I note that we, as a culture, have reified a term for this, which is “sealioning.”
Naming the problem is not solving the problem; sticking a label on something is not the same as winning an argument; the tricky part is in determining which commentary is reasonably described by the term and which isn’t (and which is controversial, or costly-but-useful, and so forth).
But as I read through this whole comment chain, I noticed that I kept wanting Oliver to be able to say the short, simple sentence:
“My past experience has led me to have a prior that threads from you beginning like this turn out to be sealioning way more often than similar threads from other people.”
Note that that’s my model of Oliver; the real Oliver has not actually expressed that [edit: exact] sentiment [edit: in those exact words] and may have critical disagreements with my model of him, or critical caveats regarding the use of the term.
I note that we, as a culture, have reified a term for this, which is “sealioning.”
Perhaps in your culture. In my culture, use of the term “sealioning” is primarily understood as an expression of anti-intellectualism (framing requests for dialogue as aggression).
In my culture, while the need to say “I don’t expect engaging with you to be productive, therefore I must decline this and all future requests for dialogue from you” is not unheard of, it is seen as a sad and unusual occasion—definitely not something meriting a short codeword with connotations of contempt.
What I meant by the word “our” was “the broader context culture-at-large,” not Less Wrong or my own personal home culture or anything like that. Apologies, that could’ve been clearer.
I think there’s another point on the spectrum (plane?) that’s neither “overt anti-intellectualism” nor “It seems to me that engaging with you will be unproductive and I should disengage.” That point being something like, “It’s reasonable and justified to conclude that this questioning isn’t going to be productive to the overall goal of the discussion, and is either motivated-by or will-result-in some other effect entirely.”
Something stronger than “I’m disengaging according to my own boundaries” and more like “this is subtly but significantly transgressive, by abusing structures that are in place for epistemic inquiry.”
If the term “sealioning” is too tainted by connotation to serve, then it’s clearly the wrong word to use; TIL. But I disagree that we don’t need or shouldn’t have any short, simple handle in this concept space; it still seems useful to me to be able to label the hypothesis without (as Oliver did) having to write words and words and words and words. The analogy to the usefulness of the term “witchhunt” was carefully chosen; it’s the sort of thing that’s hard to see at first, and once you’ve put forth the effort to see it, it’s worth … idk, cacheing or something?
What I meant by the word “our” was “the broader context culture-at-large,” not Less Wrong or my own personal home culture or anything like that. Apologies, that could’ve been clearer.
No, I got that, I was just using the opportunity to riff off your “In My Culture” piece[1] while defending Said, who is a super valuable commenter who I think is being treated pretty unfairly in this 133-comment-and-counting meta trainwreck!
Sure, sometimes he’s insistent on pressing for rigor in a way could seem “nitpicky” or “dense” to readers who, like me, are more likely to just shrug and say, “Meh, I think I mostly get the gist of what the author is trying to say” rather than honing in on a particular word or phrase and writing a comment asking for clarification.
But that’s valuable. I am glad that a website nominally devoted to mastering the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition to the degree of precision required to write a recursively self-improving superintelligence to rule over our entire future lightcone has people whose innate need for rigor is more demanding than my sense of “Meh, I think I mostly get the gist”!
while defending Said, who is a super valuable commenter
Just wanted to note that, as a person who often finds Said’s style off-putting, I appreciate reading this counterpoint from you.
EDIT: In my ideal world, Said can find a way to still be nitpick-y and insistent on precision and rigor in a way that doesn’t frustrate me (and other readers) so much. I am unfortunately not exactly sure how to get to there from here.
Note that at least from the little I have read about the term, this seems like a reasonable stance to me, and my guess (as the person who instigated this thread) is that it is indeed better to avoid importing the existing connotations that term has.
My guess is that the term is still fine to bring up as something to be analyzed at a distance (e.g. asking questions like “why did people feel the need to invent the term sealioning?”), but my sense is that it’s better to not apply it directly to a person or interlocutor, given its set of associations.
This is a relatively weakly held position of mine though, given that I only learned about that term yesterday, so I don’t have a great map of its meanings and connotations.
Edit: I do want to say that the summary of “I don’t expect engaging with you to be productive, therefore I must decline this and all future requests for dialogue from you” doesn’t strike me as a very accurate summary of what people usually mean by sealioning. I don’t think it matters much for my response, but I figured I would point out that I disagree with that summary.
