nods I agree with this and might have communicated my suggestion somewhat badly. See my response here.
I actually agree with Said that ‘authenticity’ is underdefined in the post, but I don’t think that this will be most easily fixed, or even revealed, by asking for a contextless definition of “authenticity”. Instead, what I expect to go much better, is to suggest an interpretation of the words as written, and highlight what might be wrong about them (something that other commenters have done successfully in this thread). This allows the author to actually build a model of the shape of the confusion, and try to address it, or for the author to just admit that the interpretation as given is correct and that the post contains a mistake, or for the author to argue that the interpretation as given is correct, but the reasoning that leads to the supposed mistake is wrong, all of which strike me as much more productive than trying to provide a definition of a term without many specific things to go on.
It seems to me like a good portion of the LessWrong audience is not going to know well what’s meant by the term authenticity in the Circling context.
It seems to me like the intention of this post is to explain why Circling is important to people who aren’t yet understanding Circling well and that target audience is not going to have a good insight into what authenticity means in the Circling context.
I don’t see how this is asking for a context-less definition either.
asking for a contextless definition of “authenticity”
Again this is a strawman. I didn’t ask for a “contextless” definition; the entire point of my initial question was to ask how ‘authenticity’ was being used in this post; what Vaniver meant by it! Far from being “contextless”, that is, rather, as contextualized as it gets!
Sure, you did ask within the context of the post, but that still covers a really broad spectrum of possible confusions. It is definitely not as “contextualized as it gets”, since again, both nshepperd and quanticle’s comments succeed in contextualizing much more than your comment does, and give much more concrete pointers to where their problems and confusion with the post might lie.
I didn’t have an interpretation of the words as written, nor could I have come up with one. If I had, or could’ve, I would’ve written a different initial comment, instead of the one I did write.
Given that other commenters seem to have little problem generating such an interpretation (however simple or inadequate that interpretation might be) and putting it forward, I do think in that case you should abstain from commenting. Again, I am not asking for a perfect guess of what the words mean, just any guess that has any internal structure and plausibility.
Like, quanticle’s comment here does this straightforwardly:
What are “authentic” and “authenticity” doing here? It seems to me that they could easily be replaced by “healthy” and “health”.
In this sentence, he is proposing a concrete interpretation, and is then critiquing it. If you are unable of generating the same, then I am surprised, but if so, then it does seem to me that you should likely not engage with posts in this reference class, and leave the commenting to other people.
I should clarify that my substitution of “health” for “authenticity” was meant as an example only. I didn’t think that’s what Vaniver actually meant. The point I was trying to make is roughly the same one that Said is making: I didn’t know know what concept the word “authentic” was pointing at in this case. To me, “authentic”, as an adjective, is something that usually applies to things or people, not relationships. An authentic item is one that’s of known provenance. An authentic person is one who is generally regarded as being honest and straightforward (i.e. not resorting to clever but technically true arguments). I could guess what an authentic relationship would be, but it would have be a guess, and the further clarification from Vaniver is certainly appreciated.
In general, I do not endorse proposing interpretations and then critiquing them. It’s far too easy to put your words in the other person’s mouth in those cases. I would actually claim that Said’s original query, “What do you mean by authenticity here?” is superior to mine, because it leaves the question open-ended, and allows Vaniver to reply with further details rather than boxing them into a “Yes, I agree”/”No I disagree” set of alternatives.
I should clarify that my substitution of “health” for “authenticity” was meant as an example only. I didn’t think that’s what Vaniver actually meant. The point I was trying to make is roughly the same one that Said is making: I didn’t know know what concept the word “authentic” was pointing at in this case. To me, “authentic”, as an adjective, is something that usually applies to things or people, not relationships. An authentic item is one that’s of known provenance. An authentic person is one who is generally regarded as being honest and straightforward (i.e. not resorting to clever but technically true arguments). I could guess what an authentic relationship would be, but it would have be a guess, and the further clarification from Vaniver is certainly appreciated.
That was also roughly how I interpreted it. I did not mean to suggest that your interpretation was particularly plausible, I meant to highlight the importance of providing any pointer at all to the shape of the problem you have with the term (indeed, I’ve been trying to stress that the interpretation you put forward does not have to be particularly plausible, just that it actually points at the shape of the confusion or critique you have of the post). You made it clear that you were worried about the term being used like an applause light, and so gave Vaniver a way to respond to that (to which he indeed responded with “Yes, I do think I kind of used that word as an applause light”, in his comment to nshepperd).
“What do you mean by authenticity here?” is superior to mine, because it leaves the question open-ended
My sense is that that open-endedness is quite bad, mostly for the reasons I described in many other comments.
It’s far too easy to put your words in the other person’s mouth in those cases
I agree that this is a real risk, though one that I think can be relatively straightforwardly avoided by just saying “the best interpretation I could come up with is X”. Or “the first interpretation that came to mind of this was Y”, either of which seem to create enough distance between you and the author that I am not too worried about putting words into other people’s mouths.
You keep using this term “shape of the confusion”. I assumed at first that it was just a curious figure of speech, and assigned it no significance, but now I am no longer sure. What do you mean by it?
For example, you talk about…
the importance of providing any pointer at all to the shape of the problem you have with the term (indeed, I’ve been trying to stress that the interpretation you put forward does not have to be particularly plausible, just that it actually points at the shape of the confusion or critique you have of the post)
But how is “I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say ‘[some term]’” insufficient as a pointer? What more could I say? That’s the confusion, in such a case—that I don’t know what you mean by some word—and there’s no critique beyond “you wrote a post where you used the word ‘[whatever]’, but I, a reader, don’t know what you mean by ‘[whatever]’”.
Could you elaborate on this “shape of the confusion” business? Because I genuinely don’t have any idea what you’re asking me to do, or suggesting that I should have done.
Alas, I do not think I have the time or the energy to do that at least today, at least to a level that I expect you to be satisfied with. Maybe a different commenter can chime in and fill my place.
Again, I would find replying much easier if you were to give me a possible interpretation that I might be able to correct. In a weirdly circular fashion, I do not know enough about your confusion to give you an answer that would take me less than half an hour to write, and I don’t expect other people to share your confusion particularly much.
I think I can take a stab at this; timing myself out of curiosity.
@Said: let me draw an analogy to a fictional online interaction (without implying that comment that started all of this is analogous in *all* relevant ways to the fictional one):
Author Andy: ”...a destructive mode of communication.”
Commenter Cody: “What do you mean by destructive in that context?”
If Andy had written something like “a tangerine mode of communication,” it would be understandable if Cody (and most other readers) had *literally* no referents for “tangerine” which would cause that sentence to parse at all. If Andy had instead written something like ”...a mode of communication harms the ability of conversational participants to reach agreement on the definition of terms [x, y, and z],” and Cody asked what “harms” meant in that context, as an outsider, it would be very difficult to understand where the communication had broken down, because “harms” is a widely-used term with referents that map relatively cleanly to the concepts at play, even if it is not the most common use for the term. “Destructive” is a more interesting case, because it is rarely used as a modifier to “mode of communication”, but if Cody were to claim that there was no “plausible interpretation” or “standard usage” he could assume, it would be difficult to understand how to help him construct the mental machinery to map the dictionary definition (as, for example, a “standard usage”) of “destructive” as an adjective to another concept. “Destructive” has a widely-known and well-accepted definition, and while Cody is not claiming that he does not know that definition (or any others), he is claiming that *none* of the definitions he knows produce coherent output when used to modify “mode of communication”.
This is what this looks like, from the outside. You are claiming that you have no referents for “authentic” which produce a coherent-in-context (note: no claim about whether it is justified) interpretation for the given sentence(s). Authentic has a dictionary definition of “genuine”; if we replace “authenticity” with “being genuine” in
Similarly, why should “that which can be destroyed by authenticity” be destroyed? Because authenticity is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.”
...it seems to be a coherent claim (though, again, no claim on whether it is sufficiently justified). If you have the same problem with “genuine”, then perform another substitution: “truthful self-representation” (that substitution tied together the external context with the modifier, which is maybe a sign that it’s a clearer way of communicating the mapping? Need to think about that...). It is difficult to understand what kind of answer you are looking for when you ask “what is the standard usage of authenticity”, because this is a query that is trivially resolved by a dictionary lookup/google search. If the answer that procedure provides is insufficient to provide a mapping to the broader context the term is used in, then repeating it back to you won’t help; it’s clear that your confusion is elsewhere (this is gesturing the direction of a definition for “shape of confusion”). If you don’t see any way in which any plausible definition/referent for “authentic”, set in that context, allows you generate expectations from the resulting sentence(s) (for example, being able to come up with hypothetical situations which would *not* be accurately described as such), then there’s either incompatible mental machinery, or a more subtle misunderstanding. I don’t think that’s the case, though. I believe you know (or could look up) the definition of “authentic”, and I believe that if you ran the iterated procedure of substituting synonyms (or sufficiently close referents in concept-space, accounting for the surrounding context), you would quickly find an interpolation that was sufficiently coherent. It is possible that you ran this procedure and decided that the predictions that could be generated by the result were very “fuzzy” (the distribution of possible expectations would be extremely wide; you would have trouble cleaving reality at a sensible set of joints). If so, this is the point where I would describe to the author of the original post what my interpretation of the claim was, with some hint as to what shape the distribution of generated expectations my interpretation would imply, so that the author could help me narrow the boundaries of that distribution (or point me to another spot on the map entirely, if my interpretation was completely wrong rather than insufficiently well-specified).
...almost an hour, and I don’t think I did a great job, but maybe this crosses some inferential distance.
Maybe there is a dialectal difference here? Because for me “authentic relationship” is more in the category of “tangerine mode of communication.” It is an applause light that can be used by a speaker to mean whatever they want, with no fixed meaning across contexts and speakers. It’s like calling something “morally good,” which is a meaningless statement unless you also specify the speaker’s morality. To me it stood out as just as obvious that “authentic relationship” was not sufficiently precise a phrase to use and deserved calling out for clarification, and so I was equally dumbfounded at the response Said got for asking the obvious question.
I’m afraid not, though I thank you for the attempt.
As I noted in this comment, and as Mark Friedenbach notes in a sibling comment, I don’t think ‘authentic’ has any standard usage I could substitute in. I think the standard usage is just an applause light. I didn’t think that Vaniver was using ‘authentic’ merely as a contentless applause light (and, as it turned out, I was right). Therefore there was no way for me to substitute in any meaning, nor to generate any interpretations.
(Substituting ‘genuine’ does not make the relevant bits any more comprehensible.)
It is difficult to understand what kind of answer you are looking for when you ask “what is the standard usage of authenticity”, because this is a query that is trivially resolved by a dictionary lookup/google search.
