repeatedly ask for definitions of lots of terms, without putting forward a plausible interpretation, and/or a concrete problem with the standard usage of a term
Is there a “standard usage” of ‘authentic’ or ‘authenticity’? It seems to me that the term is used in a variety of widely different ways, depending on context; and many of those usages are heavily laden with connotations, associations, etc., that encode a variety of value assumptions and aspects of world-view, which one typically cannot decode without knowing the author’s views on many things.
So… I really don’t know what Vaniver meant by this. I don’t even have a “standard usage” I could assume. I don’t have a “plausible interpretation”, either; that’s the whole point of the question! And, notably, it’s exactly the sort of term and usage the meaning of which one cannot infer from context, because it carries the bulk of the context’s meaning.
If asking for a clarification of this sort of thing is downvote-worthy, then I cannot but conclude that I am deeply confused about what Less Wrong is even for.
EDIT: Also, having re-read the comments of mine which you linked to, I find I am confused; the idea that the terms in question have “straightforward meanings”, as used in the linked contexts, is entirely baffling. The ‘counterfactual donation’ one is an exception—unlike the others, that was a straightforward enough term and concept, just one that I happened to have been unfamiliar with. But the others? How can you possibly assign straightforward meanings to them? (And if you could… why not respond with a comment where you give that straightforward explanation?! In two of the linked cases, the term in question wasn’t ever defined, even after I asked!)
EDIT 2: By the way, what is the “standard usage” of ‘authentic’ and ‘authenticity’? (And is said usage the one that Vaniver had in mind?)
To be clear, the reference class of asking for clarifications is great, and I think generally quite valuable. But my sense is that you would agree that when someone repeatedly inquires about aspects of posts that seem quite straightforward to you, in a way that results in lots of wasted effort of the author from your perspective (and associated complaints of perceiving to have wasted effort from the author), then it would be appropriate to downvote those comments after a certain number of iterations? In particular if you the question-asker seems to rarely be satisfied with the answers from the author, and as such not even you seem to get value out of the resulting threads.
To give an object-level answer to your question: I am quite confident that if you sit down for 5 minutes, with a timer, and generate potential meanings, you can find a plausible interpretation of what Vaniver meant by “authenticity” in that context, and I would take even odds that your plausible interpretation would hit pretty close to the intended meaning of what Vaniver meant.
I also generally think asking for clarifications is good, but in my experience as an author, it helps a lot for you to give any hint of what aspect of the use of the word ‘authenticity’ you find confusing, or to lead with any plausible interpretation. If you really cannot come up with one that seems even remotely plausible, then I do suggest not commenting, and would leave asking those clarifying questions to others who tend to go about doing so in a way that seems to much more frequently result in good threads (and usually are able to come up with plausible interpretations, as well as specific problems with the usage of a word).
I am also confident that if we choose random other commenters, and similarly ask them to set a five-minute timer, they will also come up with a decent interpretation of what is meant by “authenticity” in this context. I don’t think they will all give exactly the same answer, but they will all be quite similar, and usually hit pretty close to the intended meaning by Vaniver. If you want, we can even run that test here, and ask others to come up with plausible interpretations of what Vaniver meant, and then have him judge how close their guesses got to reality.
But my sense is that you would agree that when someone repeatedly inquires about aspects of posts that seem quite straightforward to you, in a way that results in lots of wasted effort of the author from your perspective (and associated complaints of perceiving to have wasted effort from the author), then it would be appropriate to downvote those comments after a certain number of iterations?
That depends on the following:
Are the aspects in question of the given posts important, or peripheral? (“What does this term, which seems to be referring to a concept that is at the very core of your argument, mean?” would be an important aspect of a post, for example.)
Are these inquiries routinely answered, straightforwardly and quickly, with clear, sensible answers?
Do the answers consist of things that were already in the post in the first place, or could easily be derived from the post (and/or trivial web searching, perhaps)?
For instance, suppose that, for example, you, repeatedly inquired about, let us say, the statistics used in this or that post on Less Wrong. Let us say that these inquiries were usually not answered—either not at all, or not satisfactorily. And now imagine that someone started downvoting these inquiries of yours. I would be quite annoyed at the downvoters! Wouldn’t you?
