Mmm, I feel like I disagree. Being angry about chairs in schools is really weird, and I think if it was a 1-in-25 thing, I would have heard of it. I have literally never heard of it before, let alone seen it happen myself.
Ah, okay, yes, this highlights a bit of a conflation I’ve been making; it was wrong/overstated to say 4%.
I agree the people who are genuinely mad about chairs in schools are way way rarer than 1-in-25.
But between people being genuinely mad, people trolling, people doing tribal politics, people who were already mad at you and looking for any excuse to needle you, people who are (on that day) actually psychotic or unhinged, etc., I claim that once the chairs-in-schools thing reaches the level of, say, someone writing an opinion piece for a local online newspaper,
then you have a frighteningly high chance (3-30%? Even for something as weird as chairs in schools?) of it spiraling out of control and attracting a bunch of people who will make your life miserable over it, or who will make the life of the principal miserable enough that policy might actually shift in response.
But yeah, the actual hardcore angry people are just a fraction of the lizardman constant in any specific instance. But like … they are often the spark that lights the tinder?
Another way to say this is something like “there’s 3-4% of the population, at any given moment, waiting to join in a pile-on, because [bored, crazy, generically angry, tribal, etc.], and it doesn’t take much to catch the attention of that swath.”
I don’t understand how you can come to this conclusion. I can’t think of very much that would support this model and isn’t better explained by other theories (such as by culture war as jaspax’s point, which tends to happen for specific reasons about specific things, rather than randomly about anything).
Is this all deduced from theory + Lizardman constant in surveys? Are there any other examples which serve as inspiration for your theory? Because if there is no other evidence then it seems way overconfident to make this strong theoretical inferences.
It’s a part of my job to insulate people from Lizardmen™ so I’m reading a lot of emails from them, listening to a lot of phone calls and voice messages, and from time to time have let’s call it conversations with them. The examples I could give for things I personally experienced some people get Hulk-level angry about regularly make people believe I’m exaggerating for comedic effect.
Also, there a r e examples of parents getting angry about their children sitting on chairs in schools and about their children not sitting on chairs. It’s one Google search away.
Also, there a r e examples of parents getting angry about their children sitting on chairs in schools and about their children not sitting on chairs. It’s one Google search away.
It’s a part of my job to insulate people from Lizardmen™ so I’m reading a lot of emails from them, listening to a lot of phone calls and voice messages, and from time to time have let’s call it conversations with them. The examples I could give for things I personally experienced some people get Hulk-level angry about regularly make people believe I’m exaggerating for comedic effect.
I would love to hear examples! Especially if they include a descriptions of what investigations your facebook friend did or what observations they had. (After all, it would be silly if a school redirected the autistic chair rage to a person who didn’t take a look at it at all, and the person then just dismissed that as people getting angry about children sitting on chairs without taking any of the specific circumstances into account.)
So if I’m reading this opinion piece correctly, it’s based on a poll where 70% of parents would like more ergonomic chairs, as well as some science arguing that the chairs are physically damaging to students. It does not name specific people or demand anyone to be fired.
You are suggesting that this is a good example of 5% of people being angry for no good reason and sending a massive dose of punishment somewhere?
The other links seem thematically similar.
though I grant that none of the above four are, like, ranting/unhinged.
What’s happening here is I tried to make a quick, offhand post, explicitly heralded as such, and then you started drilling down into specifics, and I gave quick, offhand answers, which you are now treating as if they are centrally cruxy, when they are not. The thing about chairs is an example you made up, and I played along with a bit; it wasn’t part of my argument such that I need to defend it.
I’m giving up on this conversation, which is WAY net negative at this point, in terms of value-for-time-spent. You’re wanting to be real rigorous and airtight and nitpicky and specific, and that’s actually great for LW, that’s what LW is for most of the time, but I’m not into it here.
I gave quick, offhand answers, which you are now treating as if they are centrally cruxy, when they are not
I think it is okay to make an occasional mistake, but if all quick examples you can think of are wrong, you might want to reconsider the original hypothesis. (The reason is, if the original hypothesis is right, you should be surprised that all your examples turned out to be wrong.)
Maybe the actual lizardman complaints are way less frequent than you think, and most things that seem like this are actually valid complaints. Which has an implication on whether it is a good policy to dismiss everything that seems at first glance as a lizardman complaint.
