Oh, I was unclear about this and I’ll edit into the body quickly. I didn’t want to bring the details up here. But many details can be shared; I have little-to-no private knowledge and I intend to link to the public knowledge I have in the footnote or comment.
In most things, details matter. If you can link to it in the article, why NOT link to it in the discussion of how to link to it in the article? Alternately, wouldn’t the same reasons to obfuscate in THIS discussion apply to the article itself?
Oh, that. I almost never strong-downvote, but I disagree pretty vehemently with the proposal in that post. It’s perhaps fine in a closed group, with a government-like constitution and formal monopoly on punishments for violations (including many corporations, for some classes of violation).
That’s completely NOT what I thought this question was about. But it does reinforce my main objection: details matter. Some crimes should be published, and push the admins and other users to shun the offender. Some crimes shouldn’t be, but it’s hard to know the difference, and there’s probably no way to be abstract about it. Trying to split them up is likely to seem (and to be, IMO) disingenuous, with the abstraction necessarily skewed toward this instance, but with some participants in the discussion not knowing the context. THAT is wrong.
So I came across this again, and now that I have more spoons it felt polite to try to explain why I disliked this comment.
There are three reasons. The first is: I already acknowledged your objection. You say:
Trying to split them up is likely to seem (and to be, IMO) disingenuous, with the abstraction necessarily skewed toward this instance, but with some participants in the discussion not knowing the context.
And in the post, under a list of disadvantages, I say:
You can’t really remove the initial post from its context of “Alice thinks we should punch Bob”. You can hide that context, but that doesn’t remove its influence. For example, if there are cases similar to Bob’s that would be covered by the same theory, Alice’s post is likely to gloss over the parts of the theory that relate to them-but-not-Bob, and to focus too much on the parts that relate to Bob-but-not-them.
These seem like basically the same objection to me? I don’t specifically mention why it’s bad that the abstraction is skewed towards that instance, but it seems pretty clearly what I’m describing.
So: I say “this has good features A, B, C, and bad features X, Y, Z, and overall I think it’s good”. You say “this is bad because X”. What am I to make of this? It could be that you think X is worse than I do; or it could be you think A, B, C are less good and Y, Z are less bad than I do; or it could be that you haven’t thought about A, B, C, Y, Z (perhaps because you didn’t read the post carefully); or probably a bunch of other things. But you give me no way to distinguish between these possibilities.
If you instead said: “this seems bad to me because X, and all those other considerations just don’t stack up next to it”, then I probably wouldn’t find that convincing (and wouldn’t particularly expect to be able to change your mind either), but I’d at least have a better idea of why we disagree.
The second is: you suggest no alternative course of action. I’m asking “I don’t know if I should do a thing, help?” and you’re criticizing the way I ask for help. But you haven’t suggested a different way I could ask for help, that doesn’t involve doing the thing that I don’t know if I should do.
The third is: it sounds like you don’t expect me to receive useful advice by asking this way? But I did receive useful advice.
I don’t commit to continuing this conversation effortfully, but I did want to say this much.
It may be that we’re thinking of this at different levels. I don’t believe there CAN BE a general model of norm development/enforcement—it’s all a pile of exceptions to exceptions. At best, you can examine specifics and adjust your baseline, but discussing serious violations purely in the abstract is never effective.
I don’t remember if I objected to the weighting, to the list of pros and cons, or to something else, but I remember not liking the generalization.
I’m not sure there’s useful further crux-finding to do—happy to put more effort into it, but my default will be to let it go until it comes up again.
(I’m going to reply, but I’m also happy to drop if you prefer. No obligation to respond, obviously.)
I don’t believe there CAN BE a general model of norm development/enforcement
This sounds to me like you think I’m suggesting something very different from what I’m actually suggesting. Like, it sounds like you think that I think I have a general model of norm development/enforcement; or that I am suggesting that people offer general models of norm development/enforcement; but neither is the case.
