The paragraph calling out certain people in our community for scoring points (and to some extent the last paragraph) felt, ironically, like you were suddenly scoring points, whereas the rest of the post was trying to win.
[Edit: Note that this is me responding to what turns out to be a misreading of the author’s intent, which was to call out the responders for scoring points rather than the named posters. I think it led somewhere worthwhile but Conner wasn’t doing the thing I thought he was doing.]
It also has an interesting implication, which is that scoring points won’t accomplish anything in the context of those three subjects—that it won’t help those people win. In Ben’s situation that seems valid. Ben’s mother is following the rule that curfew is curfew basically no matter what and Ben’s arguments are irrelevant. In the other referenced examples, that does not seem to be the situation. No, it’s not a sporting event where the most points wins, but it does not seem pointless to point out economic drivers of future AGI arms races if you’re trying to convince people of the likelihood of AGI arms races, it does seem like pointing out how toxic things evolve is an argument in favor of getting people to change those dynamics and/or recognize that the end products might be toxic, it does seem like pointing out what causes lynch mobs might be useful information that informs people’s actions.
That doesn’t mean that such actions are optimal. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that saying things to justify your beliefs is something people don’t do when trying to win. Arguments are won on points all the time. Beliefs are changed by point scoring all the time. Points are often not sufficient, but they are even more often helpful and they are also often required. Your points allow you to win, get people to listen, get you consideration, make people update, and so on.
A response might be, if they are helpful that’s not scoring points. But yes, they are totally scoring points. There are things that help you win that don’t score points, and there are things that both score points and help you win (and the other two quadrants as well).
What’s bad is when you score the wrong kind of points. Irrelevant points. Points that bounce off their targets. Especially points that only serve to drag the other person down rather than make a point. So what’s the difference between relevant points and irrelevant points, in this context?
My intuition is that it’s points that matter to you versus points that matter to the judges. Ben is scoring points that matter to him but don’t matter to the judges. Telling the cop you pay his salary really doesn’t help. If you’re scoring points that matter to the person you’re arguing with, or the audience, and shift their opinion, that’s a different story. Telling the cop that your wife is in labor and you’re driving her to the hospital is totally scoring points but also works if he buys it. Starving people point out their desperation, thereby scoring points in the eyes of their judge, in order to elicit help. Yes, it would be better/cleaner to win in a way that didn’t score points at all to avoid our natural inclination towards scoring more points than is efficient, but that doesn’t mean scoring points isn’t useful.
Relationships even depend on a points balance, in some sense. If you’re constantly scoring points in your own eyes but not scoring points in the other person’s eyes and they’re doing the same, that’s really bad. Both of you will think you’re way ahead on points and wonder why the other person is defecting slash being so terrible. Much better is if you can both put those points on the board in some sense, so no one thinks they’re somehow way ahead or feels totally unappreciated or unvalued or what not. This stuff matters.
I wonder how much of this is about naming things. I like that you’re attempting to name all your things with resonant terms, and I think that consequences like my reactions here are features rather than bugs because they lead to revealing real differences in world models and perceptions that would otherwise be harder to spot, but there is certainly the risk this is largely about terms instead.
My intuition is that it’s points that matter to you versus points that matter to the judges
This is pretty much 100% of it. Sometimes “the judges” are people whose opinion is decisive, like Ben’s mom, and sometimes “the judges” are just the universe (e.g. will these actions I’m taking result in the parachute opening or not).
Specifically, “scoring points instead of winning.”
I noticed I was sort of confusedly-in-disagreement with your first couple of paragraphs, and I think that boils down to me explaining things inadequately—your complaints felt invalid and your arguments and clarifications felt totally true, and I don’t think we actually disagreed. The above is an important distinction—it’s not about scoring points being bad in an absolute sense, it’s when you score points instead of winning.
In particular, I wasn’t claiming that Eliezer, Scott, and Brent are the ones doing this. I was claiming that the people who shoot back with something like “I don’t think we should listen to this guy, he doesn’t even have a PhD” are scoring points. They’re not playing the same game that Eliezer and Scott and Brent are playing (a truthseeking, accomplish-stuff sort of game) but rather the simpler, more known game of social status.
