I disagree re/ the word “insane”. The position to which I stated a counterposition is insane.
“it’s exactly opposite of the truth” and “absolutely” not only fails to help your case, but in my view actively makes things worse by using substance-free rhetoric that misleads readers into thinking the case you are bringing forward is stronger than it actually is or that this matter is so obvious and trivial that they shouldn’t even need to think very hard about it before taking your side.
I disagree, I think I should state my actual position. The phrases you quoted have meaning and conveys my position more than if they were removed.
I disagree, I think I should state my actual position. The phrases you quoted have meaning and conveys my position more than if they were removed.
It does not matter one bit if this is your “actual position”. The point of community norms about discourse is that they constrain what is or isn’t appropriate to say in a given situation; they function on the meta-level by setting up proper incentives for users to take into account when crafting their contributions here, independently of their personal assessments about who is right on the object-level. So your response is entirely off-topic, and the fact you expected it not to be is revealing of a more fundamental confusion in your thinking about this matter.
Moderation (when done properly) does not act solely to resolve individual disputes on the basis of purely local characteristics to try to ensure specific outcomes. Remember, the law is not an optimizer, but rather a system informed by principles of mechanism design that generates specific, legible, and predictable set of real rules about what is or isn’t acceptable, a system that does not bend in response to the clever arguments of an individual who thinks that he alone is special and exempt from them.
Standards are not really popular. Most people don’t like them. Or rather, most people like them in the abstract, but chafe when they get in the way, and it’s pretty rare for someone to not think that their personal exception to the standard is more justified than others’ violations. Half the people here, I think, don’t even see the problem that I’m trying to point at. Or they see it, but they don’t see it as a problem.
I think it would have been weird and useless for you to straight-up lie in your previous comment, so of course you thought what you were saying communicated your real position. Why else would you have written it? But “communicate whatever you truly feel about something, regardless of what form your writing takes” is a truly terribleway of organizing any community in which meaningful intellectual progress is intended. By contrast, giving explanations and reasoning in situations where you label the beliefs of others as “insane” prevents conversations from becoming needlessly heated and spiraling into Demon Threads, while also building towards a community that maintains high-quality contributions.
All of this stuff has already been covered in the large number of expositions people have given over the last few years on what LessWrong is about and what principles animate norms and user behavior (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc).
I doubt that we’re going to get anything useful here, but as an indication of where I’m coming from:
I would basically agree with what you’re saying if my first comment had been ad hominem, like “Bogdan is a doo-doo head”. That’s unhelpful, irrelevant, mean, inflammatory, and corrosive to the culture. (Also it’s false lol.)
I think a position can be wrong, can be insanely wrong (which means something like “is very far from the truth, is wrong in a way that produces very wrong actions, and is being produced by a process which is failing to update in a way that it should and is failing to notice that fact”), and can be exactly opposite of the truth (for example, “Redwoods are short, grass is tall” is, perhaps depending on contexts, just about the exact opposite of the truth). And these facts are often knowable and relevant if true. And therefore should be said—in a truth-seeking context. And this is the situation we’re in.
If you had responded to my original comment with something like
“Your choice of words makes it seem like you’re angry or something, and this is coming out in a way that seems like a strong bid for something, e.g. attention or agreement or something. It’s a bit hard to orient to that because it’s not clear what if anything you’re angry about, and so readers are forced to either rudely ignore / dismiss, or engage with someone who seems a bit angry or standoffish without knowing why. Can you more directly say what’s going on, e.g. what you’re angry about and what you might request, so we can evaluate that more explicitly?”
or whatever is the analogous thing that’s true for you, then we could have talked about that. Instead you called my relatively accurate and intentional presentation of my views as “misleading readers into thinking the case you are bringing forward is stronger than it actually is or that this matter is so obvious and trivial...” which sounds to me like you have a problem in your own thinking and norms of discourse, which is that you’re requiring that statements other people make be from the perspective of [the theory that’s shared between the expected community of speakers and listeners] in order for you to think they’re appropriate or non-misleading.
The fact that I have to explain this to you is probably bad, and is probably mostly your responsibility, and you should reevaluate your behavior. (I’m not trying to be gentle here, and if gentleness would help then you deserve it—but you probably won’t get it here from me.)
I think a position can be wrong, can be insanely wrong (which means something like “is very far from the truth, is wrong in a way that produces very wrong actions, and is being produced by a process which is failing to update in a way that it should and is failing to notice that fact”), and can be exactly opposite of the truth (for example, “Redwoods are short, grass is tall” is, perhaps depending on contexts, just about the exact opposite of the truth). And these facts are often knowable and relevant if true. And therefore should be said—in a truth-seeking context.
I agree to some extent, which is why I said the following to gears:
It is fine[2] to label opinions you disagree with as “insane”.
