The real broken analogy is comparing an online social club to a community, of all things. In the real world, a community is a group of people who deal with one another and compromise their values in order to share protection from bodily harm and cultivate a nurturing surrounding ecology. Invoking this metaphor (and the instinct of protection which it naturally evokes) in reference to a virtual social space is a recipe for cultishness, irrationality and grossly authoritarian “gardening” methods, such as enforcing petty politeness norms in the face of serious challenges involving failures of reasoning or ethics.
The fact that we’re even talking about how a basic challenge to groupthink might “destroy a community” shows this more clearly than anything else could. The term “virtual community” should be permanently taboo-ed here, as a matter of minimally required sanity.
In inferring that’s necessarily the case, one probably commits the fallacy of composition.
Most real-world communities involve such compromises, if only in the values of autonomy and freedom. We will gladly make these compromises given the attendant benefits, but this is not to say that a change in core values has not occurred.
Speaking of “Invoking this metaphor (and the instinct of protection which it naturally evokes)”...
You are misinterpreting my point. I’m not saying we should care about how a pure social club is managing itself. I’ll even endorse such clubs calling themselves “online communities”, if this makes folks happier. But the moment an “online community” is having harmful effects on the real world (say, by fostering misconceptions about economics and free markets [as per sibling thread], or by spreading lies such as “global warming is caused by solar activity, not by human beings”), is when respectfully engaging with that “community” becomes justified and praise-worthy. And so is criticizing them as “authoritarian” if they were to dismiss genuine grievances about their real-world impact with petty concerns about “politeness” and “manners”.
This is part of the reason why Less Wrong discourages political discussion. We do not know how to have a genuinely useful/productive political debate online, and we don’t want trolls to come here and complain about how their pet political cause is being handled. So we focus on the smaller problems of epistemic and instrumental rationality, leaving politics to specialized “open politics” websites which can experiment and take the heat for what they do. In turn, open politics folks will hopefully refer to Less Wrong for basic rationality stuff.
When multiple parties make a pact to modify their actions from what they would otherwise have done, it is a mistake to think that they have necessarily modified their values. In particular, if they agree to modify their actions to be similar to each other’s, to each perform the actions that best jointly satisfy their values, it is a mistake to think that any individual or all of them now has the value set that would be implied by an individual independently choosing to act as each has agreed.
“authoritarian”
Criticizing for doing a type of thing is misguided. “Slavery!”
Concerns about politeness, manners, and social norms that underlie clear communication are tied into real-world impact. You seem to be artificially constructing criticism by looking for types of things and labeling them with the term that describes them and connotes they are evil without making concrete criticisms of things actually said or done here (I didn’t see “politeness” or “manners” invoked in this comment thread, for example).
The real broken analogy is comparing an online social club to a community, of all things. In the real world, a community is a group of people who deal with one another and compromise their values in order to share protection from bodily harm and cultivate a nurturing surrounding ecology. Invoking this metaphor (and the instinct of protection which it naturally evokes) in reference to a virtual social space is a recipe for cultishness, irrationality and grossly authoritarian “gardening” methods, such as enforcing petty politeness norms in the face of serious challenges involving failures of reasoning or ethics.
The fact that we’re even talking about how a basic challenge to groupthink might “destroy a community” shows this more clearly than anything else could. The term “virtual community” should be permanently taboo-ed here, as a matter of minimally required sanity.
You make a good case for this
That’s wrong. It would be a poor isomorphism, it’s a fantastic analogy.
In inferring that’s necessarily the case, one probably commits the fallacy of composition.
Speaking of words worthy of “taboo”...
Speaking of “Invoking this metaphor (and the instinct of protection which it naturally evokes)”...
Most real-world communities involve such compromises, if only in the values of autonomy and freedom. We will gladly make these compromises given the attendant benefits, but this is not to say that a change in core values has not occurred.
You are misinterpreting my point. I’m not saying we should care about how a pure social club is managing itself. I’ll even endorse such clubs calling themselves “online communities”, if this makes folks happier. But the moment an “online community” is having harmful effects on the real world (say, by fostering misconceptions about economics and free markets [as per sibling thread], or by spreading lies such as “global warming is caused by solar activity, not by human beings”), is when respectfully engaging with that “community” becomes justified and praise-worthy. And so is criticizing them as “authoritarian” if they were to dismiss genuine grievances about their real-world impact with petty concerns about “politeness” and “manners”.
This is part of the reason why Less Wrong discourages political discussion. We do not know how to have a genuinely useful/productive political debate online, and we don’t want trolls to come here and complain about how their pet political cause is being handled. So we focus on the smaller problems of epistemic and instrumental rationality, leaving politics to specialized “open politics” websites which can experiment and take the heat for what they do. In turn, open politics folks will hopefully refer to Less Wrong for basic rationality stuff.
All else equal, one infers values from actions.
When multiple parties make a pact to modify their actions from what they would otherwise have done, it is a mistake to think that they have necessarily modified their values. In particular, if they agree to modify their actions to be similar to each other’s, to each perform the actions that best jointly satisfy their values, it is a mistake to think that any individual or all of them now has the value set that would be implied by an individual independently choosing to act as each has agreed.
Criticizing for doing a type of thing is misguided. “Slavery!”
Concerns about politeness, manners, and social norms that underlie clear communication are tied into real-world impact. You seem to be artificially constructing criticism by looking for types of things and labeling them with the term that describes them and connotes they are evil without making concrete criticisms of things actually said or done here (I didn’t see “politeness” or “manners” invoked in this comment thread, for example).
Often, it depends. ;)
It is legitimate to have preferences (or ethics or morals) that do deprecate all instances of doing a type of thing.
Worse, what I said was logically self-contradictory.
Let’s try again:
For almost any type of thing, it is not true that it is always deleterious.
Criticizing a type of thing is useful to the extent you and others are poor at reasoning about and acting on specifics.
Good point.
That works!