I always find it suspicious when someone says “you can easily find this via a search”, but then doesn’t actually provide the allegedly-easy-to-find answer.
So let’s actually try this exercise. Here’s the first result I get, searching for ‘authentic’ on DuckDuckGo:
Definitions 1, 2, 4 and 5 are inapplicable. Definition 3 is just a rephrasing as a contentless applause light.
The next several search results are nearly identical.
And searching for ‘authenticity’ just redirects to definitions of ‘authentic’.
I believe you know (or could look up) the definition of “authentic”, and I believe that if you ran the iterated procedure of substituting synonyms (or sufficiently close referents in concept-space, accounting for the surrounding context), you would quickly find an interpolation that was sufficiently coherent.
As you see, this does not actually work.
If so, this is the point where I would describe to the author of the original post what my interpretation of the claim was
As you see, no such interpretation could’ve been generated.
My confusion was very simple: what did Vaniver mean by ‘authentic’? (He has now made what I consider a reasonable attempt at answering the question, and an entirely reasonable promise of further explication, so no object-level response is needed, anymore; I am only restating for the record.)
I still don’t know what more I could’ve said about its “shape”.
I find it surprising that you find definitions 1,2, 4, and 5 inapplicable. “Authentic” is used three times in the original post, and “authenticity” is used twice. “Authentic” is used as a modifier for “expression”, “relationships”, and “reaction”.
Definition 1a from MW:
worthy of acceptance or belief as conformingto or based on fact
“Conforming to or based on fact” feels very similar to “the map corresponds to the territory”.
Performing the substitution: “An expression that is worthy of acceptance or belief, as the expression (map) corresponds to the internal state of the agent that generated it (territory).”
This is not necessarily the most trivial possible leap, but to draw in another analogy… if we consider concept-space to a multidimensional space with connected nodes, the weight of the connection between “authentic” and “honest” is much stronger than between “authentic” and “tangerine”. I don’t know if you’re agreeing with this part of Mark’s claim:
It is an applause light that can be used by a speaker to mean whatever they want, with no fixed meaning across contexts and speakers.
But if so, that is the part that I am explicitly disagreeing with (moreso along the axis of prescriptivism, but also for descriptivism, just to a lesser degree). That is, ignoring context, “authentic” has a set of definitions and connotations which are relatively tightly clustered, and rule out the possibility of using it as a substitute for, say, “dishonest”. Do you disagree, that in both the sense of its formal definitions, and actual in-practice usage, “authentic expression” is much closer to “honest expression” than “dishonest expression”?
The same analysis seems to apply equally well to “authentic reaction”; “authentic relationship” does seem to require linking together slightly more divergent concepts, though “relationship” has enough interfaces with “honesty” that coming up with a better-than-random (or better-than-tangerine) interpretation does not seem difficult.
I find it difficult to follow most of what you’re saying here. There seem to be several layers of speculation, analogy, inference, etc. I am skeptical that taking any such approach to interpreting an author’s words is ever productive—especially when you can, instead, just ask.
But let me try using the definition of ‘authentic’ which you suggest using, namely—
worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact
So, from the OP, we have:
That is, he didn’t trust that expression which is worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact will predictably lead to success according to his current goals, but rather that a methodological commitment to putting himself out there and seeing what happens would lead to deeper understanding and connection with others, even though it requires relinquishing attachment to specific goals.
I have no idea what this could mean. Is the hypothetical author of this hypothetical sentence saying that the person in question didn’t think that telling the truth works well, or… what? No, that seems quite bizarre, based on context. It doesn’t fit.
Next up:
Why should “that which can be destroyed by the truth” be destroyed? Because the truth is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.” Similarly, why should “that which can be destroyed by *something which is worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact *” be destroyed? Because the quality of being worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.”
This doesn’t make any sense; it seems to just be redundant. The structure of these statements sets up a comparison between things (truth and ‘authenticity’), but then (by to the candidate definition) it’s just restating the same thing twice: that truth is good.
I don’t mean to pitch ‘radical honesty’ here, or other sorts of excessive openness; relationships which are worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact include distance and walls and politeness and flexible preferences.
This is obvious nonsense; relationships aren’t the kind of thing which can be conforming to or based on fact.
if you reveal an intense emotion, I let it land and then share my reaction which is worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact, allowing you to see what actually happens when you reveal that emotion, and allowing me to see what actually happens when I let that emotion land
I have no idea what this could mean, either. Is this simply saying that one doesn’t lie in the given situation? But that makes very little sense, based on context…
It doesn’t work, as you see.
And, again, I don’t understand why you would advocate for this sort of highly speculative, effortful, highly error-prone decryption work, which is most likely to confuse you even more, when the alternative is simply to ask.
Please don’t call it “simply ask”, in particular in a framework where you are setting up a lack of response as something that is socially punishable. As a concrete illustration of this effect, T3t did spend an hour trying to explain the relevant concept to you, with basically no apparent success. You asking just the one question above resulted in at least 1.5 hours of effort from me and T3t. Your question was not free, do not treat it as such.
This appears to be the default of what happens when you ask the questions that you are asking, in the way that you are asking them. People spend literally dozens of hours of engaging with you, only to feel like they end up having completely wasted their and your time. The primary thing that you are doing when you are asking things like this, instead yourself contributing interpretative effort to the comment section, is to offload the interpretative labor on others, usually unsuccessfully and with a large multiplier on the actual costs due to misunderstandings, miscommunications and underspecified questions.
The thing you are doing doesn’t work. It is not sustainable, and it does not seem to result in any way, shape or form, in you reliably getting what you want either.
I am sorry, I am tired and I am going to tap out of this, but please don’t treat the questions that you are asking as free. They are not, and people put real effort into answering them, and even if your internal experience is that “just asking the question is much easier”, it does not result in total, in reduced cognitive effort, it instead results in many other commenters and authors putting in a lot of unnecessary work.
Even in this situation, I expect that when Vaniver gets around to writing his more extended explanation of authenticity, he will try engaging with you, and then he will give up after a few hours, and you will say you will have gotten very little value from both his posts, and his additional explanations, even after he will have put multiple hours of effort into an explanation that is in significant parts specifically tailored to you.
If I ask for an explanation of a term or concept, and the result is a lengthy answer, or multiple lengthy answers, and yet a lack of understanding—why do you treat this as a failure, or somehow an undesirable result?
To the contrary, it seems quite valuable, to me. It clearly demonstrates that the concept (which was, by assumption, used in the OP without explanation) is not obvious, and not easy to explain. It signals, both to the author and to readers, that here lie complications; that here, hidden behind this term, lurking within this concept—used, and not explained, in the author’s post—are depths, which are not obvious. It shows unambiguously a need to go back, and think carefully about how to communicate the concept; quite probably to write a post about it, or maybe more. It shows to readers that they are not to assume that anything simple and obvious is being referred to. For any readers who are similarly confused as I am, it helps them to articulate their confusion. For the author, it shows what aspects of his thinking isn’t clear, or isn’t clearly communicated; it draws out his assumptions. The result of taking heed of such a discussion is clarity in thought and writing. The result of ignoring it is confusion and error.
This, to you, is a waste? How can it be? You say it “doesn’t work”—what do you think is supposed to be happening?
It clearly demonstrates that the concept (which was, by assumption, used in the OP without explanation) is not obvious, and not easy to explain.
No, it does not clearly demonstrate that. What it demonstrates is that you, and specifically you, do not understand the concept, and that explaining it to you specifically is difficult. Your confusions do very rarely generalize. Your bafflement is not usually reflective of other people’s bafflement, and you not agreeing with a point is only very minor evidence that other people do not agree. And you being confused or unable to understand a point appears to have very little relation to when an argument actually allows others to make better predictions, and to make use of it to achieve things in the world.
What is supposed to be happening is that authors spend their effort and time on resolving confusions that have any chance of being adequately resolved, and responding to people who have any chance of benefiting from their explanations. The whole thread above with T3t is a perfect example of a confusion that I think very few other people will have, and where the explanations that are being provided are going to be of almost no value (and why I declined to try to give them, since that was a completely predictable outcome of you asking for clarification).
No, it does not clearly demonstrate that. What it demonstrates is that you, and specifically you, do not understand the concept
Also quanticle, also nshepperd, and presumably lurkers who upvoted their comments.
that explaining it to you specifically is difficult.
I think it’d be fair to read the first paragraph of my post as implicitly setting my hopes for this post as “explaining it to Said.” (In the second paragraph I say I’m not going to fully explain Circling, but if the core analogy that I’m trying to make is missing a crucial detail, that seems quite relevant.)
In a different recent post, I explicitly set my bar as “I ~80% expect this to seem like nonsense.” I don’t know how much of that post seemed like nonsense to Said, but I’d guess ‘a lot’, and nevertheless he left a detailed comment that struck me as a solid example of “yes, and” or “this fuzzy thing seems like it rhymes with the fuzzy thing you said.”
Also quanticle, also nshepperd, and presumably lurkers who upvoted their comments.
Hmm, I am not sure of this. I agree that both quanticle and nshepperd shared Said’s original question about the meaning of authenticity, but my guess is that they would not share his assessment that the explanation that has been provided by T3t above is completely inadequate or basically provides no further clarification of the pattern at hand, nor do I expect them to agree with Said’s assessment after multiple rounds back and forth with you on the topic of authenticity.
The usual pattern of Said’s comments as I experience them has been (and I think this would be reasonably straightforward to verify):
Said makes a highly upvoted comment asking a question, usually implicitly pointing out something that is unclear to many in the post
Author makes a reasonably highly upvoted reply
Said says that the explanation was basically completely useless to him, this often gets some upvotes, but drastically less than the top-level question
Author tries to clarify some more, this gets much fewer upvotes than the original reply
Said expresses more confusion, this usually gets very few upvotes
More explanations from the author, almost no upvotes
Said expresses more confusion, often being downvoted and the author and others expressing frustration
As I said in my first comment on this thread, I don’t think the original comment is where a lot of the problem lies (and I wouldn’t usually downvote it from most users). The problems usually arise in the follow-up discussion, and in the case of Said, enough authors and users have experienced those follow-up discussions that the problems have backpropagated into a broader aversion to questions like Said’s top-level question.
enough authors and users have experienced those follow-up discussions that the problems have backpropagated into a broader aversion to questions like Said’s top-level question
Just want to provide one data point: that I agree with this.
I have not personally had many back-and-forths with Said, but I’ve read enough of them to have built up a sense of frustration with Said’s communication style.
I find that he sometimes makes good points, but they’re often (usually?) wrapped in a style that I personally find unpleasant.
