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?
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?