In short, my answer to your question is “no”.
To give an object-level answer to your question: I am quite confident that if you sit down for 5 minutes, with a timer, and generate potential meanings, you can find a plausible interpretation of what Vaniver meant by “authenticity” in that context, and I would take even odds that your plausible interpretation would hit pretty close to the intended meaning of what Vaniver meant.
Regardless of whether I agree with your claim here (about which you are “quite confident”), I must point out that, in fact, this is not an object-level answer! I still don’t have an answer to my question, in fact!
To be blunt: the reason I ask such questions is precisely because I usually do not get an answer (sometimes at all; other times, nothing remotely resembling a satisfactory one).
It would be the simplest thing in the world to simply respond with an explanation of what ‘authentic’/‘authenticity’ means. Vaniver could do it; or you (or anyone else) could do it, and he could then respond with a quick “yep, that’s exactly what I meant”. (If absolutely nothing else, it would help anyone else who read the post, was confused by the term/usage, but decided not to comment. Or do you think there are no such people?) That’s all. But instead we have this whole thread, now. Is it worth anyone’s time? Is it net-positive? Probably it’s less of either of those things than simply answering the question would be—don’t you think?
Let us say that these inquiries were usually not answered—either not at all, or not satisfactorily. And now imagine that someone started downvoting these inquiries of yours.
Maybe we should write a post about this kind of conversational dynamic![1]
Alice asks Bob a question. Bob can’t answer, either for legitimate or illegitimate[2] reasons, but doesn’t want to straightforwardly say, “Sorry, I can’t answer that because …” for fear of losing face in front of the audience, so instead resorts to more opaque stonewalling tactics. Usually, Alice will eventually take a hint and give up. But if she doesn’t, we have a high-stakes battle of wills adjudicated by the audience—will Bob be exposed as being phony, or will Alice be derided as a pedant?!
A legitimate reason for not being able to answer might be: the question is an isolated demand for rigor, where Bob doesn’t have a rigorous formulation of his point, but thinks the non-rigorous version is good enough and should be conversationally “admissible.”
Regardless of whether I agree with your claim here (about which you are “quite confident”), I must point out that, in fact, this is not an object-level answer! I still don’t have an answer to my question, in fact!
Sorry, I meant this in the “more object-level than your general commenting patterns” sense. I will note that you asked why your comment was being downvoted, and since I was one of the people who had downvoted it, I figured I would explain. It doesn’t seem like the right call for me to go into a response to your original question, given that I am replying to the part of your comment that’s about voting patterns.
It would be the simplest thing in the world to simply respond with an explanation of what ‘authentic’/‘authenticity’ means.
No, it isn’t the simplest thing in the world, and the implicit assumption that anything that isn’t extremely straightforward to explain is assumed to be contendless, or in some sense problematic, is I think a major reason for why the resulting threads tend to reliably go badly.
We have to deal with the reality that sometimes a concept can be pointed at by a bunch of related concepts, in a way that still allows someone to comprehend a broader point, without it being easy or low-effort to write a precise explanation of what exactly was meant by every term.
To be clear, I don’t think that it’s usually prohibitively difficult, but in my experience, producing an answer that you consider sufficient requires at least 30 minutes of effort, and is usually accompanied by multiple spread-out back-and-forths that spread out over multiple days, since you do not give sufficient pointers to the shape of your uncertainty to resolve your confusion on the first try, often resulting in at least an hour of time spent by an author.
I am probably not going to respond further to this thread, since I don’t really expect to make much progress on it (and since we have had many similar threads in the past). It might make sense to figure this out in more detail some other time, or maybe in a separate thread in the Open Thread, or a separate post.
Meta: sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel fast. Sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel carefully. I think this disagreement comes up quite a bit in rationalist circles especially because of founder effects: the tension exists in Eliezer’s writing as well.
In the tradition of What is Seen and What is Not Seen: Said doesn’t see the posts that aren’t written because people feel like they would have to write a sequence justifying themselves carefully for the thing they really want to talk about.
I think it is also quite valuable to slow down on aspects of status quo thinking and communicating that are usually quickly glossed over. Indeed, this is the heart of Buddhism. My own frustration isn’t with method but that Said seems to choose non central examples often. What’s interesting is that in this case authenticity does seem to be pretty central.