I’m not sure if I can quickly or exhaustively describe what the problem is—it’s not that the comments are rude, per se. He’s not calling people names or anything so blatant as that. But there’s an attitude that I perceive in them, combined with a set of rhetorical moves that to me seem like bad form.
Maybe a term for the attitude / rhetorical move that I find frustrating would be: “weaponized bafflement”. Said often expresses that he has no idea what someone could mean by something, or is totally shocked that someone could think two things are similar (e.g. grouping both reading the sequences and attending CFAR as rationality training), when to me it seems pretty easy to at least generate some hypotheses about what they might mean or why they might think something.
Of course, noticing confusion is great. Asking for clarification is helpful. But the thing that Said does often strikes me as attempting to pull a “The Emperor has no clothes” move all the time, without being explicit that that’s what he’s doing, or allowing for the possibility that perhaps the emperor does have clothes. I find it tiresome.
I find myself thinking: if you’re so consistently unable to guess what people might mean, or why people might think something, maybe the problem is (at least some of the time) with your imagination.
I think that if requests for clarification or expressions of surprise more consistently seemed to acknowledge that the interlocutor might have a good point that Said is just missing, that would be fine. Instead, the common pattern seems to be an expression of surprise, combined with an implication that the interlocutor is an idiot.
Maybe that’s not what Said means to communicate, but I would find his comments more pleasant to read if they gave a wider berth to such interpretations.
I find myself thinking: if you’re so consistently unable to guess what people might mean, or why people might think something, maybe the problem is (at least some of the time) with your imagination.
Who cares who “the problem” is with? Text is supposed to be understood. The thing that attracted me to the Sequences to begin with was sensible, comprehensible and coherent explanations of complex concepts. Are we giving up on this? Or are people who value clear language and want to avoid misunderstandings (and may even be, dare I say, neuroatypical) no longer part of the target group, but instead someone to be suspicious of?
The Sequences exist to provide a canon of shared information and terminology to reference. If you can’t explain something without referencing a term that is evidently not shared by everyone, and that you don’t just not bother to define but react with hostility when pressed on, then … frankly, I don’t think that behavior is in keeping with the spirit of this blog.
1) I think “I am having trouble understanding what you mean, the best guess I can come up with is X.” is far more conducive to getting to clarity than “I have no idea what you mean.” even when X feels quite unlikely to be what the person actually meant.
I am not asking the reader to read the mind of the author. I am asking them to generate at least one hypothesis about what the author might mean.
Do not forget the lesson of the Double Illusion of Transparency—just as the author will think they have communicated clearly when they have not, someone asking a question will also think the question is clear when it has not in fact been understood.
2) Asking for clarification as a form of criticism is bad form (or at lease is a move that should be used sparingly).
Perhaps you suspect the author’s thoughts are muddled and that shining the light of clarification on what they’ve written will expose this fact. You can say, “What do you mean by X?” And perhaps you will catch them in an error.
However, doing this all the time is annoying! Especially if it’s unclear to the author whether you in fact are trying to work towards mutual understanding, or are simply playing gotcha.
If you think the author might have something meaningful that they are saying, then offering your best hypothesis will work far better for finding out what it is.
And if you don’t think there’s anything to what they’re saying, it’s a bit disingenuous to state your criticism in the form of a question.
I’m actually having a little trouble expressing this second point, because I do think there’s a place for Socratic questioning, which can be very helpful. I just think there are ways to do it that are more collaborative, polite, illuminating, and other ways that are unpleasant and adversarial.
The best rule I can come up with at the moment is: If you’re going to be in collaborative mode, offer hypotheses, and if you’re going to be in adversarial mode, don’t pretend to be in collaborative mode.
I think this once again presupposes a lot of unestablished consensus: for one, that it’s trivial for people to generate hypotheses for undefined words, that this is a worthwhile skill to begin with, and that this is a proper approach to begin with. I don’t think that a post author should get to impose this level of ideological conformance onto a commenter, and it weirds me out how much the people on this site now seem to be agreeing that Said deserves censure for (verbosely and repeatedly) disagreeing with this position.
And then it seems to be doing a lot of high-distance inference from presuming a “typical” mindset on Said’s part and figuring out a lot of implications as to what they were doing, which is exactly the thing that Said wanted to avoid by not guessing a definition? Thus kind of proving their point?
More importantly, I at least consider providing hypotheses as to a definition as obviously supererogatory. If you don’t know the meaning of a word in a text, then the meaning may be either obvious or obscured; the risk you take by asking is wasting somebody’s time for no reason. But I consider it far from shown that giving a hypothesis shortens this time at all, and more importantly, there is none such Schelling point established and thus it seems a stretch of propriety to demand it as if it was an agreed upon convention. Certainly the work to establish it as a convention should be done before the readership breaks out the mass downvotes; I mean seriously- what the fuck, LessWrong?
that it’s trivial for people to generate hypotheses for undefined words
I at least consider providing hypotheses as to a definition as obviously supererogatory. If you don’t know the meaning of a word in a text, then the meaning may be either obvious or obscured
I want to clarify that asking about the meanings of particular words is not the main thing I’m talking about (even though that was the example at the top of this whole thread).
Said expresses bafflement at all sorts of things that people say. If it was always, “what do you mean by this specific word?” that would be a very different pattern.
Or if it was always expressing genuine curiosity, as opposed to making a rhetorical point, that would also be a very different pattern.
I am particularly complaining about the pattern of expressing surprise / confusion in a way that seems to be making a rhetorical point rather than seeking genuine understanding.
However, on the topic of words in particular, I do think that simply asking, “What does X mean?” is usually not the best path forward.
Consider three cases:
X is a term you’re not familiar with (and you haven’t looked it up yet)
X is a term you’re not familiar with, so you’ve looked it up, but the definitions don’t seem to match the way it’s being used
X is a common term that seems to be used in a weird way
For which of these cases does it make sense to just write, “What do you mean by X?”
1) For case 1, it seems most respectful of others’ time to just google the term. If that answers your question, consider also leaving a comment saying, “For others who weren’t familiar with X, it means …”
2) For case 2, I’d recommend saying that you’ve looked it up and the definitions don’t seem to match. Otherwise you might just get one of the standard definitions back when someone replies to your comment and still be confused. Also this lets others know that you’re extending them the courtesy recommended in case 1.
3) For case 3, I think it depends on the specific case, and how non-standard the usage is.
3A) If you’re confident that the usage is as a technical term of art, such that when it’s pointed out, the author will say, “Ah, you’re right, I’m using that in a non-standard way. I mean …” then just asking how it’s being used seems like a fine way to go. (However, I do think it’s easy to overestimate the odds that the author will understand why you find it confusing. They may be in a bubble where everyone uses that term in that way all the time.)
3B) In a case where the author might not realize that everyone wouldn’t be familiar with the particular usage, then I think it’s helpful to say something specific about how you interpret the word and what seems off about the usage. That way they’ll have a better idea what to say to resolve the confusion.
The particular case of “authentic” at the top of this thread seems like kind of a border case between 3A and 3B. Everyone reading this should be familiar with what “authentic” means in a variety of contexts. And it’s not exactly being used as a non-standard term-of-art, but it is doing a lot of work in the post, so it does seem reasonable to poke at it for a clearer picture.
I think the ideal version of Said’s question would be the one that mentioned applause lights and “healthy” as a possible substitute. That one made it a lot clearer what the issue with the usage of a fairly common term was.
But I would agree that generating that level of comment instead of a short question is supererogatory, and I wouldn’t downvote Said’s original question. (Though since Said was the one asking it, I might find myself wondering if the discussion following the comment was going to fit the pattern of rhetorical bafflement that I’ve been annoyed by before.)
I don’t think it’s so implausible for some people to be significantly more baffled by some things that we must interpret it as an attack. An unusually large imposition of costs is not inherently an attack! May as well blame the disabled for dastardly forcing us to waste money on wheelchair ramps.
May as well blame the disabled for dastardly forcing us to waste money on wheelchair ramps
I do not believe that Said is unable to generate hypotheses in all the cases where he expresses bafflement / indignation. I believe it is (at least partially) a rhetorical move.
If people pretended to need wheelchairs to prove a point, we’d be right to blame them for forcing us to spend resources on them.
I remind readers to review the “Taboo your words” posts of the Human’s Guide to Words sequence. Asking for the meaning of words, even common words, is a rationalist’s truth finding technique. It’s not something to be persecuted.
I agree, but as I put it in the great-grandparent comment:
I want to clarify that asking about the meanings of particular words is not the main thing I’m talking about (even though that was the example at the top of this whole thread).
It’s more a pattern of expressing surprise / indignation as a rhetorical move. Here is an example, where he’s not asking for clarification, but still doing the surprise / indignation thing.
You might think that comment is perfectly fine, and even from my perspective in any one single comment, it’s often no big deal. But when surprised indignation is basically your tone in seemingly almost every thread, I eventually find it annoying.
You’re right, I do find that comment to be fine. But then I have a similar approach to truth seeking myself, and I find it tremendously effective.
Part of the background I bring to this is that some of the best rationalist thinkers and mentors I’ve met in my own life had a profound impact on me simply because they asked the necessary pointed questions and let me figure out the answer, or were willing to unabashedly share a contrasting opinion. Everyone’s learning styles are different, but for me this worked remarkably well. Said is doing something similar, so I see it as a valuable contribution.
Said is doing something similar, so I see it as a valuable contribution.
I appreciate hearing this counterpoint.
I wish there was a way to get the benefit of Said’s pointed questioning w/o readers like me being so frustrated by the style. I suspect that relatively subtle tweaks to the style could make a big difference. But I’m not exactly sure how to get there from here.
For now all I can think of is to note that some users, like Wei Dai, ask lots of pointed and clarifying questions and never provoke in me the same kind of frustration that many of Said’s comments do.
Why should Said be the one to change, though? Maybe relatively subtle tweaks to your reading style could make a big difference.
A “surprised bafflement” tone is often seen as a social attack because it’s perceived as implying, “You should know this already, therefore I’m surprised that you don’t, therefore I should have higher status than you.” But that’s not the only possible narrative. What happens if you reframe your reaction as, “He’s surprised, but surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis—the fact that he’s so cluelessly self-centered as to not be able to predict what other people know means that I should have higher status”?
Good question. When there are conflicts over norms, it’s not obvious how to resolve them in general. I suppose the easy, though less preferred, solution would be some kind of appeal to the will of the majority, or to an authority. The harder, but better, way would be an appeal to a deeper set of shared norms. I’m not sure how tractable that is in this case though.
What happens if you reframe your reaction as, “He’s surprised, but surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis—the fact that he’s so cluelessly self-centered as to not be able to predict what other people know means that I should have higher status”?
