To be clear, I think your comment was still net-negative for the thread, and provided little value (in particular in the presence of other commenters who asked the relevant questions in a, from my perspective, much more productive way)
I just want to note that my comment wouldn’t have come about were it not for Said’s.
Again, this is a problem that would easily be resolved by tone-of-voice in the real world, but since we are dealing with text-based communication here, these kinds of confusions can happen again and again.
To be frank, I find your attitude here rather baffling. The only person in this thread who interpreted Said’s original comment as an attack seems to have been you. Vaniver had no trouble posting a response, and agreed that an explanation was necessary but missing.
I just want to note that my comment wouldn’t have come about were it not for Said’s.
That’s good to know. I do think if people end up writing better comments in response to Said’s comments, then that makes a good difference to me. I would be curious about how Said’s comment helped you write your comment, if you have the time, which would help me understand the space of solutions in better.
The only person in this thread who interpreted Said’s original comment as an attack seems to have been you.
I am quite confident that is not the case. I don’t think anyone else has made it the object of discussion except me, but I can guarantee you that many people reading this thread perceived Said’s original question as an attack. This is also evident from the fact that Said’s top-level comment received many downvotes, not just from me, even if it is currently at a reasonable karma level (when I downvoted it it was at 2 karma, and an hour later it was at −4, I think).
This is also evident by clone of saturn’s comment, which I think clearly suggests that a lack of response to these comments is usually interpreted (by him and others) to be strong evidence of the author being incapable of giving a proper response, and to be clear evidence of the top-level post being confused or mistaken.
My guess would also be that Vaniver perceived the comment as at least somewhat of an attack, though I am not super confident, though he could chime in and give clarification on that. I would currently take a bet at even odds that he did, though the precise definitional question might make that bet hard to settle.
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.
My guess would also be that Vaniver perceived the comment as at least somewhat of an attack, though I am not super confident, though he could chime in and give clarification on that.
The history was as follows:
Look at the earliest reply in my inbox, agree with it (and Raemon’s comment), and edit the post.
Scroll up and see a large comment tree.
In finding the top of the large comment tree, see another comment; decide “I’ll handle that one first.”
So my view of Said’s comment was in the context of nshepperd’s comment, at which point I already saw the hole in the post and its shape.
This splits out two different dimensions; the ‘attack / benign’ dimension and the ‘vague / specific’ dimension. Of them, I think the latter is more relevant; Said’s comment is a request of the form “say more?” and nshepperd’s is a criticism of the form “your argument has structure X, but this means it puts all its weight on Y, which can’t hold that much weight.” The latter is more specific than the former, and I correspondingly found it more useful. [Like, I’m not sure I would have noticed that I also don’t define truth from just reading Said’s comment, which was quite helpful in figuring out what parts of ‘authenticity’ were relevant to describe.]
However, this is because nshepperd made a bet that paid off, in that they were able to precisely identify the issue with the post in a way that could be easily communicated to me. If nshepperd had made a similarly precise but incorrect guess, it easily could have been worse off than a vague “say more?”. That is, there’s not just the question of where the ‘interpretive labor’ burden falls, but also a question of what overall schemes minimize interpretative labor (measured using your cost function of choice).
I interpreted both of them as benign; if anything nshepperd’s is more of an attack because it directly calls “authenticity” an applause light.
Also, related to a thread elsewhere, on ‘obligations’ to respond to comments: I mostly don’t worry about outstanding ‘attacks’ on me of this type, because of something like socially recognized gnosis. That is:
In worlds where “everybody knows” what authenticity is, and Said is the lone ignoramus, I lose very few points by not responding to Said saying “but what is authenticity?”, because most of the audience views the question as a tiresome distraction.
In worlds where I want to believe or want to enforce that “everybody knows” what authenticity is, then I lose many points by not responding to Said saying “but what is authenticity?”, because the audience views the question as a pertinent point, or at least evidence that others don’t know also.
In worlds where some people know lots about authenticity, and others know little, then when Said says “but what is authenticity?”, I can respond with “this post is for people who know what I mean by that, and I’m not holding it to the standards of people who don’t know what I mean by that” and both groups can continue satisfied (the former, discussing among a group that shares vocabulary, the latter, knowing that the post is openly not up to their standards). Which should generally be a thing that I’m willing to be open about, altho it sometimes generates some social awkwardness.
