Separately: given that Said’s comments are often perceived as social attacks, it seems to me that this is most of the problem[1]. If a thread turns out to be a giant waste of everyone’s time, then that’s also bad, of course… but I would be surprised if that happened to nearly the same extent, without the percieved-social-attack thing going on.
You propose elsethread that Said could try to generate plausible interpretations to include in his comments. But if we take the main goal to be defusing perceptions of social attack, we should remember that there are other ways to achieve that goal.
For example, the following seems less social-attack-y to me than Said’s original comment in this thread[2]; I’d be curious how you’d have felt about it. (And curious how Said would have felt about writing it, or something like it.)
What do you mean by ‘authentic’, ‘authenticity’, etc.? I don’t think I’ve seen these terms (as you use them) explained on Less Wrong.
I might be able to come up with a guess about what you mean, but I don’t think it would be a very good one. The terms seem pretty central to the argument you’re making here, so I think it’s important that we avoid illusion of transparency regarding them.
[1] I do think it matters whether or not this perception is accurate, but it might not matter for the question of “what effect do these comments have on the social fabric of LW”.
[2] And FWIW, I don’t expect the original comment was intended as a social attack in the slightest. But I do think it felt like one, to me, to some degree.
And curious how Said would have felt about writing it, or something like it.
I have no idea why your proposed alternative version of my comment would be “less social-attack-y”. Of course, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why my actual comment would be “social-attack-y” in the first place, unless we assume something extremely unflattering about Vaniver (which I was not assuming) (but note that even in that scenario, your proposed edit seems to me to change nothing).
What’s more, I suspect that no possible version of my comment would change anything about this “perceived social attack” business.
In this, as in so many things, we can look for guidance to esteemed philosopher John Gabriel, who puts the matter concisely in this Penny Arcade strip:
Gabe: If all I could say was “nice,” I would mean it ironically.
Were someone else to write exactly the words I wrote in my original comment, they would not be perceived as a social attack; whereas if I write those words—or the words you suggest, or any other words whatsoever, so long as they contained the same semantic content at their core[1]—they will be perceived as a social attack. After all, I can say something different, but I cannot mean something different.
The fact is, either you think that asking what an author means by a word, or asking for examples of some phenomenon, is a social attack, or you don’t. If I ask a question along such lines, no reassurances, no disclaimers, will serve to signal anything but “I am complying with the necessary formalities in order to ask what I wish to ask”. If you think my question is a social attack without the disclaimers, then their addition will change nothing. It is the question, after all, that constitutes the social attack, if anything does—not the form, in other words, but the content.
Best to minimize such baroque signaling. There is a certain baseline of courtesy that ought to be observed, but it is mostly negative—no name-calling, no irrelevant personal attacks, etc. Almost anything beyond that only adds noise. Better to be clear and concise.
I do not think that anyone can argue that my comments violate any sensible standards of basic politeness or courtesy; beyond that, let the content stand on its own. If it’s viewed as a social attack, then that says quite a bit more about those who view it thus, than it does about my intentions (which, as any reasonable person can see, are free of any personal hostility). Trying to disguise the matter with elaborate disclaimers is pointless.
Note that your proposed addition conveys no new information; everything within it is already entailed by the original comment and its context. That I can’t come up with any good guess about the meaning of the word is implicated by me asking the question in the first place. That the term is central to the argument is obvious once the question is asked. That we should avoid the illusion of transparency is little more than an applause light for a locally shared (and publicly known to be shared) value.
I have no idea why your proposed alternative version of my comment would be “less social-attack-y”.
Nevertheless, I do think it feels that way to me, and I also think it would feel that way to others.
I don’t have a good explanation for why. I do think that signaling “I am complying with the necessary formalities in order to ask what I wish to ask” is part of it. Similar to how the word “please” signals nothing more than “I wish to signal politeness”, and that seems sufficient to actually be polite. Even though it’s a costless signal.
It does feel to me like there’s a risk here of a euphemism treadmill. If we can’t get away without adding tedious formalities, then everyone adds those formalities by default, and then they stop signalling the thing they used to signal.
I’m not fully convinced this won’t happen, but I do think it’s relevant that there’s a broader culture outside of LW which will exert some influence pulling us towards whatever signalling norms it uses.
