Derision, mockery, acts to make the argument low status, ad hominems, etc.
I don’t want to include these in “Non-Violence”, because I’m thinking of that rule as relatively absolute. By comparison, “derision” and “mockery” should probably be kept to a minimum, but I’m not going to pretend I’ve never made fun of the Time Cube guy, or that I feel super bad about having done so.
I also think sometimes a person tries to output “light-hearted playing around”, but someone else perceives it as “cruel mockery”. This can be a hint that the speaker messed up a bit, but I don’t want to treat it as a serious sin (and I don’t want to ban all play for the sake of preventing this).
Similarly, “acts to make the argument low status” is a bit tricky to encode as a rule, because even things as simple as “generating a good counter-argument” can lower the original argument’s status in many people’s eyes. (Flawed arguments should plausibly be seen as lower-status than good arguments!)
And “ad hominem” can actually be justified when the topic is someone’s character (e.g., when you’re discussing a presidential candidate’s judgment, or discussing whether to hire someone, or discussing whether someone’s safe to date). So again it’s tricky to delimit exactly which cases are OK versus bad.
I do think you’re getting at an important thing here, it’s just a bit tricky to put into words. My hope is that people will realize that those sorts of things are discouraged by:
6. Reality-Minding: “Keep your eye on the ball, hug the query, and don’t lose sight of object-levelreality.”
9. Goodwill: “Err on the side of carrots over sticks, forgiveness over punishment, and civility over incivility”
10.1. Valence-Owning: “Favor language with fewer and milder connotations, and make your arguments explicitly where possible, rather than relying excessively on the connotations, feel, fnords, or vibes of your words.”
(If people think it’s worth being more explicit here, I’d be interested in ideas for specific edits.)
I don’t want to include these in “Non-Violence”, because I’m thinking of that rule as relatively absolute. By comparison, “derision” and “mockery” should probably be kept to a minimum, but I’m not going to pretend I’ve never made fun of the Time Cube guy, or that I feel super bad about having done so.
I’ve made fun of people on Twitter, but:
Don’t think that reflects well on me as a rationalist
Don’t think such posts are acceptable content for LessWrong.
You may not feel bad about mockery (I don’t generally do so either), but do you think it reflects well on you as a rationalist?
I don’t want to include these in “Non-Violence”, because I’m thinking of that rule as relatively absolute.
I agree these aren’t acts of violence, but I listened to the rest of the post and didn’t hear you object to them anywhere else. This felt like the closest place (in that bad argument gets counterargument and doesn’t get any of the things I mentioned).
Similarly, “acts to make the argument low status” is a bit tricky to encode as a rule, because even things as simple as “generating a good counter-argument” can lower the original argument’s status in many people’s eyes. (Flawed arguments should plausibly be seen as lower-status than good arguments!)
An appropriately more nuanced version would be something like: “acts to make an argument low status for reasons other than its accuracy/veracity, and conformance to norms (some true things can be presented in very unpleasant/distasteful ways [e.g. with the deliberate goal of being maximally offensive])”.
You may not feel bas about mockery (I don’t generally do so either), but do you think it reflects well on you as a rationalist?
I like this example! I do indeed share the intuition “mocking Time Cube guy on Twitter doesn’t reflect well on me as a rationalist”. It also just seems mean to me.
I think part of what’s driving my intuition here, though, is that “mocking” sounds inherently mean-spirited, and “on Twitter” makes it sound like I’m writing the sort of low-quality viral personal attack that’s common on Twitter.
“Make a light-hearted reference to Time Cube (in a way that takes for granted that Time Cube is silly) in a chat with some friends” feels pretty unlike “write a tweet mocking and deriding Time Cube”, and the former doesn’t feel to me like it necessarily reflects poorly on me as a rationalist. (It feels more orthogonal to the spirit of rationality to me, like making puns or playing a video game; puns are neither rationalist nor anti-rationalist.)
So part of my reservation here is that I have pretty different intuitions about different versions of “tell jokes that turn on a certain claim/belief being low-probability”, and I’m not sure where to draw the line exactly (beyond the general heuristics I mentioned in the OP).