I think it is okay to make an occasional mistake, but if all quick examples you can think of are wrong, you might want to reconsider the original hypothesis.
But remember that these aren’t Duncan’s multiple quick examples but tailcalled’s single quick example. That is, it sounds like you think the conversation has gone:
Can you give some examples of the phenomenon?
Off the top of my head: A, B, C.
But A, B, C don’t seem like examples?
They were off-the-cuff.
Okay but if all your off-the-cuff examples are wrong that seems suspicious.
But I think it’s more like:
According to your hypothesis I’d expect to see A but I don’t.
Oh I totally think we see A.
I couldn’t find A on google.
Here you go.
That doesn’t seem like A?
which feels to me like “people talking past each other” should be a strong hypothesis.
Some of the examples that we haven’t disccused yet were
you have a deranged suburban woman wanting a black man in the neighborhood to be arrested, for no discernible reason besides that he is black and she is crazy
Similarly, a deranged parent calls up a school superintendent wanting a principal to be fired because their child was exposed to Michaelangelo’s David, and the superintendent laughs and gently communicates “No, we are not doing that.”
(not part of the LW post, but linked to indirectly) A professor was suspended for racism for giving an example with a Chinese word that is pronounced like “nigger”.
The school had a rule that parents should be notified of controversial subjects.
The school leadership had previously been dissatisfied with the teacher for her conflicts with some of the parents.
The students were not just exposed to a statue of a nude man, but also a painting of a nude man, and a painting of a nude sex goddess. This might sound pedantic but I am not really sure why paintings of nude sex goddesses aren’t pornographic. The painting literally depicts someone attempting to cover her up, I assume because her nudity is considered inappropriate.
Michaelangelo’s David has also been controversial in the past, e.g. when it was originally set up, its penis was covered up by golden leaves because it was considered inappropriate.
So basically, first of all it is not clear to me that it is a lizardman opinion to consider the things the teacher taught to be pornographic. Maybe it is a lizardman opinion, but at least I can’t immediately think of any coherent reason why it would be. (If you believe that it would be harmful for children to view a nude picture of Aella, but not to view a nude painting of Venus, then I would love to hear your explanation! Actually even if you believe that both would be harmful, I would also be interested in hearing your explanation, because I don’t have a good model of this harm.)
And second of all, there seems to have been a conflict in the school, where some parents were concerned about the school being woke, and the school tried to assure them by promising them that their concerns would be addressed, but the teacher in question was resistant to addressing their concerns and sought to find provocative corner-cases.
I’m less sure about the case of the professor with the case of the professor. I haven’t found as convenient sources as I did for the Michaelangelo’s David situation. It seems plausible that it is an example of what Duncan describes, but I am not 101% sure.
So I propose a count of 4 examples contradicting Duncan, 1 example supporting Duncan, and 1 example being underspecified.
I think that Duncan is correct that society generally has fairly clear categories of valid and invalid complaint topics, along with recognized justifications for the categorization scheme.
Then there are edge cases and grey zones, both about what the categories are and how we establish them.
If we select for complaints that are in turn motivated by focused activism on redefining these categories—a teacher who seeks out edge cases—then the idea that “there are valid and invalid/Lizardman complains, we know which is which, and authority figures should insulate against Lizardman complains” is the point specifically in contention.
So the Lizardman heuristic will look decidedly unhelpful in arbitrating these cases. Similarly, you probably shouldn’t lean too hard on the argument that “minors don’t have the capacity to judge laws” when legislating the specific issue of what the voting age ought to be.
On the other hand, I think we can expect that the complaint categories deemed clearly valid or invalid/Lizardman will more often correspond to the types of complaints encountered most commonly outside of the world of activism. In these cases, the Lizardman heuristic will be more helpful.
“This guy’s not an activist, he’s just a Lizardman and I can ignore him” is a thought pattern that I use to decide that my neighbor, who likes to scream at bicyclists for going to fast or cars for idling on the corner for too long, is a Lizardman and not a Citizen With A Valid Complaint.
Yet if there was a tendency for bikers to ride too fast through the neighborhood or for cars to idle too long on our block, and the neighbors gathered together to have a cogent discussion on their concerns, I’m more inclined to listen to their concerns. Maybe there are kids playing in the street that the bicyclists aren’t watching out for. Maybe the people in the idling cars seem like they might be casing houses to burglarize.