There was a mention of moderation regarding the term sealioning, so I’m addressing that. (We’re not yet addressing the thread-as-a-whole, but may do so later).
In general, it’s important to be able to give names to things. I looked into how the term sealioning seems to be defined and used on the internet-as-a-whole. It seems to have a lot of baggage, including (if used to refer to comments on LessWrong) false connotations about what sort of place LessWrong is and what behavior is appropriate on LessWrong. However, this baggage was not common knowledge. I see little reason to think those connotations were known or intended by Duncan. So, this looks to me look a good-faith proposal of terminology, but the terminology itself seems bad.
“Sealioning” is attempting to participate in “reasoned discourse” in a way that is insensitive to the appropriateness of the setting and to the buy-in of the other party. (Importantly, not “costs” of reasoned discourse; they are polite in some ways, like “oh sure, we can take an hour break for breakfast”.) People who have especially low buy-in to reasoned discourse use the word to paint the person asking for clarification as the oppressor, and themselves the victim. Importantly, they view attempting to have reasoned discourse as oppression. Thus it blends “not tracking buy-in” and “caring about reasoning over feelings” in a way that makes them challenging to unblend.
The part of sealioning that’s about setting can’t really apply to comments on LW. In the comic that originated the term, a sealion intrudes on a private conversation, follows them around and trespasses in their house; but LessWrong frontpage is a public space for public dialogue, so a LessWrong comment can’t have that problem no matter what it is.
So, conversational dynamics are worth talking about, and I do think there’s something in this space worth reifying with a term, preferably in a more abstract setting.
Huh, I am confused. I have expressed that sentiment multiple times. Here are the quotes:
My very first comment in the thread:
I wouldn’t downvote this comment for most users, but since I’ve seen a lot of threads of this type that were started by you played out, I am more confident than usual about whether I expect the resulting conversation to be valuable, and so feel more comfortable downvoting based on that.
Other occurrences:
As I mentioned in many other places, I am also very confident that dozens of authors have perceived Said’s comments to primarily be social attacks, and have found them to be major obstacles to engaging with LessWrong. Obviously basically all of these comments were on past threads, and not this specific thread, so there is a good chance that I am misunderstanding what precisely is causing their discomfort, but I am reasonably confident that I am identifying this instance as a correct example of the pattern that these authors point me to.
And:
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:
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.
And to say it very explicitly here. Yes, I am arguing that contextless questions specifically from Said turn out to waste a lot of people’s time and cause a lot of frustration in a highly predictable way.
I don’t have enough context about how “sealioning” is used to judge whether that’s a good fit for this situation, or how politicized that term is, so I don’t think I want to use that term (I had not actually encountered it until yesterday). Though the basic description on Wikipedia seems to relatively accurately describe at least the experience of people engaging with Said (independently of whether it describes the intentions of Said himself).
I agree that you’ve said this multiple times, in multiple places; I wanted you to be able to say it shortly and simply. To be able to do something analogous to saying “from where I’m currently standing, this looks to me like a witchhunt” rather than having to spell out, in many different sentences, what a witchhunt is and why it’s bad and how this situation resembles that one.
My caveats and hedges were mainly not wanting to be seen as putting words in your mouth, or presupposing your endorsement of the particular short sentence I proposed.
In general, I don’t think we’re going to have a moderator response time of ~4 hours (which is about how long Duncan’s comment had been up when you wrote yours). However, seeing a call for moderator action, we are going to be reviewing this thread and discussing what if anything to do here.
I’ve spent the last few hours catching up on the comments here. While Vaniver and Habryka have been participating in this thread and are site moderators, this seems like a case where moderation decisions should be made by people with more distance.
Hmm, my guess is you are misunderstanding the comment? I don’t think the above accuses you or anyone else of sealioning (I am also not super familiar with the term, as I said below, so I don’t think I know its full connotations).
It is bringing into the discussion a term that other people might have found useful, and from what I can tell opening up a discussion of whether that term makes sense to use in this context. In particular the comment explicitly says:
Naming the problem is not solving the problem; sticking a label on something is not the same as winning an argument; the tricky part is in determining which commentary is reasonably described by the term and which isn’t (and which is controversial, or costly-but-useful, and so forth).