Another part of my reservation is just that I’m erring on the side of keeping the list of norms too short rather than too long. I’d rather have non-exhaustive lists and encourage people to use their common sense and personal conscience as a guide in the many cases that the guidelines don’t cover (or don’t cover until you do some interpretive work).
I worry that modern society is too norm-heavy in general, encouraging people to fixate on heuristics, patches, and local Prohibited Actions, in ways that are cognitively taxing and unduly ‘domesticating’. I think this can make it harder to notice and appropriately respond to the specifics of the situation you’re in, because your brain is yelling a memorized “no! unconditional rule X!” script at you, when in fact if you consulted your unassisted conscience and your common sense you’d have an easier time seeing what the right thing to do is.
So I’m mostly interested in trying to distill core aspects of the spirit of rationalist discourse, in the hope that this can help people’s common sense and conscience grow (/ help people become more self-aware of aspects of their common sense and conscience that are already inside themselves, but that they aren’t lucid about).
I suspect I’ve left at least one important part of “the spirit of rationalist discourse” out, so I’m mainly nitpicking your suggestions in case your replies cause me to realize that I’m missing some important underlying generator that isn’t alluded to in the OP. I care less about whether “mockery” specifically gets called out in the OP, and more about whether I’ve neglected an underlying spirit/generator.
Maybe Goodwill is missing a generator-sentence that’s something like “Don’t lean into cruelty, or otherwise lose sight of what your conscience or common sense says about how best to relate to other human beings.”
“acts to make an argument low status for reasons other than its accuracy/veracity, and conformance to norms (some true things can be presented in very unpleasant/distasteful ways [e.g. with the deliberate goal of being maximally offensive])”.
Yeah, I like that more. I still worry that “low status” is vague and different people conceive of it differently, so I have the instinct that it might be good to taboo “status” here. “Conformance to norms” is also super vague; someone would need to have the right norms in mind in order for this to work.
I also don’t want to call minor things like ad hominems “violent”!
(Actually, possibly I’m already watering down “violence” more than is ideal by treating “doxxing” and “coercion” as violent. But in this context I do feel like physical violence, death threats, doxing, and coercion are in a cluster together, whatever you want to call it, and things like mockery are in a different cluster.)
It seems to me that forms of mockery, bullying, social ostracization etc are actually in the same cluster. They all attack the opponent with something else than an argument, be it physical or not. If bullying doesn’t count as violence, then the problem seems to be with labeling the cluster “violence”. Maybe rule 2 shouldn’t be called “non-violence”, but “non-aggressiveness” or something like that.
They all attack the opponent with something else than an argument, be it physical or not.
And what, precisely, is an “attack”? Can you taboo that word and give a pretty precise definition, so we know what does and doesn’t count?
I’ve seen people on the Internet use words like “bullying”, “harassment”, “violence”, “abuse”, etc. to refer to stuff like ‘disagreeing with my political opinions’.
(The logic being, e.g.: “Anti-Semites have historically killed people like me. I claim that political opinion X (e.g., about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) is anti-Semitic. Therefore you expressing your opinion is (1) a thing I should reasonably take as a veiled threat against me and an attempt to bully and harass me, and (2) a thing that will embolden anti-Semites and thereby further endanger me.”)
I’m not saying that this reasoning makes sense, or that we should totally avoid words like “bullying” because they get overused in a lot of places. But I do take stuff like this as a warning sign about what can happen if you start building your social norms around vague concepts.
I’d rather have norms that either mention extremely specific concrete things that aren’t up for interpretation (see how much more concrete “death threats” is than “bullying”), or that mention higher-level features shared by lots of different bad behavior (e.g., “avoid symmetric weapons”).
And what, precisely, is an “attack”? Can you taboo that word and give a pretty precise definition, so we know what does and doesn’t count?
How about “hurting a person or deminishing their credibility, or the credibility of their argument, without using a rational argument”? This would make it acceptable when people get hurt by rational arguments, or when their credibility is diminished by such an argument. The problem seems to be when this is achieved by something else than a rational argument.
Maybe this is not the perfect definition of the cluster which includes both physical violence and non-physical aggression, but the pure “physical violence” cluster seems in any case arbitrary. E.g. social ostracization can be far more damaging than a punch in the guts, and both are bad as a response to an argument insofar they are not themselves forms of argument.
