You have a restaurant. It’s a local monopoly, and you’re running decent profits. A new restaurant opens down the street. Some of your customers are diverted, so you lower your prices. You can no longer buy that sweet Ferrari.
You have a restaurant. It’s a local monopoly, and you’re running decent profits. A new restaurant opens down the street. Some of your customers are diverted, so you lower your prices. You have to cancel most of your donations to AMF.
In the first example, we can be reasonably sure that competition increased value. In the second example, we can be reasonable sure that competition decreased value.
Just flagging that I know people who would disagree strongly with this framing, fwiw.
(Edit: This was in response to a previous version of Raemon’s comment. See his explanation below.)
It’s frustrating to see a comment like this because I can’t guess why those people might disagree strongly with this framing (I can think of a few possibilities but none of them seem very likely), and I’m not sure if you’re open to being asked to explain. May I suggest that in similar situations in the future to add a few words saying why they would disagree, or if you didn’t want to do that right now, at least whether you’d be open to explaining more if people want to know, like “feel free to ask for more details if you’re interested” or “please don’t ask me to explain”. I could just ask you to explain anyway but then more negative emotions might follow if the request is either ignored or explicitly denied.
(Hopefully this doesn’t come across as too harsh or demanding, but I figure you probably don’t intend this effect on others and it’s a good idea to let you, and others who may write similar comments, know about it.)
First: I accidentally quoted the wrong section (all three paragraphs were relevant, with the final “we can be reasonably sure the second example decreased value” being the most relevant bit). Not sure if that changes the rest of your comment. I’ve now updated the OP.
The most important bit of information I intended to communicate here is not the particular reasons to disagree with the framing, but simply the fact that there exist prominent LW who would not agree with the “we can be reasonably confident that the second restaurant ends up canceling their AMF donations decreases value.”
I understand it being frustrating to not get to understand or discuss the reasons why, but it seems important for it to be a socially acceptable move to say “hey, your blanket statement does not apply to me, or to people I know of” without having to take time to explain why.
In this case my own answer of “am I up for being asked” is “you can certainly ask, and I may or may not get around to responding.” Although I can say briefly that possible reasons here include ‘you might not think AMF is net positive, or you might think the general practice of donating to things like AMF is not a good strategy.’
FWIW I dramatically misinterpreted what the “people” disagreed with and did not think “AMF is better than a restaurant” was the claim that would be contested.
Not sure if that changes the rest of your comment.
Yeah, the new quotes at least makes it clearer what they’re disagreeing with.
exist prominent LW
This was unclear because you just said “people”.
who would not agree with the “we can be reasonably confident that the second restaurant ends up canceling their AMF donations decreases value.”
Because of the way you quoted, I had no idea this was the disagreement. Hypotheses I generated included that they disagreed with the monopoly dynamics being described, or the right way to frame monopoly economics.
I understand it being frustrating to not get to understand or discuss the reasons why, but it seems important for it to be a socially acceptable move to say “hey, your blanket statement does not apply to me” without having to take time to explain why.
What about situations like this one, where the commenter just makes a mistake? (One could imagine an even more consequential mistake like saying or implying, for example through misquoting, the opposite of what one intended.) How does that get fixed if there’s a norm that people can say something without explaining why (which would discourage others from asking for explanations)? (I’m not necessarily proposing a solution here, just flagging this as an issue.)
In this case my own answer of “am I up for being asked” is “you can certainly ask, and I may or may not get around to responding.”
I think this, if explicitly stated, is better than nothing.
Although I can say briefly that possible reasons here include ‘you might not think AMF is net positive, and you might think the general practice of donating to things like AMF is not a good strategy.’
Even a brief explanation like this would be super helpful.
I generally agree with the “more explanation is better, all else being equal”. A background belief that has me less-than-fully-enthusiastically agreeing with you is that a stronger norm of “always include explanations and caveats like this” has a decent chance of causing people to not bother writing things at all (esp. if they’re on a busy day).