And in worlds where I just forgot that not everybody has ‘authenticity’ as a shared label, then the question “but what is authenticity?” is a welcome pointer towards more that has to be written.
So some things that I think would be nice:
It is permissible to respond to clarifying questions with “sorry, that’s a prerequisite that I won’t explain here,” which is taxed according to how ludicrous it is to impose that as a prerequisite.
Authors have well-placed trust in the audience’s ability to assess what observations are germane, and how seriously to take various ‘criticisms,’ so the tax from the previous point seems accurate / ignoring comments that seem bad to them is cheap instead of expensive.
“The Emperor Has No Clothes” objections have a place, tho it might not be every post.
Everyone gets better at interpretative labor in a way that makes communication flow more easily.
To be clear, I don’t interpret a lack of any response as anything other than a sign that the author has a busy life. What I take as strong evidence of the author being incapable of giving a proper response is when there’s a back-and-forth in which the author never directly responds to the original question.
Thanks, I am glad to hear that. Am I correct in interpreting you to disagree with Said on this point, given this paragraph of his?
There is always an obligation by any author to respond to anyone’s comment along these lines. If no response is provided to (what ought rightly to be) simple requests for clarification (such as requests to, at least roughly, define or explain an ambiguous or questionable term, or requests for examples of some purported phenomenon), the author should be interpreted as ignorant.
Yes, I disagree with that as stated, although I would agree with a slightly softened version that replaced “the author should be interpreted as ignorant” with “the post should be regarded as less trustworthy”.
Thanks! And I think I also agree with the “the post should be regarded as less trustworthy” assessment, though my guess is we probably disagree some about the effect size of that.
Am I the only one who thinks that we shouldn’t be calculating points for and against based on commentary, but instead read the content (article and commentary) and think for ourselves?
That’s not what I’m saying. If someone posts a comment along the lines of “what about X?” and it goes unresponded to by the OP, that is not a point against the original article. Arguments are not soldiers. Leaving an argument undefended is not a surrender of territory to the enemy.
Rather you the reader should consider X, and decide for yourself its relevance.
I want to again draw your attention to this comment of mine. You are, it seems to me, interpreting the given quote much too narrowly (which was reasonable when I had just posted it, but is not reasonable now that I’ve clarified).
While I do agree that comment clarified some things, my sense is still that clone of saturn would disagree with that comment as written (though I am not confident, which is why I am asking for clarification).
In particular, in the absence of the two alternatives that you list that involve someone else answering the question at hand, you maintain that it is the obligation of the author to engage in any of the other four solutions you outline, all of which strike me as roughly equally costly to writing a response. So I don’t think it changes my perspective much.
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.
I’m a bit surprised that no one in this comment chain (as far as I can see) has mentioned the possibility of these users deleting such comments on their posts, or even blocking Said in general.
It’s not a perfect solution, and maybe not all these users have enough karma to moderate their own posts (how much karma does that need?), and I believe blocking is a relatively recent feature, but… it seems like it could meaningfully lessen these obstacles?
Separately: given that Said’s comments are often perceived as social attacks, it seems to me that this is most of the problem[1]. If a thread turns out to be a giant waste of everyone’s time, then that’s also bad, of course… but I would be surprised if that happened to nearly the same extent, without the percieved-social-attack thing going on.
You propose elsethread that Said could try to generate plausible interpretations to include in his comments. But if we take the main goal to be defusing perceptions of social attack, we should remember that there are other ways to achieve that goal.
For example, the following seems less social-attack-y to me than Said’s original comment in this thread[2]; I’d be curious how you’d have felt about it. (And curious how Said would have felt about writing it, or something like it.)
What do you mean by ‘authentic’, ‘authenticity’, etc.? I don’t think I’ve seen these terms (as you use them) explained on Less Wrong.
I might be able to come up with a guess about what you mean, but I don’t think it would be a very good one. The terms seem pretty central to the argument you’re making here, so I think it’s important that we avoid illusion of transparency regarding them.
[1] I do think it matters whether or not this perception is accurate, but it might not matter for the question of “what effect do these comments have on the social fabric of LW”.
[2] And FWIW, I don’t expect the original comment was intended as a social attack in the slightest. But I do think it felt like one, to me, to some degree.
And curious how Said would have felt about writing it, or something like it.
I have no idea why your proposed alternative version of my comment would be “less social-attack-y”. Of course, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why my actual comment would be “social-attack-y” in the first place, unless we assume something extremely unflattering about Vaniver (which I was not assuming) (but note that even in that scenario, your proposed edit seems to me to change nothing).