I’ve seen people on the Internet use words like “bullying”, “harassment”, “violence”, “abuse”, etc. to refer to stuff like ‘disagreeing with my political opinions’.
Yes, people do that, but them confusing disagreement with bullying doesn’t mean disagreement is bullying. And the fact that disagreement is okay doesn’t mean that bullying, mockery, etc. is a valid discourse strategy.
Moreover, the speaker can identify actions like mockery by introspection, so avoiding it doesn’t rely on the capabilities of the listener to distinguish it from disagreement. The vagueness objection seems to assume the perspective of the listener, but rule 2 applies to us in our role as speakers. It recommends what we should say or do, not how we should interpret others. (Of course, there could be an additional rule which says that we, as listeners, shouldn’t be quick to dismiss mere disagreements as personal attacks.)
How about “hurting a person or deminishing their credibility, or the credibility of their argument, without using a rational argument”?
“Hurting a person” still seems too vague to me (sometimes people are “hurt” just because you disagreed with them on a claim of fact), “Diminishing… the credibility of their argument, without using a rational argument” sounds similar to “using symmetric weapons” to me (but the latter strikes me as more precise and general: don’t try to persuade people via tools that aren’t Bayesian evidence for the truth of the thing you’re trying to persuade them of).
“A rational argument”, I worry, is too vague here, and will make people think that all rationalist conversation as to look like their mental picture of Spock-style discourse.
The problem seems to be when this is achieved by something else than a rational argument.
A lot of things can hurt people’s feelings other than rational arguments, and I don’t think the person causing the hurt is always at fault for those things. (E.g., maybe I beat someone at a video game and this upset them.)
but the pure “physical violence” cluster seems in any case arbitrary. E.g. social ostracization can be far more damaging than a punch in the guts, and both are bad as a response to an argument insofar they are not themselves forms of argument.
The point of separating out physical violence isn’t to say “this is the worst thing you can do to someone”. It’s to draw a clear black line around a case that’s especially easy to rule completely out of bounds. We’ve made at least some progress thereby, and it would be a mistake to throw out this progress just because it doesn’t solve every other problem; don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Other sorts of actions can be worse than some forms of physical violence consequentially, but there isn’t a good sharp black line in every case for clearly verbally transmitting what those out-of-bound actions are. See also my reply to DragonGod.
Even “this is at least as harmful as a punch in the gut” isn’t a good pointer, since some people are extremely emotionally brittle and can be put in severe pain with very minor social slights. I think it’s virtuous to try to help those people flourish, but I don’t want to claim that a rationalist has done a Terrible Thing if they ever do something that makes someone that upset; it depends on the situation.
I feel specifically uncomfortable with leaning on the phrase “social ostracization” here, because it’s so vague, and the way you’re talking about it makes it sound like you want rationalists to be individually responsible for making every human on Earth feel happy, welcome, and accepted in the rat community. “Ostracization” seems clearly bad to me if it looks like bullying and harassment, but sometimes “ostracizing” just means banning someone from an Internet forum, and I think banning is often prosocial.
(Including banning someone because of an argument! If someone keeps posting off-topic arguments, feel free to ban.)
“Hurting a person” still seems too vague to me (sometimes people are “hurt” just because you disagreed with them on a claim of fact),
Even “this is at least as harmful as a punch in the gut” isn’t a good pointer, since some people are extremely emotionally brittle and can be put in severe pain with very minor social slights. I think it’s virtuous to try to help those people flourish, but I don’t want to claim that a rationalist has done a Terrible Thing if they ever do something that makes someone that upset; it depends on the situation.
As I said, if someone feels upset by mere disagreement, that’s not a violation of a rational discourse norm.
The focus on physical violence is nice insofar violence is halfway clear-cut, but is also fairly useless insofar the badness of violence is obvious to most people (unlike things like bullying, bad-faith mockery, moral grandstanding, etc which are very common), and mostly irrelevant in internet discussions without physical contact, where most irrational discourse is happening nowadays, very nonviolently.
I feel specifically uncomfortable with leaning on the phrase “social ostracization” here, because it’s so vague, and the way you’re talking about it makes it sound like you want rationalists to be individually responsible for making every human on Earth feel happy, welcome, and accepted in the rat community.