I mean, I think I agree with you that (from the few minutes of reading I’ve done about that term) I very likely don’t want us to use the term in the way it is used in most of the rest of the internet. I do think it’s pointing at a real cluster of people’s experiences, so I don’t think I want to ban mention of that term completely from LessWrong. It seems valid for people to look at that term and see whether it helps them makes sense of some experiences, and in any case its use is at least a valid sociological phenomenon that people can analyze.
Edit: I think my feelings here are somewhat similar to Nazi comparisons or something like that. I think sometimes someone actions are indeed somewhat similar to the historical activities of nazis, and it’s sometimes fine to bring that up as a comparison, but I in the vast majority of cases I prefer others to use a less loaded and less-frequently-misused comparison. Again, I don’t know to what degree sealioning falls into that category, but your reaction suggests that you perceive it to have a similar history of misuse, so I think there might be a good argument here to avoid using that term unless really necessary. Though other users and moderators who have more context might want to chime in on what rules we want to have here.
I’m sorry, but it is entirely implausible to construe Duncan’s comment as not being an accusation. I no longer have any interest in doing the usual song-and-dance about how he didn’t literally say the specific sequence of words “Said is sealioning”, and so what he actually meant was something very nuanced and subtle and definitely, absolutely didn’t mean to actually accuse me, etc., etc.
(As for the word itself, and the concept behind it—I have found that its (unironic, non-quoted) use is an infallible indicator of bad faith. Zack’s characterization of the term is much too charitable.)
I thought the comment was pretty clear that it was trying to give a summary of my comments, and a suggestion for how I should phrase my comment in order to better get my point across. A suggestion which (at least for the case of the use of “sealioning”) I disagreed with.
I agree with you that there was an implicature in Duncan’s comment that he thought the term was an accurate characterization, though I am actually and honestly not that confident Duncan actually believes that the term accurately describes your commenting patterns (in addition to it accurately describing my model of your commenting patterns). I would currently give it about 75% probability, but not more.
In general, I think implicatures of this type should be treated differently than outright accusations, though I also don’t think they should be completely ignored.
On a more general note, since the term appears to be a relatively niche term that I haven’t heard before, it seems to me that the correct way for us to deal with this, would be for people to say openly what connotations the term has to them, and if enough people agree that the term has unhelpful connotations, then avoid using the term. I don’t think we should harshly punish introducing a term like this if there isn’t an established precedent of the connotations of that term.
I think it would be a mistake for us to use that term here; I think as well as describing a pattern of behavior it comes with an implied interpretation of blameworthiness that we really don’t want to import.
I note that we, as a culture, have reified a term for this, which is “sealioning.”
Naming the problem is not solving the problem; sticking a label on something is not the same as winning an argument; the tricky part is in determining which commentary is reasonably described by the term and which isn’t (and which is controversial, or costly-but-useful, and so forth).
But as I read through this whole comment chain, I noticed that I kept wanting Oliver to be able to say the short, simple sentence:
“My past experience has led me to have a prior that threads from you beginning like this turn out to be sealioning way more often than similar threads from other people.”
Note that that’s my model of Oliver; the real Oliver has not actually expressed that [edit: exact] sentiment [edit: in those exact words] and may have critical disagreements with my model of him, or critical caveats regarding the use of the term.
Perhaps in your culture. In my culture, use of the term “sealioning” is primarily understood as an expression of anti-intellectualism (framing requests for dialogue as aggression).
In my culture, while the need to say “I don’t expect engaging with you to be productive, therefore I must decline this and all future requests for dialogue from you” is not unheard of, it is seen as a sad and unusual occasion—definitely not something meriting a short codeword with connotations of contempt.
What I meant by the word “our” was “the broader context culture-at-large,” not Less Wrong or my own personal home culture or anything like that. Apologies, that could’ve been clearer.
I think there’s another point on the spectrum (plane?) that’s neither “overt anti-intellectualism” nor “It seems to me that engaging with you will be unproductive and I should disengage.” That point being something like, “It’s reasonable and justified to conclude that this questioning isn’t going to be productive to the overall goal of the discussion, and is either motivated-by or will-result-in some other effect entirely.”
Something stronger than “I’m disengaging according to my own boundaries” and more like “this is subtly but significantly transgressive, by abusing structures that are in place for epistemic inquiry.”