This is in fact often my reaction. But I will note that neither social attacks nor the writings of clueless self-centered people are particularly fun to read. (Especially not when it seems to be both.)
That may be stating it overly harshly. I do think Said is an intelligent person and often has good points to make. And I find it valuable to learn that others are getting a lot of value from his comments.
The signal to noise (not exactly the right term) ratio has not seemed particularly favorable to me though. But perhaps there’s yet some different reframing that I could do to be less frustrated (in addition to whatever changes Said might make).
Why should we have one set of norms at all? Should we really be driving towards cultural unity? Isn’t it okay for there to be subsets of people who drive differently? Just learn to ignore what you don’t find useful.
When designing norms, we should take into account an asymmetry between reading and writing: each comment is only written once, but read many times. Each norm imposed on writers to not be unduly annoying constrains the information flow of the forum much more than each norm imposed on readers to not be unduly annoyed.
Maybe a term for the attitude / rhetorical move that I find frustrating would be: “weaponized bafflement”. Said often expresses that he has no idea what someone could mean by something, or is totally shocked that someone could think two things are similar (e.g. grouping both reading the sequences and attending CFAR as rationality training), when to me it seems pretty easy to at least generate some hypotheses about what they might mean or why they might think something.
To me this particular move is part of a broader pattern used by Said and a few other common posters on here of using the Socratic method to make their point, which is frequently time consuming, annoying to answer, and IMO a bad tool for finding the truth.
Whenever I detect someone using the Socratic method in the comment section of my posts I ask them to more directly make their point, and in fact may add it to my author commenting guidelines.
my guess is that they would not share his assessment that the explanation that has been provided by T3t above is completely inadequate
This worries me because of double illusion of transparency concerns. That is, one frame we could have here is that Said is virtuously refusing to pretend to understand anything he doesn’t understand. Suppose the version of “authentic” that is necessary to make this post work is actually quite detailed and nuanced, in ways that T3t’s guess don’t quite get at; then it seems like T3t and I might mistakenly believe that communication has taken place when it actually hasn’t, whereas Said and I will have no such illusions.
If there are problems with this situation, I think they come from differing people having different expectations of how bad it is to not have communicated something to Said, and I think we fix that by aligning those expectations.
The usual pattern of Said’s comments as I experience them has been (and I think this would be reasonably straightforward to verify)
This lines up with a model where Said is being especially rigorous when it comes to dependencies, and the audience isn’t, and the audience has some random scattering of dependencies where each further reply is only useful to a smaller fraction of the population. It also is explained by people becoming more and more pessimistic that communication will happen, and so not tuning in to the tree to follow things.
T3t’s explanations seem quite useless to me. The procedure they describe seems highly unlikely to reach anything like a correct interpretation of anything, being basically a random walk in concept space.
It’s hard to see what “I don’t understand what you meant by X, also here’s a set of completely wrong definitions I arrived at by free association starting at X” could possibly add over “I don’t understand what you meant by X”, apart from wasting everyone’s time redirecting attention onto a priori wrong interpretations.
I’m also somewhat alarmed to see people on this site advocating the sort of reasoning by superficial analogy we see here:
“Conforming to or based on fact” feels very similar to “the map corresponds to the territory”.
Performing the substitution: “An expression that is worthy of acceptance or belief, as the expression (map) corresponds to the internal state of the agent that generated it (territory).”
To reiterate, I don’t explicitly use anything like the procedures I described in my posts to do any sort of interpretation. I came up with them to use as levers to attempt bridging the inferential distance between Said and I; I agree that in practice trying to use those models explicitly would be extremely error-prone (probably better than a random walk, but maybe not by much).
More salient to the point at hand: you understood (to a sufficient degree) the models I was describing, and your criticisms contain information about your understanding of those models. If for whatever reason I wanted to continue discussing those models, those two things being true would make it possible for me to respond further (with clarifications, questions about your interpretations, etc).
Alas, then that guess of mine was probably wrong, but thank you for clarifying your position. In that case I will have to admit that I am arguing for a change in norms that you will also likely perceive to be worse.
To be clear though, you have given an argument against the procedure that T3t has described. The question at hand was whether their explanation helped you come to better understand the procedure (independently of whether you agree with it). It seems to me that you did indeed come to better understand the procedure in question, though my guess is there are still significant misunderstandings left. Is your sense that your model of the kind of procedure that me and T3t are advocating for has stayed the same after reading their comment?
If I read “authentic relationship”, “a relationship which is built on honest premises and communication (i.e. neither party has lied or misled the other about their background, motivations, or relevant personality characteristics)” is my first guess as to what that would mean. My question is: are you incapable of performing this sort of “decryption work” (as in, the examples you generated are your best effort), or is your chief complaint that it’s effortful and error-prone (as in, you could have extrapolated something similar to what I did, but you believe that doing so is epistemically unjustified)?
I am advocating for this because, in practice, this seems to minimize the amount of time and communication necessary to make sure both parties are on the same page w.r.t. the definitions of terms used and the intent behind what is being communicated. The way you ask questions reveals almost nothing about the state of your mental map of the subject of discussion (what you think the boundaries are, how you think it corresponds to the surrounding context, etc). This increases the amount of communication required to answer your question much more than linearly—you know “where” you are confused much better than the author. The author can guess, but the author is dealing with the entire possibility space of things you can be confused about; the amount of work that can go into resolving that confusion is unbounded. However, if you put forth your interpretation, then ask for clarification/correction, the author has a much more constrained space to explore to attempt to diagnose where your map is insufficiently well-specified/pointing at the wrong thing/has some other conflict with the author’s map. ~Linear time for you to come up with the most straightforward possible interpretation (contingent on you actually being able to do so—still not clear to what degree this is a disagreement in the allowable degree of inference), + ~linear time for the author to identify mistakes, vs 0 time for you + unbounded time for the author.
The problem I’m having with trying to respond to the rest of your post (and the previous one in the thread) is that I don’t feel like I have a better sense of your position on the more critical underlying issues now than when I first replied.
I will try to be more specific still, though I will be leaning on concepts similar to those in ML, such as embeddings, vectors, dimensionality, etc. I can try to find another set of concepts if this doesn’t translate well enough. (I already tried to come up with an analogy with interfaces & generics in the software engineering sense, but couldn’t actually come up with a coherent model without bringing in intersection types, at which point I gave up. Maybe that gives you some idea of what I was going for anyways.) When you performed the substitutions for “authentic”, it looks like you traveled the smallest possible distance away from the “authentic” node, and not in the direction of any cluster of nodes that would be closer to (or have higher connective weight with, if you prefer) “relationship” (or “expression”, or “reaction”). Naturally, the node you landed on fit the surrounding context about as well as a square peg in a round hole.
Now, to be absolutely clear, when you say that “authentic” has no standard meaning, are you claiming that “authentic” is equidistant from every other node in your graph (of all possible concepts)? I feel like we’ve ruled that out, but I’m not 100% sure; if that is the case then the direction I’m going in with the rest of this is probably fruitless.
If not, if you do indeed have a graph with concepts that are much closer to “authentic” than other concepts, then some of the concepts in the “authentic”-adjacent cluster will likewise be much closer to the “relationship” node along many dimensions than most of the others. What are those dimensions? Relationships have many properties and embedded concepts: participants, duration, style, etc. The dimensions we could say are relevant for linking together “authentic” and “relationship” would be more granular, likely describing the terms on which the participants engaged in the relationship, and the style of communication they use. If you refuse to traverse the graph to any appreciable degree (and make public where you landed; ideally also the path you followed), it’s much harder for anybody else to help you. It’s not clear at which level of linguistic abstraction the disconnect is—you could be missing the “authentic” node altogether (solved by dictionary), you could be missing connections from “authentic” to “honest” to “honesty about self” (don’t think this is the problem; not clear how to solve this if it is), you could be asserting that those connections in your graph have equal weights to, say, the connections from “authentic” to “tangerine” to “random number generator”, so there’s literally no way for you to privilege the first set when trying to trace a path from “authentic” to “relationship”, because you have no idea which direction to go looking in (don’t think this is the problem either), or you could be asserting that the first set of connections do indeed have heavier weights, but not to a sufficient degree (if there is any such degree) that you would feel justified in traversing those nodes.
EDIT: I want to note that I started writing this comment well before Habryka posted his response. It strikes me that he hit on some very similar things (at one point I edited out a sentence that called your initial question “underspecified”; it’s not that it wasn’t an accurate description of my feelings on the subject, but I decided to taboo that word because I thought of a better way to explain what I thought the problem was).
If I read “authentic relationship”, “a relationship which is built on honest premises and communication (i.e. neither party has lied or misled the other about their background, motivations, or relevant personality characteristics)” is my first guess as to what that would mean. My question is: are you incapable of performing this sort of “decryption work” (as in, the examples you generated are your best effort), or is your chief complaint that it’s effortful and error-prone (as in, you could have extrapolated something similar to what I did, but you believe that doing so is epistemically unjustified)?
I don’t know how you generated that guess, so my answer can only be the former.
As for the rest of your comment, I find it baffling. Nothing resembling what you describe is how I think when interpreting people’s writing (nor, as far as am aware, does anyone else I know think like this). In any case, if this is the type and amount of thought necessary to interpret a term used in a post, then I must say, even more emphatically, that such interpretation attempts are ill-advised. There is just no way such efforts can be justified.
But there is an even simpler response to make. Namely: suppose that your guess (quoted above) had been right; suppose that Vaniver, when he said “authentic relationship”, had indeed meant “a relationship which is built on …” (etc.).
Would it not be easy for him simply to say that? Wouldn’t that have been the easiest thing in the world? Why would he have needed to know anything about the “shape of my confusion”, or my mental models, or any such thing?
(Now, as it turns out, the actual meaning of ‘authentic’, as used in the OP, was rather more complicated. But that is a separate matter entirely!)
I was not describing the process I use to interpret novel linguistic compositions such as “authentic relationship”—my brain does that under the hood, automatically, in a process that is fairly opaque to me; despite that, the results are sufficiently accurate that I don’t spend hours trying to resolve minutiae, even in highly complex technical domains.
I was attempting to use an analogy with word embeddings in multi-dimensional space to explain why the way you approach information-gathering has asymmetrical costs. I can’t come up with another analogy, because your response is totally non-informative with respect to how/why/where my first analogy failed to land. Did you notice that you didn’t even tell me whether you’re familiar with the concepts used? I have literally zero bytes of information with which to attempt to generate a more targeted analogy.
Would it not be easy for him simply to say that?
This doesn’t really seem material to the point I was trying to discuss, but (I imagine) it’s because there can be a trade-off between density and precision when trying to convey information. (And, also, how is he supposed to know which parts of his post are going to be incomprehensible to which people? Again, one could put in an unbounded amount of effort into specifying with ever more clarity and precision exactly what they mean by every word.)
