreed upon norm, but it’s very fuzzy, and the way everyone else implements it feels pretty different from how Duncan implements it.”
I do think that “better operationalize ‘be careful psychologizing’ is an important (and somewhat urgent) problem”, so I have it on my TODO list to write a post about it. It may or may not jive with Duncan’s operationalization.
I do think there is some amount of “Duncan just cares about this in a way that is relatively atypical, and I haven’t heard anyone else really argue for”. “Hold yourself to the absolute highest standard” feels like a phrasing I don’t expect anyone else to endorse. (Note: if you endorse that phrasing, do feel free to reply here and say so!).
(I do think the expansion-description of the norm is something I expect a fair number of LWers to endorse)
I think Zack Davis is onto something with point #5
Zack has a response post. I haven’t fully parsed the post and formed an all-things-considered opinion on it, but I think it’s articulating an important alternate frame on #5 and it’s one of the reasons I feel most like these are not “basics of rationalist discourse”, but, “basics on one type of rationalist discourse.”
I think it’s true that “aim for convergence on truth” isn’t (necessarily) in conflict with the sort of competitive debate style group-truthseeking that Zack prefers. But it seems to me much of the point of the stated phrasing is to create a particular vibe, that percolates through heated disagreement, and I think there are other vibes that accomplish other goals (even within the space of solving the particular set of problems here)
I think Habryka (my boss) also often prefers something similar to Zack’s conversational vibe, and I’ve come to find a value in it sometimes.
(Note: Duncan has blocked Zack from commenting on his posts, so Zack can’t respond here. I think this is a fine use of the author moderation tools we built (see my original reasoning), and Zack writing a response post in a separate thread is also a fine/intended response. But, seemed potentially important for people to be modeling)
I feel anxious about the difference between “these norms are good” and “the way Duncan would enforce these norms is good.”
I have some kind of longstanding disagreement with Duncan about how to approach norms, and I still don’t really know for sure what our disagreement is about, but I feel a bit anxious about the bridge between “maybe having these guidelines be an improvement over LW status quo” and “being excited about Duncan proactively pushing for them.”
Duncan reiterated in the comments here that these are not rules, they’re guidelines. He’s also used the word “norms”. IMO the word “norm” technically includes both rules and guidelines but connotationally feels more like “rules” and I think there’s a very strong slope towards this. (And people are correct to be wary of a strong slope towards this)
...
When I mentioned I was writing this comment, Vaniver said “I think it’d be better if you specifically addressed the part where Duncan’s enforcement approach is motivated strongly by protecting the Neville Longbottoms of the world.” Something about this [Vaniver’s suggestion of it] feels off to me, like, it’s not really my crux, and I’m not sure it even interfaces with my desire to flag it here (which is not really justifying myself to Duncan or trying to hash anything out, just noting to the LW community my overall position here, since I curated this post).
But, doesn’t seem wrong to do, so, noting:
I don’t really alieve that [the vague (conflict)-y?] style of moderation I expect Duncan to veer towards is as helpful as he thinks for helping the Neville Longbottoms of the world. I believe that some people message him about things like this. Maybe if I had read those messages I’d feel differently. But I… also expect Duncan-style moderation to have at least some kind of negative effect on some Neville Longbottoms, which isn’t as visible. (I personally find it very expensive to give Duncan negative feedback, have heard this is true from other people, and so don’t trust his assessment of his overall Neville Longbottom impact. Maybe also disagree on “who counts as a Neville Longbottom”)
Insofar as it was the best way to protect Nevilles, I do just think it’s super costly, and while I value protecting Nevilles I don’t think it’s near the top of my list of things worth burning this many resources for (both my personal resources, and communal “willingness to engage in conflict.”). I recognize that is sad for Nevilles.