If the term “sealioning” is too tainted by connotation to serve, then it’s clearly the wrong word to use; TIL. But I disagree that we don’t need or shouldn’t have any short, simple handle in this concept space; it still seems useful to me to be able to label the hypothesis without (as Oliver did) having to write words and words and words and words. The analogy to the usefulness of the term “witchhunt” was carefully chosen; it’s the sort of thing that’s hard to see at first, and once you’ve put forth the effort to see it, it’s worth … idk, cacheing or something?
No, I got that, I was just using the opportunity to riff off your “In My Culture” piece[1] while defending Said, who is a super valuable commenter who I think is being treated pretty unfairly in this 133-comment-and-counting meta trainwreck!
Sure, sometimes he’s insistent on pressing for rigor in a way could seem “nitpicky” or “dense” to readers who, like me, are more likely to just shrug and say, “Meh, I think I mostly get the gist of what the author is trying to say” rather than honing in on a particular word or phrase and writing a comment asking for clarification.
But that’s valuable. I am glad that a website nominally devoted to mastering the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition to the degree of precision required to write a recursively self-improving superintelligence to rule over our entire future lightcone has people whose innate need for rigor is more demanding than my sense of “Meh, I think I mostly get the gist”!
This is actually the second time in four months. Sorry, it writes itself!
Just wanted to note that, as a person who often finds Said’s style off-putting, I appreciate reading this counterpoint from you.
EDIT: In my ideal world, Said can find a way to still be nitpick-y and insistent on precision and rigor in a way that doesn’t frustrate me (and other readers) so much. I am unfortunately not exactly sure how to get to there from here.
Note that at least from the little I have read about the term, this seems like a reasonable stance to me, and my guess (as the person who instigated this thread) is that it is indeed better to avoid importing the existing connotations that term has.
My guess is that the term is still fine to bring up as something to be analyzed at a distance (e.g. asking questions like “why did people feel the need to invent the term sealioning?”), but my sense is that it’s better to not apply it directly to a person or interlocutor, given its set of associations.
This is a relatively weakly held position of mine though, given that I only learned about that term yesterday, so I don’t have a great map of its meanings and connotations.
Edit: I do want to say that the summary of “I don’t expect engaging with you to be productive, therefore I must decline this and all future requests for dialogue from you” doesn’t strike me as a very accurate summary of what people usually mean by sealioning. I don’t think it matters much for my response, but I figured I would point out that I disagree with that summary.
There was a mention of moderation regarding the term sealioning, so I’m addressing that. (We’re not yet addressing the thread-as-a-whole, but may do so later).
In general, it’s important to be able to give names to things. I looked into how the term sealioning seems to be defined and used on the internet-as-a-whole. It seems to have a lot of baggage, including (if used to refer to comments on LessWrong) false connotations about what sort of place LessWrong is and what behavior is appropriate on LessWrong. However, this baggage was not common knowledge. I see little reason to think those connotations were known or intended by Duncan. So, this looks to me look a good-faith proposal of terminology, but the terminology itself seems bad.
“Sealioning” is attempting to participate in “reasoned discourse” in a way that is insensitive to the appropriateness of the setting and to the buy-in of the other party. (Importantly, not “costs” of reasoned discourse; they are polite in some ways, like “oh sure, we can take an hour break for breakfast”.) People who have especially low buy-in to reasoned discourse use the word to paint the person asking for clarification as the oppressor, and themselves the victim. Importantly, they view attempting to have reasoned discourse as oppression. Thus it blends “not tracking buy-in” and “caring about reasoning over feelings” in a way that makes them challenging to unblend.
The part of sealioning that’s about setting can’t really apply to comments on LW. In the comic that originated the term, a sealion intrudes on a private conversation, follows them around and trespasses in their house; but LessWrong frontpage is a public space for public dialogue, so a LessWrong comment can’t have that problem no matter what it is.
So, conversational dynamics are worth talking about, and I do think there’s something in this space worth reifying with a term, preferably in a more abstract setting.
Huh, I am confused. I have expressed that sentiment multiple times. Here are the quotes:
My very first comment in the thread:
Other occurrences:
And:
And:
And to say it very explicitly here. Yes, I am arguing that contextless questions specifically from Said turn out to waste a lot of people’s time and cause a lot of frustration in a highly predictable way.