What’s more, I suspect that no possible version of my comment would change anything about this “perceived social attack” business.
In this, as in so many things, we can look for guidance to esteemed philosopher John Gabriel, who puts the matter concisely in this Penny Arcade strip:
Gabe: If all I could say was “nice,” I would mean it ironically.
Were someone else to write exactly the words I wrote in my original comment, they would not be perceived as a social attack; whereas if I write those words—or the words you suggest, or any other words whatsoever, so long as they contained the same semantic content at their core[1]—they will be perceived as a social attack. After all, I can say something different, but I cannot mean something different.
The fact is, either you think that asking what an author means by a word, or asking for examples of some phenomenon, is a social attack, or you don’t. If I ask a question along such lines, no reassurances, no disclaimers, will serve to signal anything but “I am complying with the necessary formalities in order to ask what I wish to ask”. If you think my question is a social attack without the disclaimers, then their addition will change nothing. It is the question, after all, that constitutes the social attack, if anything does—not the form, in other words, but the content.
Best to minimize such baroque signaling. There is a certain baseline of courtesy that ought to be observed, but it is mostly negative—no name-calling, no irrelevant personal attacks, etc. Almost anything beyond that only adds noise. Better to be clear and concise.
I do not think that anyone can argue that my comments violate any sensible standards of basic politeness or courtesy; beyond that, let the content stand on its own. If it’s viewed as a social attack, then that says quite a bit more about those who view it thus, than it does about my intentions (which, as any reasonable person can see, are free of any personal hostility). Trying to disguise the matter with elaborate disclaimers is pointless.
Note that your proposed addition conveys no new information; everything within it is already entailed by the original comment and its context. That I can’t come up with any good guess about the meaning of the word is implicated by me asking the question in the first place. That the term is central to the argument is obvious once the question is asked. That we should avoid the illusion of transparency is little more than an applause light for a locally shared (and publicly known to be shared) value.
I have no idea why your proposed alternative version of my comment would be “less social-attack-y”.
Nevertheless, I do think it feels that way to me, and I also think it would feel that way to others.
I don’t have a good explanation for why. I do think that signaling “I am complying with the necessary formalities in order to ask what I wish to ask” is part of it. Similar to how the word “please” signals nothing more than “I wish to signal politeness”, and that seems sufficient to actually be polite. Even though it’s a costless signal.
It does feel to me like there’s a risk here of a euphemism treadmill. If we can’t get away without adding tedious formalities, then everyone adds those formalities by default, and then they stop signalling the thing they used to signal.
I’m not fully convinced this won’t happen, but I do think it’s relevant that there’s a broader culture outside of LW which will exert some influence pulling us towards whatever signalling norms it uses.
Were someone else to write exactly the words I wrote in my original comment, they would not be perceived as a social attack; whereas if I write those words—or the words you suggest, or any other words whatsoever, so long as they contained the same semantic content at their core[1]—they will be perceived as a social attack.
This doesn’t strike me as literally true, and I do think you could appear less social-attack-y than you do, without changing the core semantic content of what you write.
But I do feel like it’s the case that your speech style is more likely to be perceived as a social attack coming from you than from someone else.
I wish it weren’t so. It’s certainly possible for “the identity and history of the speaker” to be a meaningful input into the question “was this a social attack”. But I think the direction is wrong, in this case. I think you’re the single user on LW who’s earned the most epistemic “benefit of the doubt”. That is, if literally any other user were to write in the style you write, I think it would be epistemically correct to give more probability to it being a social attack than it is for you.
And yet here we are. I don’t claim to fully understand it.
That I can’t come up with any good guess about the meaning of the word is implicated by me asking the question in the first place.
I don’t think this is true. It might be that you think you probably could come up with a good guess, but don’t want to spend the cognitive effort on doing so. It might be that you think you have a good guess, but you want to confirm that it’s right. I’ve sometimes asked people to clarify their meaning for a reason along the lines of: “I’m pretty sure I have a good idea what you mean. But if I give my own definition and then reply to it, you can say that that wasn’t what you meant. If you give your own definition, I can hold you to it.” (Implicit to this is a mistrust of their honesty and/or rationality.)
That the term is central to the argument is obvious once the question is asked.
I don’t think this is true, either. Someone might ask this question about a term that isn’t central, perhaps just because they’re curious about a tangent.
