For the record, the poor capitalization and informal tone there (and in the preceding tweet) were intended to be tells that those tweets were still being written from the “shitposting” frame
I just want to say that this “haha yeah” is really disrespectful. Straightening out the so-called “rationalist” community’s collective position on the cognitive function of categorization (culminating in January’s 10,000-word capstone post “Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception”) has been the major project of my life for the past forty months, with dolphins in particular as my specific central example. You don’t know how many tears I’ve cried and how long I’ve suffered over this.
How would you feel if you sunk forty months of your life into deconfusing a philosophical issue that had huge, life-altering practical stakes for you, and the response to your careful arguments from community authorities was a dismissive “haha yeah”? Would you, perhaps, be somewhat upset?
I’ve barely been able to accomplish anything at my dayjob for the past ten days because I’ve been so furious about this. I think I want to develop my unpublished draft reply in progress into a followup post that will more carefully explain the case that paraphyletic categories are doing useful cognitive work, the fact that the colloquial and botanical senses of the word “berry” have coexisted for some time, and my socio-psychological theory of how we got in this absurd situation in the first place.
I don’t know how long this will take me to finish. It’s possible that I should take a break from this topic for week—or two—and finish the draft when I’m in a more stable state of mind. But when I do—and I will—if you have any scrap of human decency in your brain, you will not shitpost at me. You will reply with the seriousness implied by the fact that your fellow rationalists and any interested ancestor-simulators are watching you. If your time is sufficiently valuable to you that you have no further interest in this matter without additional incentives, the $2000 cheerful price offer mentioned above will remain open.
This isn’t a “pretend to agree with me to appease my untreated mental illness” move. I don’t want people to pretend to agree with me if I’m wrong! If I get things wrong and you or others point out the specific things that I’m actually wrong about, that’s great! That’s how we all become less wrong together. But the process of using the beautiful weapons of reasoned argument to become less wrong together, only works if both sides are being honest; the discourse algorithm doesn’t produce accurate maps if one side is allowed to shitpost.
How would you feel if you sunk forty months of your life into deconfusing a philosophical issue that had huge, life-altering practical stakes for you, and the response to your careful arguments from community authorities was a dismissive “haha yeah”? Would you, perhaps, be somewhat upset?
Perhaps! But also that doesn’t seem to me like what happened. The response to your careful arguments was the 1000ish words that engage with what seemed to me to be the heart of your questions, and that attempted to convey some ways it seemed you were misunderstanding my communications. Also, the primary intent of the “haha yeah” was not dismissal, and the 100ish words following it were intended to convey some ways it seemed you were misunderstanding the linked twitter thread. Your apparent reading of my “haha yeah” as dismissive of your careful arguments looks to me like yet another way you’re misunderstanding my communications.
(FWIW, as far as I can tell on very brief introspection, the main purpose of the ‘haha yeah’ was to hold open a space—however small—for online correspondence to be actually fun, with a comparatively minor side purpose of dismissing a very limited part of your argument. Furthermore, my conversational ethics do not permit such attempts at dismissal to be purely implicit, and the following paragraph attempts to render explicit the grounds on which I believe a specific narrow part of your argument deserved dismissal. There are forces in play whose names I don’t readily have on this brief introspection, and my account might change on a deeper introspection, but I feel like I know where the dismissal is in all this, and don’t expect I’d find that the main purpose was dismissal-based if I introspected further.)
My take on this conversation is that you’re dramatically mismodelling me, and then running really far—and getting quite distressed—based on bad models. For instance, it looks to me like you read my ‘haha yeah’ as “the response”, despite how it follows a thousand-odd words of engagement, and is sandwiched between a quote selecting a narrow portion of your argument and a paragraph explaining why I think that argument is off-kilter. I have a sense this sort of dramatic misread of my intentions has been happening repeatedly since the beginning, without engagement with my attempts at clarification, and I currently despair of communication.
I know you haven’t solicited advice, but for future reference, if you were taking smaller steps in your assumptions about my intentions, and asking more and earlier questions (example: “What’s the ‘haha yeah’ doing for you? (I’m reading it as broadly dismissive, and feel hurt by it).”), I both expect that you’d have a better chance of communicating with me, and that I’d be more enthusiastic about trying. (I acknowledge that this style of communication requires a high degree of trust, and that you might not have that trust with me.)
As things stand, I have the sense that you’re lashing out wildly at shadow-versions of me you’ve constructed, and I’m not enthusiastic about engaging further on the object level (and my cheerful price is quite high, alas).
But when I do—and I will—if you have any scrap of human decency in your brain, you will not shitpost at me.
