Regardless of whether I agree with your claim here (about which you are “quite confident”), I must point out that, in fact, this is not an object-level answer! I still don’t have an answer to my question, in fact!
Sorry, I meant this in the “more object-level than your general commenting patterns” sense. I will note that you asked why your comment was being downvoted, and since I was one of the people who had downvoted it, I figured I would explain. It doesn’t seem like the right call for me to go into a response to your original question, given that I am replying to the part of your comment that’s about voting patterns.
It would be the simplest thing in the world to simply respond with an explanation of what ‘authentic’/‘authenticity’ means.
No, it isn’t the simplest thing in the world, and the implicit assumption that anything that isn’t extremely straightforward to explain is assumed to be contendless, or in some sense problematic, is I think a major reason for why the resulting threads tend to reliably go badly.
We have to deal with the reality that sometimes a concept can be pointed at by a bunch of related concepts, in a way that still allows someone to comprehend a broader point, without it being easy or low-effort to write a precise explanation of what exactly was meant by every term.
To be clear, I don’t think that it’s usually prohibitively difficult, but in my experience, producing an answer that you consider sufficient requires at least 30 minutes of effort, and is usually accompanied by multiple spread-out back-and-forths that spread out over multiple days, since you do not give sufficient pointers to the shape of your uncertainty to resolve your confusion on the first try, often resulting in at least an hour of time spent by an author.
I am probably not going to respond further to this thread, since I don’t really expect to make much progress on it (and since we have had many similar threads in the past). It might make sense to figure this out in more detail some other time, or maybe in a separate thread in the Open Thread, or a separate post.
Meta: sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel fast. Sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel carefully. I think this disagreement comes up quite a bit in rationalist circles especially because of founder effects: the tension exists in Eliezer’s writing as well.
In the tradition of What is Seen and What is Not Seen: Said doesn’t see the posts that aren’t written because people feel like they would have to write a sequence justifying themselves carefully for the thing they really want to talk about.
I think it is also quite valuable to slow down on aspects of status quo thinking and communicating that are usually quickly glossed over. Indeed, this is the heart of Buddhism. My own frustration isn’t with method but that Said seems to choose non central examples often. What’s interesting is that in this case authenticity does seem to be pretty central.
Anyway, I’m writing this partially in appreciation for what habryka is trying to communicate here, since it is high effort and in expectation low reward.
Wait a minute. You said that the concept in question (‘authenticity’) has a “pretty straightforward” meaning, to you. (This, allegedly, was the problem with my question: that the term, and concept, I asked about, was straightforward, and its meaning obvious and known, or easily inferred.)
But now you’re saying that it’s not straightforward to explain, and is “pointed at by a bunch of related concepts”, and it’s not “easy or low-effort” to write an explanation—and that this is the problem with my question (that answering it would take too much effort).
So which is it? Is my question too obvious and simple to bother answering it? Or is it too hard and complicated and time-consuming to answer? Or are you suggesting that it could be, somehow, both?
Let me ask you this: do you think I’m the only one who read this post, and thought “Hmm, ‘authentic’? ‘authenticity’? What does he mean by that…?” I mean, I’m no genius, but I’m not stupid, either; if I had trouble understanding what’s meant here, probably at least some others did, too. (Or do you disagree?)
And I’ve read a whole lot of Less Wrong stuff; do you think there might be other readers, who are, perhaps, even less immersed in the whole Less Wrong memeplex, who are even less sure that the know what any of these terms and concepts mean? (I mean, it would be one thing if the term was hyperlinked, like a Sequence post. Someone comes along and asks “Hold on, now, what in the gosh-darn heck is an ‘affective death spiral’?!”—you say “click the link, man”, and you’re done; or you respond with a hyperlink, at the worst. But that’s not the case here!)
Would you say that I’m below-average in willingness to post comments asking for clarifications, or above-average? And what do you think the answer implies, about how many other readers have similar questions, but say nothing?
Finally (as noted by someone I discussed this post with elsewhere), Vaniver, in the OP, analogizes ‘authenticity’ to truth. Indeed, as far as I can tell, the entirety of the post’s rhetorical force comes from this analogy. Yet recall how much effort Eliezer dedicated, in the Sequences and later, to explaining just what in the world he meant by ‘truth’! However much effort it takes to explain ‘truth’—Eliezer applied that effort, because it was necessary.
Does ‘truth’ deserve extensive, laborious explanation, but ‘authenticity’—only a breezy dismissal?