Your response to Habryka also seems to not materially respond to his main points (the grossly asymmetrical effort involved, and the fact that the time spent is not free, it is traded off against other pursuits).
You list certain outcomes you consider beneficial, but “things are not easy to explain and have hidden complexities” is true for literally everything given a sufficient level of desired precision. It is a fully general argument in favor of asking arbitrarily vague questions.
EDIT: I did want to thank you for your straightforward answer here:
I don’t know how you generated that guess, so my answer can only be the former.
That, at least, would let me move the conversation forward with a tentative conclusion for that question, but unfortunately that answer seems to imply sufficiently different mental machinery that I’m a bit stuck regardless. I’ll come back to this if I come up with something exceptionally clever to try to solve that problem, I suppose.
I still don’t know what more I could’ve said about its “shape”.
Just want to point out that I think that simply adding the following to your original comment would have been a marginal improvement:
I think the standard usage is just an applause light.
That is, if your comment had been, “‘Authentic’ seems like it’s often used as an applause light to me. Can you say more about specifically what you mean by it in this context?” I think that would have been an improvement over the original comment.
I agree with others that just saying, “What do you mean by X?” When X is a common, well-known word can often be insufficient for making it easy for the author to figure out what to say in reply.
FWIW, that wasn’t my interpretation of quanticle’s comment at all. My reading is that “healthy” was not meant as a proposed interpretation of “authentic” but as an illustrative substitution demonstrating the content-freeness of this use of the word—because the post doesn’t get any more or less convincing when you replace “authentic” with different words.
This is similar to what EY does in Applause Lights itself, where he replaces words with their opposites to demonstrate that sentences are uninformative.
(As an interpretation, it would also be rather barren, and not particularly ‘concrete’ either: obviously “‘authentic’ means ‘healthy’” just raises the question of what ‘healthy’ means in this context!)
Yes, to be clear, I agree with this. I would count that substitution as a possible interpretation of the word (in particular an interpretation of it being basically just an applause light), but I don’t care too much about quibbling about words here.
Meaning no offense to quanticle (and casting no aspersions on the rest of his comment), but I have no idea what the heck he meant with the quoted bit. That substitution seems to me to be entirely out of left field. I don’t see it as plausible even in retrospect.
nods I am surprised to hear that, but in that case I do sadly see little way of making progress on this, and can only continue to request you to leave the relevant commenting and question-asking to people in the reference class of quanticle then.
nods I agree with this and might have communicated my suggestion somewhat badly. See my response here.
I actually agree with Said that ‘authenticity’ is underdefined in the post, but I don’t think that this will be most easily fixed, or even revealed, by asking for a contextless definition of “authenticity”. Instead, what I expect to go much better, is to suggest an interpretation of the words as written, and highlight what might be wrong about them (something that other commenters have done successfully in this thread). This allows the author to actually build a model of the shape of the confusion, and try to address it, or for the author to just admit that the interpretation as given is correct and that the post contains a mistake, or for the author to argue that the interpretation as given is correct, but the reasoning that leads to the supposed mistake is wrong, all of which strike me as much more productive than trying to provide a definition of a term without many specific things to go on.
It seems to me like a good portion of the LessWrong audience is not going to know well what’s meant by the term authenticity in the Circling context.
It seems to me like the intention of this post is to explain why Circling is important to people who aren’t yet understanding Circling well and that target audience is not going to have a good insight into what authenticity means in the Circling context.
I don’t see how this is asking for a context-less definition either.
Again this is a strawman. I didn’t ask for a “contextless” definition; the entire point of my initial question was to ask how ‘authenticity’ was being used in this post; what Vaniver meant by it! Far from being “contextless”, that is, rather, as contextualized as it gets!
Sure, you did ask within the context of the post, but that still covers a really broad spectrum of possible confusions. It is definitely not as “contextualized as it gets”, since again, both nshepperd and quanticle’s comments succeed in contextualizing much more than your comment does, and give much more concrete pointers to where their problems and confusion with the post might lie.
I didn’t have an interpretation of the words as written, nor could I have come up with one. If I had, or could’ve, I would’ve written a different initial comment, instead of the one I did write.
Given that other commenters seem to have little problem generating such an interpretation (however simple or inadequate that interpretation might be) and putting it forward, I do think in that case you should abstain from commenting. Again, I am not asking for a perfect guess of what the words mean, just any guess that has any internal structure and plausibility.
Like, quanticle’s comment here does this straightforwardly:
In this sentence, he is proposing a concrete interpretation, and is then critiquing it. If you are unable of generating the same, then I am surprised, but if so, then it does seem to me that you should likely not engage with posts in this reference class, and leave the commenting to other people.
I should clarify that my substitution of “health” for “authenticity” was meant as an example only. I didn’t think that’s what Vaniver actually meant. The point I was trying to make is roughly the same one that Said is making: I didn’t know know what concept the word “authentic” was pointing at in this case. To me, “authentic”, as an adjective, is something that usually applies to things or people, not relationships. An authentic item is one that’s of known provenance. An authentic person is one who is generally regarded as being honest and straightforward (i.e. not resorting to clever but technically true arguments). I could guess what an authentic relationship would be, but it would have be a guess, and the further clarification from Vaniver is certainly appreciated.
In general, I do not endorse proposing interpretations and then critiquing them. It’s far too easy to put your words in the other person’s mouth in those cases. I would actually claim that Said’s original query, “What do you mean by authenticity here?” is superior to mine, because it leaves the question open-ended, and allows Vaniver to reply with further details rather than boxing them into a “Yes, I agree”/”No I disagree” set of alternatives.
That was also roughly how I interpreted it. I did not mean to suggest that your interpretation was particularly plausible, I meant to highlight the importance of providing any pointer at all to the shape of the problem you have with the term (indeed, I’ve been trying to stress that the interpretation you put forward does not have to be particularly plausible, just that it actually points at the shape of the confusion or critique you have of the post). You made it clear that you were worried about the term being used like an applause light, and so gave Vaniver a way to respond to that (to which he indeed responded with “Yes, I do think I kind of used that word as an applause light”, in his comment to nshepperd).
My sense is that that open-endedness is quite bad, mostly for the reasons I described in many other comments.
I agree that this is a real risk, though one that I think can be relatively straightforwardly avoided by just saying “the best interpretation I could come up with is X”. Or “the first interpretation that came to mind of this was Y”, either of which seem to create enough distance between you and the author that I am not too worried about putting words into other people’s mouths.
You keep using this term “shape of the confusion”. I assumed at first that it was just a curious figure of speech, and assigned it no significance, but now I am no longer sure. What do you mean by it?
For example, you talk about…
But how is “I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say ‘[some term]’” insufficient as a pointer? What more could I say? That’s the confusion, in such a case—that I don’t know what you mean by some word—and there’s no critique beyond “you wrote a post where you used the word ‘[whatever]’, but I, a reader, don’t know what you mean by ‘[whatever]’”.
Could you elaborate on this “shape of the confusion” business? Because I genuinely don’t have any idea what you’re asking me to do, or suggesting that I should have done.
Alas, I do not think I have the time or the energy to do that at least today, at least to a level that I expect you to be satisfied with. Maybe a different commenter can chime in and fill my place.
Again, I would find replying much easier if you were to give me a possible interpretation that I might be able to correct. In a weirdly circular fashion, I do not know enough about your confusion to give you an answer that would take me less than half an hour to write, and I don’t expect other people to share your confusion particularly much.
I think I can take a stab at this; timing myself out of curiosity.
@Said: let me draw an analogy to a fictional online interaction (without implying that comment that started all of this is analogous in *all* relevant ways to the fictional one):
Author Andy: ”...a destructive mode of communication.”
Commenter Cody: “What do you mean by destructive in that context?”
If Andy had written something like “a tangerine mode of communication,” it would be understandable if Cody (and most other readers) had *literally* no referents for “tangerine” which would cause that sentence to parse at all. If Andy had instead written something like ”...a mode of communication harms the ability of conversational participants to reach agreement on the definition of terms [x, y, and z],” and Cody asked what “harms” meant in that context, as an outsider, it would be very difficult to understand where the communication had broken down, because “harms” is a widely-used term with referents that map relatively cleanly to the concepts at play, even if it is not the most common use for the term. “Destructive” is a more interesting case, because it is rarely used as a modifier to “mode of communication”, but if Cody were to claim that there was no “plausible interpretation” or “standard usage” he could assume, it would be difficult to understand how to help him construct the mental machinery to map the dictionary definition (as, for example, a “standard usage”) of “destructive” as an adjective to another concept. “Destructive” has a widely-known and well-accepted definition, and while Cody is not claiming that he does not know that definition (or any others), he is claiming that *none* of the definitions he knows produce coherent output when used to modify “mode of communication”.
This is what this looks like, from the outside. You are claiming that you have no referents for “authentic” which produce a coherent-in-context (note: no claim about whether it is justified) interpretation for the given sentence(s). Authentic has a dictionary definition of “genuine”; if we replace “authenticity” with “being genuine” in
...it seems to be a coherent claim (though, again, no claim on whether it is sufficiently justified). If you have the same problem with “genuine”, then perform another substitution: “truthful self-representation” (that substitution tied together the external context with the modifier, which is maybe a sign that it’s a clearer way of communicating the mapping? Need to think about that...). It is difficult to understand what kind of answer you are looking for when you ask “what is the standard usage of authenticity”, because this is a query that is trivially resolved by a dictionary lookup/google search. If the answer that procedure provides is insufficient to provide a mapping to the broader context the term is used in, then repeating it back to you won’t help; it’s clear that your confusion is elsewhere (this is gesturing the direction of a definition for “shape of confusion”). If you don’t see any way in which any plausible definition/referent for “authentic”, set in that context, allows you generate expectations from the resulting sentence(s) (for example, being able to come up with hypothetical situations which would *not* be accurately described as such), then there’s either incompatible mental machinery, or a more subtle misunderstanding. I don’t think that’s the case, though. I believe you know (or could look up) the definition of “authentic”, and I believe that if you ran the iterated procedure of substituting synonyms (or sufficiently close referents in concept-space, accounting for the surrounding context), you would quickly find an interpolation that was sufficiently coherent. It is possible that you ran this procedure and decided that the predictions that could be generated by the result were very “fuzzy” (the distribution of possible expectations would be extremely wide; you would have trouble cleaving reality at a sensible set of joints). If so, this is the point where I would describe to the author of the original post what my interpretation of the claim was, with some hint as to what shape the distribution of generated expectations my interpretation would imply, so that the author could help me narrow the boundaries of that distribution (or point me to another spot on the map entirely, if my interpretation was completely wrong rather than insufficiently well-specified).