Were someone else to write exactly the words I wrote in my original comment, they would not be perceived as a social attack; whereas if I write those words—or the words you suggest, or any other words whatsoever, so long as they contained the same semantic content at their core[1]—they will be perceived as a social attack.
This doesn’t strike me as literally true, and I do think you could appear less social-attack-y than you do, without changing the core semantic content of what you write.
But I do feel like it’s the case that your speech style is more likely to be perceived as a social attack coming from you than from someone else.
I wish it weren’t so. It’s certainly possible for “the identity and history of the speaker” to be a meaningful input into the question “was this a social attack”. But I think the direction is wrong, in this case. I think you’re the single user on LW who’s earned the most epistemic “benefit of the doubt”. That is, if literally any other user were to write in the style you write, I think it would be epistemically correct to give more probability to it being a social attack than it is for you.
And yet here we are. I don’t claim to fully understand it.
That I can’t come up with any good guess about the meaning of the word is implicated by me asking the question in the first place.
I don’t think this is true. It might be that you think you probably could come up with a good guess, but don’t want to spend the cognitive effort on doing so. It might be that you think you have a good guess, but you want to confirm that it’s right. I’ve sometimes asked people to clarify their meaning for a reason along the lines of: “I’m pretty sure I have a good idea what you mean. But if I give my own definition and then reply to it, you can say that that wasn’t what you meant. If you give your own definition, I can hold you to it.” (Implicit to this is a mistrust of their honesty and/or rationality.)
That the term is central to the argument is obvious once the question is asked.
I don’t think this is true, either. Someone might ask this question about a term that isn’t central, perhaps just because they’re curious about a tangent.
That we should avoid the illusion of transparency is little more than an applause light for a locally shared (and publicly known to be shared) value.
This does seem true.
I feel like I may well be using the term “social attack” to refer to a group of things that should ideally be separated. If I am doing that, I’m not sure whether the confusion was originally introduced by myself or not. I’m not sure what to do with this feeling, but I do think I should note it.
Although I don’t think you’re performing social attacks—in this case, I don’t think I even feel-them-but-disendorse-that-feeling—I do think this is the kind of conversation that has potential to eat up lots of time unproductively. (Which, I guess that points against my “I would be surprised” from two comments up.) So by default, after this comment I’m going to limit myself to two more posts on this topic.
In the case of “please”, it’s certainly very close to being costless—almost indistinguishable, really. This is because “please” is a very, very common signal of politeness—so common as to be universally understood, and not just in our culture but in many others. Many people say “please” reflexively. It still costs something, but very little.
But the sorts of disclaimers we’re talking about cost much more. They cost time to type (and energy, and stress on one’s hands, etc.). They cost cognitive effort—the need to recall just what sorts of disclaimers and reassurances are required, in this particular community, with its particular, idiosyncratic ideas about what constitutes politeness. They cost yet more effort, to figure out which of those norms apply in this case, and how to navigate this particular situation—what aspects of one’s question may be perceived as a “social attack”, and what meaningless words, precisely, one must use to defuse that perception. None of these things are costless.
And, as you say, there’s a treadmill. If it’s mandatory to say these things, then they mean nothing. And if it’s mandatory for me (only) to say these things, then they mean nothing coming from me. (Rather, they don’t mean the things they say, and instead only mean “I am complying with the necessary formalities …” etc.)
EDIT: I listed costs to the writer, but in my haste I entirely forgot what is probably an even more important point: that there is a cost to the reader, of such disclaimers and reassurances! Just look at every proposed modification to my original comment, that has been put forth in this giant comment thread. Each one makes a comment of two short sentences (short enough to have fit into a tweet, even before the doubling of Twitter’s character limit) balloon to at least thrice that length, if not much more—and the density of information / insight / message plummets! This wastes the time of every reader—in aggregate, a cost orders of magnitude more severe than the costs to the writer.
I think you’re the single user on LW who’s earned the most epistemic “benefit of the doubt”. That is, if literally any other user were to write in the style you write, I think it would be epistemically correct to give more probability to it being a social attack than it is for you.