Anyway, I’m writing this partially in appreciation for what habryka is trying to communicate here, since it is high effort and in expectation low reward.
Wait a minute. You said that the concept in question (‘authenticity’) has a “pretty straightforward” meaning, to you. (This, allegedly, was the problem with my question: that the term, and concept, I asked about, was straightforward, and its meaning obvious and known, or easily inferred.)
But now you’re saying that it’s not straightforward to explain, and is “pointed at by a bunch of related concepts”, and it’s not “easy or low-effort” to write an explanation—and that this is the problem with my question (that answering it would take too much effort).
So which is it? Is my question too obvious and simple to bother answering it? Or is it too hard and complicated and time-consuming to answer? Or are you suggesting that it could be, somehow, both?
Let me ask you this: do you think I’m the only one who read this post, and thought “Hmm, ‘authentic’? ‘authenticity’? What does he mean by that…?” I mean, I’m no genius, but I’m not stupid, either; if I had trouble understanding what’s meant here, probably at least some others did, too. (Or do you disagree?)
And I’ve read a whole lot of Less Wrong stuff; do you think there might be other readers, who are, perhaps, even less immersed in the whole Less Wrong memeplex, who are even less sure that the know what any of these terms and concepts mean? (I mean, it would be one thing if the term was hyperlinked, like a Sequence post. Someone comes along and asks “Hold on, now, what in the gosh-darn heck is an ‘affective death spiral’?!”—you say “click the link, man”, and you’re done; or you respond with a hyperlink, at the worst. But that’s not the case here!)
Would you say that I’m below-average in willingness to post comments asking for clarifications, or above-average? And what do you think the answer implies, about how many other readers have similar questions, but say nothing?
Finally (as noted by someone I discussed this post with elsewhere), Vaniver, in the OP, analogizes ‘authenticity’ to truth. Indeed, as far as I can tell, the entirety of the post’s rhetorical force comes from this analogy. Yet recall how much effort Eliezer dedicated, in the Sequences and later, to explaining just what in the world he meant by ‘truth’! However much effort it takes to explain ‘truth’—Eliezer applied that effort, because it was necessary.
Does ‘truth’ deserve extensive, laborious explanation, but ‘authenticity’—only a breezy dismissal?
Hmm, so, I think you might have misunderstood my suggestion. My argument was not that in this and other cases standard usage is sufficient. My argument was that in order to actually bridge the inferential gap, it is a massive help to the author and the other commenters, if you point out a concrete problem with a plausible interpretation that comes to mind. I think generating that plausible interpretation takes about 5 minutes, is pretty straightforward, and is something that I would ask you to do.
However, in order to then actually bridge the gap, significant additional time is likely going to be required in people responding to each other. However, I would argue that how much time is required for that exchange will drastically change depending on how much you as a commenter will have given the author to work with.
This is something that both nshepperd’s and quanticle’s comments successfully do in this thread.
Finally (as noted by someone I discussed this post with elsewhere), Vaniver, in the OP, analogizes ‘authenticity’ to truth. Indeed, as far as I can tell, the entirety of the post’s rhetorical force comes from this analogy. Yet recall how much effort Eliezer dedicated, in the Sequences and later, to explaining just what in the world he meant by ‘truth’! However much effort it takes to explain ‘truth’—Eliezer applied that effort, because it was necessary.
Does ‘truth’ deserve extensive, laborious explanation, but ‘authenticity’—only a breezy dismissal?
I wanted to note here that I think this is right; that the analogy between truth and authenticity is what gives this post rhetorical force (and is a huge chunk of why I think rationality and Circling are cousins), that it was good to give truth an extensive, laborious explanation, and that it would also be good to give ‘authenticity’ an extensive, laborious explanation.
Furthermore, I think one of the ways in which Eliezer is an exceptional writer is that he notices dependencies and serializes them; “ah, in order to explain C, I must first explain B, and for B I must first explain A.” I often find myself in the opposite approach; “explain C, figure out what was missing, and then explain B, figure out what was missing, and then explain A.” (Tho I think this happens to Eliezer too.) Pushback of the form “but what do you mean by B?” is an integral part of this process.