I think what I’m trying to do in a Bayesian sense is decide if the person with the complaint is worth listening to. Have they recognized a problem that deserves a higher priority than it gets right now? Are they seeking the right kind of attention, a productive solution? Do they have some awareness of context, some flexibility and responsiveness to other issues? Do I need to be involved?
If so, I’m happy to listen with respect. If they’re too far in the other direction—as many people are—I’m happy to dismiss them as Lizardman/trolls and block/ignore/divert attention away from them.
There’s a danger in this approach, which is miscategorizing activists as Lizardmen and vice versa, either because you made an honest mistake or because you got tricked by the political opposition/other Lizardmen. That’s what we see to some extent in the “Rainbowland” example, although I’m firmly on the pro-diversity side in that argument and am unlikely to take anti-diversity activists seriously for other reasons. I don’t think they’re “lizardmen” (complaining about potentially valid issues in an invalid way) I just think they are wrong (complaining about invalid issues in a more or less valid way).
Strongly agree with Viliam here, and I suspect the crux is a definition of “valid” complaint. The examples I can think of, and have seen in this thread do not hinge on unpopularity or percentage, they hinge on disagreement about duty to perform or not-perform various acts of protection/guidance toward norms, vs duty to respect variance from those norms.
Puritanism is, in fact, alien to me, and I’d probably fail an ITT on the topic. But it’s common enough that it’s not right to invoke “lizardman” as the relevant categorization.
Sorry, but the specifics are centrally cruxy to me due to Aumann’s agreement theorem. If I hear people being angry about some random thing, I might assume that there is some underlying reason that the angry Lizardman people have for their opinion, and this reason might persuade me if I looked closer. Your post instead suggests that it’s not worth looking closer because they are probably just crazy, and we should set up some institutions to block the angry people from having an influence. Before setting up institutions to block people with inconvenient opinions, I’d really like to know whether those opinions do indeed tend to be crazy or if they are actually fairly worthwhile.
I find it telling that each of the concrete examples we have been able to come up with actually suggests that your post is exactly the opposite of the truth, and it suggests to me that maybe we need the opposite policy, institutions that better integrate people’s complaints.
You’re missing me in several ways, for instance doing a substitution from “if you remove insulation from existing institutions, people give up and those institutions erode” (which the post says) to “we should set up institutions to block angry people from having an influence” (which is similar but is not what the post is arguing).
I guess to me these feel like two sides of the same coin? Part of your point is that insulation levels have been dropping, and institutions seem to vary a lot in their insulation, so unless you believe that most reductions in insulation are good, one would think you would believe that there’s a need for some increases in isolation.
But if you are just pointing at the existence of a tradeoff to be mindful of, rather than advocating for one particular side of the tradeoff, and you find it plausible that most reductions insulation are good, then I am sympathetic to your point. That’s just not how your post came off to me, and in particular your post seems to be misdiagnosing aspects of the cause in a way that would suggest a more one-sided approach.
If we take someone drinking three cups of coffee a day and make them instead drink zero cups of coffee a day, they’re gonna have a bad time. That doesn’t mean we should have more people drinking three cups of coffee a day. It’s plausible we should, but someone saying “we shouldn’t take coffee-drinkers’ coffee away” is not saying “we should give non-coffee-drinkers more coffee”.
If I hear people being angry about some random thing, I might assume that there is some underlying reason that the angry Lizardman people have for their opinion, and this reason might persuade me if I looked closer.
and
I’d really like to know whether those opinions do indeed tend to be crazy or if they are actually fairly worthwhile.
… I direct your attention to Privileging the Hypothesis, which maybe I should edit into the OP as a prereq.
each of the concrete examples we have been able to come up with
Suppose that your good friend, the police commissioner, tells you in strictest confidence that the crime kingpin of your city is Wulky Wilkinsen. As a rationalist, are you licensed to believe this statement? Put it this way: if you go ahead and insult Wulky, I’d call you foolhardy. Since it is prudent to act as if Wulky has a substantially higher-than-default probability of being a crime boss, the police commissioner’s statement must have been strong Bayesian evidence.
