I was worried about the initial military framing of Dragon Army (yes, also by Duncan, yes, people did get upset about that one, but many others thought it was actively good.) Other people did express disapproval in that case, but mostly along the lines of worrying that having a hierarchy or standards might enable internal abuse, not on the grounds that the whole point of an army is to physically attack the outgroup, armies are institutions optimized for performing that specific goal, and no particular enemy had been named.
This seems to me to be an example of something I might call “weaponized disingenuousness.” The book Ender’s Game is well-known in both our broader culture and our specific, narrow subculture, and was specifically referenced in my Dragon Army post. This comment, though, acts as if that fact is either unknown or irrelevant, and as if the mere presence of the word “army” overrides the highly relevant context, and cannot be in any way metaphorical or tongue-in-cheek.
(That context being that we’re all taking part in a community focused on the long-term thriving of humanity, and that “Dragon Army” is an overt reference to a group of school-age children in a laser tag league, in training for a pan-cultural mission to defend the entire human race from an extraterrestrial existential threat, and therefore not really a model that should trigger the nodes “gonna attack the neighbors.” I’m particularly intrigued by the implication that Ben is in my outgroup; if so, it’s by his choice, not mine; my circle of concern by default includes him.)
In short, the aforementioned deep concern cannot be labeled rational unless there are other, unmentioned cruxes in the mix. The implication is unjustified by the words Ben spent justifying it.
(That doesn’t mean that there may not have been reasons for concern that aren’t mentioned here, of course.)
Given the dogged way in which Ben is promoting claims of the form “Duncan/Duncan’s views are violent and dangerous/will lead to violence and danger/will make the world worse,” though, and the fact that he’s never bothered to check whether any of his representations or stereotypes of me are accurate or pass my ITT (or to hash things out at all, really; he refused my last offer to participate in a conversation facilitated by a moderator who was already explicitly on his side) all the while throwing them around on the internet with the weight of his reputation behind them and no acknowledgement of uncertainty or incomplete information in sight …
… given all that, the available space of hypotheses in which he is all of [neutrally well-intentioned], [clear-thinking and perceptive], and [attempting to be straightforward in his arguments rather than deceptive or manipulative] is rapidly dwindling. I already suspect that at least one of the above must be false; I’m the type of human who often misses things and gets things wrong, so that’s not strong evidence of anything, but it’s looking like the safe bet so far.
I don’t mean to claim that you’re uniquely terrible here. You’re just unusually clear and honest about messages our culture seems to be nearly saturated with. I’m upset about that, not about you. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to make this more clear.
My sense of what you were trying to with Dragon Army is: you noticed that organizations with structured expectations and clear lines of authority can sometimes do things that disorganized humans can’t, and tried to create one based in part on thinking the problem through, and in part on examples you’d either seen work or heard of working. This seems basically admirable.
Unfortunately, a very large number of our stories about such things are about organized killing:
That context being that we’re all taking part in a community focused on the long-term thriving of humanity, and that “Dragon Army” is an overt reference to a group of school-age children in a laser tag league, in training for a pan-cultural mission to defend the entire human race from an extraterrestrial existential threat, and therefore not really a model that should trigger the nodes “gonna attack the neighbors.”
This seems to me like it is literally a story about how humanity bands together to attack the neighbors, by creating an abusive environment in which promising children are trained / filtered to create an elite fighting force. (Of course there are mitigating factors—the neighbors attacked first and are very scary and we’re asked to believe for plot reasons that abusing a bunch of children really is the least-bad option, although it’s not clear to me that the reader should fully believe the characters making these claims.)
The second book in the Ender’s Game series deals with the first book’s protagonist coming to terms with the genocide he was manipulated into committing in the first book. The third book is titled “Xenocide.”
I am fascinated by this conversation/disagreement about Ender’s Game. I think it might be really important. I am upvoting both comments.