My claim there is that even the ones who care about e.g. AI arms races are not in that moment expressing that care—they’ve switched away from engaging with the ideas to engaging with the social subgame. Their true objection to (e.g.) some claim about economics is not “Eliezer doesn’t have a PhD.” They’re ignoring the economics question, and shifting into the trivial subgame and scoring points that are valid in that subgame but futile/useless in the larger game of “will I bring about my will in the world.” Maybe their point-scoring is kind of correlated with winning that larger game (because social status is a useful currency) just like my cousin Ben making logical arguments sometimes has an effect, sort of, maybe, if mom’s in the right mood. But it’s not highly likely to make a difference. It’s mostly pandering or self-gratification or something not motivated by the actual end goal.
(In contrast, something like the Yudkowsky-Hanson debate is not “scoring points instead of winning.” It’s scoring points in the actual relevant game.)
So yeah—I felt like most of your objection was to straw versions of what I was trying to say, and I apologize for the extent to which I set up those strawmen myself (and thus it’s not your fault you found yourself objecting to them). I wasn’t at all claiming that e.g. it’s “pointless to point out economic drivers of arms races” or that it’s “pointless to point out how toxic things evolve.” I was claiming that the response to those claims often shifts the conversation into a pointless subgame where people score futile points that have little-to-no bearing on the original topic, and that indeed this is why people in the Eliezer/Scott/Brent archetype often get tired and just drop out of the discussion at that moment. They recognize that no further progress is likely to be made and they’re not interested in scoring trivial points, so they go off to do something else instead.
Ah, that makes more sense. I agree that we mostly agree. I went back and read the paragraph in question and I see how that part of this happened. I blame pronouns—now that I know who/what everything is referring to it all makes sense. I think if you replaced “those people” with the “those responding” or something like that, this confusion doesn’t happen.
That doesn’t mean this isn’t also my fault, though; I didn’t even see the alternate/actual interpretation, and what you wrote was at worst ambiguous. So I was being somewhat uncharitable there in not looking for an alternate explanation, which seems bad.
People who have something to protect just win—or if they can’t win, they freeze or flail. What they don’t do is confidently pursue an irrelevant subgame that distracts them from the true goal and prevents them from noticing that they’ve lost.
I’m not sure this is always true. Your story about Ben got me thinking about a friend who went through parental abuse as a teenager, and they had a goal that mattered to them (getting their parents to leave them in peace) but they didn’t see any chance to win, because the parents had all the power. And they definitely kept trying to score points instead of winning, because trying to win “is pointless anyway” (=was probably too frustrating/humiliating/upsetting for them).
I think a lot of people, when faced with the despair of not being able to win no matter what they do, would start trying anyway. “Every little bit counts” and “at least you tried” and so on.
This advice does work for me, as someone who already values winning more than scoring points, but I’m not sure that it would help someone get out of scoring-points mode if they aren’t used to focusing on winning.
That said, thank you for writing this post and giving concrete strategies on how to fight this!
Does “point-scoring” correspond to status-seeking behavior?
Presumably people agree that in some circumstances, status seeking can be rational. If the actual disagreement is about who should have higher status, is whataboutism actually a fallacy?
(More generally, I would have liked to see more speculation about why point-scoring behavior evolved/what people who engage in it are trying to accomplish.)
In the specific way that I use the phrase in my head, it corresponds to status-seeking behavior that is orthogonal to the actual goal. Status-seeking behavior evolved in general because it’s broadly useful, like money-seeking behavior. But just as there are circumstances where you shouldn’t be concerned with collecting money, so too are there circumstances where you shouldn’t be concerned with collecting status, and our ingrained systems don’t always notice the relevant circumstantial detail.
Sure, but the fact that my System 1 is pushing me towards status seeking is evidence that now is a good time to do it.
In Ben’s case, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the only plausible strategy to get your aunt to loosen her grip is indeed for him to convince you and his dad to form a coalition with him and try to persuade his mom to loosen up.