...almost an hour, and I don’t think I did a great job, but maybe this crosses some inferential distance.
Maybe there is a dialectal difference here? Because for me “authentic relationship” is more in the category of “tangerine mode of communication.” It is an applause light that can be used by a speaker to mean whatever they want, with no fixed meaning across contexts and speakers. It’s like calling something “morally good,” which is a meaningless statement unless you also specify the speaker’s morality. To me it stood out as just as obvious that “authentic relationship” was not sufficiently precise a phrase to use and deserved calling out for clarification, and so I was equally dumbfounded at the response Said got for asking the obvious question.
I’m afraid not, though I thank you for the attempt.
As I noted in this comment, and as Mark Friedenbach notes in a sibling comment, I don’t think ‘authentic’ has any standard usage I could substitute in. I think the standard usage is just an applause light. I didn’t think that Vaniver was using ‘authentic’ merely as a contentless applause light (and, as it turned out, I was right). Therefore there was no way for me to substitute in any meaning, nor to generate any interpretations.
(Substituting ‘genuine’ does not make the relevant bits any more comprehensible.)
I always find it suspicious when someone says “you can easily find this via a search”, but then doesn’t actually provide the allegedly-easy-to-find answer.
So let’s actually try this exercise. Here’s the first result I get, searching for ‘authentic’ on DuckDuckGo:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/authentic
Definitions 1, 2, 4 and 5 are inapplicable. Definition 3 is just a rephrasing as a contentless applause light.
The next several search results are nearly identical.
And searching for ‘authenticity’ just redirects to definitions of ‘authentic’.
As you see, this does not actually work.
As you see, no such interpretation could’ve been generated.
My confusion was very simple: what did Vaniver mean by ‘authentic’? (He has now made what I consider a reasonable attempt at answering the question, and an entirely reasonable promise of further explication, so no object-level response is needed, anymore; I am only restating for the record.)
I still don’t know what more I could’ve said about its “shape”.
I find it surprising that you find definitions 1,2, 4, and 5 inapplicable. “Authentic” is used three times in the original post, and “authenticity” is used twice. “Authentic” is used as a modifier for “expression”, “relationships”, and “reaction”.
Definition 1a from MW:
“Conforming to or based on fact” feels very similar to “the map corresponds to the territory”.
Performing the substitution: “An expression that is worthy of acceptance or belief, as the expression (map) corresponds to the internal state of the agent that generated it (territory).”
This is not necessarily the most trivial possible leap, but to draw in another analogy… if we consider concept-space to a multidimensional space with connected nodes, the weight of the connection between “authentic” and “honest” is much stronger than between “authentic” and “tangerine”. I don’t know if you’re agreeing with this part of Mark’s claim:
But if so, that is the part that I am explicitly disagreeing with (moreso along the axis of prescriptivism, but also for descriptivism, just to a lesser degree). That is, ignoring context, “authentic” has a set of definitions and connotations which are relatively tightly clustered, and rule out the possibility of using it as a substitute for, say, “dishonest”. Do you disagree, that in both the sense of its formal definitions, and actual in-practice usage, “authentic expression” is much closer to “honest expression” than “dishonest expression”?
The same analysis seems to apply equally well to “authentic reaction”; “authentic relationship” does seem to require linking together slightly more divergent concepts, though “relationship” has enough interfaces with “honesty” that coming up with a better-than-random (or better-than-tangerine) interpretation does not seem difficult.
I find it difficult to follow most of what you’re saying here. There seem to be several layers of speculation, analogy, inference, etc. I am skeptical that taking any such approach to interpreting an author’s words is ever productive—especially when you can, instead, just ask.
But let me try using the definition of ‘authentic’ which you suggest using, namely—
So, from the OP, we have:
I have no idea what this could mean. Is the hypothetical author of this hypothetical sentence saying that the person in question didn’t think that telling the truth works well, or… what? No, that seems quite bizarre, based on context. It doesn’t fit.
Next up:
This doesn’t make any sense; it seems to just be redundant. The structure of these statements sets up a comparison between things (truth and ‘authenticity’), but then (by to the candidate definition) it’s just restating the same thing twice: that truth is good.
This is obvious nonsense; relationships aren’t the kind of thing which can be conforming to or based on fact.
I have no idea what this could mean, either. Is this simply saying that one doesn’t lie in the given situation? But that makes very little sense, based on context…
It doesn’t work, as you see.
And, again, I don’t understand why you would advocate for this sort of highly speculative, effortful, highly error-prone decryption work, which is most likely to confuse you even more, when the alternative is simply to ask.
Please don’t call it “simply ask”, in particular in a framework where you are setting up a lack of response as something that is socially punishable. As a concrete illustration of this effect, T3t did spend an hour trying to explain the relevant concept to you, with basically no apparent success. You asking just the one question above resulted in at least 1.5 hours of effort from me and T3t. Your question was not free, do not treat it as such.
This appears to be the default of what happens when you ask the questions that you are asking, in the way that you are asking them. People spend literally dozens of hours of engaging with you, only to feel like they end up having completely wasted their and your time. The primary thing that you are doing when you are asking things like this, instead yourself contributing interpretative effort to the comment section, is to offload the interpretative labor on others, usually unsuccessfully and with a large multiplier on the actual costs due to misunderstandings, miscommunications and underspecified questions.
The thing you are doing doesn’t work. It is not sustainable, and it does not seem to result in any way, shape or form, in you reliably getting what you want either.
I am sorry, I am tired and I am going to tap out of this, but please don’t treat the questions that you are asking as free. They are not, and people put real effort into answering them, and even if your internal experience is that “just asking the question is much easier”, it does not result in total, in reduced cognitive effort, it instead results in many other commenters and authors putting in a lot of unnecessary work.
Even in this situation, I expect that when Vaniver gets around to writing his more extended explanation of authenticity, he will try engaging with you, and then he will give up after a few hours, and you will say you will have gotten very little value from both his posts, and his additional explanations, even after he will have put multiple hours of effort into an explanation that is in significant parts specifically tailored to you.
If I ask for an explanation of a term or concept, and the result is a lengthy answer, or multiple lengthy answers, and yet a lack of understanding—why do you treat this as a failure, or somehow an undesirable result?
To the contrary, it seems quite valuable, to me. It clearly demonstrates that the concept (which was, by assumption, used in the OP without explanation) is not obvious, and not easy to explain. It signals, both to the author and to readers, that here lie complications; that here, hidden behind this term, lurking within this concept—used, and not explained, in the author’s post—are depths, which are not obvious. It shows unambiguously a need to go back, and think carefully about how to communicate the concept; quite probably to write a post about it, or maybe more. It shows to readers that they are not to assume that anything simple and obvious is being referred to. For any readers who are similarly confused as I am, it helps them to articulate their confusion. For the author, it shows what aspects of his thinking isn’t clear, or isn’t clearly communicated; it draws out his assumptions. The result of taking heed of such a discussion is clarity in thought and writing. The result of ignoring it is confusion and error.
This, to you, is a waste? How can it be? You say it “doesn’t work”—what do you think is supposed to be happening?
No, it does not clearly demonstrate that. What it demonstrates is that you, and specifically you, do not understand the concept, and that explaining it to you specifically is difficult. Your confusions do very rarely generalize. Your bafflement is not usually reflective of other people’s bafflement, and you not agreeing with a point is only very minor evidence that other people do not agree. And you being confused or unable to understand a point appears to have very little relation to when an argument actually allows others to make better predictions, and to make use of it to achieve things in the world.
What is supposed to be happening is that authors spend their effort and time on resolving confusions that have any chance of being adequately resolved, and responding to people who have any chance of benefiting from their explanations. The whole thread above with T3t is a perfect example of a confusion that I think very few other people will have, and where the explanations that are being provided are going to be of almost no value (and why I declined to try to give them, since that was a completely predictable outcome of you asking for clarification).
Also quanticle, also nshepperd, and presumably lurkers who upvoted their comments.
I think it’d be fair to read the first paragraph of my post as implicitly setting my hopes for this post as “explaining it to Said.” (In the second paragraph I say I’m not going to fully explain Circling, but if the core analogy that I’m trying to make is missing a crucial detail, that seems quite relevant.)
In a different recent post, I explicitly set my bar as “I ~80% expect this to seem like nonsense.” I don’t know how much of that post seemed like nonsense to Said, but I’d guess ‘a lot’, and nevertheless he left a detailed comment that struck me as a solid example of “yes, and” or “this fuzzy thing seems like it rhymes with the fuzzy thing you said.”
Hmm, I am not sure of this. I agree that both quanticle and nshepperd shared Said’s original question about the meaning of authenticity, but my guess is that they would not share his assessment that the explanation that has been provided by T3t above is completely inadequate or basically provides no further clarification of the pattern at hand, nor do I expect them to agree with Said’s assessment after multiple rounds back and forth with you on the topic of authenticity.
The usual pattern of Said’s comments as I experience them has been (and I think this would be reasonably straightforward to verify):
Said makes a highly upvoted comment asking a question, usually implicitly pointing out something that is unclear to many in the post
Author makes a reasonably highly upvoted reply
Said says that the explanation was basically completely useless to him, this often gets some upvotes, but drastically less than the top-level question
Author tries to clarify some more, this gets much fewer upvotes than the original reply
Said expresses more confusion, this usually gets very few upvotes
More explanations from the author, almost no upvotes
Said expresses more confusion, often being downvoted and the author and others expressing frustration
As I said in my first comment on this thread, I don’t think the original comment is where a lot of the problem lies (and I wouldn’t usually downvote it from most users). The problems usually arise in the follow-up discussion, and in the case of Said, enough authors and users have experienced those follow-up discussions that the problems have backpropagated into a broader aversion to questions like Said’s top-level question.
Just want to provide one data point: that I agree with this.
I have not personally had many back-and-forths with Said, but I’ve read enough of them to have built up a sense of frustration with Said’s communication style.
I find that he sometimes makes good points, but they’re often (usually?) wrapped in a style that I personally find unpleasant.
I’m not sure if I can quickly or exhaustively describe what the problem is—it’s not that the comments are rude, per se. He’s not calling people names or anything so blatant as that. But there’s an attitude that I perceive in them, combined with a set of rhetorical moves that to me seem like bad form.
Maybe a term for the attitude / rhetorical move that I find frustrating would be: “weaponized bafflement”. Said often expresses that he has no idea what someone could mean by something, or is totally shocked that someone could think two things are similar (e.g. grouping both reading the sequences and attending CFAR as rationality training), when to me it seems pretty easy to at least generate some hypotheses about what they might mean or why they might think something.