Some things it makes me consider:
a) When is violence / attacking the outgroup justified?
b) Would it have been abusive if the children hadn’t been lied to? (I lean no. But given that they were lied to, I lean yes.)
c) Is it OK to sometimes frame “the default ways of the universe” as a kind of outgroup, in order to motivate action ‘against’ them? Ender’s Game was about another sentient lifeform. But in ways, the universe has “something vaguely resembling” anthropomorphizable demons that tend to work against human interests. (We, as a community, have already solidified Moloch as one. And there are others.) In a way, we ARE trying to mobilize ourselves ‘against the outgroup’—with that outgroup being kind of nebulous and made-up, but still trying to point at real forces that threaten our existence/happiness.
Q for benquo:
How do you feel about sports (or laser tag leagues)?
To clarify, I’m not saying that forming an army is always the wrong choice; I’m just saying that it’s one that makes sense when you want to attack the outgroup. Often attacking the outgroup is the correct move! That’s why biological and cultural evolution equipped us with that ability. On (c), I don’t like the “OK vs not OK” framing. It’s more that any particular mode of organization is going to capture some cognitive and coordination efficiencies at the price of limiting the kinds of things it can do somehow. Militaries are optimized to randomize* the target, which is pretty much the opposite of what we’d like to do with the future of humanity, unless we’re up against an utility-minimizer.
Play-fighting like laser tag and sports seems basically good; I haven’t prioritized it in my life and I’m probably paying some cognitive cost for not getting much of that.
* This is more literally true of weapons than of militaries, but militaries are optimized for the ability to credibly promise to randomize arbitrary targets, sometimes subject to particular rules of engagement, sometimes optimizing directly for “credibly” in social reality via intimidation tactics rather than actual force-projection capacity.
I don’t see you as having come close to establishing, beyond the (I claim weak) argument from the single-word framing, that the actual amount or parts of structure or framing that Dragon Army has inherited from militaries are optimized for attacking the outgroup to a degree that makes worrying justified.
This definitely doesn’t establish that. And this seems like a terrible context in which to continue to elaborate on all my criticisms of Duncan’s projects, so I’m not going to do that.
My main criticisms of Dragon Army are on the Dragon Army thread, albeit worded conservatively in a way that may not make it clear how these things are related to the “army” framing. If you want to discuss that, some other venue seems right at this point, this discussion is already way too broad in scope.
Since Benquo says he thinks sports are good, I’d be curious whether he is also worried about sports teams with names that suggest violence. Many teams are named after parties in a violent historical conflict or violent animals: Patriots, Braves, Panthers, Raptors, Bulls, Sharks, Warriors, Cavaliers, Rangers, Raiders, Blackhawks, Predators, Tigers, Pirates, Timberwolves...
I have a vague and unspecified concern (which might be unfair, and which I hope you will call out if you find it to be unfair) that this might be the beginnings of a drift across the line into scoring points, or the start of a snowball rolling downhill.
Like, you’re almost certainly just genuinely curious about the gears of benquo’s model. The word “army” raised a flag … does the word “warriors” raise a similar flag? This is an entirely valid question for finding the boundaries of benquo’s beliefs.
But I would be sad if other people piled on after this comment with a whole bunch of “do you think [innocuous thing] is bad or not?” comments. I fear something like, the conversation turning into an inquisition? A sense that the crowd gets to demand that benquo’s model defend itself, but the crowd isn’t symmetrically required to defend its model?
I want to firmly reiterate that I think there’s literally zero to object to in the above comment, both in content and tone; it’s more about a (very weak) gut-level intuition about what comes after it. I also note the possibility that these four paragraphs may not be worth the space I’ve spent on them—that this concern is too trivial to have taken up this much time. But since (boy howdy) this has been quite the week for things spiraling out of control, I am more motivated than usual to raise the ghost-of-a-concern before it becomes an actual concern. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have said anything.
Just wanted to say I appreciate the above comment a lot – the comment here is exactly the sort of thing I struggle the most with how to respond to (either when wearing a mod hat or just as a conversational participant), since there’s nothing wrong (either technically or in spirit), and yet it’s (at least sometimes, often enough to notice) the spark of something beginning to spiral.