Nope nope nope, beware perverse incentives and motivated cognition. Part of what I did was give Ben a handful of frames and trigger-action patterns and clever tricks that allowed him to completely route around this whole class of problem and in fact win her approval on other questions in the same space, once he ditched the point-scoring behavior.
In general, I suspect that point-scoring behavior is the right answer less than 5% of the time (though I admit I pulled that number out of an anonymous butt).
In my head, this is flavored as a kind of question substitution. Ben was wishfully living in the universe where things would go the way he wanted them to, rather in the universe where things just are what they are, and you have to adapt to the rules that are handed to you. The question Ben was originally faced with was something like “how do I talk my mom into letting me stay out late?” This is a hard question, with no clear, predetermined roadmap.
Not performing this kind of question substitution is the kind of thing I view as a key skill that correlates strongly with psychological development, and in particular that the divide you are pointing at here is the one between pre- and post-formal stages, with the formal stage being a period of transition from the wishful-thinking worldview to the actually-doing-it worldview.
But even if you disagree with the developmental psychology relationship, making the change from wishful-thinking to actually-doing-it is the thing that was the seed of my motivation starting about 4 years ago when I moved to Berkeley and discovered way more wishful-thinking than I thought existed in the community when I read what people wrote online. Developmental psychology has been one tool for helping me understand why this divide exists, and I like this idea of talking about “scoring points” because it describes a what of what it seems to me people are doing from the inside where they play the game to win but play the game at a lower level where they don’t even see the bigger game being played around them.
I think there’s something here about pre-post-formal in various contexts or something. Like, I’ve just added a “related to” link to Abram’s post about third person perspective, because it feels to me like Ben is being formal, just not in relationship to his mother. He’s being formal with respect to this imagined impartial judge who’s looking down on both him and his mother and awarding the victory to whoever’s scored the most points.
I feel that you’ve used Scoring Points in two distinct ways.
In the first, you are scoring points with an imaginary judge. Perhaps you are doing it so that people will support you later when you tell them what happened, but a lot of the time it is just so that you feel justified in your actions.
In the second, you are saying things that you know will impress the audience. The idea is to leverage social pressure against the person so that they have to agree with you or to just gain social status.
I’m not sure whether these distinct circumstances should be combined in a single term.
Related from the Sequences: Whining-Based Communities, Rationality is Systematized Winning
The paragraph calling out certain people in our community for scoring points (and to some extent the last paragraph) felt, ironically, like you were suddenly scoring points, whereas the rest of the post was trying to win.
[Edit: Note that this is me responding to what turns out to be a misreading of the author’s intent, which was to call out the responders for scoring points rather than the named posters. I think it led somewhere worthwhile but Conner wasn’t doing the thing I thought he was doing.]
It also has an interesting implication, which is that scoring points won’t accomplish anything in the context of those three subjects—that it won’t help those people win. In Ben’s situation that seems valid. Ben’s mother is following the rule that curfew is curfew basically no matter what and Ben’s arguments are irrelevant. In the other referenced examples, that does not seem to be the situation. No, it’s not a sporting event where the most points wins, but it does not seem pointless to point out economic drivers of future AGI arms races if you’re trying to convince people of the likelihood of AGI arms races, it does seem like pointing out how toxic things evolve is an argument in favor of getting people to change those dynamics and/or recognize that the end products might be toxic, it does seem like pointing out what causes lynch mobs might be useful information that informs people’s actions.
That doesn’t mean that such actions are optimal. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that saying things to justify your beliefs is something people don’t do when trying to win. Arguments are won on points all the time. Beliefs are changed by point scoring all the time. Points are often not sufficient, but they are even more often helpful and they are also often required. Your points allow you to win, get people to listen, get you consideration, make people update, and so on.
A response might be, if they are helpful that’s not scoring points. But yes, they are totally scoring points. There are things that help you win that don’t score points, and there are things that both score points and help you win (and the other two quadrants as well).
What’s bad is when you score the wrong kind of points. Irrelevant points. Points that bounce off their targets. Especially points that only serve to drag the other person down rather than make a point. So what’s the difference between relevant points and irrelevant points, in this context?
