(Parts of this comment were misinterpreted. I have slightly edited this comment to make it clearer; this editing was done after lionhearted replied to it. )
I downvoted this post. The OP describes a phenomenon that everyone knows about, then suggests that “stupidity” (a word mostly left undefined) and “malice” aren’t good explanations. (How did “malice” ever seem like a good explanation in the first place?) That’s kind of correct, maybe, depending on what class of things the OP is using “stupidity” to refer to. A single word is never a good explanation for an aspect of human psychology. The OP then suggests that the “egalitarian instinct” is an explanation. The OP gives little explanation for this explanation (ETA: I didn’t mean explaining what the egalitarian instinct is, which is easily researched by those interested, but explaining more persuasively/effectively how it explains the phenomenon mentioned), no mention of other possible explanations (no acknowledgment of the existence of other possible explanations), and no description of what the world would look like if the OP’s explanation were wrong. Thinking up one plausible explanation for an observed phenomenon is fine, I guess, if that’s where you want to start, and you don’t care too much about the phenomenon in question. Writing a Less Wrong post that looks exactly like that, though, is just wrong. This is not how you go about constructing a model of human psychology.
I would like to complain in more detail about the way “stupidity” and “malice” are brought up and almost immediately dismissed. It causes some part of the the reader’s brain to read along and think “Yeah, stupidity doesn’t sound like a very good hypothesis, and huh, malice doesn’t either… I wonder what a good explanation would be? Oh, the OP suggests the egalitarian instinct, that’s comparatively a lot more plausible than stupidity or malice which means it’s probably correct.” If stupidity and malice had never been brought up, the reader would be a lot more likely to treat the proposed explanation of egalitarianism with a healthier amount of skepticism. Bringing up the red herrings thus misleads.
(How did “malice” ever seem like a good explanation in the first place?)
Why not? Are you saying humans are never systematically glad at another’s misfortune or loss under certain conditions? I would say humans often are. LWers probably come from societies and situations where this kind of behaviour is less prevalent than the human norm.
You’re right, I was imprecise; the bad habit is asking it and halfway-assuming the answer will be ‘yes’ instead of asking it without the presumption of nonsense.
But malice never being a good explanation when malice is basically “desiring another misfortune or loss”. So malice never being a good explanation is completely ridiculous. I wanted to check if you where really saying what I thought you where saying so I rephrased it in my own words to match how I understood your statement.
I wanted to check if you where really saying what I thought you where saying so I rephrased it in my own words to match how I understood your statement.
That part is of course a good habit. I think the confusion happened because I was asking “how did malice ever seem like a good explanation [for this phenomenon] in the first place?”, not “how did malice ever seem like a good explanation [for anything ever in the history of the universe] in the first place?”.
In fairness, you did some raise some good points as well, and I’ll address those -
The OP describes a phenomenon that everyone knows about.
Indeed. And yet, one many people can’t explain. Which is why it’s worth thinking about.
The OP then suggests that “stupidity” (a word left undefined) and “malice” aren’t good explanations.
I defined stupidity in the post as “impl[ying] poor judgment,” meaning going through a conscious faulty thought process. I could have been more explicit about this definition at the expense of pace and brevity, by making the post more heavy and harder for casual readers to digest, without adding significantly more clarity. I suppose it could have been defined explicitly, but I don’t think the piece becomes stronger if I do. Rather, I think it becomes weaker for the vast majority of potential readers.
(How did “malice” ever seem like a good explanation in the first place?)
Some of this behavior certainly seems mean-spirited and malicious to people. Many examples available if you honestly can’t think of any.
A single word is never a good explanation for an aspect of human psychology.
True, yes, but you must consider audience. There’s a reason, unfortunately, why popular magazines are more popular than science journals. Style does matter, which always must be a consideration if you’re tackling a complex theme and want your piece to be accessible to a wide variety of people.
The OP then suggests that the “egalitarian instinct” is an explanation. The OP gives little explanation for this explanation,
It has been written about extensively. Again, this wasn’t a PhD thesis. In fact, it’s been written about extensively here on LessWrong before, notably “Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct” by Eliezer. I suppose I did assume some familiarity with the material that other readers might not have, and could have cited that as relevant prerequisite reading.
no mention of other possible explanations (no acknowledgment of the existence of other possible explanations),
Again, because I was formulating a hypothesis, not writing a thesis.
I appreciate you taking the time to reply and elaborate on your thoughts, but there might be a difference in goals and expectations here. I’ve attempted to write a series of observations, reason through them, and come up for one explanation for a not-fully-understood phenomenon.