Of course, noticing confusion is great. Asking for clarification is helpful. But the thing that Said does often strikes me as attempting to pull a “The Emperor has no clothes” move all the time, without being explicit that that’s what he’s doing, or allowing for the possibility that perhaps the emperor does have clothes. I find it tiresome.
I find myself thinking: if you’re so consistently unable to guess what people might mean, or why people might think something, maybe the problem is (at least some of the time) with your imagination.
I think that if requests for clarification or expressions of surprise more consistently seemed to acknowledge that the interlocutor might have a good point that Said is just missing, that would be fine. Instead, the common pattern seems to be an expression of surprise, combined with an implication that the interlocutor is an idiot.
Maybe that’s not what Said means to communicate, but I would find his comments more pleasant to read if they gave a wider berth to such interpretations.
Who cares who “the problem” is with? Text is supposed to be understood. The thing that attracted me to the Sequences to begin with was sensible, comprehensible and coherent explanations of complex concepts. Are we giving up on this? Or are people who value clear language and want to avoid misunderstandings (and may even be, dare I say, neuroatypical) no longer part of the target group, but instead someone to be suspicious of?
The Sequences exist to provide a canon of shared information and terminology to reference. If you can’t explain something without referencing a term that is evidently not shared by everyone, and that you don’t just not bother to define but react with hostility when pressed on, then … frankly, I don’t think that behavior is in keeping with the spirit of this blog.
Let me restate my core claims:
1) I think “I am having trouble understanding what you mean, the best guess I can come up with is X.” is far more conducive to getting to clarity than “I have no idea what you mean.” even when X feels quite unlikely to be what the person actually meant.
I am not asking the reader to read the mind of the author. I am asking them to generate at least one hypothesis about what the author might mean.
Do not forget the lesson of the Double Illusion of Transparency—just as the author will think they have communicated clearly when they have not, someone asking a question will also think the question is clear when it has not in fact been understood.
2) Asking for clarification as a form of criticism is bad form (or at lease is a move that should be used sparingly).
Perhaps you suspect the author’s thoughts are muddled and that shining the light of clarification on what they’ve written will expose this fact. You can say, “What do you mean by X?” And perhaps you will catch them in an error.
However, doing this all the time is annoying! Especially if it’s unclear to the author whether you in fact are trying to work towards mutual understanding, or are simply playing gotcha.
If you think the author might have something meaningful that they are saying, then offering your best hypothesis will work far better for finding out what it is.
And if you don’t think there’s anything to what they’re saying, it’s a bit disingenuous to state your criticism in the form of a question.
I’m actually having a little trouble expressing this second point, because I do think there’s a place for Socratic questioning, which can be very helpful. I just think there are ways to do it that are more collaborative, polite, illuminating, and other ways that are unpleasant and adversarial.
The best rule I can come up with at the moment is: If you’re going to be in collaborative mode, offer hypotheses, and if you’re going to be in adversarial mode, don’t pretend to be in collaborative mode.
I think this once again presupposes a lot of unestablished consensus: for one, that it’s trivial for people to generate hypotheses for undefined words, that this is a worthwhile skill to begin with, and that this is a proper approach to begin with. I don’t think that a post author should get to impose this level of ideological conformance onto a commenter, and it weirds me out how much the people on this site now seem to be agreeing that Said deserves censure for (verbosely and repeatedly) disagreeing with this position.
And then it seems to be doing a lot of high-distance inference from presuming a “typical” mindset on Said’s part and figuring out a lot of implications as to what they were doing, which is exactly the thing that Said wanted to avoid by not guessing a definition? Thus kind of proving their point?
More importantly, I at least consider providing hypotheses as to a definition as obviously supererogatory. If you don’t know the meaning of a word in a text, then the meaning may be either obvious or obscured; the risk you take by asking is wasting somebody’s time for no reason. But I consider it far from shown that giving a hypothesis shortens this time at all, and more importantly, there is none such Schelling point established and thus it seems a stretch of propriety to demand it as if it was an agreed upon convention. Certainly the work to establish it as a convention should be done before the readership breaks out the mass downvotes; I mean seriously- what the fuck, LessWrong?
I want to clarify that asking about the meanings of particular words is not the main thing I’m talking about (even though that was the example at the top of this whole thread).
Said expresses bafflement at all sorts of things that people say. If it was always, “what do you mean by this specific word?” that would be a very different pattern.
Or if it was always expressing genuine curiosity, as opposed to making a rhetorical point, that would also be a very different pattern.
I am particularly complaining about the pattern of expressing surprise / confusion in a way that seems to be making a rhetorical point rather than seeking genuine understanding.
However, on the topic of words in particular, I do think that simply asking, “What does X mean?” is usually not the best path forward.
Consider three cases:
X is a term you’re not familiar with (and you haven’t looked it up yet)
X is a term you’re not familiar with, so you’ve looked it up, but the definitions don’t seem to match the way it’s being used
X is a common term that seems to be used in a weird way
For which of these cases does it make sense to just write, “What do you mean by X?”
1) For case 1, it seems most respectful of others’ time to just google the term. If that answers your question, consider also leaving a comment saying, “For others who weren’t familiar with X, it means …”
2) For case 2, I’d recommend saying that you’ve looked it up and the definitions don’t seem to match. Otherwise you might just get one of the standard definitions back when someone replies to your comment and still be confused. Also this lets others know that you’re extending them the courtesy recommended in case 1.
3) For case 3, I think it depends on the specific case, and how non-standard the usage is.
3A) If you’re confident that the usage is as a technical term of art, such that when it’s pointed out, the author will say, “Ah, you’re right, I’m using that in a non-standard way. I mean …” then just asking how it’s being used seems like a fine way to go. (However, I do think it’s easy to overestimate the odds that the author will understand why you find it confusing. They may be in a bubble where everyone uses that term in that way all the time.)
3B) In a case where the author might not realize that everyone wouldn’t be familiar with the particular usage, then I think it’s helpful to say something specific about how you interpret the word and what seems off about the usage. That way they’ll have a better idea what to say to resolve the confusion.
The particular case of “authentic” at the top of this thread seems like kind of a border case between 3A and 3B. Everyone reading this should be familiar with what “authentic” means in a variety of contexts. And it’s not exactly being used as a non-standard term-of-art, but it is doing a lot of work in the post, so it does seem reasonable to poke at it for a clearer picture.
I think the ideal version of Said’s question would be the one that mentioned applause lights and “healthy” as a possible substitute. That one made it a lot clearer what the issue with the usage of a fairly common term was.
But I would agree that generating that level of comment instead of a short question is supererogatory, and I wouldn’t downvote Said’s original question. (Though since Said was the one asking it, I might find myself wondering if the discussion following the comment was going to fit the pattern of rhetorical bafflement that I’ve been annoyed by before.)
I don’t think it’s so implausible for some people to be significantly more baffled by some things that we must interpret it as an attack. An unusually large imposition of costs is not inherently an attack! May as well blame the disabled for dastardly forcing us to waste money on wheelchair ramps.
I do not believe that Said is unable to generate hypotheses in all the cases where he expresses bafflement / indignation. I believe it is (at least partially) a rhetorical move.
If people pretended to need wheelchairs to prove a point, we’d be right to blame them for forcing us to spend resources on them.
I remind readers to review the “Taboo your words” posts of the Human’s Guide to Words sequence. Asking for the meaning of words, even common words, is a rationalist’s truth finding technique. It’s not something to be persecuted.
I agree, but as I put it in the great-grandparent comment:
It’s more a pattern of expressing surprise / indignation as a rhetorical move. Here is an example, where he’s not asking for clarification, but still doing the surprise / indignation thing.
You might think that comment is perfectly fine, and even from my perspective in any one single comment, it’s often no big deal. But when surprised indignation is basically your tone in seemingly almost every thread, I eventually find it annoying.
You’re right, I do find that comment to be fine. But then I have a similar approach to truth seeking myself, and I find it tremendously effective.
Part of the background I bring to this is that some of the best rationalist thinkers and mentors I’ve met in my own life had a profound impact on me simply because they asked the necessary pointed questions and let me figure out the answer, or were willing to unabashedly share a contrasting opinion. Everyone’s learning styles are different, but for me this worked remarkably well. Said is doing something similar, so I see it as a valuable contribution.
I appreciate hearing this counterpoint.
I wish there was a way to get the benefit of Said’s pointed questioning w/o readers like me being so frustrated by the style. I suspect that relatively subtle tweaks to the style could make a big difference. But I’m not exactly sure how to get there from here.
For now all I can think of is to note that some users, like Wei Dai, ask lots of pointed and clarifying questions and never provoke in me the same kind of frustration that many of Said’s comments do.
Why should Said be the one to change, though? Maybe relatively subtle tweaks to your reading style could make a big difference.
A “surprised bafflement” tone is often seen as a social attack because it’s perceived as implying, “You should know this already, therefore I’m surprised that you don’t, therefore I should have higher status than you.” But that’s not the only possible narrative. What happens if you reframe your reaction as, “He’s surprised, but surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis—the fact that he’s so cluelessly self-centered as to not be able to predict what other people know means that I should have higher status”?
Good question. When there are conflicts over norms, it’s not obvious how to resolve them in general. I suppose the easy, though less preferred, solution would be some kind of appeal to the will of the majority, or to an authority. The harder, but better, way would be an appeal to a deeper set of shared norms. I’m not sure how tractable that is in this case though.
This is in fact often my reaction. But I will note that neither social attacks nor the writings of clueless self-centered people are particularly fun to read. (Especially not when it seems to be both.)
That may be stating it overly harshly. I do think Said is an intelligent person and often has good points to make. And I find it valuable to learn that others are getting a lot of value from his comments.
The signal to noise (not exactly the right term) ratio has not seemed particularly favorable to me though. But perhaps there’s yet some different reframing that I could do to be less frustrated (in addition to whatever changes Said might make).
Why should we have one set of norms at all? Should we really be driving towards cultural unity? Isn’t it okay for there to be subsets of people who drive differently? Just learn to ignore what you don’t find useful.
When designing norms, we should take into account an asymmetry between reading and writing: each comment is only written once, but read many times. Each norm imposed on writers to not be unduly annoying constrains the information flow of the forum much more than each norm imposed on readers to not be unduly annoyed.
Driving away other writers with annoyingness also constrains the flow of information. Trade-offs abound!
To me this particular move is part of a broader pattern used by Said and a few other common posters on here of using the Socratic method to make their point, which is frequently time consuming, annoying to answer, and IMO a bad tool for finding the truth.
Whenever I detect someone using the Socratic method in the comment section of my posts I ask them to more directly make their point, and in fact may add it to my author commenting guidelines.