If you instead make it ”...of any particular norm” then it’s closer? I do think I have some general models of “here is a norm that we should develop and enforce”, and I think other people might also have such models that they can offer. I don’t think I have them in exacting detail, such that I can specify in advance exactly how I think we should respond to every situation, and I’m not suggesting that others try to offer that level of detail either. I don’t think that’s particularly a problem.
(Do you think e.g. laws against murder are a big pile of exceptions to exceptions? I think it’s overall good that we have a relatively-succinct idea of “here are the situations in which we consider it acceptable for a person to kill another person”, even if the relatively-succinct form doesn’t fully capture everything we might think about specific instances of homicide.)
I note that you still haven’t suggested how you think I should have acted. From
I don’t remember if I objected to the weighting, to the list of pros and cons, or to something else, but I remember not liking the generalization.
It kind of sounds like maybe you think that me asking this question was fine, and maybe you even think me giving my own answer could have been fine, but you think the specific answer I gave (i.e. the list considerations I wrote) was a bad answer? (What did you think of Ben’s comment?)
Here’s a hypothesis: you misunderstand what I was suggesting in “now here’s why I’m punching you”. The thing I was actually suggesting is a thing you don’t in general have a problem with. There are some instances of it—like my answer in this thread—that you think are bad. There are other instances of it—perhaps like my essay on responsibility that you commented on positively, and perhaps like Ben’s comment in this thread—that you think are fine.
I think it’s very likely I misunderstood (and likely still do) - it may be that I am over-focused on “punching” as a metaphor, and that is blocking my ability to understand the tie between general and specific. In fact, I don’t quite know what you’re suggesting - you seem like a pretty reasonable and thoughtful person, and I doubt I’d strongly object to whatever you think is right, even if I somewhat disagree. I do react badly to what seems like an encouragement to violate or radically change norms without a fair bit of effort into drawing the boundaries of the change.
Do you think e.g. laws against murder are a big pile of exceptions to exceptions?
Absolutely and obviously! If you don’t, that’s probably a good pointer toward one of our cruxes. The social balance of when is potentially-deadly force permitted, not permitted but not really punished, and actively punished in what ways, depending on who was involved, the specific circumstances, and who is doing the punishing, is a huge mass of contradictions and specifics. These norms and laws have evolved over millenea of human codification of laws, and have changed radically both over time and among different groups.
edited to add that not just written laws against murder which are piles of exceptions, but the implementation of the laws are heavily individual-judgement-based, from who gets investigated, to what charges to bring, to what evidence to allow or suppress, to human decisions of guilt, to judicial decision of punishment.
I think it’s very likely I misunderstood (and likely still do)
Okay. I think it’s likely not worth it for me to try again to explain.
I do note that I still don’t know what you think of the examples I gave, or what you think I should have done differently in this situation.
I should give a correction: I suggested that Ben’s comment in this thread was an example of the thing. (I didn’t say so explicitly, but I was thinking it.) That’s not quite right. I claim that Ben’s comment could be an example of the thing, in that someone doing the thing could generate it. But (without having access to Ben’s internals, I assume) it’s probably not the case that Ben generated it by doing the thing I described in “why I’m punching you”. I’m more interested in the thing generated than the generating process, but I do think the generating process matters, and plausibly you think it matters more than I do.
(If it’s still unclear to you what the thing is, then “whether it matters to Dagon more than philh” might be a thing you have no way of evaluating. That’s fine, I’m not asking you to try to evaluate it, I’m just kind of noting this for the record because I said something that was kind of untrue and I want to correct it.)
I’ll also claim Killing Socrates as an example of the thing, based on this comment.
If you don’t, that’s probably a good pointer toward one of our cruxes.
Not really, I just wrote unclearly here. It’s not that I do or don’t think laws against murder are a big pile of exceptions to exceptions. It’s that when you say
it’s all a pile of exceptions to exceptions. At best, you can examine specifics and adjust your baseline, but discussing serious violations purely in the abstract is never effective.
My reaction is, like, “it sounds like this would rule out writing down laws against murder”.
(Gonna limit myself to two more effortful comments after this.)
Willing to take a few more shots at it myself. Let’s stay with the murder topic, and I’ll see if I can tie it back to the original question.