I don’t have enough context about how “sealioning” is used to judge whether that’s a good fit for this situation, or how politicized that term is, so I don’t think I want to use that term (I had not actually encountered it until yesterday). Though the basic description on Wikipedia seems to relatively accurately describe at least the experience of people engaging with Said (independently of whether it describes the intentions of Said himself).
I agree that you’ve said this multiple times, in multiple places; I wanted you to be able to say it shortly and simply. To be able to do something analogous to saying “from where I’m currently standing, this looks to me like a witchhunt” rather than having to spell out, in many different sentences, what a witchhunt is and why it’s bad and how this situation resembles that one.
My caveats and hedges were mainly not wanting to be seen as putting words in your mouth, or presupposing your endorsement of the particular short sentence I proposed.
nods Cool, that clarifies it.
… “sealioning”?
This is what Less Wrong is, now? Accusing people of ‘sealioning’? This is permitted, and receives neither massive downvotes nor moderator censure?
I said before that I disagreed with namespace’s view of the site. I was wrong; he was right.
Moderator hat on.
In general, I don’t think we’re going to have a moderator response time of ~4 hours (which is about how long Duncan’s comment had been up when you wrote yours). However, seeing a call for moderator action, we are going to be reviewing this thread and discussing what if anything to do here.
I’ve spent the last few hours catching up on the comments here. While Vaniver and Habryka have been participating in this thread and are site moderators, this seems like a case where moderation decisions should be made by people with more distance.
Hmm, my guess is you are misunderstanding the comment? I don’t think the above accuses you or anyone else of sealioning (I am also not super familiar with the term, as I said below, so I don’t think I know its full connotations).
It is bringing into the discussion a term that other people might have found useful, and from what I can tell opening up a discussion of whether that term makes sense to use in this context. In particular the comment explicitly says:
I mean, I think I agree with you that (from the few minutes of reading I’ve done about that term) I very likely don’t want us to use the term in the way it is used in most of the rest of the internet. I do think it’s pointing at a real cluster of people’s experiences, so I don’t think I want to ban mention of that term completely from LessWrong. It seems valid for people to look at that term and see whether it helps them makes sense of some experiences, and in any case its use is at least a valid sociological phenomenon that people can analyze.
Edit: I think my feelings here are somewhat similar to Nazi comparisons or something like that. I think sometimes someone actions are indeed somewhat similar to the historical activities of nazis, and it’s sometimes fine to bring that up as a comparison, but I in the vast majority of cases I prefer others to use a less loaded and less-frequently-misused comparison. Again, I don’t know to what degree sealioning falls into that category, but your reaction suggests that you perceive it to have a similar history of misuse, so I think there might be a good argument here to avoid using that term unless really necessary. Though other users and moderators who have more context might want to chime in on what rules we want to have here.
I’m sorry, but it is entirely implausible to construe Duncan’s comment as not being an accusation. I no longer have any interest in doing the usual song-and-dance about how he didn’t literally say the specific sequence of words “Said is sealioning”, and so what he actually meant was something very nuanced and subtle and definitely, absolutely didn’t mean to actually accuse me, etc., etc.
(As for the word itself, and the concept behind it—I have found that its (unironic, non-quoted) use is an infallible indicator of bad faith. Zack’s characterization of the term is much too charitable.)
I thought the comment was pretty clear that it was trying to give a summary of my comments, and a suggestion for how I should phrase my comment in order to better get my point across. A suggestion which (at least for the case of the use of “sealioning”) I disagreed with.
I agree with you that there was an implicature in Duncan’s comment that he thought the term was an accurate characterization, though I am actually and honestly not that confident Duncan actually believes that the term accurately describes your commenting patterns (in addition to it accurately describing my model of your commenting patterns). I would currently give it about 75% probability, but not more.
In general, I think implicatures of this type should be treated differently than outright accusations, though I also don’t think they should be completely ignored.
On a more general note, since the term appears to be a relatively niche term that I haven’t heard before, it seems to me that the correct way for us to deal with this, would be for people to say openly what connotations the term has to them, and if enough people agree that the term has unhelpful connotations, then avoid using the term. I don’t think we should harshly punish introducing a term like this if there isn’t an established precedent of the connotations of that term.
I think it would be a mistake for us to use that term here; I think as well as describing a pattern of behavior it comes with an implied interpretation of blameworthiness that we really don’t want to import.