---
That said, sometimes there’s a post intended to explain C to people who already have B, or B grounds out in experience; we talk about color without feeling a need to explain color to the blind. I think that’s not the case here; I am hoping to make the thing I like about Circling legible to the highly skeptical, systematic thinkers who want to compile the thing themselves and so want me to provide the dependency chain.
But also I’m not convinced that I can succeed, as parts of it may end up depending on experience, but at least we can figure out which parts and what experience.
a precise explanation of what exactly was meant by every term
Incidentally, this is a strawman; I did not ask, in my initial comment, for a precise explanation of what exactly is meant—even by one term, much less every term. Any explanation at all, even a rough, approximate, or extensional one, would be much better than nothing (which is what we currently have), and it would be a good starting point for any further discussion that might be called for.
Is there a “standard usage” of ‘authentic’ or ‘authenticity’? It seems to me that the term is used in a variety of widely different ways, depending on context; and many of those usages are heavily laden with connotations, associations, etc., that encode a variety of value assumptions and aspects of world-view, which one typically cannot decode without knowing the author’s views on many things.
So… I really don’t know what Vaniver meant by this. I don’t even have a “standard usage” I could assume. I don’t have a “plausible interpretation”, either; that’s the whole point of the question! And, notably, it’s exactly the sort of term and usage the meaning of which one cannot infer from context, because it carries the bulk of the context’s meaning.
If asking for a clarification of this sort of thing is downvote-worthy, then I cannot but conclude that I am deeply confused about what Less Wrong is even for.
EDIT: Also, having re-read the comments of mine which you linked to, I find I am confused; the idea that the terms in question have “straightforward meanings”, as used in the linked contexts, is entirely baffling. The ‘counterfactual donation’ one is an exception—unlike the others, that was a straightforward enough term and concept, just one that I happened to have been unfamiliar with. But the others? How can you possibly assign straightforward meanings to them? (And if you could… why not respond with a comment where you give that straightforward explanation?! In two of the linked cases, the term in question wasn’t ever defined, even after I asked!)
EDIT 2: By the way, what is the “standard usage” of ‘authentic’ and ‘authenticity’? (And is said usage the one that Vaniver had in mind?)
To be clear, the reference class of asking for clarifications is great, and I think generally quite valuable. But my sense is that you would agree that when someone repeatedly inquires about aspects of posts that seem quite straightforward to you, in a way that results in lots of wasted effort of the author from your perspective (and associated complaints of perceiving to have wasted effort from the author), then it would be appropriate to downvote those comments after a certain number of iterations? In particular if you the question-asker seems to rarely be satisfied with the answers from the author, and as such not even you seem to get value out of the resulting threads.
To give an object-level answer to your question: I am quite confident that if you sit down for 5 minutes, with a timer, and generate potential meanings, you can find a plausible interpretation of what Vaniver meant by “authenticity” in that context, and I would take even odds that your plausible interpretation would hit pretty close to the intended meaning of what Vaniver meant.
I also generally think asking for clarifications is good, but in my experience as an author, it helps a lot for you to give any hint of what aspect of the use of the word ‘authenticity’ you find confusing, or to lead with any plausible interpretation. If you really cannot come up with one that seems even remotely plausible, then I do suggest not commenting, and would leave asking those clarifying questions to others who tend to go about doing so in a way that seems to much more frequently result in good threads (and usually are able to come up with plausible interpretations, as well as specific problems with the usage of a word).
I am also confident that if we choose random other commenters, and similarly ask them to set a five-minute timer, they will also come up with a decent interpretation of what is meant by “authenticity” in this context. I don’t think they will all give exactly the same answer, but they will all be quite similar, and usually hit pretty close to the intended meaning by Vaniver. If you want, we can even run that test here, and ask others to come up with plausible interpretations of what Vaniver meant, and then have him judge how close their guesses got to reality.
That depends on the following:
Are the aspects in question of the given posts important, or peripheral? (“What does this term, which seems to be referring to a concept that is at the very core of your argument, mean?” would be an important aspect of a post, for example.)
Are these inquiries routinely answered, straightforwardly and quickly, with clear, sensible answers?