I guess I also just thought it was totally fine for you to ask me for additional information (and I’m updating that it may be more common than I thought for the OP phrasing to make people feel like they couldn’t ask).
A background belief that has me less-than-fully-enthusiastically agreeing with you is that a stronger norm of “always include explanations and caveats like this” has a decent chance of causing people to not bother writing things at all (esp. if they’re on a busy day).
What about either:
Give at least a short explanation unless you’re really busy, or
Use your best judgment of how much explanation to include, but keep in mind that if you include none at all, you might cause a bunch of people to waste time and feel frustrated trying to figure out what you mean or why you think what you think.
they couldn’t ask
Not so much that I couldn’t ask (i.e., there’s a rule or norm against asking in that situation) but rather that I didn’t want to ask (i.e., the possibility and uncertainty of being ignored or denied makes cost-benefit seem to favor not asking). (I only did speak up because I thought it was an opportunity to affect more than this one instance of the situation.) What about an additional norm of, “if no explanation is included, at least say a few words about whether or not you’d be open to providing an explanation upon request”?
I tried to introspect more on why I’m often reluctant to ask for explanations, and came up with these reasons. (But note some of these might just be rationalizations and not my real reasons.)
I already spent quite some time trying to puzzle out the explanation, and asking is like admitting defeat.
If there is a simple explanation that I reasonably could have figured out without asking, I look bad by asking.
It’s forcing me to publicly signal interest, and maybe I don’t want to do that.
Related to 3, it’s forcing me to raise the status of the person I’m asking, by showing that I’m interested in what they’re saying. (Relatedly, I worry this might cause people to withhold explanations more often than they should.)
If my request is ignored or denied, I would feel bad, perhaps in part because it seems to lower my status.
I feel annoyed that the commenter didn’t value my time enough to preemptively include an explanation, and therefore don’t want to interact further with them.
My comment requesting an explanation is going to read by lots of people for whom it has no value, and I don’t want to impose that cost on them, or make them subconsciously annoyed at me, etc.
ETA: By the time the answer comes, the topic may have left my short term memory, plus I may not be that interested anymore.
All of these make sense. Again, I’m generally pro-more-explanation all things being equal.
The question is what the norm should be when more explanation trades off against “people bothering to write the comment in the first place”. My first comment here was something I easily might have not bothered to write in the first place if I had felt obligated to write up anything more than a quick “hey, your ‘we statement’ here doesn’t apply to everyone.”
In this particular case, it’s possible that it was net negative to write my OC because it was sufficiently unclear that people didn’t even know what part of the text I was referring to. So I’d endorse at least being more clear about what I was objecting to.
But I’m pretty hesitant about norms that say “if you’re going to engage at all, you have to engage a lot.”
I appreciate you writing up your reasons here, sorry for not replying for a few days.
I think I have more thoughts but am trying to focus more on coding right now and may not get back to it another few days.
(people seem split on whether a comment like this is helpful or not, I think ideally if we implemented reacts I’d have just responded with a “thinking about it” react or something)
I don’t seem why it would be important to have such a social standard on LessWrong. We already have a problem of people on LessWrong being discouraged from writing post because they expect to get criticism that isn’t helpful to them.
I rather have social standards on LessWrong that do enforce quality norms in criticism then encourage people to voice criticism without providing arguments.
Huh, I hadn’t originally been thinking in terms of criticism (I thought of it more as a minor factual correction, which, I dunno maybe also counts as criticism, but of a different sort)
Reflecting a bit more though – there’s some context I just realized I’d been acting on implicitly, but which is among the more explicit moderation policies that LW has:
The LW frontpage guidelines say: “present your own perspective, avoid trying to represent group consensus.” This is not an ironclad rule, but it is something you should be hesitant about – in particular because it’s easy to misrepresent what other people think by accident (due to typical mind fallacy etc)
I’d have had a very different response if toon had said “In the first example, I’m reasonably sure that competition increased value. In the second example, I’m reasonably sure that competition decreased value.” (compared to the original, which said “we can be reasonably sure”)
None of this is something I actually had that strong an opinion about (the reason I didn’t put much effort into my initial comment was because this wasn’t actually that important to me, I just wanted to quickly flag that the “we” didn’t speak for everyone, and I think minor factual corrections, and minor norm violations, shouldn’t require much effort to flag).