I’ve heard (perhaps incorrectly) that this is very emotionally salient to you, that you take it seriously, and that you care deeply about how I react. I feel an abstract compassion for you in this; your quest sounds like a thankless job and plausibly a virtuous one. Only abstract compassion, though, because my current emotional response is one that emits sentences like “well fuck you too; call me back when you can model me farther than you can throw me”. It is from that state that I dispute your factual claim quoted above. My model of human mindspace contains variants of me who could retain some decency while shitposting in ways you perceive as being “at you”. (Example: the thing I’m perceiving as you mismodelling-and-lashing-out hurts to be on the receiving end of, and I claim that humans can retain their decency while lashing out in response to being hurt. Also, I think the shitposting has purposes you’re not modelling, and there are ways your response could be shaped such that shitposting in reply seems reasonable on its face.)
(ETA: the primary connotation of the above is something like “you seem to be attempting to apply pressure to me in a manner I consider invalid; it holds no sway over me” / “I have perceived this as a desperate simultaneous plea for both compassion and deference, and while I have the compassion, I lack the deference”. Neither of those are quite right etc. I add this parenthetical out of an anticipation that, without it, you’ll wildly misinterpret me here. I feel bitterness about how regularly and wildly you seem to misinterpret me, without apparent awareness or acknowledgement, and the bitterness tempts me to sharper phrasings.)
All that said, I’ve heard you as making a request that I avoid a certain type of glibness in my replies to you, on the grounds that it causes you great distress. Insofar as this doesn’t cause me to stop interacting with you wholesale (eg, for fear that I’ll cause you undue great distress given your apparent propensity to misread me), and insofar as I don’t, like, forget when I’m banging out a very quick response, I predict I’ll honor that request. And for the record, I do not intend to cause you distress, and I continue to respect your what-seems-to-me-like conviction in the pursuit of truth.
While it seems to me like you’re trying to protect an important pole of coherency and consistency here, I think this comment as well as some features of the OP (to a lesser extent) overstep some important bounds and make it quite tricky to have a productive conversation, in a way that I would like to both discourage and advise against. I worry that you’re imputing positions stronger than people are holding, and thus creating more disagreement than exists, and raising the emotional stakes of that disagreement more than seems necessary to continue the conversation.
I would rather not perpetuate an escalatory dynamic where you think you need to make a bigger and bigger fuss in order to get responses, in a way that can be reminiscent of ‘trapped priors’; it seems to me like the conversation in this thread could have been basically as effective at challenging So8res’s position and provoking elaboration with much less strain on your part, and yet when I imagine being in your shoes this encounter probably feels like an example of the success of this approach.
Concretely, in this case, I think you’re exasperated about humor and shitposting in a way that isn’t justified and is failing to credit the ways in which people are responding to your bids for increased seriousness and abstraction. The standard you seem to be imposing is not “please respond to seriousness with seriousness” but the much stronger “please never joke in public about something I take very seriously”, which seems like a pretty drastic standard, and one I would mildly warn against trying to enforce on LW.
(On the object level, I agree with Ben Pace that you are right that the about-face on this example deserves explanation, but my sense is that the explanation is satisfactory; the take that I’d summarize as ‘there’s a paraphyletic grouping that pretends to obviousness that it does not possess on closer examination’ seems sensible enough, tho I am interested in disagreements you have with that take.)
I applaud your earlier decision to have a friend review a draft before posting it, since I think this is the sort of behavior that leads to more intellectual progress and less mutual misunderstanding. In that spirit, I’d be happy to review any further comments you want to make in this conversation, in the hopes of having it go a bit better.
“please don’t shitpost and when you engage with me please avoid all attempts at humor because these pattern-match to ways I am abused and if you do those things even if in good faith it will only hurt our communication, perhaps disastrously, never help” would, I think, cover basically everything you want to cover without also signaling that it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you.
OTOH if it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you then you have successfully signaled that.
Possibly this isn’t fair but I’m pretty sure it’s an accurate reading.
I would note the similarity between “haha yeah” and the stated lack of punctuation and capitalization in “shitposts”, which are supposed to be light jokes.
Also, you say
If I get things wrong and you or others point out the specific things that I’m actually wrong about, that’s great! That’s how we all become less wrong together. But the process of using the beautiful weapons of reasoned argument to become less wrong together, only works if both sides are being honest; the discourse algorithm doesn’t produce accurate maps if one side is allowed to shitpost.
That argument is also a valid argument against making emotional appeals about your past mental state and how it has been affected by this argument. There are rumors about mathematicians being driven mad by the concept of infinity. This doesn’t make them very good at teaching Calculus in college, but rather the opposite.
Crying over the amount of spilt ink doesn’t have that much epistemic relevance. That your particle accelerator cost X million dollars doesn’t make it produce better data. Truth can be frustrating and unfair in that sense.