It’s already stimulated some good discussion. I’m happy with that result and it has, thus far, done what I intended. I think a longer, weightier, more formal post would have been less effective at the intended goal of putting out observations, a hypothesis, and stimulating some discussion.
I didn’t pick up that the article was “formulating a hypothesis”. Did the article indicate that this is what it was doing? Perhaps I missed it.
Now that I do know, from your comment, that the article was doing that, I have to say I’m a bit surprised; I didn’t expect to see that sort of article in the main section. Then again, I’m no expert on Less Wrong so maybe that sort of thing is not so uncommon.
Read and understood, we probably agree about most everything here and discussing it further is probably suboptimal.
I’ll make a few clarifications that I don’t think you’d argue with too much:
It has been written about extensively. Again, this wasn’t a PhD thesis. In fact, it’s been written about extensively here on LessWrong before, notably “Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct” by Eliezer. I suppose I did assume some familiarity with the material that other readers might not have, and could have cited that as relevant prerequisite reading.
I had read the post and recognized the concept, but a link to it would have primed me more for looking at similarities/differences between the phenomena you and he discuss. Consider adding one?
Some of this behavior certainly seems mean-spirited and malicious to people. Many examples available if you honestly can’t think of any.
I can think of many examples, but I can also think of many examples that don’t seem malicious, in fact most don’t, and since you’re proposing an explanation of the class of behaviors, it seemed absurd to think that anyone would think that malice was an explanation. But upon reflection this was severe typical mind fallacy on my part.
Mostly fair points, but you missed the scope of this post. It’s a 550 word post that marks a series of observations and a hypothesis.
It has stimulated some good discussion about alternative reasons that this phenomenon exists.
This is not how you go about constructing a model of human psychology.
Your idea of the target scope is off. It was not an attempt to construct a model of human psychology, which would be more fit for a PhD thesis than a 550 word post. It is a series of observation, reasoning, and a hypothesis.
It has stimulated some good discussion about alternative reasons that this phenomenon exists.
I had neglected this important consideration and I will retract my downvote until I have thought about this more. I still think this post shows off some bad cognitive habits, and I’m afraid that it getting many upvotes would both incentivize bad cognitive habits and reflect poorly on Less Wrong. Thus currently my policy is “downvote if it gets above 15, upvote if it gets below 0, else do nothing”.
It was not an attempt to construct a model of human psychology, which would be more fit for a PhD thesis than a 550 word post.
I didn’t mean to imply that. I was trying to say “this is not how one should generally go about constructing a model of any aspect or set of aspects of human psychology” but thought that sounded too clunky.
I agree that a <1000 word post shouldn’t go into lots of details, but if you’re trying to keep it short then I think it’s a bad idea to put forth a hypothesis unless it’s sufficiently clear that it’s a particularly good or interesting one. I think you could have spent the words you did on your hypothesis much more effectively by proposing some plausible hypotheses and then explicitly asking Less Wrong what they thought. I would consider upvoting the post if you did this, sexy title be damned, but I realize that would be a fair bit of work for you even if you agreed it would be better.
Interesting. Okay, thank you for the feedback. One thing I’m going to think about is signal-to-noise ratio vs. putting ideas out there.
My first inclination is that putting out a larger volume of potentially correct work and letting it go through trial-by-fire and be discussed is superior to waiting until an argument is fully bulletproofed, caveat’ed, and so on. But there’s probably some tuneups I could have made to write it more strongly—I’ll sleep on it tonight, re-read your comments tomorrow, and give it more thought. Thanks for your replies.
A large volume of potentially correct work that you seek discussion on might do better in the discussion area. I found this one valuable for the term Egalité Irréfléchie, which does have a nice ring to it; but otherwise a bit tedious: Everything between the second paragraph and “I used to wonder...” sounded completely superfluous; the last half sounded painfully belabored on its own points.
The redundancy of the text was balanced by the lightness of the support. Where lukeprog would’ve added 60 citations to peer-reviewed papers, you merely said “there’s plenty of research on this.”
I’ve enjoyed your writing before, but I think this one wasn’t quite ready for the main LW posting area.
My first inclination is that putting out a larger volume of potentially correct work and letting it go through trial-by-fire and be discussed is superior to waiting until an argument is fully bulletproofed, caveat’ed, and so on.