Not quite Neville-specific but relevant: a central crux of mine re: Duncan is that his norm-enforcement approach doesn’t feel compatible with the other people who seem, to me, like they should be his closest allies. Norm Innovation and Theory of Mind is my elaboration on this.
i.e. the fact that Duncan is somehow blocking Zack Davis instead of figuring out how to work with him, when I think I’ve probably learned/updated more from Zack Davis on many topics that Duncan cares strongly about than I have from Duncan, feels like something has gone pretty wrong somewhere. (Also, I think I’d probably count Zack specifically as a Neville? When Duncan objects to many of Zack’s phrasings of things [which I agree with Duncan are misleading/bad-some-way], I parse the situation more like Neville trying to stand up for something while not quite having the skills to do it, where my primary impulse is to try and shelter/protect that so it feels safe enough to pursue it in a more healthy way)
(I feel a bit awkward using this example where Zack can’t directly reply, and might move some of this onto Zack’s thread if it feels appropriate. Sorry Zack. My vague model of you endorses me saying things without worrying overmuch about how you feel about it in the moment, but, uh, sorry if wrong)
I’m almost certain that I’ve commented on this before, and I really don’t mean to start that conversation again… but since you’ve mentioned, elsethread, my potential disagreements with Duncan on rule/norm enforcement, etc., I will note for the record that I think this facility of the forum (authors blocking individual members from commenting on their posts) is maybe the single worst-for-rational-discussion feature of Less Wrong. (I haven’t done an exhaustive survey of the forum software’s features and ranked them on this axis, hence “maybe”; but I can’t easily think of a worse one.)
Maybe placing a button that leads to a list of blocked users under each post (with a Karma threshold to avoid mentioning blocked users that could be spammers or something, with links to optional explanations for individual decisions) would get the best of both worlds? Something you don’t need to search for. (I’d also add mandatory bounds on durations of bans. Banning indefinitely is unnecessarily Azkaban.) Right now AFAIK this information is private, so even moderators shouldn’t discretionally reveal it, unless it’s retelling of public info already available elsewhere. (Edit: It’s not private, thanks to Said Achmiz for pointing this out.)
Being able to protect your posts seems important to some people, and an occasional feud makes it a valuable alternative to involvement of moderators. But not seeing the filtering acting on a debate hurts clarity of its perception.
Isn’t this info visible at https://www.lesswrong.com/moderation ?
So it is, thanks for pointing this out. I’ve even seen this before, but since forgot to the point of not being aware of this existing when writing my comment. From the way Duncan phrased his reply he either also wasn’t aware of this, or there is a way of banning users privately as opposed to publicly, so that these decisions don’t show up on that page.
This is exactly the kind of situation I meant to rule out by saying that the list of banned users should be directly accessible from each affected post, as something you don’t need to search for.
(I was not aware but also am fortunately not ashamed of my blocks, so)
Yes, sure, if you’re going to allow people to ban users from their posts, the list of these banned users should be prominently displayed on each post. But this is a fairly weak mitigation. Much better to not have the feature in the first place.
I made my block of Zack public, so Ray has not done anything amiss.
If we instead had a culture that would ban Zack for confidently, emphatically, and with-no-hedges calling other users insane when he hasn’t even finished reading their claim, it would be less necessary. I have very few users blocked in this way.
But such a culture would be bad, so it is good that we don’t have it.
I haven’t seen this comment you refer to (I gather it’s been deleted or edited), so I will refrain from opining on whether perhaps some mild censure would be warranted for such. Certainly this is not out of the question.
This hardly makes it better, and I think you can probably see why.
I (tentatively, since we haven’t had a real discussion and it would be silly to be confident) think the culture you are envisioning is made of fabricated options.
(Link is to a specific section discussing block lists in particular.)
In particular, I think you underestimate the corrosive power of a flood of bullshit, and how motivated some people are to produce that flood. Concentration of Force also feels relevant here (and yes, I see the irony).
That entire argument (which I’d read before, but re-read now) seems to me to be wrongheaded in so many different ways that I’d have to write a response at least twice as long to untangle it. Certainly the sort of (indeed straw) view you describe has almost nothing in common with my view on the matter; and it also entirely fails to mention what I consider the most important aspect of the question. There are also background assumptions which I consider to be totally wrong, implied values which seem to me to be thoroughly undesirable, etc.