That we should avoid the illusion of transparency is little more than an applause light for a locally shared (and publicly known to be shared) value.
This does seem true.
I feel like I may well be using the term “social attack” to refer to a group of things that should ideally be separated. If I am doing that, I’m not sure whether the confusion was originally introduced by myself or not. I’m not sure what to do with this feeling, but I do think I should note it.
Although I don’t think you’re performing social attacks—in this case, I don’t think I even feel-them-but-disendorse-that-feeling—I do think this is the kind of conversation that has potential to eat up lots of time unproductively. (Which, I guess that points against my “I would be surprised” from two comments up.) So by default, after this comment I’m going to limit myself to two more posts on this topic.
In the case of “please”, it’s certainly very close to being costless—almost indistinguishable, really. This is because “please” is a very, very common signal of politeness—so common as to be universally understood, and not just in our culture but in many others. Many people say “please” reflexively. It still costs something, but very little.
But the sorts of disclaimers we’re talking about cost much more. They cost time to type (and energy, and stress on one’s hands, etc.). They cost cognitive effort—the need to recall just what sorts of disclaimers and reassurances are required, in this particular community, with its particular, idiosyncratic ideas about what constitutes politeness. They cost yet more effort, to figure out which of those norms apply in this case, and how to navigate this particular situation—what aspects of one’s question may be perceived as a “social attack”, and what meaningless words, precisely, one must use to defuse that perception. None of these things are costless.
And, as you say, there’s a treadmill. If it’s mandatory to say these things, then they mean nothing. And if it’s mandatory for me (only) to say these things, then they mean nothing coming from me. (Rather, they don’t mean the things they say, and instead only mean “I am complying with the necessary formalities …” etc.)
EDIT: I listed costs to the writer, but in my haste I entirely forgot what is probably an even more important point: that there is a cost to the reader, of such disclaimers and reassurances! Just look at every proposed modification to my original comment, that has been put forth in this giant comment thread. Each one makes a comment of two short sentences (short enough to have fit into a tweet, even before the doubling of Twitter’s character limit) balloon to at least thrice that length, if not much more—and the density of information / insight / message plummets! This wastes the time of every reader—in aggregate, a cost orders of magnitude more severe than the costs to the writer.
I think you’re the single user on LW who’s earned the most epistemic “benefit of the doubt”. That is, if literally any other user were to write in the style you write, I think it would be epistemically correct to give more probability to it being a social attack than it is for you.
Thank you for the kind words. I am not sure if I quite deserve this praise, but if I do, it is certainly my intention to continue deserving it.
That the term is central to the argument is obvious once the question is asked.
I don’t think this is true, either. Someone might ask this question about a term that isn’t central, perhaps just because they’re curious about a tangent.
To be clear, I meant that this is obvious in this case, not necessarily in the general case.
To be clear, I meant only that “please” is costless (and you’re right that it’s only nearly so). This seemed relevant because we might therefore expect it to have devolved into meaninglessness, but this doesn’t seem to have happened.
I agree with the costs that you list, with the caveat that as I mentioned I’m unsure about the treadmill. I just also think commenting in that style has benefits as well, and I’m legitimately unsure which side dominates.
I just want to note that my comment wouldn’t have come about were it not for Said’s.
To be frank, I find your attitude here rather baffling. The only person in this thread who interpreted Said’s original comment as an attack seems to have been you. Vaniver had no trouble posting a response, and agreed that an explanation was necessary but missing.
That’s good to know. I do think if people end up writing better comments in response to Said’s comments, then that makes a good difference to me. I would be curious about how Said’s comment helped you write your comment, if you have the time, which would help me understand the space of solutions in better.
I am quite confident that is not the case. I don’t think anyone else has made it the object of discussion except me, but I can guarantee you that many people reading this thread perceived Said’s original question as an attack. This is also evident from the fact that Said’s top-level comment received many downvotes, not just from me, even if it is currently at a reasonable karma level (when I downvoted it it was at 2 karma, and an hour later it was at −4, I think).
This is also evident by clone of saturn’s comment, which I think clearly suggests that a lack of response to these comments is usually interpreted (by him and others) to be strong evidence of the author being incapable of giving a proper response, and to be clear evidence of the top-level post being confused or mistaken.
My guess would also be that Vaniver perceived the comment as at least somewhat of an attack, though I am not super confident, though he could chime in and give clarification on that. I would currently take a bet at even odds that he did, though the precise definitional question might make that bet hard to settle.