If a single naive person can say “The emperor has no clothes” and all the epistemics come falling down, maybe they should come falling down. With solid deconfusion even if a single authority figure says “I am not convinced” the solace from the work itself should be plenty.
This plea that the issue should be handled in the tone of seriousness seems like a bad application of social pressure. We shouldn’t need swearing on bibles. Using the role of constituting community beliefs as social-versus game value chips seems bad.
I just want to say that this “haha yeah” is really disrespectful. Straightening out the so-called “rationalist” community’s collective position on the cognitive function of categorization (culminating in January’s 10,000-word capstone post “Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception”) has been the major project of my life for the past forty months, with dolphins in particular as my specific central example. You don’t know how many tears I’ve cried and how long I’ve suffered over this.
How would you feel if you sunk forty months of your life into deconfusing a philosophical issue that had huge, life-altering practical stakes for you, and the response to your careful arguments from community authorities was a dismissive “haha yeah”? Would you, perhaps, be somewhat upset?
I’ve barely been able to accomplish anything at my dayjob for the past ten days because I’ve been so furious about this. I think I want to develop my unpublished draft reply in progress into a followup post that will more carefully explain the case that paraphyletic categories are doing useful cognitive work, the fact that the colloquial and botanical senses of the word “berry” have coexisted for some time, and my socio-psychological theory of how we got in this absurd situation in the first place.
I don’t know how long this will take me to finish. It’s possible that I should take a break from this topic for week—or two—and finish the draft when I’m in a more stable state of mind. But when I do—and I will—if you have any scrap of human decency in your brain, you will not shitpost at me. You will reply with the seriousness implied by the fact that your fellow rationalists and any interested ancestor-simulators are watching you. If your time is sufficiently valuable to you that you have no further interest in this matter without additional incentives, the $2000 cheerful price offer mentioned above will remain open.
This isn’t a “pretend to agree with me to appease my untreated mental illness” move. I don’t want people to pretend to agree with me if I’m wrong! If I get things wrong and you or others point out the specific things that I’m actually wrong about, that’s great! That’s how we all become less wrong together. But the process of using the beautiful weapons of reasoned argument to become less wrong together, only works if both sides are being honest; the discourse algorithm doesn’t produce accurate maps if one side is allowed to shitpost.
I have the honor to be your obedient servant.
Perhaps! But also that doesn’t seem to me like what happened. The response to your careful arguments was the 1000ish words that engage with what seemed to me to be the heart of your questions, and that attempted to convey some ways it seemed you were misunderstanding my communications. Also, the primary intent of the “haha yeah” was not dismissal, and the 100ish words following it were intended to convey some ways it seemed you were misunderstanding the linked twitter thread. Your apparent reading of my “haha yeah” as dismissive of your careful arguments looks to me like yet another way you’re misunderstanding my communications.
(FWIW, as far as I can tell on very brief introspection, the main purpose of the ‘haha yeah’ was to hold open a space—however small—for online correspondence to be actually fun, with a comparatively minor side purpose of dismissing a very limited part of your argument. Furthermore, my conversational ethics do not permit such attempts at dismissal to be purely implicit, and the following paragraph attempts to render explicit the grounds on which I believe a specific narrow part of your argument deserved dismissal. There are forces in play whose names I don’t readily have on this brief introspection, and my account might change on a deeper introspection, but I feel like I know where the dismissal is in all this, and don’t expect I’d find that the main purpose was dismissal-based if I introspected further.)
My take on this conversation is that you’re dramatically mismodelling me, and then running really far—and getting quite distressed—based on bad models. For instance, it looks to me like you read my ‘haha yeah’ as “the response”, despite how it follows a thousand-odd words of engagement, and is sandwiched between a quote selecting a narrow portion of your argument and a paragraph explaining why I think that argument is off-kilter. I have a sense this sort of dramatic misread of my intentions has been happening repeatedly since the beginning, without engagement with my attempts at clarification, and I currently despair of communication.
I know you haven’t solicited advice, but for future reference, if you were taking smaller steps in your assumptions about my intentions, and asking more and earlier questions (example: “What’s the ‘haha yeah’ doing for you? (I’m reading it as broadly dismissive, and feel hurt by it).”), I both expect that you’d have a better chance of communicating with me, and that I’d be more enthusiastic about trying. (I acknowledge that this style of communication requires a high degree of trust, and that you might not have that trust with me.)
As things stand, I have the sense that you’re lashing out wildly at shadow-versions of me you’ve constructed, and I’m not enthusiastic about engaging further on the object level (and my cheerful price is quite high, alas).