That said, I’ve updated that (obviously, in retrospect), if I write a quick off-the-cuff comment it’s not obvious to anyone else why it’s short. I’ll at least think a little more about it before posting next time, but probably won’t be radically changing my personal policy.
Just flagging that I know people who would disagree strongly with this framing, fwiw.
(Edit: This was in response to a previous version of Raemon’s comment. See his explanation below.)
It’s frustrating to see a comment like this because I can’t guess why those people might disagree strongly with this framing (I can think of a few possibilities but none of them seem very likely), and I’m not sure if you’re open to being asked to explain. May I suggest that in similar situations in the future to add a few words saying why they would disagree, or if you didn’t want to do that right now, at least whether you’d be open to explaining more if people want to know, like “feel free to ask for more details if you’re interested” or “please don’t ask me to explain”. I could just ask you to explain anyway but then more negative emotions might follow if the request is either ignored or explicitly denied.
(Hopefully this doesn’t come across as too harsh or demanding, but I figure you probably don’t intend this effect on others and it’s a good idea to let you, and others who may write similar comments, know about it.)
First: I accidentally quoted the wrong section (all three paragraphs were relevant, with the final “we can be reasonably sure the second example decreased value” being the most relevant bit). Not sure if that changes the rest of your comment. I’ve now updated the OP.
The most important bit of information I intended to communicate here is not the particular reasons to disagree with the framing, but simply the fact that there exist prominent LW who would not agree with the “we can be reasonably confident that the second restaurant ends up canceling their AMF donations decreases value.”
I understand it being frustrating to not get to understand or discuss the reasons why, but it seems important for it to be a socially acceptable move to say “hey, your blanket statement does not apply to me, or to people I know of” without having to take time to explain why.
In this case my own answer of “am I up for being asked” is “you can certainly ask, and I may or may not get around to responding.” Although I can say briefly that possible reasons here include ‘you might not think AMF is net positive, or you might think the general practice of donating to things like AMF is not a good strategy.’
Replace AMF with any organisation for which this statement becomes obviously true. If none such organisations exists, I’m curious.
FWIW I dramatically misinterpreted what the “people” disagreed with and did not think “AMF is better than a restaurant” was the claim that would be contested.
Yeah, the new quotes at least makes it clearer what they’re disagreeing with.
This was unclear because you just said “people”.
Because of the way you quoted, I had no idea this was the disagreement. Hypotheses I generated included that they disagreed with the monopoly dynamics being described, or the right way to frame monopoly economics.
What about situations like this one, where the commenter just makes a mistake? (One could imagine an even more consequential mistake like saying or implying, for example through misquoting, the opposite of what one intended.) How does that get fixed if there’s a norm that people can say something without explaining why (which would discourage others from asking for explanations)? (I’m not necessarily proposing a solution here, just flagging this as an issue.)
I think this, if explicitly stated, is better than nothing.
Even a brief explanation like this would be super helpful.
I generally agree with the “more explanation is better, all else being equal”. A background belief that has me less-than-fully-enthusiastically agreeing with you is that a stronger norm of “always include explanations and caveats like this” has a decent chance of causing people to not bother writing things at all (esp. if they’re on a busy day).
I guess I also just thought it was totally fine for you to ask me for additional information (and I’m updating that it may be more common than I thought for the OP phrasing to make people feel like they couldn’t ask).
What about either:
Give at least a short explanation unless you’re really busy, or
Use your best judgment of how much explanation to include, but keep in mind that if you include none at all, you might cause a bunch of people to waste time and feel frustrated trying to figure out what you mean or why you think what you think.