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.
The history was as follows:
Look at the earliest reply in my inbox, agree with it (and Raemon’s comment), and edit the post.
Scroll up and see a large comment tree.
In finding the top of the large comment tree, see another comment; decide “I’ll handle that one first.”
So my view of Said’s comment was in the context of nshepperd’s comment, at which point I already saw the hole in the post and its shape.
This splits out two different dimensions; the ‘attack / benign’ dimension and the ‘vague / specific’ dimension. Of them, I think the latter is more relevant; Said’s comment is a request of the form “say more?” and nshepperd’s is a criticism of the form “your argument has structure X, but this means it puts all its weight on Y, which can’t hold that much weight.” The latter is more specific than the former, and I correspondingly found it more useful. [Like, I’m not sure I would have noticed that I also don’t define truth from just reading Said’s comment, which was quite helpful in figuring out what parts of ‘authenticity’ were relevant to describe.]
However, this is because nshepperd made a bet that paid off, in that they were able to precisely identify the issue with the post in a way that could be easily communicated to me. If nshepperd had made a similarly precise but incorrect guess, it easily could have been worse off than a vague “say more?”. That is, there’s not just the question of where the ‘interpretive labor’ burden falls, but also a question of what overall schemes minimize interpretative labor (measured using your cost function of choice).
I interpreted both of them as benign; if anything nshepperd’s is more of an attack because it directly calls “authenticity” an applause light.
Also, related to a thread elsewhere, on ‘obligations’ to respond to comments: I mostly don’t worry about outstanding ‘attacks’ on me of this type, because of something like socially recognized gnosis. That is:
In worlds where “everybody knows” what authenticity is, and Said is the lone ignoramus, I lose very few points by not responding to Said saying “but what is authenticity?”, because most of the audience views the question as a tiresome distraction.
In worlds where I want to believe or want to enforce that “everybody knows” what authenticity is, then I lose many points by not responding to Said saying “but what is authenticity?”, because the audience views the question as a pertinent point, or at least evidence that others don’t know also.
In worlds where some people know lots about authenticity, and others know little, then when Said says “but what is authenticity?”, I can respond with “this post is for people who know what I mean by that, and I’m not holding it to the standards of people who don’t know what I mean by that” and both groups can continue satisfied (the former, discussing among a group that shares vocabulary, the latter, knowing that the post is openly not up to their standards). Which should generally be a thing that I’m willing to be open about, altho it sometimes generates some social awkwardness.
And in worlds where I just forgot that not everybody has ‘authenticity’ as a shared label, then the question “but what is authenticity?” is a welcome pointer towards more that has to be written.
So some things that I think would be nice:
It is permissible to respond to clarifying questions with “sorry, that’s a prerequisite that I won’t explain here,” which is taxed according to how ludicrous it is to impose that as a prerequisite.
Authors have well-placed trust in the audience’s ability to assess what observations are germane, and how seriously to take various ‘criticisms,’ so the tax from the previous point seems accurate / ignoring comments that seem bad to them is cheap instead of expensive.
“The Emperor Has No Clothes” objections have a place, tho it might not be every post.
Everyone gets better at interpretative labor in a way that makes communication flow more easily.
To be clear, I don’t interpret a lack of any response as anything other than a sign that the author has a busy life. What I take as strong evidence of the author being incapable of giving a proper response is when there’s a back-and-forth in which the author never directly responds to the original question.
Thanks, I am glad to hear that. Am I correct in interpreting you to disagree with Said on this point, given this paragraph of his?
Yes, I disagree with that as stated, although I would agree with a slightly softened version that replaced “the author should be interpreted as ignorant” with “the post should be regarded as less trustworthy”.
Thanks! And I think I also agree with the “the post should be regarded as less trustworthy” assessment, though my guess is we probably disagree some about the effect size of that.
Am I the only one who thinks that we shouldn’t be calculating points for and against based on commentary, but instead read the content (article and commentary) and think for ourselves?
Probably? Commentary is useful because most of us aren’t smart enough to anticipate all possible criticisms and responses to those criticisms.
That’s not what I’m saying. If someone posts a comment along the lines of “what about X?” and it goes unresponded to by the OP, that is not a point against the original article. Arguments are not soldiers. Leaving an argument undefended is not a surrender of territory to the enemy.
Rather you the reader should consider X, and decide for yourself its relevance.