It is fine to give your conclusions without explaining the reasons behind your positions.[3]
It is not fine to do 1 and 2 at the same time.
The fact that you chose the word “insane” to describe something that did not seem obviously false, had a fair bit of support in this community, and that you had not given any arguments against at the time was the problem.
The fact that you think something is “insane” is informationally useful to other people, and, all else equal, should be communicated. But all else is not equal, because (as I explained in my previous comments), it is a fabricated option to think that relaxing norms around the way in which particular kinds of information is communicating will not negatively affect the quality of the conversation that unfolds afterwards.
So you could (at least in my view, not sure what the mods think) say something is “insane” if you explain why, because this allows for opportunities to drag the conversation away from mud-slinging Demon Threads and towards the object-level arguments being discussed (and, in this case, saying you think your interlocutor’s position is crazy could actually be helpful at times, since it signals a great level of disagreement and allows for the quicker identification of how many inferential distances between you and the other commenters). Likewise, you could give your conclusions without presenting arguments or explanations for it, as long as your position is not stated in an overly inflammatory manner, because this then incentivizes useful and clear-headed discourse later on when users can ask what the arguments actually are. But if you go the third route, then you maximize the likelihood of the conversation getting derailed.
“Your choice of words makes it seem like you’re angry or something, and this is coming out in a way that seems like a strong bid for something, e.g. attention or agreement or something. It’s a bit hard to orient to that because it’s not clear what if anything you’re angry about, and so readers are forced to either rudely ignore / dismiss, or engage with someone who seems a bit angry or standoffish without knowing why. Can you more directly say what’s going on, e.g. what you’re angry about and what you might request, so we can evaluate that more explicitly?”
This framing focuses on the wrong part, I think. You can be as angry as you want to when you are commenting on LessWrong, and it seems to be inappropriate to enforce norms about the emotions one is supposed to feel when contributing here. The part that matters is whether specific norms of discourse are getting violated (about the literal things someone is writing, not how they feel in that moment), in which case (as I have argued above) I believe the internal state of mind of the person violating them is primarily irrelevant.
you have a problem in your own thinking and norms of discourse
I’m also not sure what you mean by this. You also implied later on that “requiring that statements other people make be from the perspective of [the theory that’s shared between the expected community of speakers and listeners] in order for you to think they’re appropriate” is wrong, which… doesn’t make sense to me, because that’s the very definition of the word appropriate: “meeting the requirements [i.e. norms] of a purpose or situation.”
The same statement can be appropriate or inappropriate, depending on the rules and norms of the community it is made in.
to think that relaxing norms around the way in which particular kinds of information is communicating will not negatively affect the quality of the conversation that unfolds afterwards.
If this happens because someone says something true, relevant, and useful, in a way that doesn’t have alternative expressions that are really easy and obvious to do (such as deleting the statement “So and so is a doo-doo head”), then it’s the fault of the conversation, not the statement.
The alternative expression, in this particular case (not in the mine run of cases), is not to change the word “insane” (because it seems you are certain enough in your belief that it is applicable here that it makes sense for you to communicate this idea some way), but rather to simply write more (or link to a place that contain arguments which relate, with particularity, to the situation at hand) by explaining why you think it’s is true that the statement is “insane”.
If you are so confident in your conclusion that you are willing to label the articulation of the opposing view as “insane”, then it should be straightforward (and more importantly, should not take so much time that it becomes daunting) to give reasons for that, at the time you make that labeling.
I disagree re/ the word “insane”. The position to which I stated a counterposition is insane.
I disagree, I think I should state my actual position. The phrases you quoted have meaning and conveys my position more than if they were removed.
It does not matter one bit if this is your “actual position”. The point of community norms about discourse is that they constrain what is or isn’t appropriate to say in a given situation; they function on the meta-level by setting up proper incentives for users to take into account when crafting their contributions here, independently of their personal assessments about who is right on the object-level. So your response is entirely off-topic, and the fact you expected it not to be is revealing of a more fundamental confusion in your thinking about this matter.
Moderation (when done properly) does not act solely to resolve individual disputes on the basis of purely local characteristics to try to ensure specific outcomes. Remember, the law is not an optimizer, but rather a system informed by principles of mechanism design that generates specific, legible, and predictable set of real rules about what is or isn’t acceptable, a system that does not bend in response to the clever arguments of an individual who thinks that he alone is special and exempt from them.
As Duncan Sabien once wrote:
I think it would have been weird and useless for you to straight-up lie in your previous comment, so of course you thought what you were saying communicated your real position. Why else would you have written it? But “communicate whatever you truly feel about something, regardless of what form your writing takes” is a truly terrible way of organizing any community in which meaningful intellectual progress is intended. By contrast, giving explanations and reasoning in situations where you label the beliefs of others as “insane” prevents conversations from becoming needlessly heated and spiraling into Demon Threads, while also building towards a community that maintains high-quality contributions.