Mmm, I feel like I disagree. Being angry about chairs in schools is really weird, and I think if it was a 1-in-25 thing, I would have heard of it. I have literally never heard of it before, let alone seen it happen myself.
Ah, okay, yes, this highlights a bit of a conflation I’ve been making; it was wrong/overstated to say 4%.
I agree the people who are genuinely mad about chairs in schools are way way rarer than 1-in-25.
But between people being genuinely mad, people trolling, people doing tribal politics, people who were already mad at you and looking for any excuse to needle you, people who are (on that day) actually psychotic or unhinged, etc., I claim that once the chairs-in-schools thing reaches the level of, say, someone writing an opinion piece for a local online newspaper,
then you have a frighteningly high chance (3-30%? Even for something as weird as chairs in schools?) of it spiraling out of control and attracting a bunch of people who will make your life miserable over it, or who will make the life of the principal miserable enough that policy might actually shift in response.
But yeah, the actual hardcore angry people are just a fraction of the lizardman constant in any specific instance. But like … they are often the spark that lights the tinder?
Another way to say this is something like “there’s 3-4% of the population, at any given moment, waiting to join in a pile-on, because [bored, crazy, generically angry, tribal, etc.], and it doesn’t take much to catch the attention of that swath.”
I don’t understand how you can come to this conclusion. I can’t think of very much that would support this model and isn’t better explained by other theories (such as by culture war as jaspax’s point, which tends to happen for specific reasons about specific things, rather than randomly about anything).
Is this all deduced from theory + Lizardman constant in surveys? Are there any other examples which serve as inspiration for your theory? Because if there is no other evidence then it seems way overconfident to make this strong theoretical inferences.
A FB friend of mine writes:
It’s not “one Google search away”, it took five Google searches to find anything and the article I came up with was PARENTS’ RAGE School apologises to furious parents after STRAPPING autistic students into ‘special’ chairs to stop them from moving, which seems like it would be a much more special policy than just the policy of having ordinary children sit in ordinary chairs in ordinary ways under ordinary conditions.
I would love to hear examples! Especially if they include a descriptions of what investigations your facebook friend did or what observations they had. (After all, it would be silly if a school redirected the autistic chair rage to a person who didn’t take a look at it at all, and the person then just dismissed that as people getting angry about children sitting on chairs without taking any of the specific circumstances into account.)
Oh, I had googled “sitting on chairs in school complaint” to confirm what my friend said and found several from that one search:
https://eagleeye.news/7613/opinion/school-chairs-have-negative-effects-on-teenage-posture/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/apr/19/children-bad-backs-uncomfortable-school-chairs-campaign
https://statehornet.com/2004/04/university-receives-complaints-about-classroom-chairs/
http://handedness.org/action/fairdesks.html
So for me it was indeed one search away, though I grant that none of the above four are, like, ranting/unhinged.
(I feel some degree of kinship that you and I both checked, though.)
So if I’m reading this opinion piece correctly, it’s based on a poll where 70% of parents would like more ergonomic chairs, as well as some science arguing that the chairs are physically damaging to students. It does not name specific people or demand anyone to be fired.
You are suggesting that this is a good example of 5% of people being angry for no good reason and sending a massive dose of punishment somewhere?
The other links seem thematically similar.
Doesn’t that undermine the point of your OP?
sigh.
No.
What’s happening here is I tried to make a quick, offhand post, explicitly heralded as such, and then you started drilling down into specifics, and I gave quick, offhand answers, which you are now treating as if they are centrally cruxy, when they are not. The thing about chairs is an example you made up, and I played along with a bit; it wasn’t part of my argument such that I need to defend it.
I’m giving up on this conversation, which is WAY net negative at this point, in terms of value-for-time-spent. You’re wanting to be real rigorous and airtight and nitpicky and specific, and that’s actually great for LW, that’s what LW is for most of the time, but I’m not into it here.
I think it is okay to make an occasional mistake, but if all quick examples you can think of are wrong, you might want to reconsider the original hypothesis. (The reason is, if the original hypothesis is right, you should be surprised that all your examples turned out to be wrong.)
Maybe the actual lizardman complaints are way less frequent than you think, and most things that seem like this are actually valid complaints. Which has an implication on whether it is a good policy to dismiss everything that seems at first glance as a lizardman complaint.