I think I’d have to see some examples of what you’re thinking of here before I could have any opinion on whatever this is.
Could you elaborate? What exactly is the relevance?
Please, do so.
That would be exactly the sort of “starting that conversation again” that I said I didn’t want to do…
Just giving you an opportunity to hang “this is wrongheaded” on something more legible than “Said opaquely asserts that it is so.” Perfectly fine for you not to feel like taking it.
>”Hold yourself to the absolute highest standard” feels like a phrasing I don’t expect anyone else to endorse. (Note: if you endorse that phrasing, do feel free to reply here and say so!).
I agree with this phrasing, as I understand it. It seems important to note that by “hold yourself to the absolute highest standard” in this context, what I mean is “make the very best effort you’re capable of to follow the rest of these guidelines, taking no shortcuts and slowing down however much is necessary to accomplish this”, as opposed to something more like “consider yourself a terrible person if you fail to uphold any virtue whatsoever while modeling or assessing others’ internal states”.
Hmm. I don’t think most people will interpret “hold yourself to the absolute highest standard” that way.
I agree, that’s a very strange interpretation of “hold yourself to the absolute highest standard”, to the point where I’d say “no, that’s just not what it means to hold someone to some standard”.
Er. Are you intentionally conflating [holding yourself to a standard] with [holding someone else/someone else holding you]? Because those are very different mental and social motions and I’m not sure why you just elided the distinction.
How are they different?
I believe the burden of proof/burden of explanation here is on “how are these two obviously different things the same?”
I’ll be happy to ELI5 if you genuinely try to figure out how they’re different and genuinely fail, but I have a hard time believing that this will be necessary.
I don’t understand how they aren’t the same. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to make this distinction before you said anything, and it’s still not occurring to me now.
Holding someone else to some standard: if they perform below the standard, consider them to have failed, act accordingly.
Holding yourself to some standard: if you perform below the standard, consider yourself to have failed, act accordingly.
What’s the difference? It can’t be that you don’t have to “act accordingly”, that’s true in both cases. It can’t be the matter of who knows the person failed—in both cases, that’s (a) the person who failed, (b) the person doing the standard-to-holding, (c) any onlookers. (In the latter case, (a) and (b) are the same person.)
So what is the important difference you’re seeing?
This does not yet seem to me like a genuine attempt to figure it out; this reads to me like what you actually attempted to do was confirm in your own head that you were correct.
Come on. Why am I the one who needs to be making a “genuine attempt to figure it out”? Have you given me any reason to believe that you know something that I don’t, that you’re more right about this? You disagreed with something I said, and that’s fine. Tell me why. I explained my view (even though it seemed obvious to me), but you’ve explained nothing, and only claimed that your view was obvious. I think the ball is clearly in your court, and the “instructor” posture is, to put it mildly, unhelpful.
Because the claim you’re making is “two completely different things are effectively the same.”
Note that I didn’t say you “need” to make the genuine attempt. I said that’s what it would take for me personally to be happy to explain it to you.
You’re welcome to not pay that price of entry! But I’d prefer you not try to pass off rehearsing your own position as paying that price of entry.
So you say. But I say that that the claim you are making is “two things that are effectively the same are completely different”.
Thus by the same token, it’s you who should be making a genuine attempt to figure out what I mean!
But of course this is silly. Again: you disagree with a thing I said, and that’s fine. Tell me why. This shouldn’t be hard. What, in brief, is the difference you see between these two (allegedly) obviously different things?
Also, I must note that I did, in fact, “genuinely try to figure out how they’re different”, and failed (genuinely, one assumes?). I have no idea why you would suggest otherwise. I can’t read your mind, so I have no idea even what sort of objection you are thinking of. Short of that, analyzing the apparently relevant aspects of the question is all I can do, and is what I did. (Indeed even doing this, for what seems to me to be an obvious point, was motivated by an unusually high degree of trust that my interlocutor had some non-stupid reason for disagreeing, so it seems quite absurd to have it met with a suggestion that it was somehow insufficient.)