Definitely depends on what your goals are. If you’re interested in getting feedback for your ideas while stimulating discussion then doing what you did except with more of a “but that’s my take on it and I’m not completely satisfied with it yet, what does Less Wrong think?” approach will get more useful feedback. Posting things somewhat-haphazardly will get you more feedback on background/meta stuff, like the things I’ve focused on in my comment replies, which can be useful but can also backfire in non-obvious ways. Your reputation might get hurt to some extent, which will cause you to get less upvotes and attention in the future when you want people to really pay attention to your well-thought-out ideas. I think this downside is very easy to underestimate. I tentatively think (though I haven’t done a quantitative analysis and there are many other possible explanations) that I used to get a lot more karma per comment before I started posting about things that had way too much inferential distance, or that pattern-matched to things people believe for silly reasons. That was about 4 months ago.
(Parts of this comment were misinterpreted. I have slightly edited this comment to make it clearer; this editing was done after lionhearted replied to it. )
I downvoted this post. The OP describes a phenomenon that everyone knows about, then suggests that “stupidity” (a word mostly left undefined) and “malice” aren’t good explanations. (How did “malice” ever seem like a good explanation in the first place?) That’s kind of correct, maybe, depending on what class of things the OP is using “stupidity” to refer to. A single word is never a good explanation for an aspect of human psychology. The OP then suggests that the “egalitarian instinct” is an explanation. The OP gives little explanation for this explanation (ETA: I didn’t mean explaining what the egalitarian instinct is, which is easily researched by those interested, but explaining more persuasively/effectively how it explains the phenomenon mentioned), no mention of other possible explanations (no acknowledgment of the existence of other possible explanations), and no description of what the world would look like if the OP’s explanation were wrong. Thinking up one plausible explanation for an observed phenomenon is fine, I guess, if that’s where you want to start, and you don’t care too much about the phenomenon in question. Writing a Less Wrong post that looks exactly like that, though, is just wrong. This is not how you go about constructing a model of human psychology.
I would like to complain in more detail about the way “stupidity” and “malice” are brought up and almost immediately dismissed. It causes some part of the the reader’s brain to read along and think “Yeah, stupidity doesn’t sound like a very good hypothesis, and huh, malice doesn’t either… I wonder what a good explanation would be? Oh, the OP suggests the egalitarian instinct, that’s comparatively a lot more plausible than stupidity or malice which means it’s probably correct.” If stupidity and malice had never been brought up, the reader would be a lot more likely to treat the proposed explanation of egalitarianism with a healthier amount of skepticism. Bringing up the red herrings thus misleads.
Why not? Are you saying humans are never systematically glad at another’s misfortune or loss under certain conditions? I would say humans often are. LWers probably come from societies and situations where this kind of behaviour is less prevalent than the human norm.
This is a really bad habit. (Specifically the habit of asking or thinking things like “Are you saying completely ridiculous thing #24626772?”.)
The answer is yes fairly often, which gives a lot of info cheaply.
You’re right, I was imprecise; the bad habit is asking it and halfway-assuming the answer will be ‘yes’ instead of asking it without the presumption of nonsense.
Yes, being polite is good, and rhetorical questions can easily go the other away.
Perhaps this is so.
But malice never being a good explanation when malice is basically “desiring another misfortune or loss”. So malice never being a good explanation is completely ridiculous. I wanted to check if you where really saying what I thought you where saying so I rephrased it in my own words to match how I understood your statement.
That part is of course a good habit. I think the confusion happened because I was asking “how did malice ever seem like a good explanation [for this phenomenon] in the first place?”, not “how did malice ever seem like a good explanation [for anything ever in the history of the universe] in the first place?”.
In fairness, you did some raise some good points as well, and I’ll address those -
Indeed. And yet, one many people can’t explain. Which is why it’s worth thinking about.
I defined stupidity in the post as “impl[ying] poor judgment,” meaning going through a conscious faulty thought process. I could have been more explicit about this definition at the expense of pace and brevity, by making the post more heavy and harder for casual readers to digest, without adding significantly more clarity. I suppose it could have been defined explicitly, but I don’t think the piece becomes stronger if I do. Rather, I think it becomes weaker for the vast majority of potential readers.
Some of this behavior certainly seems mean-spirited and malicious to people. Many examples available if you honestly can’t think of any.
True, yes, but you must consider audience. There’s a reason, unfortunately, why popular magazines are more popular than science journals. Style does matter, which always must be a consideration if you’re tackling a complex theme and want your piece to be accessible to a wide variety of people.
It has been written about extensively. Again, this wasn’t a PhD thesis. In fact, it’s been written about extensively here on LessWrong before, notably “Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct” by Eliezer. I suppose I did assume some familiarity with the material that other readers might not have, and could have cited that as relevant prerequisite reading.
Again, because I was formulating a hypothesis, not writing a thesis.