My reaction is, like, “it sounds like this would rule out writing down laws against murder”.
This does rule out writing down rules against murder without context. It rules out trying to determine rules from first principles. It means that any discussion should probably happen in the legislature, and focused mostly on practical problems, rather than on a random message board. A given group may want to (or have to) discuss how to handle a murder that’s not addressed by the legal system, but it’ll almost certainly start with the reasons it wasn’t addressed and hinge on specifics, not generalities.
Likewise for when and how to punch people (in the literal sense, and in the metaphor for verbally attacking a norm defector outside of a formalized sanction system) - in the abstract, just don’t. In the specific, sometimes you probably should.
Also likewise for when to bring up unrelated accusations. Generally, unless it’s relevant to the point or you’re involved in the context, don’t. Sometimes it IS arguably relevant, or most of the audience is involved in the context, in which case do. But that line is very twisty and over-fitted to the data, not cleanly generalizable.
This does rule out writing down rules against murder without context. It rules out trying to determine rules from first principles. It means that any discussion should probably happen in the legislature, and focused mostly on practical problems, rather than on a random message board. A given group may want to (or have to) discuss how to handle a murder that’s not addressed by the legal system, but it’ll almost certainly start with the reasons it wasn’t addressed and hinge on specifics, not generalities.
I think I broadly agree with these as desiderata, but there are other desiderata that are often incompatible with them. I think the original essay elaborates on that a bit, but off the cuff I’d say “the legislature has finite time and maybe the question literal murder is a fine use of that time but other things less so” and “sometimes there are good reasons you don’t want to discuss the specifics”.
Like, this seems super reasonable if we’re only talking about literal murder, but… recall that the context was
[you:] it’s all a pile of exceptions to exceptions. At best, you can examine specifics and adjust your baseline, but discussing serious violations purely in the abstract is never effective.
[me:] My reaction is, like, “it sounds like this would rule out writing down laws against murder”.
So when you say e.g. “It means that any discussion should probably happen in the legislature”, do you just mean discussion of murder? Or do you also include discussion of things that are less bad, and less universally agreed to be bad, than murder; but that match the “pile of exceptions to exceptions” thing?
If the former then this just seems like an irrelevant tangent—the thing that means discussion should probably happen in the legislature, is not the thing that we were talking about previously. If the latter, then I simply disagree.
in the abstract, just don’t. In the specific, sometimes you probably should.
Okay, but how do you know when those times are? My model of you refuses to answer this question, saying there’s no general answer. Honestly this feels to me more like trying to avoid blame than like trying to help people do the right thing? Like, you’d prefer someone to make a mistake because you didn’t say anything, than to make a mistake based on advice you gave, even if you expect your advice to reduce the number and magnitude of mistakes? Not saying that’s what’s going on here, but I get a sense of that kind of dynamic.
But that line is very twisty and over-fitted to the data, not cleanly generalizable.
If I thought the line was cleanly generalizable, I wouldn’t have had to ask this question, or at least I would have asked it very differently. As it was I gave a list of several considerations, and asked people for others. I claim that my behavior here does not look like the behavior of someone who thinks anything like e.g. “I can figure out the answers to three yes-no questions and then I’ll know what I should do”.
I have to admit I’m getting a little lost between generality and specific, and what’s literal “murder” or “punching” and what’s a metaphor for something even less clear, which we’re not willing to specify. Also a bit unsure whether we’re talking about frameworks and actions undertaken by random users/residents and by formal legislative/judicial/administrative rulemaking. I think I’ll bow out for now.
what’s literal “murder” or “punching” and what’s a metaphor for something even less clear, which we’re not willing to specify.
I don’t think I’ve ever been unwilling to specify what these are metaphors for. E.g. the third sentence (or fourth, depending how you count) of “why I’m punching you”:
Things I take as metaphorical punching include name calling, writing angry tweets to or about someone, ejecting them from a group, callout posts, and arguing that we should punch them.