I’ve heard (perhaps incorrectly) that this is very emotionally salient to you, that you take it seriously, and that you care deeply about how I react. I feel an abstract compassion for you in this; your quest sounds like a thankless job and plausibly a virtuous one. Only abstract compassion, though, because my current emotional response is one that emits sentences like “well fuck you too; call me back when you can model me farther than you can throw me”. It is from that state that I dispute your factual claim quoted above. My model of human mindspace contains variants of me who could retain some decency while shitposting in ways you perceive as being “at you”. (Example: the thing I’m perceiving as you mismodelling-and-lashing-out hurts to be on the receiving end of, and I claim that humans can retain their decency while lashing out in response to being hurt. Also, I think the shitposting has purposes you’re not modelling, and there are ways your response could be shaped such that shitposting in reply seems reasonable on its face.)
(ETA: the primary connotation of the above is something like “you seem to be attempting to apply pressure to me in a manner I consider invalid; it holds no sway over me” / “I have perceived this as a desperate simultaneous plea for both compassion and deference, and while I have the compassion, I lack the deference”. Neither of those are quite right etc. I add this parenthetical out of an anticipation that, without it, you’ll wildly misinterpret me here. I feel bitterness about how regularly and wildly you seem to misinterpret me, without apparent awareness or acknowledgement, and the bitterness tempts me to sharper phrasings.)
All that said, I’ve heard you as making a request that I avoid a certain type of glibness in my replies to you, on the grounds that it causes you great distress. Insofar as this doesn’t cause me to stop interacting with you wholesale (eg, for fear that I’ll cause you undue great distress given your apparent propensity to misread me), and insofar as I don’t, like, forget when I’m banging out a very quick response, I predict I’ll honor that request. And for the record, I do not intend to cause you distress, and I continue to respect your what-seems-to-me-like conviction in the pursuit of truth.
Thanks. I regret letting my emotions get the better of me. I apologize.
Some notes with my mod hat on:
While it seems to me like you’re trying to protect an important pole of coherency and consistency here, I think this comment as well as some features of the OP (to a lesser extent) overstep some important bounds and make it quite tricky to have a productive conversation, in a way that I would like to both discourage and advise against. I worry that you’re imputing positions stronger than people are holding, and thus creating more disagreement than exists, and raising the emotional stakes of that disagreement more than seems necessary to continue the conversation.
I would rather not perpetuate an escalatory dynamic where you think you need to make a bigger and bigger fuss in order to get responses, in a way that can be reminiscent of ‘trapped priors’; it seems to me like the conversation in this thread could have been basically as effective at challenging So8res’s position and provoking elaboration with much less strain on your part, and yet when I imagine being in your shoes this encounter probably feels like an example of the success of this approach.
Concretely, in this case, I think you’re exasperated about humor and shitposting in a way that isn’t justified and is failing to credit the ways in which people are responding to your bids for increased seriousness and abstraction. The standard you seem to be imposing is not “please respond to seriousness with seriousness” but the much stronger “please never joke in public about something I take very seriously”, which seems like a pretty drastic standard, and one I would mildly warn against trying to enforce on LW.
(On the object level, I agree with Ben Pace that you are right that the about-face on this example deserves explanation, but my sense is that the explanation is satisfactory; the take that I’d summarize as ‘there’s a paraphyletic grouping that pretends to obviousness that it does not possess on closer examination’ seems sensible enough, tho I am interested in disagreements you have with that take.)
I applaud your earlier decision to have a friend review a draft before posting it, since I think this is the sort of behavior that leads to more intellectual progress and less mutual misunderstanding. In that spirit, I’d be happy to review any further comments you want to make in this conversation, in the hopes of having it go a bit better.
Feedback:
“please don’t shitpost and when you engage with me please avoid all attempts at humor because these pattern-match to ways I am abused and if you do those things even if in good faith it will only hurt our communication, perhaps disastrously, never help” would, I think, cover basically everything you want to cover without also signaling that it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you.
OTOH if it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you then you have successfully signaled that.
Possibly this isn’t fair but I’m pretty sure it’s an accurate reading.
I would note the similarity between “haha yeah” and the stated lack of punctuation and capitalization in “shitposts”, which are supposed to be light jokes.
Also, you say
That argument is also a valid argument against making emotional appeals about your past mental state and how it has been affected by this argument. There are rumors about mathematicians being driven mad by the concept of infinity. This doesn’t make them very good at teaching Calculus in college, but rather the opposite.
Crying over the amount of spilt ink doesn’t have that much epistemic relevance. That your particle accelerator cost X million dollars doesn’t make it produce better data. Truth can be frustrating and unfair in that sense.
If a single naive person can say “The emperor has no clothes” and all the epistemics come falling down, maybe they should come falling down. With solid deconfusion even if a single authority figure says “I am not convinced” the solace from the work itself should be plenty.
This plea that the issue should be handled in the tone of seriousness seems like a bad application of social pressure. We shouldn’t need swearing on bibles. Using the role of constituting community beliefs as social-versus game value chips seems bad.