Hmm, so, I think you might have misunderstood my suggestion. My argument was not that in this and other cases standard usage is sufficient. My argument was that in order to actually bridge the inferential gap, it is a massive help to the author and the other commenters, if you point out a concrete problem with a plausible interpretation that comes to mind. I think generating that plausible interpretation takes about 5 minutes, is pretty straightforward, and is something that I would ask you to do.
However, in order to then actually bridge the gap, significant additional time is likely going to be required in people responding to each other. However, I would argue that how much time is required for that exchange will drastically change depending on how much you as a commenter will have given the author to work with.
This is something that both nshepperd’s and quanticle’s comments successfully do in this thread.
Finally (as noted by someone I discussed this post with elsewhere), Vaniver, in the OP, analogizes ‘authenticity’ to truth. Indeed, as far as I can tell, the entirety of the post’s rhetorical force comes from this analogy. Yet recall how much effort Eliezer dedicated, in the Sequences and later, to explaining just what in the world he meant by ‘truth’! However much effort it takes to explain ‘truth’—Eliezer applied that effort, because it was necessary.
Does ‘truth’ deserve extensive, laborious explanation, but ‘authenticity’—only a breezy dismissal?
I wanted to note here that I think this is right; that the analogy between truth and authenticity is what gives this post rhetorical force (and is a huge chunk of why I think rationality and Circling are cousins), that it was good to give truth an extensive, laborious explanation, and that it would also be good to give ‘authenticity’ an extensive, laborious explanation.
Furthermore, I think one of the ways in which Eliezer is an exceptional writer is that he notices dependencies and serializes them; “ah, in order to explain C, I must first explain B, and for B I must first explain A.” I often find myself in the opposite approach; “explain C, figure out what was missing, and then explain B, figure out what was missing, and then explain A.” (Tho I think this happens to Eliezer too.) Pushback of the form “but what do you mean by B?” is an integral part of this process.
---
That said, sometimes there’s a post intended to explain C to people who already have B, or B grounds out in experience; we talk about color without feeling a need to explain color to the blind. I think that’s not the case here; I am hoping to make the thing I like about Circling legible to the highly skeptical, systematic thinkers who want to compile the thing themselves and so want me to provide the dependency chain.
But also I’m not convinced that I can succeed, as parts of it may end up depending on experience, but at least we can figure out which parts and what experience.
a precise explanation of what exactly was meant by every term
Incidentally, this is a strawman; I did not ask, in my initial comment, for a precise explanation of what exactly is meant—even by one term, much less every term. Any explanation at all, even a rough, approximate, or extensional one, would be much better than nothing (which is what we currently have), and it would be a good starting point for any further discussion that might be called for.
Sorry, I meant this in the “more object-level than your general commenting patterns” sense. I will note that you asked why your comment was being downvoted, and since I was one of the people who had downvoted it, I figured I would explain. It doesn’t seem like the right call for me to go into a response to your original question, given that I am replying to the part of your comment that’s about voting patterns.
No, it isn’t the simplest thing in the world, and the implicit assumption that anything that isn’t extremely straightforward to explain is assumed to be contendless, or in some sense problematic, is I think a major reason for why the resulting threads tend to reliably go badly.
We have to deal with the reality that sometimes a concept can be pointed at by a bunch of related concepts, in a way that still allows someone to comprehend a broader point, without it being easy or low-effort to write a precise explanation of what exactly was meant by every term.
To be clear, I don’t think that it’s usually prohibitively difficult, but in my experience, producing an answer that you consider sufficient requires at least 30 minutes of effort, and is usually accompanied by multiple spread-out back-and-forths that spread out over multiple days, since you do not give sufficient pointers to the shape of your uncertainty to resolve your confusion on the first try, often resulting in at least an hour of time spent by an author.
I am probably not going to respond further to this thread, since I don’t really expect to make much progress on it (and since we have had many similar threads in the past). It might make sense to figure this out in more detail some other time, or maybe in a separate thread in the Open Thread, or a separate post.
Meta: sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel fast. Sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel carefully. I think this disagreement comes up quite a bit in rationalist circles especially because of founder effects: the tension exists in Eliezer’s writing as well.
In the tradition of What is Seen and What is Not Seen: Said doesn’t see the posts that aren’t written because people feel like they would have to write a sequence justifying themselves carefully for the thing they really want to talk about.