Oh, I see. Yes, I was assuming in the context of this discussion that X is something you hadn’t already thought of, and do find relevant.
Sorry, I see the confusion. By “content” I meant both the article and it’s comments. I edited my comment to say as much.
I want to again draw your attention to this comment of mine. You are, it seems to me, interpreting the given quote much too narrowly (which was reasonable when I had just posted it, but is not reasonable now that I’ve clarified).
While I do agree that comment clarified some things, my sense is still that clone of saturn would disagree with that comment as written (though I am not confident, which is why I am asking for clarification).
In particular, in the absence of the two alternatives that you list that involve someone else answering the question at hand, you maintain that it is the obligation of the author to engage in any of the other four solutions you outline, all of which strike me as roughly equally costly to writing a response. So I don’t think it changes my perspective much.
I’m a bit surprised that no one in this comment chain (as far as I can see) has mentioned the possibility of these users deleting such comments on their posts, or even blocking Said in general.
It’s not a perfect solution, and maybe not all these users have enough karma to moderate their own posts (how much karma does that need?), and I believe blocking is a relatively recent feature, but… it seems like it could meaningfully lessen these obstacles?
Separately: given that Said’s comments are often perceived as social attacks, it seems to me that this is most of the problem[1]. If a thread turns out to be a giant waste of everyone’s time, then that’s also bad, of course… but I would be surprised if that happened to nearly the same extent, without the percieved-social-attack thing going on.
You propose elsethread that Said could try to generate plausible interpretations to include in his comments. But if we take the main goal to be defusing perceptions of social attack, we should remember that there are other ways to achieve that goal.
For example, the following seems less social-attack-y to me than Said’s original comment in this thread[2]; I’d be curious how you’d have felt about it. (And curious how Said would have felt about writing it, or something like it.)
[1] I do think it matters whether or not this perception is accurate, but it might not matter for the question of “what effect do these comments have on the social fabric of LW”.
[2] And FWIW, I don’t expect the original comment was intended as a social attack in the slightest. But I do think it felt like one, to me, to some degree.
I have no idea why your proposed alternative version of my comment would be “less social-attack-y”. Of course, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why my actual comment would be “social-attack-y” in the first place, unless we assume something extremely unflattering about Vaniver (which I was not assuming) (but note that even in that scenario, your proposed edit seems to me to change nothing).
What’s more, I suspect that no possible version of my comment would change anything about this “perceived social attack” business.
In this, as in so many things, we can look for guidance to esteemed philosopher John Gabriel, who puts the matter concisely in this Penny Arcade strip:
Were someone else to write exactly the words I wrote in my original comment, they would not be perceived as a social attack; whereas if I write those words—or the words you suggest, or any other words whatsoever, so long as they contained the same semantic content at their core[1]—they will be perceived as a social attack. After all, I can say something different, but I cannot mean something different.
The fact is, either you think that asking what an author means by a word, or asking for examples of some phenomenon, is a social attack, or you don’t. If I ask a question along such lines, no reassurances, no disclaimers, will serve to signal anything but “I am complying with the necessary formalities in order to ask what I wish to ask”. If you think my question is a social attack without the disclaimers, then their addition will change nothing. It is the question, after all, that constitutes the social attack, if anything does—not the form, in other words, but the content.
Best to minimize such baroque signaling. There is a certain baseline of courtesy that ought to be observed, but it is mostly negative—no name-calling, no irrelevant personal attacks, etc. Almost anything beyond that only adds noise. Better to be clear and concise.
I do not think that anyone can argue that my comments violate any sensible standards of basic politeness or courtesy; beyond that, let the content stand on its own. If it’s viewed as a social attack, then that says quite a bit more about those who view it thus, than it does about my intentions (which, as any reasonable person can see, are free of any personal hostility). Trying to disguise the matter with elaborate disclaimers is pointless.
Note that your proposed addition conveys no new information; everything within it is already entailed by the original comment and its context. That I can’t come up with any good guess about the meaning of the word is implicated by me asking the question in the first place. That the term is central to the argument is obvious once the question is asked. That we should avoid the illusion of transparency is little more than an applause light for a locally shared (and publicly known to be shared) value.
Nevertheless, I do think it feels that way to me, and I also think it would feel that way to others.
I don’t have a good explanation for why. I do think that signaling “I am complying with the necessary formalities in order to ask what I wish to ask” is part of it. Similar to how the word “please” signals nothing more than “I wish to signal politeness”, and that seems sufficient to actually be polite. Even though it’s a costless signal.