The reason I would suggest otherwise—
(Actually, I note that I was careful to only talk about my perceptions and not make claims about your internal state, because indeed I have no access to it)
—the reason that I stated that it did not seem to me to be the case that you had made a genuine effort is because your comment both:
a) bears hallmarks/markers that one would expect to find in someone rehearsing their preexisting belief, such as listing out justifications for that belief
b) conspicuously lacks hallmarks/markers that one would expect to find in someone making a serious attempt, such as offering up any hypotheses at all (even if tenuous; “the best I was able to come up with was X, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re thinking”), or making visible a thought process that contains (e.g.) “okay, but if this were true, what sorts of things might I expect to see? Hmmm...”
If you were to collect 1000 examples of people genuinely trying to squint their way across an inferential gap, very very few of them would look like yours.
If you were to collect 1000 examples of people who were mostly just paying lip service to the idea of entertaining an alternative hypothesis, and primarily spending their time rehearsing their own arguments, the vast majority of them would look a lot like yours.
(Additionally, though this is small/circumstantial, I’m pretty sure your comment came up much faster than even a five-minute timer’s worth of thought would have allowed, meaning that you spent less time trying to see the thing than it would have taken me to write out a comment that would have a good chance of making it clear to a five-year-old.)
Basically, it would be unreasonable for someone to conclude, based on looking at your comment, that you had probably put forth anything resembling a genuine effort. It’s certainly possible; the representativeness heuristic can lead us astray and it’s not always what it looks like. But the safe bet is clear.
(speaking loosely) This is such a weird conversation, wtf is happening.
(speaking not so loosely) I think I’m confused? I have some (mutually compatible) hypotheses:
H1) the concept “burden of proof” is doing a lot of STUFF here somehow, and I don’t quite understand how or why. (Apparently relevant questions: What is it doing? Why is it doing it? Does “burden of proof” mean something really different to Duncan than to Said? What does “burden of proof” mean to me and where exactly does my own model of it stumble in surprise while reading this?)
H2) Something about personal history between Duncan and Said? This is not at all gearsy but “things go all weird and bad when people have been mad at each other in the past” seems to be a thing. (Questions: Could it be that at least one of Duncan and Said has recognized they are not in a dynamic where following the rationalist discourse guidelines makes sense and so they are not doing so, but I’m expecting them to do so and this is the source of my dissonance? Are they perhaps failing to listen to each other because their past experiences have caused strong (accurate or not) caricatures to exist in the head of the other, such that each person is listening mainly to the caricature and hearing mainly what they expect to hear by default? What exactly is their past history? How much do which parts of it matter?)
H3) Duncan and Said have different beliefs about the correct order of operations for disagreements (or something like that). Perhaps Duncan emphasizes “getting structural discourse practices in proper order first”, while Said emphasizes “engaging primarily with the object level topic by whatever means feel natural in the moment, and only attending to more structural things when stuck”. (Questions: Is this true? Why the difference? Are there times when one order of operations is better than another? What are the times?)
FWIW, it’s not at all clear to me, before really thinking about, what the difference is between “holding oneself to a standard” and “holding someone else to a standard”. Here’s what happens when I try to guess at what the differences might be.
1) Maybe it has something to do with the points at which intervention is feasible. When holding yourself to a standard, you can intervene in your own mind before taking action, and you can also attempt to course-correct in the middle of acting. When holding someone else to a standard, you can only intervene after you have observed the action.
2) Like 1, except since you can also intervene after observing the action when holding yourself to a standard as well, “holding yourself to a standard” is an umbrella covering a wider range of thingies than “holding someone else to a standard”, but some of the thingies it covers are the same.
3) Perhaps the difference is a matter of degree, for some reason? Like perhaps there is something about holding other people to standards that makes the highest standard you can reasonably hold someone to much lower than the highest standard you can reasonably hold yourself to, or (less plausibly?) vise versa.
Of these, 2 certainly seems the closest to matching my observations of the world in general; but it does not help me make sense of Duncan’s words as much as 1 does.