That seems to me an uncharitable interpretation. Social ostracization is prototypically something which happens e.g. when someone gets cancelled by a Twitter mob. “Mob” insofar those people don’t use rational arguments to attack you, even if “attacking you without using arguments” can’t be defined perfectly precisely. (Something like the Bostrom witch-hunt on Twitter, which included outright defamation, but hardly any arguments.)
If you would consequently shun vagueness, then you couldn’t even discourage violence, because the difference between violence and non-violence is gradual, it likewise admits of borderline cases. But since violence is bad despite borderline cases, the borderline cases and exceptions you cited also don’t seem very serious. You never get perfectly precise definitions. And you have to embrace some more vagueness than in the case of violence, unless you want to refer only to a tiny subset of irrational discourse.
By the way, I would say banning/blocking is irrational when it is done in response to disagreement (often people on Twitter ban other people who merely disagree with them) and acceptable when off-topic or purely harassment. Sometimes there are borderline cases which lie in between, those are grey areas where blocking may be neither clearly bad nor clearly acceptable, but such grey areas are in no way counterexamples to the clear-cut cases.
I don’t want to include these in “Non-Violence”, because I’m thinking of that rule as relatively absolute. By comparison, “derision” and “mockery” should probably be kept to a minimum, but I’m not going to pretend I’ve never made fun of the Time Cube guy, or that I feel super bad about having done so.
I also think sometimes a person tries to output “light-hearted playing around”, but someone else perceives it as “cruel mockery”. This can be a hint that the speaker messed up a bit, but I don’t want to treat it as a serious sin (and I don’t want to ban all play for the sake of preventing this).
Similarly, “acts to make the argument low status” is a bit tricky to encode as a rule, because even things as simple as “generating a good counter-argument” can lower the original argument’s status in many people’s eyes. (Flawed arguments should plausibly be seen as lower-status than good arguments!)
And “ad hominem” can actually be justified when the topic is someone’s character (e.g., when you’re discussing a presidential candidate’s judgment, or discussing whether to hire someone, or discussing whether someone’s safe to date). So again it’s tricky to delimit exactly which cases are OK versus bad.
I do think you’re getting at an important thing here, it’s just a bit tricky to put into words. My hope is that people will realize that those sorts of things are discouraged by:
1. Truth-Seeking: “Try not to ‘win’ arguments using symmetric weapons”
6. Reality-Minding: “Keep your eye on the ball, hug the query, and don’t lose sight of object-level reality.”
9. Goodwill: “Err on the side of carrots over sticks, forgiveness over punishment, and civility over incivility”
10.1. Valence-Owning: “Favor language with fewer and milder connotations, and make your arguments explicitly where possible, rather than relying excessively on the connotations, feel, fnords, or vibes of your words.”
(If people think it’s worth being more explicit here, I’d be interested in ideas for specific edits.)
I’ve made fun of people on Twitter, but:
Don’t think that reflects well on me as a rationalist
Don’t think such posts are acceptable content for LessWrong.
You may not feel bad about mockery (I don’t generally do so either), but do you think it reflects well on you as a rationalist?
I agree these aren’t acts of violence, but I listened to the rest of the post and didn’t hear you object to them anywhere else. This felt like the closest place (in that bad argument gets counterargument and doesn’t get any of the things I mentioned).
An appropriately more nuanced version would be something like: “acts to make an argument low status for reasons other than its accuracy/veracity, and conformance to norms (some true things can be presented in very unpleasant/distasteful ways [e.g. with the deliberate goal of being maximally offensive])”.
I like this example! I do indeed share the intuition “mocking Time Cube guy on Twitter doesn’t reflect well on me as a rationalist”. It also just seems mean to me.
I think part of what’s driving my intuition here, though, is that “mocking” sounds inherently mean-spirited, and “on Twitter” makes it sound like I’m writing the sort of low-quality viral personal attack that’s common on Twitter.
“Make a light-hearted reference to Time Cube (in a way that takes for granted that Time Cube is silly) in a chat with some friends” feels pretty unlike “write a tweet mocking and deriding Time Cube”, and the former doesn’t feel to me like it necessarily reflects poorly on me as a rationalist. (It feels more orthogonal to the spirit of rationality to me, like making puns or playing a video game; puns are neither rationalist nor anti-rationalist.)