Thank you for the kind words. I am not sure if I quite deserve this praise, but if I do, it is certainly my intention to continue deserving it.
That the term is central to the argument is obvious once the question is asked.
I don’t think this is true, either. Someone might ask this question about a term that isn’t central, perhaps just because they’re curious about a tangent.
To be clear, I meant that this is obvious in this case, not necessarily in the general case.
To be clear, I meant only that “please” is costless (and you’re right that it’s only nearly so). This seemed relevant because we might therefore expect it to have devolved into meaninglessness, but this doesn’t seem to have happened.
I agree with the costs that you list, with the caveat that as I mentioned I’m unsure about the treadmill. I just also think commenting in that style has benefits as well, and I’m legitimately unsure which side dominates.
Separately: given that Said’s comments are often perceived as social attacks, it seems to me that this is most of the problem[1]. If a thread turns out to be a giant waste of everyone’s time, then that’s also bad, of course… but I would be surprised if that happened to nearly the same extent, without the percieved-social-attack thing going on.
You propose elsethread that Said could try to generate plausible interpretations to include in his comments. But if we take the main goal to be defusing perceptions of social attack, we should remember that there are other ways to achieve that goal.
For example, the following seems less social-attack-y to me than Said’s original comment in this thread[2]; I’d be curious how you’d have felt about it. (And curious how Said would have felt about writing it, or something like it.)
[1] I do think it matters whether or not this perception is accurate, but it might not matter for the question of “what effect do these comments have on the social fabric of LW”.
[2] And FWIW, I don’t expect the original comment was intended as a social attack in the slightest. But I do think it felt like one, to me, to some degree.
I have no idea why your proposed alternative version of my comment would be “less social-attack-y”. Of course, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why my actual comment would be “social-attack-y” in the first place, unless we assume something extremely unflattering about Vaniver (which I was not assuming) (but note that even in that scenario, your proposed edit seems to me to change nothing).
What’s more, I suspect that no possible version of my comment would change anything about this “perceived social attack” business.
In this, as in so many things, we can look for guidance to esteemed philosopher John Gabriel, who puts the matter concisely in this Penny Arcade strip:
Were someone else to write exactly the words I wrote in my original comment, they would not be perceived as a social attack; whereas if I write those words—or the words you suggest, or any other words whatsoever, so long as they contained the same semantic content at their core[1]—they will be perceived as a social attack. After all, I can say something different, but I cannot mean something different.
The fact is, either you think that asking what an author means by a word, or asking for examples of some phenomenon, is a social attack, or you don’t. If I ask a question along such lines, no reassurances, no disclaimers, will serve to signal anything but “I am complying with the necessary formalities in order to ask what I wish to ask”. If you think my question is a social attack without the disclaimers, then their addition will change nothing. It is the question, after all, that constitutes the social attack, if anything does—not the form, in other words, but the content.
Best to minimize such baroque signaling. There is a certain baseline of courtesy that ought to be observed, but it is mostly negative—no name-calling, no irrelevant personal attacks, etc. Almost anything beyond that only adds noise. Better to be clear and concise.
I do not think that anyone can argue that my comments violate any sensible standards of basic politeness or courtesy; beyond that, let the content stand on its own. If it’s viewed as a social attack, then that says quite a bit more about those who view it thus, than it does about my intentions (which, as any reasonable person can see, are free of any personal hostility). Trying to disguise the matter with elaborate disclaimers is pointless.
Note that your proposed addition conveys no new information; everything within it is already entailed by the original comment and its context. That I can’t come up with any good guess about the meaning of the word is implicated by me asking the question in the first place. That the term is central to the argument is obvious once the question is asked. That we should avoid the illusion of transparency is little more than an applause light for a locally shared (and publicly known to be shared) value.
Nevertheless, I do think it feels that way to me, and I also think it would feel that way to others.
I don’t have a good explanation for why. I do think that signaling “I am complying with the necessary formalities in order to ask what I wish to ask” is part of it. Similar to how the word “please” signals nothing more than “I wish to signal politeness”, and that seems sufficient to actually be polite. Even though it’s a costless signal.
It does feel to me like there’s a risk here of a euphemism treadmill. If we can’t get away without adding tedious formalities, then everyone adds those formalities by default, and then they stop signalling the thing they used to signal.