It does feel to me like there’s a risk here of a euphemism treadmill. If we can’t get away without adding tedious formalities, then everyone adds those formalities by default, and then they stop signalling the thing they used to signal.
I’m not fully convinced this won’t happen, but I do think it’s relevant that there’s a broader culture outside of LW which will exert some influence pulling us towards whatever signalling norms it uses.
This doesn’t strike me as literally true, and I do think you could appear less social-attack-y than you do, without changing the core semantic content of what you write.
But I do feel like it’s the case that your speech style is more likely to be perceived as a social attack coming from you than from someone else.
I wish it weren’t so. It’s certainly possible for “the identity and history of the speaker” to be a meaningful input into the question “was this a social attack”. But I think the direction is wrong, in this case. I think you’re the single user on LW who’s earned the most epistemic “benefit of the doubt”. That is, if literally any other user were to write in the style you write, I think it would be epistemically correct to give more probability to it being a social attack than it is for you.
And yet here we are. I don’t claim to fully understand it.
I don’t think this is true. It might be that you think you probably could come up with a good guess, but don’t want to spend the cognitive effort on doing so. It might be that you think you have a good guess, but you want to confirm that it’s right. I’ve sometimes asked people to clarify their meaning for a reason along the lines of: “I’m pretty sure I have a good idea what you mean. But if I give my own definition and then reply to it, you can say that that wasn’t what you meant. If you give your own definition, I can hold you to it.” (Implicit to this is a mistrust of their honesty and/or rationality.)
I don’t think this is true, either. Someone might ask this question about a term that isn’t central, perhaps just because they’re curious about a tangent.
This does seem true.
I feel like I may well be using the term “social attack” to refer to a group of things that should ideally be separated. If I am doing that, I’m not sure whether the confusion was originally introduced by myself or not. I’m not sure what to do with this feeling, but I do think I should note it.
Although I don’t think you’re performing social attacks—in this case, I don’t think I even feel-them-but-disendorse-that-feeling—I do think this is the kind of conversation that has potential to eat up lots of time unproductively. (Which, I guess that points against my “I would be surprised” from two comments up.) So by default, after this comment I’m going to limit myself to two more posts on this topic.
But of course it’s not costless.
In the case of “please”, it’s certainly very close to being costless—almost indistinguishable, really. This is because “please” is a very, very common signal of politeness—so common as to be universally understood, and not just in our culture but in many others. Many people say “please” reflexively. It still costs something, but very little.
But the sorts of disclaimers we’re talking about cost much more. They cost time to type (and energy, and stress on one’s hands, etc.). They cost cognitive effort—the need to recall just what sorts of disclaimers and reassurances are required, in this particular community, with its particular, idiosyncratic ideas about what constitutes politeness. They cost yet more effort, to figure out which of those norms apply in this case, and how to navigate this particular situation—what aspects of one’s question may be perceived as a “social attack”, and what meaningless words, precisely, one must use to defuse that perception. None of these things are costless.
And, as you say, there’s a treadmill. If it’s mandatory to say these things, then they mean nothing. And if it’s mandatory for me (only) to say these things, then they mean nothing coming from me. (Rather, they don’t mean the things they say, and instead only mean “I am complying with the necessary formalities …” etc.)
EDIT: I listed costs to the writer, but in my haste I entirely forgot what is probably an even more important point: that there is a cost to the reader, of such disclaimers and reassurances! Just look at every proposed modification to my original comment, that has been put forth in this giant comment thread. Each one makes a comment of two short sentences (short enough to have fit into a tweet, even before the doubling of Twitter’s character limit) balloon to at least thrice that length, if not much more—and the density of information / insight / message plummets! This wastes the time of every reader—in aggregate, a cost orders of magnitude more severe than the costs to the writer.
Thank you for the kind words. I am not sure if I quite deserve this praise, but if I do, it is certainly my intention to continue deserving it.
To be clear, I meant that this is obvious in this case, not necessarily in the general case.
To be clear, I meant only that “please” is costless (and you’re right that it’s only nearly so). This seemed relevant because we might therefore expect it to have devolved into meaninglessness, but this doesn’t seem to have happened.
I agree with the costs that you list, with the caveat that as I mentioned I’m unsure about the treadmill. I just also think commenting in that style has benefits as well, and I’m legitimately unsure which side dominates.