So part of my reservation here is that I have pretty different intuitions about different versions of “tell jokes that turn on a certain claim/belief being low-probability”, and I’m not sure where to draw the line exactly (beyond the general heuristics I mentioned in the OP).
Another part of my reservation is just that I’m erring on the side of keeping the list of norms too short rather than too long. I’d rather have non-exhaustive lists and encourage people to use their common sense and personal conscience as a guide in the many cases that the guidelines don’t cover (or don’t cover until you do some interpretive work).
I worry that modern society is too norm-heavy in general, encouraging people to fixate on heuristics, patches, and local Prohibited Actions, in ways that are cognitively taxing and unduly ‘domesticating’. I think this can make it harder to notice and appropriately respond to the specifics of the situation you’re in, because your brain is yelling a memorized “no! unconditional rule X!” script at you, when in fact if you consulted your unassisted conscience and your common sense you’d have an easier time seeing what the right thing to do is.
So I’m mostly interested in trying to distill core aspects of the spirit of rationalist discourse, in the hope that this can help people’s common sense and conscience grow (/ help people become more self-aware of aspects of their common sense and conscience that are already inside themselves, but that they aren’t lucid about).
I suspect I’ve left at least one important part of “the spirit of rationalist discourse” out, so I’m mainly nitpicking your suggestions in case your replies cause me to realize that I’m missing some important underlying generator that isn’t alluded to in the OP. I care less about whether “mockery” specifically gets called out in the OP, and more about whether I’ve neglected an underlying spirit/generator.
Maybe Goodwill is missing a generator-sentence that’s something like “Don’t lean into cruelty, or otherwise lose sight of what your conscience or common sense says about how best to relate to other human beings.”
Yeah, I like that more. I still worry that “low status” is vague and different people conceive of it differently, so I have the instinct that it might be good to taboo “status” here. “Conformance to norms” is also super vague; someone would need to have the right norms in mind in order for this to work.
I also don’t want to call minor things like ad hominems “violent”!
(Actually, possibly I’m already watering down “violence” more than is ideal by treating “doxxing” and “coercion” as violent. But in this context I do feel like physical violence, death threats, doxing, and coercion are in a cluster together, whatever you want to call it, and things like mockery are in a different cluster.)
It seems to me that forms of mockery, bullying, social ostracization etc are actually in the same cluster. They all attack the opponent with something else than an argument, be it physical or not. If bullying doesn’t count as violence, then the problem seems to be with labeling the cluster “violence”. Maybe rule 2 shouldn’t be called “non-violence”, but “non-aggressiveness” or something like that.
And what, precisely, is an “attack”? Can you taboo that word and give a pretty precise definition, so we know what does and doesn’t count?
I’ve seen people on the Internet use words like “bullying”, “harassment”, “violence”, “abuse”, etc. to refer to stuff like ‘disagreeing with my political opinions’.
(The logic being, e.g.: “Anti-Semites have historically killed people like me. I claim that political opinion X (e.g., about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) is anti-Semitic. Therefore you expressing your opinion is (1) a thing I should reasonably take as a veiled threat against me and an attempt to bully and harass me, and (2) a thing that will embolden anti-Semites and thereby further endanger me.”)
I’m not saying that this reasoning makes sense, or that we should totally avoid words like “bullying” because they get overused in a lot of places. But I do take stuff like this as a warning sign about what can happen if you start building your social norms around vague concepts.
I’d rather have norms that either mention extremely specific concrete things that aren’t up for interpretation (see how much more concrete “death threats” is than “bullying”), or that mention higher-level features shared by lots of different bad behavior (e.g., “avoid symmetric weapons”).
How about “hurting a person or deminishing their credibility, or the credibility of their argument, without using a rational argument”? This would make it acceptable when people get hurt by rational arguments, or when their credibility is diminished by such an argument. The problem seems to be when this is achieved by something else than a rational argument.
Maybe this is not the perfect definition of the cluster which includes both physical violence and non-physical aggression, but the pure “physical violence” cluster seems in any case arbitrary. E.g. social ostracization can be far more damaging than a punch in the guts, and both are bad as a response to an argument insofar they are not themselves forms of argument.