I appreciate you taking the time to reply and elaborate on your thoughts, but there might be a difference in goals and expectations here. I’ve attempted to write a series of observations, reason through them, and come up for one explanation for a not-fully-understood phenomenon.
It’s already stimulated some good discussion. I’m happy with that result and it has, thus far, done what I intended. I think a longer, weightier, more formal post would have been less effective at the intended goal of putting out observations, a hypothesis, and stimulating some discussion.
I didn’t pick up that the article was “formulating a hypothesis”. Did the article indicate that this is what it was doing? Perhaps I missed it.
Now that I do know, from your comment, that the article was doing that, I have to say I’m a bit surprised; I didn’t expect to see that sort of article in the main section. Then again, I’m no expert on Less Wrong so maybe that sort of thing is not so uncommon.
Read and understood, we probably agree about most everything here and discussing it further is probably suboptimal.
I’ll make a few clarifications that I don’t think you’d argue with too much:
I had read the post and recognized the concept, but a link to it would have primed me more for looking at similarities/differences between the phenomena you and he discuss. Consider adding one?
I can think of many examples, but I can also think of many examples that don’t seem malicious, in fact most don’t, and since you’re proposing an explanation of the class of behaviors, it seemed absurd to think that anyone would think that malice was an explanation. But upon reflection this was severe typical mind fallacy on my part.
Mostly fair points, but you missed the scope of this post. It’s a 550 word post that marks a series of observations and a hypothesis.
It has stimulated some good discussion about alternative reasons that this phenomenon exists.
Your idea of the target scope is off. It was not an attempt to construct a model of human psychology, which would be more fit for a PhD thesis than a 550 word post. It is a series of observation, reasoning, and a hypothesis.
I had neglected this important consideration and I will retract my downvote until I have thought about this more. I still think this post shows off some bad cognitive habits, and I’m afraid that it getting many upvotes would both incentivize bad cognitive habits and reflect poorly on Less Wrong. Thus currently my policy is “downvote if it gets above 15, upvote if it gets below 0, else do nothing”.
I didn’t mean to imply that. I was trying to say “this is not how one should generally go about constructing a model of any aspect or set of aspects of human psychology” but thought that sounded too clunky.
I agree that a <1000 word post shouldn’t go into lots of details, but if you’re trying to keep it short then I think it’s a bad idea to put forth a hypothesis unless it’s sufficiently clear that it’s a particularly good or interesting one. I think you could have spent the words you did on your hypothesis much more effectively by proposing some plausible hypotheses and then explicitly asking Less Wrong what they thought. I would consider upvoting the post if you did this, sexy title be damned, but I realize that would be a fair bit of work for you even if you agreed it would be better.
Interesting. Okay, thank you for the feedback. One thing I’m going to think about is signal-to-noise ratio vs. putting ideas out there.
My first inclination is that putting out a larger volume of potentially correct work and letting it go through trial-by-fire and be discussed is superior to waiting until an argument is fully bulletproofed, caveat’ed, and so on. But there’s probably some tuneups I could have made to write it more strongly—I’ll sleep on it tonight, re-read your comments tomorrow, and give it more thought. Thanks for your replies.
A large volume of potentially correct work that you seek discussion on might do better in the discussion area. I found this one valuable for the term Egalité Irréfléchie, which does have a nice ring to it; but otherwise a bit tedious: Everything between the second paragraph and “I used to wonder...” sounded completely superfluous; the last half sounded painfully belabored on its own points.
The redundancy of the text was balanced by the lightness of the support. Where lukeprog would’ve added 60 citations to peer-reviewed papers, you merely said “there’s plenty of research on this.”
I’ve enjoyed your writing before, but I think this one wasn’t quite ready for the main LW posting area.
Definitely depends on what your goals are. If you’re interested in getting feedback for your ideas while stimulating discussion then doing what you did except with more of a “but that’s my take on it and I’m not completely satisfied with it yet, what does Less Wrong think?” approach will get more useful feedback. Posting things somewhat-haphazardly will get you more feedback on background/meta stuff, like the things I’ve focused on in my comment replies, which can be useful but can also backfire in non-obvious ways. Your reputation might get hurt to some extent, which will cause you to get less upvotes and attention in the future when you want people to really pay attention to your well-thought-out ideas. I think this downside is very easy to underestimate. I tentatively think (though I haven’t done a quantitative analysis and there are many other possible explanations) that I used to get a lot more karma per comment before I started posting about things that had way too much inferential distance, or that pattern-matched to things people believe for silly reasons. That was about 4 months ago.