This worries me because of double illusion of transparency concerns. That is, one frame we could have here is that Said is virtuously refusing to pretend to understand anything he doesn’t understand. Suppose the version of “authentic” that is necessary to make this post work is actually quite detailed and nuanced, in ways that T3t’s guess don’t quite get at; then it seems like T3t and I might mistakenly believe that communication has taken place when it actually hasn’t, whereas Said and I will have no such illusions.
If there are problems with this situation, I think they come from differing people having different expectations of how bad it is to not have communicated something to Said, and I think we fix that by aligning those expectations.
This lines up with a model where Said is being especially rigorous when it comes to dependencies, and the audience isn’t, and the audience has some random scattering of dependencies where each further reply is only useful to a smaller fraction of the population. It also is explained by people becoming more and more pessimistic that communication will happen, and so not tuning in to the tree to follow things.
T3t’s explanations seem quite useless to me. The procedure they describe seems highly unlikely to reach anything like a correct interpretation of anything, being basically a random walk in concept space.
It’s hard to see what “I don’t understand what you meant by X, also here’s a set of completely wrong definitions I arrived at by free association starting at X” could possibly add over “I don’t understand what you meant by X”, apart from wasting everyone’s time redirecting attention onto a priori wrong interpretations.
I’m also somewhat alarmed to see people on this site advocating the sort of reasoning by superficial analogy we see here:
So, overall, I’m not very impressed, no.
To reiterate, I don’t explicitly use anything like the procedures I described in my posts to do any sort of interpretation. I came up with them to use as levers to attempt bridging the inferential distance between Said and I; I agree that in practice trying to use those models explicitly would be extremely error-prone (probably better than a random walk, but maybe not by much).
More salient to the point at hand: you understood (to a sufficient degree) the models I was describing, and your criticisms contain information about your understanding of those models. If for whatever reason I wanted to continue discussing those models, those two things being true would make it possible for me to respond further (with clarifications, questions about your interpretations, etc).
Alas, then that guess of mine was probably wrong, but thank you for clarifying your position. In that case I will have to admit that I am arguing for a change in norms that you will also likely perceive to be worse.
To be clear though, you have given an argument against the procedure that T3t has described. The question at hand was whether their explanation helped you come to better understand the procedure (independently of whether you agree with it). It seems to me that you did indeed come to better understand the procedure in question, though my guess is there are still significant misunderstandings left. Is your sense that your model of the kind of procedure that me and T3t are advocating for has stayed the same after reading their comment?
If I read “authentic relationship”, “a relationship which is built on honest premises and communication (i.e. neither party has lied or misled the other about their background, motivations, or relevant personality characteristics)” is my first guess as to what that would mean. My question is: are you incapable of performing this sort of “decryption work” (as in, the examples you generated are your best effort), or is your chief complaint that it’s effortful and error-prone (as in, you could have extrapolated something similar to what I did, but you believe that doing so is epistemically unjustified)?
I am advocating for this because, in practice, this seems to minimize the amount of time and communication necessary to make sure both parties are on the same page w.r.t. the definitions of terms used and the intent behind what is being communicated. The way you ask questions reveals almost nothing about the state of your mental map of the subject of discussion (what you think the boundaries are, how you think it corresponds to the surrounding context, etc). This increases the amount of communication required to answer your question much more than linearly—you know “where” you are confused much better than the author. The author can guess, but the author is dealing with the entire possibility space of things you can be confused about; the amount of work that can go into resolving that confusion is unbounded. However, if you put forth your interpretation, then ask for clarification/correction, the author has a much more constrained space to explore to attempt to diagnose where your map is insufficiently well-specified/pointing at the wrong thing/has some other conflict with the author’s map. ~Linear time for you to come up with the most straightforward possible interpretation (contingent on you actually being able to do so—still not clear to what degree this is a disagreement in the allowable degree of inference), + ~linear time for the author to identify mistakes, vs 0 time for you + unbounded time for the author.
The problem I’m having with trying to respond to the rest of your post (and the previous one in the thread) is that I don’t feel like I have a better sense of your position on the more critical underlying issues now than when I first replied.
I will try to be more specific still, though I will be leaning on concepts similar to those in ML, such as embeddings, vectors, dimensionality, etc. I can try to find another set of concepts if this doesn’t translate well enough. (I already tried to come up with an analogy with interfaces & generics in the software engineering sense, but couldn’t actually come up with a coherent model without bringing in intersection types, at which point I gave up. Maybe that gives you some idea of what I was going for anyways.) When you performed the substitutions for “authentic”, it looks like you traveled the smallest possible distance away from the “authentic” node, and not in the direction of any cluster of nodes that would be closer to (or have higher connective weight with, if you prefer) “relationship” (or “expression”, or “reaction”). Naturally, the node you landed on fit the surrounding context about as well as a square peg in a round hole.
Now, to be absolutely clear, when you say that “authentic” has no standard meaning, are you claiming that “authentic” is equidistant from every other node in your graph (of all possible concepts)? I feel like we’ve ruled that out, but I’m not 100% sure; if that is the case then the direction I’m going in with the rest of this is probably fruitless.
If not, if you do indeed have a graph with concepts that are much closer to “authentic” than other concepts, then some of the concepts in the “authentic”-adjacent cluster will likewise be much closer to the “relationship” node along many dimensions than most of the others. What are those dimensions? Relationships have many properties and embedded concepts: participants, duration, style, etc. The dimensions we could say are relevant for linking together “authentic” and “relationship” would be more granular, likely describing the terms on which the participants engaged in the relationship, and the style of communication they use. If you refuse to traverse the graph to any appreciable degree (and make public where you landed; ideally also the path you followed), it’s much harder for anybody else to help you. It’s not clear at which level of linguistic abstraction the disconnect is—you could be missing the “authentic” node altogether (solved by dictionary), you could be missing connections from “authentic” to “honest” to “honesty about self” (don’t think this is the problem; not clear how to solve this if it is), you could be asserting that those connections in your graph have equal weights to, say, the connections from “authentic” to “tangerine” to “random number generator”, so there’s literally no way for you to privilege the first set when trying to trace a path from “authentic” to “relationship”, because you have no idea which direction to go looking in (don’t think this is the problem either), or you could be asserting that the first set of connections do indeed have heavier weights, but not to a sufficient degree (if there is any such degree) that you would feel justified in traversing those nodes.
EDIT: I want to note that I started writing this comment well before Habryka posted his response. It strikes me that he hit on some very similar things (at one point I edited out a sentence that called your initial question “underspecified”; it’s not that it wasn’t an accurate description of my feelings on the subject, but I decided to taboo that word because I thought of a better way to explain what I thought the problem was).
I don’t know how you generated that guess, so my answer can only be the former.
As for the rest of your comment, I find it baffling. Nothing resembling what you describe is how I think when interpreting people’s writing (nor, as far as am aware, does anyone else I know think like this). In any case, if this is the type and amount of thought necessary to interpret a term used in a post, then I must say, even more emphatically, that such interpretation attempts are ill-advised. There is just no way such efforts can be justified.
But there is an even simpler response to make. Namely: suppose that your guess (quoted above) had been right; suppose that Vaniver, when he said “authentic relationship”, had indeed meant “a relationship which is built on …” (etc.).
Would it not be easy for him simply to say that? Wouldn’t that have been the easiest thing in the world? Why would he have needed to know anything about the “shape of my confusion”, or my mental models, or any such thing?
(Now, as it turns out, the actual meaning of ‘authentic’, as used in the OP, was rather more complicated. But that is a separate matter entirely!)
I was not describing the process I use to interpret novel linguistic compositions such as “authentic relationship”—my brain does that under the hood, automatically, in a process that is fairly opaque to me; despite that, the results are sufficiently accurate that I don’t spend hours trying to resolve minutiae, even in highly complex technical domains.
I was attempting to use an analogy with word embeddings in multi-dimensional space to explain why the way you approach information-gathering has asymmetrical costs. I can’t come up with another analogy, because your response is totally non-informative with respect to how/why/where my first analogy failed to land. Did you notice that you didn’t even tell me whether you’re familiar with the concepts used? I have literally zero bytes of information with which to attempt to generate a more targeted analogy.
This doesn’t really seem material to the point I was trying to discuss, but (I imagine) it’s because there can be a trade-off between density and precision when trying to convey information. (And, also, how is he supposed to know which parts of his post are going to be incomprehensible to which people? Again, one could put in an unbounded amount of effort into specifying with ever more clarity and precision exactly what they mean by every word.)
Your response to Habryka also seems to not materially respond to his main points (the grossly asymmetrical effort involved, and the fact that the time spent is not free, it is traded off against other pursuits).
You list certain outcomes you consider beneficial, but “things are not easy to explain and have hidden complexities” is true for literally everything given a sufficient level of desired precision. It is a fully general argument in favor of asking arbitrarily vague questions.
EDIT: I did want to thank you for your straightforward answer here:
That, at least, would let me move the conversation forward with a tentative conclusion for that question, but unfortunately that answer seems to imply sufficiently different mental machinery that I’m a bit stuck regardless. I’ll come back to this if I come up with something exceptionally clever to try to solve that problem, I suppose.
Just want to point out that I think that simply adding the following to your original comment would have been a marginal improvement:
That is, if your comment had been, “‘Authentic’ seems like it’s often used as an applause light to me. Can you say more about specifically what you mean by it in this context?” I think that would have been an improvement over the original comment.
I agree with others that just saying, “What do you mean by X?” When X is a common, well-known word can often be insufficient for making it easy for the author to figure out what to say in reply.
It’s Double Illusion of Transparency all the way down. :P
Thank you! At least I endorse this as a pretty accurate summary of what I am trying to point to.
FWIW, that wasn’t my interpretation of quanticle’s comment at all. My reading is that “healthy” was not meant as a proposed interpretation of “authentic” but as an illustrative substitution demonstrating the content-freeness of this use of the word—because the post doesn’t get any more or less convincing when you replace “authentic” with different words.
This is similar to what EY does in Applause Lights itself, where he replaces words with their opposites to demonstrate that sentences are uninformative.
(As an interpretation, it would also be rather barren, and not particularly ‘concrete’ either: obviously “‘authentic’ means ‘healthy’” just raises the question of what ‘healthy’ means in this context!)
Yes, to be clear, I agree with this. I would count that substitution as a possible interpretation of the word (in particular an interpretation of it being basically just an applause light), but I don’t care too much about quibbling about words here.
Meaning no offense to quanticle (and casting no aspersions on the rest of his comment), but I have no idea what the heck he meant with the quoted bit. That substitution seems to me to be entirely out of left field. I don’t see it as plausible even in retrospect.
nods I am surprised to hear that, but in that case I do sadly see little way of making progress on this, and can only continue to request you to leave the relevant commenting and question-asking to people in the reference class of quanticle then.