My intuition is that it’s points that matter to you versus points that matter to the judges. Ben is scoring points that matter to him but don’t matter to the judges. Telling the cop you pay his salary really doesn’t help. If you’re scoring points that matter to the person you’re arguing with, or the audience, and shift their opinion, that’s a different story. Telling the cop that your wife is in labor and you’re driving her to the hospital is totally scoring points but also works if he buys it. Starving people point out their desperation, thereby scoring points in the eyes of their judge, in order to elicit help. Yes, it would be better/cleaner to win in a way that didn’t score points at all to avoid our natural inclination towards scoring more points than is efficient, but that doesn’t mean scoring points isn’t useful.
Relationships even depend on a points balance, in some sense. If you’re constantly scoring points in your own eyes but not scoring points in the other person’s eyes and they’re doing the same, that’s really bad. Both of you will think you’re way ahead on points and wonder why the other person is defecting slash being so terrible. Much better is if you can both put those points on the board in some sense, so no one thinks they’re somehow way ahead or feels totally unappreciated or unvalued or what not. This stuff matters.
I wonder how much of this is about naming things. I like that you’re attempting to name all your things with resonant terms, and I think that consequences like my reactions here are features rather than bugs because they lead to revealing real differences in world models and perceptions that would otherwise be harder to spot, but there is certainly the risk this is largely about terms instead.
This is pretty much 100% of it. Sometimes “the judges” are people whose opinion is decisive, like Ben’s mom, and sometimes “the judges” are just the universe (e.g. will these actions I’m taking result in the parachute opening or not).
I noticed I was sort of confusedly-in-disagreement with your first couple of paragraphs, and I think that boils down to me explaining things inadequately—your complaints felt invalid and your arguments and clarifications felt totally true, and I don’t think we actually disagreed. The above is an important distinction—it’s not about scoring points being bad in an absolute sense, it’s when you score points instead of winning.
In particular, I wasn’t claiming that Eliezer, Scott, and Brent are the ones doing this. I was claiming that the people who shoot back with something like “I don’t think we should listen to this guy, he doesn’t even have a PhD” are scoring points. They’re not playing the same game that Eliezer and Scott and Brent are playing (a truthseeking, accomplish-stuff sort of game) but rather the simpler, more known game of social status.
My claim there is that even the ones who care about e.g. AI arms races are not in that moment expressing that care—they’ve switched away from engaging with the ideas to engaging with the social subgame. Their true objection to (e.g.) some claim about economics is not “Eliezer doesn’t have a PhD.” They’re ignoring the economics question, and shifting into the trivial subgame and scoring points that are valid in that subgame but futile/useless in the larger game of “will I bring about my will in the world.” Maybe their point-scoring is kind of correlated with winning that larger game (because social status is a useful currency) just like my cousin Ben making logical arguments sometimes has an effect, sort of, maybe, if mom’s in the right mood. But it’s not highly likely to make a difference. It’s mostly pandering or self-gratification or something not motivated by the actual end goal.
(In contrast, something like the Yudkowsky-Hanson debate is not “scoring points instead of winning.” It’s scoring points in the actual relevant game.)
So yeah—I felt like most of your objection was to straw versions of what I was trying to say, and I apologize for the extent to which I set up those strawmen myself (and thus it’s not your fault you found yourself objecting to them). I wasn’t at all claiming that e.g. it’s “pointless to point out economic drivers of arms races” or that it’s “pointless to point out how toxic things evolve.” I was claiming that the response to those claims often shifts the conversation into a pointless subgame where people score futile points that have little-to-no bearing on the original topic, and that indeed this is why people in the Eliezer/Scott/Brent archetype often get tired and just drop out of the discussion at that moment. They recognize that no further progress is likely to be made and they’re not interested in scoring trivial points, so they go off to do something else instead.
Ah, that makes more sense. I agree that we mostly agree. I went back and read the paragraph in question and I see how that part of this happened. I blame pronouns—now that I know who/what everything is referring to it all makes sense. I think if you replaced “those people” with the “those responding” or something like that, this confusion doesn’t happen.