Yes, people do that, but them confusing disagreement with bullying doesn’t mean disagreement is bullying. And the fact that disagreement is okay doesn’t mean that bullying, mockery, etc. is a valid discourse strategy.
Moreover, the speaker can identify actions like mockery by introspection, so avoiding it doesn’t rely on the capabilities of the listener to distinguish it from disagreement. The vagueness objection seems to assume the perspective of the listener, but rule 2 applies to us in our role as speakers. It recommends what we should say or do, not how we should interpret others. (Of course, there could be an additional rule which says that we, as listeners, shouldn’t be quick to dismiss mere disagreements as personal attacks.)
“Hurting a person” still seems too vague to me (sometimes people are “hurt” just because you disagreed with them on a claim of fact), “Diminishing… the credibility of their argument, without using a rational argument” sounds similar to “using symmetric weapons” to me (but the latter strikes me as more precise and general: don’t try to persuade people via tools that aren’t Bayesian evidence for the truth of the thing you’re trying to persuade them of).
“A rational argument”, I worry, is too vague here, and will make people think that all rationalist conversation as to look like their mental picture of Spock-style discourse.
A lot of things can hurt people’s feelings other than rational arguments, and I don’t think the person causing the hurt is always at fault for those things. (E.g., maybe I beat someone at a video game and this upset them.)
The point of separating out physical violence isn’t to say “this is the worst thing you can do to someone”. It’s to draw a clear black line around a case that’s especially easy to rule completely out of bounds. We’ve made at least some progress thereby, and it would be a mistake to throw out this progress just because it doesn’t solve every other problem; don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Other sorts of actions can be worse than some forms of physical violence consequentially, but there isn’t a good sharp black line in every case for clearly verbally transmitting what those out-of-bound actions are. See also my reply to DragonGod.
Even “this is at least as harmful as a punch in the gut” isn’t a good pointer, since some people are extremely emotionally brittle and can be put in severe pain with very minor social slights. I think it’s virtuous to try to help those people flourish, but I don’t want to claim that a rationalist has done a Terrible Thing if they ever do something that makes someone that upset; it depends on the situation.
I feel specifically uncomfortable with leaning on the phrase “social ostracization” here, because it’s so vague, and the way you’re talking about it makes it sound like you want rationalists to be individually responsible for making every human on Earth feel happy, welcome, and accepted in the rat community. “Ostracization” seems clearly bad to me if it looks like bullying and harassment, but sometimes “ostracizing” just means banning someone from an Internet forum, and I think banning is often prosocial.
(Including banning someone because of an argument! If someone keeps posting off-topic arguments, feel free to ban.)
As I said, if someone feels upset by mere disagreement, that’s not a violation of a rational discourse norm.
The focus on physical violence is nice insofar violence is halfway clear-cut, but is also fairly useless insofar the badness of violence is obvious to most people (unlike things like bullying, bad-faith mockery, moral grandstanding, etc which are very common), and mostly irrelevant in internet discussions without physical contact, where most irrational discourse is happening nowadays, very nonviolently.
That seems to me an uncharitable interpretation. Social ostracization is prototypically something which happens e.g. when someone gets cancelled by a Twitter mob. “Mob” insofar those people don’t use rational arguments to attack you, even if “attacking you without using arguments” can’t be defined perfectly precisely. (Something like the Bostrom witch-hunt on Twitter, which included outright defamation, but hardly any arguments.)
If you would consequently shun vagueness, then you couldn’t even discourage violence, because the difference between violence and non-violence is gradual, it likewise admits of borderline cases. But since violence is bad despite borderline cases, the borderline cases and exceptions you cited also don’t seem very serious. You never get perfectly precise definitions. And you have to embrace some more vagueness than in the case of violence, unless you want to refer only to a tiny subset of irrational discourse.
By the way, I would say banning/blocking is irrational when it is done in response to disagreement (often people on Twitter ban other people who merely disagree with them) and acceptable when off-topic or purely harassment. Sometimes there are borderline cases which lie in between, those are grey areas where blocking may be neither clearly bad nor clearly acceptable, but such grey areas are in no way counterexamples to the clear-cut cases.