But remember that these aren’t Duncan’s multiple quick examples but tailcalled’s single quick example. That is, it sounds like you think the conversation has gone:
Can you give some examples of the phenomenon?
Off the top of my head: A, B, C.
But A, B, C don’t seem like examples?
They were off-the-cuff.
Okay but if all your off-the-cuff examples are wrong that seems suspicious.
But I think it’s more like:
According to your hypothesis I’d expect to see A but I don’t.
Oh I totally think we see A.
I couldn’t find A on google.
Here you go.
That doesn’t seem like A?
which feels to me like “people talking past each other” should be a strong hypothesis.
This thread started with the Rainbowland example, which was chosen by Duncan.
Okay, sure. But that’s one of Duncan’s examples, not all of Duncan’s examples.
(It’s also not clear to me whether Duncan disendorses that on reflection or simply hasn’t taken the time to elaborate on it.)
Some of the examples that we haven’t disccused yet were
you have a deranged suburban woman wanting a black man in the neighborhood to be arrested, for no discernible reason besides that he is black and she is crazy
Similarly, a deranged parent calls up a school superintendent wanting a principal to be fired because their child was exposed to Michaelangelo’s David, and the superintendent laughs and gently communicates “No, we are not doing that.”
(not part of the LW post, but linked to indirectly) A professor was suspended for racism for giving an example with a Chinese word that is pronounced like “nigger”.
I don’t know which situation the suburban woman story refers to, however I think I know what situation the Michaelangelo’s David situation refers to, and from my research there are several missing facts to the story:
The school had a rule that parents should be notified of controversial subjects.
The school leadership had previously been dissatisfied with the teacher for her conflicts with some of the parents.
The students were not just exposed to a statue of a nude man, but also a painting of a nude man, and a painting of a nude sex goddess. This might sound pedantic but I am not really sure why paintings of nude sex goddesses aren’t pornographic. The painting literally depicts someone attempting to cover her up, I assume because her nudity is considered inappropriate.
Michaelangelo’s David has also been controversial in the past, e.g. when it was originally set up, its penis was covered up by golden leaves because it was considered inappropriate.
So basically, first of all it is not clear to me that it is a lizardman opinion to consider the things the teacher taught to be pornographic. Maybe it is a lizardman opinion, but at least I can’t immediately think of any coherent reason why it would be. (If you believe that it would be harmful for children to view a nude picture of Aella, but not to view a nude painting of Venus, then I would love to hear your explanation! Actually even if you believe that both would be harmful, I would also be interested in hearing your explanation, because I don’t have a good model of this harm.)
And second of all, there seems to have been a conflict in the school, where some parents were concerned about the school being woke, and the school tried to assure them by promising them that their concerns would be addressed, but the teacher in question was resistant to addressing their concerns and sought to find provocative corner-cases.
I’m less sure about the case of the professor with the case of the professor. I haven’t found as convenient sources as I did for the Michaelangelo’s David situation. It seems plausible that it is an example of what Duncan describes, but I am not 101% sure.
So I propose a count of 4 examples contradicting Duncan, 1 example supporting Duncan, and 1 example being underspecified.
I think that Duncan is correct that society generally has fairly clear categories of valid and invalid complaint topics, along with recognized justifications for the categorization scheme.
Then there are edge cases and grey zones, both about what the categories are and how we establish them.
If we select for complaints that are in turn motivated by focused activism on redefining these categories—a teacher who seeks out edge cases—then the idea that “there are valid and invalid/Lizardman complains, we know which is which, and authority figures should insulate against Lizardman complains” is the point specifically in contention.
So the Lizardman heuristic will look decidedly unhelpful in arbitrating these cases. Similarly, you probably shouldn’t lean too hard on the argument that “minors don’t have the capacity to judge laws” when legislating the specific issue of what the voting age ought to be.
On the other hand, I think we can expect that the complaint categories deemed clearly valid or invalid/Lizardman will more often correspond to the types of complaints encountered most commonly outside of the world of activism. In these cases, the Lizardman heuristic will be more helpful.
“This guy’s not an activist, he’s just a Lizardman and I can ignore him” is a thought pattern that I use to decide that my neighbor, who likes to scream at bicyclists for going to fast or cars for idling on the corner for too long, is a Lizardman and not a Citizen With A Valid Complaint.