That doesn’t mean this isn’t also my fault, though; I didn’t even see the alternate/actual interpretation, and what you wrote was at worst ambiguous. So I was being somewhat uncharitable there in not looking for an alternate explanation, which seems bad.
content note: child abuse
I’m not sure this is always true. Your story about Ben got me thinking about a friend who went through parental abuse as a teenager, and they had a goal that mattered to them (getting their parents to leave them in peace) but they didn’t see any chance to win, because the parents had all the power. And they definitely kept trying to score points instead of winning, because trying to win “is pointless anyway” (=was probably too frustrating/humiliating/upsetting for them).
I think a lot of people, when faced with the despair of not being able to win no matter what they do, would start trying anyway. “Every little bit counts” and “at least you tried” and so on.
This advice does work for me, as someone who already values winning more than scoring points, but I’m not sure that it would help someone get out of scoring-points mode if they aren’t used to focusing on winning.
That said, thank you for writing this post and giving concrete strategies on how to fight this!
I appreciate the fact that you posted this on a forum where you can literally score points for saying this.
Does “point-scoring” correspond to status-seeking behavior?
Presumably people agree that in some circumstances, status seeking can be rational. If the actual disagreement is about who should have higher status, is whataboutism actually a fallacy?
(More generally, I would have liked to see more speculation about why point-scoring behavior evolved/what people who engage in it are trying to accomplish.)
In the specific way that I use the phrase in my head, it corresponds to status-seeking behavior that is orthogonal to the actual goal. Status-seeking behavior evolved in general because it’s broadly useful, like money-seeking behavior. But just as there are circumstances where you shouldn’t be concerned with collecting money, so too are there circumstances where you shouldn’t be concerned with collecting status, and our ingrained systems don’t always notice the relevant circumstantial detail.
Sure, but the fact that my System 1 is pushing me towards status seeking is evidence that now is a good time to do it.
In Ben’s case, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the only plausible strategy to get your aunt to loosen her grip is indeed for him to convince you and his dad to form a coalition with him and try to persuade his mom to loosen up.
Nope nope nope, beware perverse incentives and motivated cognition. Part of what I did was give Ben a handful of frames and trigger-action patterns and clever tricks that allowed him to completely route around this whole class of problem and in fact win her approval on other questions in the same space, once he ditched the point-scoring behavior.
In general, I suspect that point-scoring behavior is the right answer less than 5% of the time (though I admit I pulled that number out of an anonymous butt).
Not performing this kind of question substitution is the kind of thing I view as a key skill that correlates strongly with psychological development, and in particular that the divide you are pointing at here is the one between pre- and post-formal stages, with the formal stage being a period of transition from the wishful-thinking worldview to the actually-doing-it worldview.
But even if you disagree with the developmental psychology relationship, making the change from wishful-thinking to actually-doing-it is the thing that was the seed of my motivation starting about 4 years ago when I moved to Berkeley and discovered way more wishful-thinking than I thought existed in the community when I read what people wrote online. Developmental psychology has been one tool for helping me understand why this divide exists, and I like this idea of talking about “scoring points” because it describes a what of what it seems to me people are doing from the inside where they play the game to win but play the game at a lower level where they don’t even see the bigger game being played around them.
I think there’s something here about pre-post-formal in various contexts or something. Like, I’ve just added a “related to” link to Abram’s post about third person perspective, because it feels to me like Ben is being formal, just not in relationship to his mother. He’s being formal with respect to this imagined impartial judge who’s looking down on both him and his mother and awarding the victory to whoever’s scored the most points.
I feel that you’ve used Scoring Points in two distinct ways.
In the first, you are scoring points with an imaginary judge. Perhaps you are doing it so that people will support you later when you tell them what happened, but a lot of the time it is just so that you feel justified in your actions.
In the second, you are saying things that you know will impress the audience. The idea is to leverage social pressure against the person so that they have to agree with you or to just gain social status.
I’m not sure whether these distinct circumstances should be combined in a single term.