There’s also a huge distinction between the set of standards it’s possible to try to hold oneself to, which is a set you will mostly feel on-board with or at worst conflicted about—
(Like, when you try to hold yourself to a standard you either think it’s good/correct to do so or at least a part of you thinks it’s good/correct to do so)
—versus the set of standards you could try to hold someone else to, which contains a lot of stuff that they might reject or disagree with or think stupid, etc.
The kinds of conflict that can emerge, internally, from trying to hold myself to some standard are very very different from the kinds of conflict that can emerge, interpersonally, from trying to hold someone else to some standard. The former has way fewer ways in which it can go explosively wrong in the broader social web.
Another possibility is that he did some of his thinking before he read the post he was replying to, right? On my priors that’s even likely; I think that when people post disagreement on LW it’s mostly after thinking about the thing they’re disagreeing with, and your immediate reply didn’t really add any new information for him to update on. Your inference isn’t valid.
I agree that it wouldn’t be valid as an absolute, or even as a strong claim.
I’m not sure I agree that it is no evidence at all.
Disclaimer: I know Said Achmiz from another LW social context.
In my experience, the safe bet is that minds are more diverse than almost anyone expects.
A statement advanced in a discussion like “well, but nobody could seriously miss that X” is near-universally false.
(This is especially ironic cause of the “You don’t exist” post you just wrote.)
Yes, that’s why I haven’t made any statements like that; I disagree that there’s any irony present unless you layer in a bunch of implication and interpretation over top of what I have actually said.
(I refer you to guideline 7.)
Can you explain what you mean by “the Neville Longbottoms of the world”? Who are these people, what are their defining characteristics? (I’ve read HPMOR, but some people—so I am told—have not; and even I don’t really understand what you mean here.) What is involved in “protecting” them…?
Oh, also: I think Jim’s comment on #6 also felt like an important point to me.
(Agreed; I upvoted at the time though haven’t figured out how to respond or how to act on it yet.)
My only major disagreement with the above is that I don’t think Zack’s actually responding to my post, and wouldn’t characterize it as such. =P
I think Zack’s post has some interesting thoughts, and it’d be much easier to get at those thoughts if they weren’t [pretending to be in response to me but actually responding to a caricature of Zack’s invention]. If someone keeps saying things you agree with as if they are defeaters of your previous point, it’s … exhausting.
I have a post in the works about how things which seem to be quite close to each other (like me and Zack) are actually often VERY distant (it’s kind of trying to flip the valence on “the narcissism of small differences”), and their apparent closeness an artifact of something like a blind spot or colorblindness.
I… roll to disbelieve that this is your only disagreement with the above.
My only major one.
You raise some hypotheses where I take the other side, but I think the conversations are worth having and it’s not obviously dumb for you to have the preliminary positions you have.
fair
Well, if Zack’s post isn’t properly understood as a response to yours, then there’s a disconnect somewhere. Obviously, if you say that you didn’t mean what Zack characterized you as saying, I believe you; but the question then is—what did you mean? I confess that I can’t see how to apply your point #5 either.
Er. If you’re actually saying “the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that Zack hasn’t properly characterized your point,” as opposed to “it’s on Zack to demonstrate that he has,” then I’m not sure how to productively begin.
You may not be saying that. But Zack’s post reads, to me, like someone who read the bullet point, leapt to a conclusion about several dumb things that it meant, refused to read the expansion, and is off to the races. (This accords with my previous experiences of Zack.)
If you’ve read the expansion on 5 and you’re still confused, I’m happy to answer questions.
No, I am not saying that. All I meant was that I read your explanation, I had some thoughts about it; then I read Zack’s post, thought “yep, sounds about right”; then I read your comment on Zack’s post and was confused. Apparently, what I (and Zack?) understood you to be saying is not what you meant to say.
What you should do with this information is up to you, of course; I don’t say that you have any obligation here, as such. And, of course, there are some things that I could do: I could re-read that part of your post, I could ask specific questions, I could think more and harder, etc. Will I do some of those things? Maybe.