I think it is also quite valuable to slow down on aspects of status quo thinking and communicating that are usually quickly glossed over. Indeed, this is the heart of Buddhism. My own frustration isn’t with method but that Said seems to choose non central examples often. What’s interesting is that in this case authenticity does seem to be pretty central.
Anyway, I’m writing this partially in appreciation for what habryka is trying to communicate here, since it is high effort and in expectation low reward.
Wait a minute. You said that the concept in question (‘authenticity’) has a “pretty straightforward” meaning, to you. (This, allegedly, was the problem with my question: that the term, and concept, I asked about, was straightforward, and its meaning obvious and known, or easily inferred.)
But now you’re saying that it’s not straightforward to explain, and is “pointed at by a bunch of related concepts”, and it’s not “easy or low-effort” to write an explanation—and that this is the problem with my question (that answering it would take too much effort).
So which is it? Is my question too obvious and simple to bother answering it? Or is it too hard and complicated and time-consuming to answer? Or are you suggesting that it could be, somehow, both?
Let me ask you this: do you think I’m the only one who read this post, and thought “Hmm, ‘authentic’? ‘authenticity’? What does he mean by that…?” I mean, I’m no genius, but I’m not stupid, either; if I had trouble understanding what’s meant here, probably at least some others did, too. (Or do you disagree?)
And I’ve read a whole lot of Less Wrong stuff; do you think there might be other readers, who are, perhaps, even less immersed in the whole Less Wrong memeplex, who are even less sure that the know what any of these terms and concepts mean? (I mean, it would be one thing if the term was hyperlinked, like a Sequence post. Someone comes along and asks “Hold on, now, what in the gosh-darn heck is an ‘affective death spiral’?!”—you say “click the link, man”, and you’re done; or you respond with a hyperlink, at the worst. But that’s not the case here!)
Would you say that I’m below-average in willingness to post comments asking for clarifications, or above-average? And what do you think the answer implies, about how many other readers have similar questions, but say nothing?
Finally (as noted by someone I discussed this post with elsewhere), Vaniver, in the OP, analogizes ‘authenticity’ to truth. Indeed, as far as I can tell, the entirety of the post’s rhetorical force comes from this analogy. Yet recall how much effort Eliezer dedicated, in the Sequences and later, to explaining just what in the world he meant by ‘truth’! However much effort it takes to explain ‘truth’—Eliezer applied that effort, because it was necessary.
Does ‘truth’ deserve extensive, laborious explanation, but ‘authenticity’—only a breezy dismissal?
Hmm, so, I think you might have misunderstood my suggestion. My argument was not that in this and other cases standard usage is sufficient. My argument was that in order to actually bridge the inferential gap, it is a massive help to the author and the other commenters, if you point out a concrete problem with a plausible interpretation that comes to mind. I think generating that plausible interpretation takes about 5 minutes, is pretty straightforward, and is something that I would ask you to do.
However, in order to then actually bridge the gap, significant additional time is likely going to be required in people responding to each other. However, I would argue that how much time is required for that exchange will drastically change depending on how much you as a commenter will have given the author to work with.
This is something that both nshepperd’s and quanticle’s comments successfully do in this thread.
I wanted to note here that I think this is right; that the analogy between truth and authenticity is what gives this post rhetorical force (and is a huge chunk of why I think rationality and Circling are cousins), that it was good to give truth an extensive, laborious explanation, and that it would also be good to give ‘authenticity’ an extensive, laborious explanation.
Furthermore, I think one of the ways in which Eliezer is an exceptional writer is that he notices dependencies and serializes them; “ah, in order to explain C, I must first explain B, and for B I must first explain A.” I often find myself in the opposite approach; “explain C, figure out what was missing, and then explain B, figure out what was missing, and then explain A.” (Tho I think this happens to Eliezer too.) Pushback of the form “but what do you mean by B?” is an integral part of this process.
---
That said, sometimes there’s a post intended to explain C to people who already have B, or B grounds out in experience; we talk about color without feeling a need to explain color to the blind. I think that’s not the case here; I am hoping to make the thing I like about Circling legible to the highly skeptical, systematic thinkers who want to compile the thing themselves and so want me to provide the dependency chain.
But also I’m not convinced that I can succeed, as parts of it may end up depending on experience, but at least we can figure out which parts and what experience.
Incidentally, this is a strawman; I did not ask, in my initial comment, for a precise explanation of what exactly is meant—even by one term, much less every term. Any explanation at all, even a rough, approximate, or extensional one, would be much better than nothing (which is what we currently have), and it would be a good starting point for any further discussion that might be called for.