Do the answers consist of things that were already in the post in the first place, or could easily be derived from the post (and/or trivial web searching, perhaps)?
For instance, suppose that, for example, you, repeatedly inquired about, let us say, the statistics used in this or that post on Less Wrong. Let us say that these inquiries were usually not answered—either not at all, or not satisfactorily. And now imagine that someone started downvoting these inquiries of yours. I would be quite annoyed at the downvoters! Wouldn’t you?
In short, my answer to your question is “no”.
Regardless of whether I agree with your claim here (about which you are “quite confident”), I must point out that, in fact, this is not an object-level answer! I still don’t have an answer to my question, in fact!
To be blunt: the reason I ask such questions is precisely because I usually do not get an answer (sometimes at all; other times, nothing remotely resembling a satisfactory one).
It would be the simplest thing in the world to simply respond with an explanation of what ‘authentic’/‘authenticity’ means. Vaniver could do it; or you (or anyone else) could do it, and he could then respond with a quick “yep, that’s exactly what I meant”. (If absolutely nothing else, it would help anyone else who read the post, was confused by the term/usage, but decided not to comment. Or do you think there are no such people?) That’s all. But instead we have this whole thread, now. Is it worth anyone’s time? Is it net-positive? Probably it’s less of either of those things than simply answering the question would be—don’t you think?
Maybe we should write a post about this kind of conversational dynamic![1]
Alice asks Bob a question. Bob can’t answer, either for legitimate or illegitimate[2] reasons, but doesn’t want to straightforwardly say, “Sorry, I can’t answer that because …” for fear of losing face in front of the audience, so instead resorts to more opaque stonewalling tactics. Usually, Alice will eventually take a hint and give up. But if she doesn’t, we have a high-stakes battle of wills adjudicated by the audience—will Bob be exposed as being phony, or will Alice be derided as a pedant?!
Where by “dynamic”, I mean “thingy”.
A legitimate reason for not being able to answer might be: the question is an isolated demand for rigor, where Bob doesn’t have a rigorous formulation of his point, but thinks the non-rigorous version is good enough and should be conversationally “admissible.”
Sorry, I meant this in the “more object-level than your general commenting patterns” sense. I will note that you asked why your comment was being downvoted, and since I was one of the people who had downvoted it, I figured I would explain. It doesn’t seem like the right call for me to go into a response to your original question, given that I am replying to the part of your comment that’s about voting patterns.
No, it isn’t the simplest thing in the world, and the implicit assumption that anything that isn’t extremely straightforward to explain is assumed to be contendless, or in some sense problematic, is I think a major reason for why the resulting threads tend to reliably go badly.
We have to deal with the reality that sometimes a concept can be pointed at by a bunch of related concepts, in a way that still allows someone to comprehend a broader point, without it being easy or low-effort to write a precise explanation of what exactly was meant by every term.
To be clear, I don’t think that it’s usually prohibitively difficult, but in my experience, producing an answer that you consider sufficient requires at least 30 minutes of effort, and is usually accompanied by multiple spread-out back-and-forths that spread out over multiple days, since you do not give sufficient pointers to the shape of your uncertainty to resolve your confusion on the first try, often resulting in at least an hour of time spent by an author.
I am probably not going to respond further to this thread, since I don’t really expect to make much progress on it (and since we have had many similar threads in the past). It might make sense to figure this out in more detail some other time, or maybe in a separate thread in the Open Thread, or a separate post.
Meta: sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel fast. Sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel carefully. I think this disagreement comes up quite a bit in rationalist circles especially because of founder effects: the tension exists in Eliezer’s writing as well.
In the tradition of What is Seen and What is Not Seen: Said doesn’t see the posts that aren’t written because people feel like they would have to write a sequence justifying themselves carefully for the thing they really want to talk about.
I think it is also quite valuable to slow down on aspects of status quo thinking and communicating that are usually quickly glossed over. Indeed, this is the heart of Buddhism. My own frustration isn’t with method but that Said seems to choose non central examples often. What’s interesting is that in this case authenticity does seem to be pretty central.
Anyway, I’m writing this partially in appreciation for what habryka is trying to communicate here, since it is high effort and in expectation low reward.