I don’t think that Zack’s reading is going to be especially representative; I think that a supermajority of people would not independently generate an understanding of 5 that matches his.
(Something different happens if people are given a Multiple Choice question where Zack’s interpretation is one of four or five possible interpretations; there I suspect it is an attractor that would drag more people in. This is most of why it’s important to me that he be understood to not actually be responding to me, rather than to his own strawman.)
If I were to discover that e.g. half of readers interpreted me the way Zack did, this would mean that I urgently needed to rewrite the post to head off those misunderstandings at the pass.
But I don’t currently anticipate that.
FYI I generated an understanding of 5 that was similar enough to Zack’s understanding to also nod along with his post and think “yup, sounds about right”(ish).
5 and 10 do feel like the weakest ones/the ones most likely to earn a rewrite that manages to strengthen them substantially.
But, like. It is specifically because of an anticipation that users like Zack would immediately and enthusiastically leap to recalcitrant strawmanning that I felt I had to post this wholesale as a complete list rather than ask “hey, I’ve got like eight of these I feel good about and two more I need help with; whaddyathink, LW?”
Like, what would’ve allowed a discussion on the merits of 5 and 10 to productively proceed is the prereq of enough-of-something-like-5-and-10 already being in the water (plus maybe a healthy dose of 8 and 9), and I was not at all confident we have that.
I for sure think that a conversation with Julia and Vaniver and Scott, etc., on how to create the better thing that 5 and 10 were trying to point to, would be lovely, and would work.
I feel like you’re not doing the mirror of guideline 8, here? Like, you’re being asked to restate or clarify your point, and your response looks to me like “well, until you show that you got it the first time around, I’m not going to clarify it.” If they got it the first time around, why would they need clarification?
Here and in one other notable place in this larger back-and-forth, I wasn’t asking him to show me that he understood it; I was asking him to share the labor of getting him across this inferential gap.
This was written when I thought Vaniver’s question was in the other place, so it’s a smidge odd as an answer here, but:
If someone asks me to explain why I think the sky is blue, especially if it’s someone who’s historically been a mixture of hostile, dismissive, and personally critical, I am suspicious that anything worthwhile will come from me putting forth effort.
(Here I’m basically claiming “I would have answered this question differently if it had come from Vaniver, or RandomLWUser420.”)
If they demonstrate that they’re really actually curious, by e.g. showing a little of their own attempt to figure out why I might have this belief, I am reassured, and more willing to give them the effort.
But of course, they’re welcome to say “not gonna jump through a hoop,” and in my world we have then achieved cooperation (in the form of each of us noting what we’re not interested in doing, and not doing it).
(I’m not super motivated to correct misunderstandings in the heads of Said or Zack particularly, so I didn’t have a want, myself, along the lines of “please let me try again.”)
Another way to say this:
Neither Said (who was actually present in the conversation) nor Zack (who was spiritually present and being invoked and very much at the forefront of my mind) seems to me to ever bother with the sixth guideline/split-and-commit, and more locally Zack was not bothering with it in his post in any genuinely substantive way, and Said was similarly not bothering with it in his back-and-forth with me.
“My conversational partner is willing to flex their sixth guideline muscles from time to time” is a prerequisite for my sustained/enthusiastic participation in a conversation.
In my experience, Said is pretty good at not jumping to conclusions in the ‘putting words in their mouth’ sense, tho in the opposite direction from how your guideline 6 suggests. Like, my model of Said tries to have a hole where the confusions are, instead of filling it with a distribution over lots of guesses.
I remember at one point pressing him on the “but why don’t you just guess and get it right tho” point, but couldn’t quickly find it; I think I might have been thinking of this thread on Zetetic Explanation. I don’t use his style, but it does seem coherent to me and I’m reluctant to declare it outside the bounds of rational conversation, and more than once have used Said as the target audience for a post.
This seems right and fair to me, and I think you and others feeling this way is a huge force behind the “we’re going to try to make LW fun again” moderation push of the last ~5 years.