I’m not fully convinced this won’t happen, but I do think it’s relevant that there’s a broader culture outside of LW which will exert some influence pulling us towards whatever signalling norms it uses.
This doesn’t strike me as literally true, and I do think you could appear less social-attack-y than you do, without changing the core semantic content of what you write.
But I do feel like it’s the case that your speech style is more likely to be perceived as a social attack coming from you than from someone else.
I wish it weren’t so. It’s certainly possible for “the identity and history of the speaker” to be a meaningful input into the question “was this a social attack”. But I think the direction is wrong, in this case. I think you’re the single user on LW who’s earned the most epistemic “benefit of the doubt”. That is, if literally any other user were to write in the style you write, I think it would be epistemically correct to give more probability to it being a social attack than it is for you.
And yet here we are. I don’t claim to fully understand it.
I don’t think this is true. It might be that you think you probably could come up with a good guess, but don’t want to spend the cognitive effort on doing so. It might be that you think you have a good guess, but you want to confirm that it’s right. I’ve sometimes asked people to clarify their meaning for a reason along the lines of: “I’m pretty sure I have a good idea what you mean. But if I give my own definition and then reply to it, you can say that that wasn’t what you meant. If you give your own definition, I can hold you to it.” (Implicit to this is a mistrust of their honesty and/or rationality.)
I don’t think this is true, either. Someone might ask this question about a term that isn’t central, perhaps just because they’re curious about a tangent.
This does seem true.
I feel like I may well be using the term “social attack” to refer to a group of things that should ideally be separated. If I am doing that, I’m not sure whether the confusion was originally introduced by myself or not. I’m not sure what to do with this feeling, but I do think I should note it.
Although I don’t think you’re performing social attacks—in this case, I don’t think I even feel-them-but-disendorse-that-feeling—I do think this is the kind of conversation that has potential to eat up lots of time unproductively. (Which, I guess that points against my “I would be surprised” from two comments up.) So by default, after this comment I’m going to limit myself to two more posts on this topic.
But of course it’s not costless.
In the case of “please”, it’s certainly very close to being costless—almost indistinguishable, really. This is because “please” is a very, very common signal of politeness—so common as to be universally understood, and not just in our culture but in many others. Many people say “please” reflexively. It still costs something, but very little.
But the sorts of disclaimers we’re talking about cost much more. They cost time to type (and energy, and stress on one’s hands, etc.). They cost cognitive effort—the need to recall just what sorts of disclaimers and reassurances are required, in this particular community, with its particular, idiosyncratic ideas about what constitutes politeness. They cost yet more effort, to figure out which of those norms apply in this case, and how to navigate this particular situation—what aspects of one’s question may be perceived as a “social attack”, and what meaningless words, precisely, one must use to defuse that perception. None of these things are costless.
And, as you say, there’s a treadmill. If it’s mandatory to say these things, then they mean nothing. And if it’s mandatory for me (only) to say these things, then they mean nothing coming from me. (Rather, they don’t mean the things they say, and instead only mean “I am complying with the necessary formalities …” etc.)
EDIT: I listed costs to the writer, but in my haste I entirely forgot what is probably an even more important point: that there is a cost to the reader, of such disclaimers and reassurances! Just look at every proposed modification to my original comment, that has been put forth in this giant comment thread. Each one makes a comment of two short sentences (short enough to have fit into a tweet, even before the doubling of Twitter’s character limit) balloon to at least thrice that length, if not much more—and the density of information / insight / message plummets! This wastes the time of every reader—in aggregate, a cost orders of magnitude more severe than the costs to the writer.
Thank you for the kind words. I am not sure if I quite deserve this praise, but if I do, it is certainly my intention to continue deserving it.
To be clear, I meant that this is obvious in this case, not necessarily in the general case.
To be clear, I meant only that “please” is costless (and you’re right that it’s only nearly so). This seemed relevant because we might therefore expect it to have devolved into meaninglessness, but this doesn’t seem to have happened.
I agree with the costs that you list, with the caveat that as I mentioned I’m unsure about the treadmill. I just also think commenting in that style has benefits as well, and I’m legitimately unsure which side dominates.