Someone following the advice in that post might use metaphors and be unwilling to specify what they’re metaphors for. But I’d expect them to be willing to specify this particular metaphor, i.e. what kind of punching they’re talking about. (Or more likely I’d expect them to not speak metaphorically about that at all.)
(Actually, I don’t think I’ve used “murder” metaphorically at all. I’ve used it as an example, but that’s not the same.)
for some reason, I don’t seem to be able to edit my previous comment. I’d like to apologize for framing that as accusatory—I don’t believe you’re intentionally causing confusion among different topics and different levels of abstraction. I do mean to say that I’m not able/willing to put in sufficient effort to keep things straight in my mind, and to bring value to the discussion. I am bowing out for that reason.
Fair enough. I think that’s my actual objection—it’s intentionally obfuscated what’s happening here, and my complaints that specifics matter are ignored. For topics like this (where there’s a lot of social uncertainty and an unclear equilibrium between multiple opposing desires), you need to generalize from multiple worked examples, not from first principles.
Oh, I was unclear about this and I’ll edit into the body quickly. I didn’t want to bring the details up here. But many details can be shared; I have little-to-no private knowledge and I intend to link to the public knowledge I have in the footnote or comment.
In most things, details matter. If you can link to it in the article, why NOT link to it in the discussion of how to link to it in the article? Alternately, wouldn’t the same reasons to obfuscate in THIS discussion apply to the article itself?
I believe this is answered by the linked post.
Oh, that. I almost never strong-downvote, but I disagree pretty vehemently with the proposal in that post. It’s perhaps fine in a closed group, with a government-like constitution and formal monopoly on punishments for violations (including many corporations, for some classes of violation).
That’s completely NOT what I thought this question was about. But it does reinforce my main objection: details matter. Some crimes should be published, and push the admins and other users to shun the offender. Some crimes shouldn’t be, but it’s hard to know the difference, and there’s probably no way to be abstract about it. Trying to split them up is likely to seem (and to be, IMO) disingenuous, with the abstraction necessarily skewed toward this instance, but with some participants in the discussion not knowing the context. THAT is wrong.
So I came across this again, and now that I have more spoons it felt polite to try to explain why I disliked this comment.
There are three reasons. The first is: I already acknowledged your objection. You say:
And in the post, under a list of disadvantages, I say:
These seem like basically the same objection to me? I don’t specifically mention why it’s bad that the abstraction is skewed towards that instance, but it seems pretty clearly what I’m describing.
So: I say “this has good features A, B, C, and bad features X, Y, Z, and overall I think it’s good”. You say “this is bad because X”. What am I to make of this? It could be that you think X is worse than I do; or it could be you think A, B, C are less good and Y, Z are less bad than I do; or it could be that you haven’t thought about A, B, C, Y, Z (perhaps because you didn’t read the post carefully); or probably a bunch of other things. But you give me no way to distinguish between these possibilities.
If you instead said: “this seems bad to me because X, and all those other considerations just don’t stack up next to it”, then I probably wouldn’t find that convincing (and wouldn’t particularly expect to be able to change your mind either), but I’d at least have a better idea of why we disagree.
The second is: you suggest no alternative course of action. I’m asking “I don’t know if I should do a thing, help?” and you’re criticizing the way I ask for help. But you haven’t suggested a different way I could ask for help, that doesn’t involve doing the thing that I don’t know if I should do.
The third is: it sounds like you don’t expect me to receive useful advice by asking this way? But I did receive useful advice.
I don’t commit to continuing this conversation effortfully, but I did want to say this much.
It may be that we’re thinking of this at different levels. I don’t believe there CAN BE a general model of norm development/enforcement—it’s all a pile of exceptions to exceptions. At best, you can examine specifics and adjust your baseline, but discussing serious violations purely in the abstract is never effective.
I don’t remember if I objected to the weighting, to the list of pros and cons, or to something else, but I remember not liking the generalization.
I’m not sure there’s useful further crux-finding to do—happy to put more effort into it, but my default will be to let it go until it comes up again.
(I’m going to reply, but I’m also happy to drop if you prefer. No obligation to respond, obviously.)