All of this stuff has already been covered in the large number of expositions people have given over the last few years on what LessWrong is about and what principles animate norms and user behavior (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc).
I doubt that we’re going to get anything useful here, but as an indication of where I’m coming from:
I would basically agree with what you’re saying if my first comment had been ad hominem, like “Bogdan is a doo-doo head”. That’s unhelpful, irrelevant, mean, inflammatory, and corrosive to the culture. (Also it’s false lol.)
I think a position can be wrong, can be insanely wrong (which means something like “is very far from the truth, is wrong in a way that produces very wrong actions, and is being produced by a process which is failing to update in a way that it should and is failing to notice that fact”), and can be exactly opposite of the truth (for example, “Redwoods are short, grass is tall” is, perhaps depending on contexts, just about the exact opposite of the truth). And these facts are often knowable and relevant if true. And therefore should be said—in a truth-seeking context. And this is the situation we’re in.
If you had responded to my original comment with something like
or whatever is the analogous thing that’s true for you, then we could have talked about that. Instead you called my relatively accurate and intentional presentation of my views as “misleading readers into thinking the case you are bringing forward is stronger than it actually is or that this matter is so obvious and trivial...” which sounds to me like you have a problem in your own thinking and norms of discourse, which is that you’re requiring that statements other people make be from the perspective of [the theory that’s shared between the expected community of speakers and listeners] in order for you to think they’re appropriate or non-misleading.
The fact that I have to explain this to you is probably bad, and is probably mostly your responsibility, and you should reevaluate your behavior. (I’m not trying to be gentle here, and if gentleness would help then you deserve it—but you probably won’t get it here from me.)
I agree to some extent, which is why I said the following to gears:
The fact that you chose the word “insane” to describe something that did not seem obviously false, had a fair bit of support in this community, and that you had not given any arguments against at the time was the problem.
The fact that you think something is “insane” is informationally useful to other people, and, all else equal, should be communicated. But all else is not equal, because (as I explained in my previous comments), it is a fabricated option to think that relaxing norms around the way in which particular kinds of information is communicating will not negatively affect the quality of the conversation that unfolds afterwards.
So you could (at least in my view, not sure what the mods think) say something is “insane” if you explain why, because this allows for opportunities to drag the conversation away from mud-slinging Demon Threads and towards the object-level arguments being discussed (and, in this case, saying you think your interlocutor’s position is crazy could actually be helpful at times, since it signals a great level of disagreement and allows for the quicker identification of how many inferential distances between you and the other commenters). Likewise, you could give your conclusions without presenting arguments or explanations for it, as long as your position is not stated in an overly inflammatory manner, because this then incentivizes useful and clear-headed discourse later on when users can ask what the arguments actually are. But if you go the third route, then you maximize the likelihood of the conversation getting derailed.
This framing focuses on the wrong part, I think. You can be as angry as you want to when you are commenting on LessWrong, and it seems to be inappropriate to enforce norms about the emotions one is supposed to feel when contributing here. The part that matters is whether specific norms of discourse are getting violated (about the literal things someone is writing, not how they feel in that moment), in which case (as I have argued above) I believe the internal state of mind of the person violating them is primarily irrelevant.
I’m also not sure what you mean by this. You also implied later on that “requiring that statements other people make be from the perspective of [the theory that’s shared between the expected community of speakers and listeners] in order for you to think they’re appropriate” is wrong, which… doesn’t make sense to me, because that’s the very definition of the word appropriate: “meeting the requirements [i.e. norms] of a purpose or situation.”
The same statement can be appropriate or inappropriate, depending on the rules and norms of the community it is made in.
If this happens because someone says something true, relevant, and useful, in a way that doesn’t have alternative expressions that are really easy and obvious to do (such as deleting the statement “So and so is a doo-doo head”), then it’s the fault of the conversation, not the statement.
The alternative expression, in this particular case (not in the mine run of cases), is not to change the word “insane” (because it seems you are certain enough in your belief that it is applicable here that it makes sense for you to communicate this idea some way), but rather to simply write more (or link to a place that contain arguments which relate, with particularity, to the situation at hand) by explaining why you think it’s is true that the statement is “insane”.
If you are so confident in your conclusion that you are willing to label the articulation of the opposing view as “insane”, then it should be straightforward (and more importantly, should not take so much time that it becomes daunting) to give reasons for that, at the time you make that labeling.
NOPE!
I think I’m going to bow out of this conversation right now, since it doesn’t seem you want to meaningfully engage.
I’d be open to alternative words for “insane” the way I intended it.