My sense is that you’ll keep generating reasons [...] no matter what I say
Thanks for articulating a specific way in which you think I’m being systematically dumb! This is super helpful, because it makes it clear how to proceed: I can either bite the bullet (“Yes, and I’d be right to keep generating such reasons, because …”) or try to provide evidence that I’m not being stupid in that particular way.
As it happens, I do not want to bite this bullet; I think I’m smarter than your model of me, and I’m eager to prove it by addressing your cruxes. (I wouldn’t expect you to take my word for it.)
One sub-crux is “people don’t get sick of you and stop talking to you” (or, people get sick of a given discussion area being drama-prone)
I agree that this is a real risk![1] You mention Vaniver’s comment, which mentions that the Royal Society prioritized keeping the conversation going. I think I also prioritize this: in yet-unpublished work,[2] I talk about how in politically charged Twitter discussions, I sometimes try to use the minimal amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the discussion going, when I suspect my interlocutor would hang up the phone if they knew what I was really thinking.
Another sub-crux is “phrasing things in a triggery-way makes people feel less safe (and then less willing to open up and share vulnerable information), and also makes people more fight-minded and think less rationaly (i.e. less able to process information correctly).”
All other things being equal, I agree that this is a relevant consideration. Correspondingly, I think I do pay a fair amount of attention to word choice depending on what I’m trying to convey to what audience. I admit that I often end up going with a relatively “fighty” tone when it feels appropriate for what I’m trying to do, but … I also often don’t? If someone wanted to persuade me to change my policy here, I’d need specific examples of things I’ve written that are allegedly making people feel unsafe.
I suspect a crux there is that I’m more likely to interpret feelings of unsafety as a decision-theoretic extortion attempt, that sometimes people feel unsafe because the elephant in their brain can predict that others will offer to distort shared maps as a concession to make them feel safe.
Did you notice how I started this comment by thanking you for expressing a negative opinion of my rationality? That was very deliberate on my part: I’m trying to make it cheap to criticize me. It may not be the same thing you’re calling tact, but it seems related (in being an attempt to shape incentives to favor opening up).
don’t seem to engage at all with the actual social question of how to build a truthseeking institution
I agree that I’ve been focusing on individual practice rather than institution-building. Someone who was focusing on institution-building might therefore find my meta-discoursey posts less interesting. (I think my mathposts should be good either way.)
A big crux here is that I think institutions are often dumber than their members as individuals and that you can build more interesting systems out of smarter bricks. I’m not eager to pay the costs of coordinating for some alleged collective benefit that I mostly just don’t think is real in the first place.
to be able to answer the question “how would you know if it were too high or too low?”, and that’s the sort of thing I’d find actually persuasive here.
I mean, I definitely think that an intellectual forum where people were routinely making off-topic personal insults should be moderated to require more tact (e.g., by instituting an enforced rule against off-topic personal insults). Is that still too ideological for you (because I expect to be able to appeal to principles like speech being “on topic”, rather than empirically checking how people are feeling)?
I almost left off the last paragraph because it seemed to push the comment in a more political-fight-y direction [...] I’m not sure whether was the right call
I’m glad you included it! It was a great paragraph! More generally, I think heuristics for limiting damage from political fights by means of hiding them are going to generalize poorly to this particular conflict, which is very weird because my side of the conflict is specifically fighting to reveal information about hidden conflicts.
As an aside, in a recent email thread with Ben, Jessica, and Michael after not being part of their clique for 2½ years, I was disappointed with some aspects of their performance; I worry that almost everyone in a position to find flaws in their ideology has written them off and been written off by them. I want to figure out how to sic Said on them.
Thanks for articulating a specific way in which you think I’m being systematically dumb! This is super helpful, because it makes it clear how to proceed: I can either bite the bullet (“Yes, and I’d be right to keep generating such reasons, because …”) or try to provide evidence that I’m not being stupid in that particular way.
As it happens, I do not want to bite this bullet; I think I’m smarter than your model of me, and I’m eager to prove it by addressing your cruxes. (I wouldn’t expect you to take my word for it.)
I agree that this is a real risk![1] You mention Vaniver’s comment, which mentions that the Royal Society prioritized keeping the conversation going. I think I also prioritize this: in yet-unpublished work,[2] I talk about how in politically charged Twitter discussions, I sometimes try to use the minimal amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the discussion going, when I suspect my interlocutor would hang up the phone if they knew what I was really thinking.
All other things being equal, I agree that this is a relevant consideration. Correspondingly, I think I do pay a fair amount of attention to word choice depending on what I’m trying to convey to what audience. I admit that I often end up going with a relatively “fighty” tone when it feels appropriate for what I’m trying to do, but … I also often don’t? If someone wanted to persuade me to change my policy here, I’d need specific examples of things I’ve written that are allegedly making people feel unsafe.
I suspect a crux there is that I’m more likely to interpret feelings of unsafety as a decision-theoretic extortion attempt, that sometimes people feel unsafe because the elephant in their brain can predict that others will offer to distort shared maps as a concession to make them feel safe.
Did you notice how I started this comment by thanking you for expressing a negative opinion of my rationality? That was very deliberate on my part: I’m trying to make it cheap to criticize me. It may not be the same thing you’re calling tact, but it seems related (in being an attempt to shape incentives to favor opening up).
I agree that I’ve been focusing on individual practice rather than institution-building. Someone who was focusing on institution-building might therefore find my meta-discoursey posts less interesting. (I think my mathposts should be good either way.)
A big crux here is that I think institutions are often dumber than their members as individuals and that you can build more interesting systems out of smarter bricks. I’m not eager to pay the costs of coordinating for some alleged collective benefit that I mostly just don’t think is real in the first place.
I mean, I definitely think that an intellectual forum where people were routinely making off-topic personal insults should be moderated to require more tact (e.g., by instituting an enforced rule against off-topic personal insults). Is that still too ideological for you (because I expect to be able to appeal to principles like speech being “on topic”, rather than empirically checking how people are feeling)?
I’m glad you included it! It was a great paragraph! More generally, I think heuristics for limiting damage from political fights by means of hiding them are going to generalize poorly to this particular conflict, which is very weird because my side of the conflict is specifically fighting to reveal information about hidden conflicts.
As an aside, in a recent email thread with Ben, Jessica, and Michael after not being part of their clique for 2½ years, I was disappointed with some aspects of their performance; I worry that almost everyone in a position to find flaws in their ideology has written them off and been written off by them. I want to figure out how to sic Said on them.
Possibly worth yanking out into its own post? (Working title: “Good Bad Faith”.)