This sounds to me like you think I’m suggesting something very different from what I’m actually suggesting. Like, it sounds like you think that I think I have a general model of norm development/enforcement; or that I am suggesting that people offer general models of norm development/enforcement; but neither is the case.
If you instead make it ”...of any particular norm” then it’s closer? I do think I have some general models of “here is a norm that we should develop and enforce”, and I think other people might also have such models that they can offer. I don’t think I have them in exacting detail, such that I can specify in advance exactly how I think we should respond to every situation, and I’m not suggesting that others try to offer that level of detail either. I don’t think that’s particularly a problem.
(Do you think e.g. laws against murder are a big pile of exceptions to exceptions? I think it’s overall good that we have a relatively-succinct idea of “here are the situations in which we consider it acceptable for a person to kill another person”, even if the relatively-succinct form doesn’t fully capture everything we might think about specific instances of homicide.)
I note that you still haven’t suggested how you think I should have acted. From
It kind of sounds like maybe you think that me asking this question was fine, and maybe you even think me giving my own answer could have been fine, but you think the specific answer I gave (i.e. the list considerations I wrote) was a bad answer? (What did you think of Ben’s comment?)
Here’s a hypothesis: you misunderstand what I was suggesting in “now here’s why I’m punching you”. The thing I was actually suggesting is a thing you don’t in general have a problem with. There are some instances of it—like my answer in this thread—that you think are bad. There are other instances of it—perhaps like my essay on responsibility that you commented on positively, and perhaps like Ben’s comment in this thread—that you think are fine.
I think it’s very likely I misunderstood (and likely still do) - it may be that I am over-focused on “punching” as a metaphor, and that is blocking my ability to understand the tie between general and specific. In fact, I don’t quite know what you’re suggesting - you seem like a pretty reasonable and thoughtful person, and I doubt I’d strongly object to whatever you think is right, even if I somewhat disagree. I do react badly to what seems like an encouragement to violate or radically change norms without a fair bit of effort into drawing the boundaries of the change.
Absolutely and obviously! If you don’t, that’s probably a good pointer toward one of our cruxes. The social balance of when is potentially-deadly force permitted, not permitted but not really punished, and actively punished in what ways, depending on who was involved, the specific circumstances, and who is doing the punishing, is a huge mass of contradictions and specifics. These norms and laws have evolved over millenea of human codification of laws, and have changed radically both over time and among different groups.
edited to add that not just written laws against murder which are piles of exceptions, but the implementation of the laws are heavily individual-judgement-based, from who gets investigated, to what charges to bring, to what evidence to allow or suppress, to human decisions of guilt, to judicial decision of punishment.
Okay. I think it’s likely not worth it for me to try again to explain.
I do note that I still don’t know what you think of the examples I gave, or what you think I should have done differently in this situation.
I should give a correction: I suggested that Ben’s comment in this thread was an example of the thing. (I didn’t say so explicitly, but I was thinking it.) That’s not quite right. I claim that Ben’s comment could be an example of the thing, in that someone doing the thing could generate it. But (without having access to Ben’s internals, I assume) it’s probably not the case that Ben generated it by doing the thing I described in “why I’m punching you”. I’m more interested in the thing generated than the generating process, but I do think the generating process matters, and plausibly you think it matters more than I do.
(If it’s still unclear to you what the thing is, then “whether it matters to Dagon more than philh” might be a thing you have no way of evaluating. That’s fine, I’m not asking you to try to evaluate it, I’m just kind of noting this for the record because I said something that was kind of untrue and I want to correct it.)
I’ll also claim Killing Socrates as an example of the thing, based on this comment.
Not really, I just wrote unclearly here. It’s not that I do or don’t think laws against murder are a big pile of exceptions to exceptions. It’s that when you say
My reaction is, like, “it sounds like this would rule out writing down laws against murder”.
(Gonna limit myself to two more effortful comments after this.)
Willing to take a few more shots at it myself. Let’s stay with the murder topic, and I’ll see if I can tie it back to the original question.