Yet if there was a tendency for bikers to ride too fast through the neighborhood or for cars to idle too long on our block, and the neighbors gathered together to have a cogent discussion on their concerns, I’m more inclined to listen to their concerns. Maybe there are kids playing in the street that the bicyclists aren’t watching out for. Maybe the people in the idling cars seem like they might be casing houses to burglarize.
I think what I’m trying to do in a Bayesian sense is decide if the person with the complaint is worth listening to. Have they recognized a problem that deserves a higher priority than it gets right now? Are they seeking the right kind of attention, a productive solution? Do they have some awareness of context, some flexibility and responsiveness to other issues? Do I need to be involved?
If so, I’m happy to listen with respect. If they’re too far in the other direction—as many people are—I’m happy to dismiss them as Lizardman/trolls and block/ignore/divert attention away from them.
There’s a danger in this approach, which is miscategorizing activists as Lizardmen and vice versa, either because you made an honest mistake or because you got tricked by the political opposition/other Lizardmen. That’s what we see to some extent in the “Rainbowland” example, although I’m firmly on the pro-diversity side in that argument and am unlikely to take anti-diversity activists seriously for other reasons. I don’t think they’re “lizardmen” (complaining about potentially valid issues in an invalid way) I just think they are wrong (complaining about invalid issues in a more or less valid way).
Strongly agree with Viliam here, and I suspect the crux is a definition of “valid” complaint. The examples I can think of, and have seen in this thread do not hinge on unpopularity or percentage, they hinge on disagreement about duty to perform or not-perform various acts of protection/guidance toward norms, vs duty to respect variance from those norms.
Puritanism is, in fact, alien to me, and I’d probably fail an ITT on the topic. But it’s common enough that it’s not right to invoke “lizardman” as the relevant categorization.
I agree to your if-then. The “if” condition does not hold, tho.
Sorry, but the specifics are centrally cruxy to me due to Aumann’s agreement theorem. If I hear people being angry about some random thing, I might assume that there is some underlying reason that the angry Lizardman people have for their opinion, and this reason might persuade me if I looked closer. Your post instead suggests that it’s not worth looking closer because they are probably just crazy, and we should set up some institutions to block the angry people from having an influence. Before setting up institutions to block people with inconvenient opinions, I’d really like to know whether those opinions do indeed tend to be crazy or if they are actually fairly worthwhile.
I find it telling that each of the concrete examples we have been able to come up with actually suggests that your post is exactly the opposite of the truth, and it suggests to me that maybe we need the opposite policy, institutions that better integrate people’s complaints.
You’re missing me in several ways, for instance doing a substitution from “if you remove insulation from existing institutions, people give up and those institutions erode” (which the post says) to “we should set up institutions to block angry people from having an influence” (which is similar but is not what the post is arguing).
I guess to me these feel like two sides of the same coin? Part of your point is that insulation levels have been dropping, and institutions seem to vary a lot in their insulation, so unless you believe that most reductions in insulation are good, one would think you would believe that there’s a need for some increases in isolation.
But if you are just pointing at the existence of a tradeoff to be mindful of, rather than advocating for one particular side of the tradeoff, and you find it plausible that most reductions insulation are good, then I am sympathetic to your point. That’s just not how your post came off to me, and in particular your post seems to be misdiagnosing aspects of the cause in a way that would suggest a more one-sided approach.
People adapt to states of affairs.
If we take someone drinking three cups of coffee a day and make them instead drink zero cups of coffee a day, they’re gonna have a bad time. That doesn’t mean we should have more people drinking three cups of coffee a day. It’s plausible we should, but someone saying “we shouldn’t take coffee-drinkers’ coffee away” is not saying “we should give non-coffee-drinkers more coffee”.
As for
and
… I direct your attention to Privileging the Hypothesis, which maybe I should edit into the OP as a prereq.
Each of the concrete examples you have made up.
This thread started with one of the examples you came up with.
It’s not privileging the hypothesis to Aumann-agree with someone. See Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence:
In general, people know what experiences they’ve had, and can exchange information about them through talking with each other. Strong evidence is common.
Substantial repeated direct personal experience, along with substantial repeated direct observation of the experiences of people around me.
Could you give some examples of your personal experiences?