Wait a minute. You said that the concept in question (‘authenticity’) has a “pretty straightforward” meaning, to you. (This, allegedly, was the problem with my question: that the term, and concept, I asked about, was straightforward, and its meaning obvious and known, or easily inferred.)
But now you’re saying that it’s not straightforward to explain, and is “pointed at by a bunch of related concepts”, and it’s not “easy or low-effort” to write an explanation—and that this is the problem with my question (that answering it would take too much effort).
So which is it? Is my question too obvious and simple to bother answering it? Or is it too hard and complicated and time-consuming to answer? Or are you suggesting that it could be, somehow, both?
Let me ask you this: do you think I’m the only one who read this post, and thought “Hmm, ‘authentic’? ‘authenticity’? What does he mean by that…?” I mean, I’m no genius, but I’m not stupid, either; if I had trouble understanding what’s meant here, probably at least some others did, too. (Or do you disagree?)
And I’ve read a whole lot of Less Wrong stuff; do you think there might be other readers, who are, perhaps, even less immersed in the whole Less Wrong memeplex, who are even less sure that the know what any of these terms and concepts mean? (I mean, it would be one thing if the term was hyperlinked, like a Sequence post. Someone comes along and asks “Hold on, now, what in the gosh-darn heck is an ‘affective death spiral’?!”—you say “click the link, man”, and you’re done; or you respond with a hyperlink, at the worst. But that’s not the case here!)
Would you say that I’m below-average in willingness to post comments asking for clarifications, or above-average? And what do you think the answer implies, about how many other readers have similar questions, but say nothing?
Finally (as noted by someone I discussed this post with elsewhere), Vaniver, in the OP, analogizes ‘authenticity’ to truth. Indeed, as far as I can tell, the entirety of the post’s rhetorical force comes from this analogy. Yet recall how much effort Eliezer dedicated, in the Sequences and later, to explaining just what in the world he meant by ‘truth’! However much effort it takes to explain ‘truth’—Eliezer applied that effort, because it was necessary.
Does ‘truth’ deserve extensive, laborious explanation, but ‘authenticity’—only a breezy dismissal?
Hmm, so, I think you might have misunderstood my suggestion. My argument was not that in this and other cases standard usage is sufficient. My argument was that in order to actually bridge the inferential gap, it is a massive help to the author and the other commenters, if you point out a concrete problem with a plausible interpretation that comes to mind. I think generating that plausible interpretation takes about 5 minutes, is pretty straightforward, and is something that I would ask you to do.
However, in order to then actually bridge the gap, significant additional time is likely going to be required in people responding to each other. However, I would argue that how much time is required for that exchange will drastically change depending on how much you as a commenter will have given the author to work with.
This is something that both nshepperd’s and quanticle’s comments successfully do in this thread.
I wanted to note here that I think this is right; that the analogy between truth and authenticity is what gives this post rhetorical force (and is a huge chunk of why I think rationality and Circling are cousins), that it was good to give truth an extensive, laborious explanation, and that it would also be good to give ‘authenticity’ an extensive, laborious explanation.
Furthermore, I think one of the ways in which Eliezer is an exceptional writer is that he notices dependencies and serializes them; “ah, in order to explain C, I must first explain B, and for B I must first explain A.” I often find myself in the opposite approach; “explain C, figure out what was missing, and then explain B, figure out what was missing, and then explain A.” (Tho I think this happens to Eliezer too.) Pushback of the form “but what do you mean by B?” is an integral part of this process.
---
That said, sometimes there’s a post intended to explain C to people who already have B, or B grounds out in experience; we talk about color without feeling a need to explain color to the blind. I think that’s not the case here; I am hoping to make the thing I like about Circling legible to the highly skeptical, systematic thinkers who want to compile the thing themselves and so want me to provide the dependency chain.
But also I’m not convinced that I can succeed, as parts of it may end up depending on experience, but at least we can figure out which parts and what experience.
Incidentally, this is a strawman; I did not ask, in my initial comment, for a precise explanation of what exactly is meant—even by one term, much less every term. Any explanation at all, even a rough, approximate, or extensional one, would be much better than nothing (which is what we currently have), and it would be a good starting point for any further discussion that might be called for.