Not so much that I couldn’t ask (i.e., there’s a rule or norm against asking in that situation) but rather that I didn’t want to ask (i.e., the possibility and uncertainty of being ignored or denied makes cost-benefit seem to favor not asking). (I only did speak up because I thought it was an opportunity to affect more than this one instance of the situation.) What about an additional norm of, “if no explanation is included, at least say a few words about whether or not you’d be open to providing an explanation upon request”?
I tried to introspect more on why I’m often reluctant to ask for explanations, and came up with these reasons. (But note some of these might just be rationalizations and not my real reasons.)
I already spent quite some time trying to puzzle out the explanation, and asking is like admitting defeat.
If there is a simple explanation that I reasonably could have figured out without asking, I look bad by asking.
It’s forcing me to publicly signal interest, and maybe I don’t want to do that.
Related to 3, it’s forcing me to raise the status of the person I’m asking, by showing that I’m interested in what they’re saying. (Relatedly, I worry this might cause people to withhold explanations more often than they should.)
If my request is ignored or denied, I would feel bad, perhaps in part because it seems to lower my status.
I feel annoyed that the commenter didn’t value my time enough to preemptively include an explanation, and therefore don’t want to interact further with them.
My comment requesting an explanation is going to read by lots of people for whom it has no value, and I don’t want to impose that cost on them, or make them subconsciously annoyed at me, etc.
ETA: By the time the answer comes, the topic may have left my short term memory, plus I may not be that interested anymore.
All of these make sense. Again, I’m generally pro-more-explanation all things being equal.
The question is what the norm should be when more explanation trades off against “people bothering to write the comment in the first place”. My first comment here was something I easily might have not bothered to write in the first place if I had felt obligated to write up anything more than a quick “hey, your ‘we statement’ here doesn’t apply to everyone.”
In this particular case, it’s possible that it was net negative to write my OC because it was sufficiently unclear that people didn’t even know what part of the text I was referring to. So I’d endorse at least being more clear about what I was objecting to.
But I’m pretty hesitant about norms that say “if you’re going to engage at all, you have to engage a lot.”
(see my reply to Christian for some more context)
I appreciate you writing up your reasons here, sorry for not replying for a few days.
I think I have more thoughts but am trying to focus more on coding right now and may not get back to it another few days.
(people seem split on whether a comment like this is helpful or not, I think ideally if we implemented reacts I’d have just responded with a “thinking about it” react or something)
I don’t seem why it would be important to have such a social standard on LessWrong. We already have a problem of people on LessWrong being discouraged from writing post because they expect to get criticism that isn’t helpful to them.
I rather have social standards on LessWrong that do enforce quality norms in criticism then encourage people to voice criticism without providing arguments.
Huh, I hadn’t originally been thinking in terms of criticism (I thought of it more as a minor factual correction, which, I dunno maybe also counts as criticism, but of a different sort)
Reflecting a bit more though – there’s some context I just realized I’d been acting on implicitly, but which is among the more explicit moderation policies that LW has:
The LW frontpage guidelines say: “present your own perspective, avoid trying to represent group consensus.” This is not an ironclad rule, but it is something you should be hesitant about – in particular because it’s easy to misrepresent what other people think by accident (due to typical mind fallacy etc)
I’d have had a very different response if toon had said “In the first example, I’m reasonably sure that competition increased value. In the second example, I’m reasonably sure that competition decreased value.” (compared to the original, which said “we can be reasonably sure”)
None of this is something I actually had that strong an opinion about (the reason I didn’t put much effort into my initial comment was because this wasn’t actually that important to me, I just wanted to quickly flag that the “we” didn’t speak for everyone, and I think minor factual corrections, and minor norm violations, shouldn’t require much effort to flag).
That said, I’ve updated that (obviously, in retrospect), if I write a quick off-the-cuff comment it’s not obvious to anyone else why it’s short. I’ll at least think a little more about it before posting next time, but probably won’t be radically changing my personal policy.