This does rule out writing down rules against murder without context. It rules out trying to determine rules from first principles. It means that any discussion should probably happen in the legislature, and focused mostly on practical problems, rather than on a random message board. A given group may want to (or have to) discuss how to handle a murder that’s not addressed by the legal system, but it’ll almost certainly start with the reasons it wasn’t addressed and hinge on specifics, not generalities.
Likewise for when and how to punch people (in the literal sense, and in the metaphor for verbally attacking a norm defector outside of a formalized sanction system) - in the abstract, just don’t. In the specific, sometimes you probably should.
Also likewise for when to bring up unrelated accusations. Generally, unless it’s relevant to the point or you’re involved in the context, don’t. Sometimes it IS arguably relevant, or most of the audience is involved in the context, in which case do. But that line is very twisty and over-fitted to the data, not cleanly generalizable.
I think I broadly agree with these as desiderata, but there are other desiderata that are often incompatible with them. I think the original essay elaborates on that a bit, but off the cuff I’d say “the legislature has finite time and maybe the question literal murder is a fine use of that time but other things less so” and “sometimes there are good reasons you don’t want to discuss the specifics”.
Like, this seems super reasonable if we’re only talking about literal murder, but… recall that the context was
So when you say e.g. “It means that any discussion should probably happen in the legislature”, do you just mean discussion of murder? Or do you also include discussion of things that are less bad, and less universally agreed to be bad, than murder; but that match the “pile of exceptions to exceptions” thing?
If the former then this just seems like an irrelevant tangent—the thing that means discussion should probably happen in the legislature, is not the thing that we were talking about previously. If the latter, then I simply disagree.
Okay, but how do you know when those times are? My model of you refuses to answer this question, saying there’s no general answer. Honestly this feels to me more like trying to avoid blame than like trying to help people do the right thing? Like, you’d prefer someone to make a mistake because you didn’t say anything, than to make a mistake based on advice you gave, even if you expect your advice to reduce the number and magnitude of mistakes? Not saying that’s what’s going on here, but I get a sense of that kind of dynamic.
If I thought the line was cleanly generalizable, I wouldn’t have had to ask this question, or at least I would have asked it very differently. As it was I gave a list of several considerations, and asked people for others. I claim that my behavior here does not look like the behavior of someone who thinks anything like e.g. “I can figure out the answers to three yes-no questions and then I’ll know what I should do”.
I have to admit I’m getting a little lost between generality and specific, and what’s literal “murder” or “punching” and what’s a metaphor for something even less clear, which we’re not willing to specify. Also a bit unsure whether we’re talking about frameworks and actions undertaken by random users/residents and by formal legislative/judicial/administrative rulemaking. I think I’ll bow out for now.
Fair enough. Though to clarify one point:
I don’t think I’ve ever been unwilling to specify what these are metaphors for. E.g. the third sentence (or fourth, depending how you count) of “why I’m punching you”:
Someone following the advice in that post might use metaphors and be unwilling to specify what they’re metaphors for. But I’d expect them to be willing to specify this particular metaphor, i.e. what kind of punching they’re talking about. (Or more likely I’d expect them to not speak metaphorically about that at all.)
(Actually, I don’t think I’ve used “murder” metaphorically at all. I’ve used it as an example, but that’s not the same.)
for some reason, I don’t seem to be able to edit my previous comment. I’d like to apologize for framing that as accusatory—I don’t believe you’re intentionally causing confusion among different topics and different levels of abstraction. I do mean to say that I’m not able/willing to put in sufficient effort to keep things straight in my mind, and to bring value to the discussion. I am bowing out for that reason.
Apology accepted and appreciated :)
Like in the comments of the other post, I feel like you misunderstand what’s happening here but I don’t feel like trying to unpack.
Fair enough. I think that’s my actual objection—it’s intentionally obfuscated what’s happening here, and my complaints that specifics matter are ignored. For topics like this (where there’s a lot of social uncertainty and an unclear equilibrium between multiple opposing desires), you need to generalize from multiple worked examples, not from first principles.