And if we weren’t already knee deep in a thread that’s done some spiralling, I often feel the most helpless when I see the first such comment in a thread, and saying anything about it feels likely to do more harm than good.
[noticing that me responding to this in this way could also be the beginnings of some kind of spiral, but I’m hoping it’s the good kind]
This is the sort of thing that motivated the Demon Thread concept, and part of my goal there was to get the concept enough in the zeitgeist that there’s a critical mass of people who, early on in a thread, see a comment like that, or notice themselves about to make a comment like that, and just… shift their tone a little to ensure it goes well without having to draw attention to it.
Writing this out is leading me to notice that a particular flaw in the term “Demon Seed” that I used there, which is in itself a bit of an inflammatory term, which makes it a poor handle to use to refer to the sort of comment that’s first in the chain, that’s perfectly fine except for being slightly shaped in a way that might build into a pattern.
I think part of what’s going on here is that “armies are for organized violence” feels very similar to “armies are the outgroup and people associated with them should be scapegoated,” especially to people in the actor mode. I don’t actually think the latter, though, just the former.
I liked Ender’s Game a lot, and I’m enjoying Orson Scott Card’s new Fleet School series, which has a really good treatment of friendship and trust. The fictional Dragon Army wasn’t inherently bad, it was just a military unit of elite child-soldiers. That’s a very specific sort of thing, and one should be pretty careful in generalizing leadership lessons from it to nonabusive peacetime conditions like the ones Duncan set up for his group house.
To be honest, I think Eliezer’s “Rationality Dojo” framing was somewhat unfortunate in hindsight. Some sorts of adversarial intelligence are going to be part of a well-rounded human mind, but framing that as coextensive with rationality seems … bad.
Sports is a zero-sum contest, so names that suggest adversarial players seem appropriate.
If you had at any point bothered to investigate the person whose character and opinions you were confidently summarizing left and right, you would know that I have tattooed on my hand “What would Ender do?” and yes, that includes the lessons of Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide and the times that Ender repeatedly put his life on the line to forestall the repeat of history’s mistakes, and to protect the last survivor of the Formic race. You have no need to educate me on the lessons of the Ender saga; that still doesn’t make Dragon Army itself, nor what Ender did with the soldiers in it any kind of flag of threat against you or anyone. If I’d named my project “Colonel Graff Did Nothing Wrong,” then sure.
The next time you want to demonstrate upsetness with a zeitgeist and not with an individual, try avoiding making repeated libelous strawmans of that specific individual’s positions and beliefs.
I’m not saying that your house was a specific threat to any particular person. The actual criticism of the house paradigm is not something I trust this forum to deal with well, and my track record of explaining that sort of thing without causing you or someone else to construe it as a *personal attack* is not very good, so I’m reluctant to go into it here.
What I was responding to in the above comment was your claim that the Dragon Army brand shouldn’t trigger anyone’s threat detection. This doesn’t make any sense to me given the content of Ender’s Game. If you’d instead said, “yes, I can see how naming something after the military unit of abused children that carries out a genocidal war would trigger someone’s threat-detection, but I promise I’m genre-savvy about this because I’ve read the sequels and internalized their lessons,” I wouldn’t necessarily believe the claim, but I’d understand what I was being asked to believe.
I genuinely don’t understand how your comment was meant to be reassuring, and while I can come up with some hypotheses, I basically don’t expect that I can share those hypotheses in a way that doesn’t actually start another heated exchange.
I think you and I disagree strongly about the base rates of threat à la Scott Alexander’s “different worlds.” From your perspective, I imagine I’m coming across like someone saying that muggings never happen, because I grew up in an affluent suburb and am typical minding that everywhere else is just like that; from my perspective, it feels like your priors are skewed similar to those of parents who are anxiously preoccupied about child abductions because of overexposure in the news, and who don’t attend to base rates.
In other words, I don’t think I disagree with your actions given high priors of threat and need-to-defend; I just disagree that those priors are appropriate.
(I note that you’ve mentioned being missed or mischaracterized several times, so I’m sensitive to the possibility that I’m addressing a stereotype that doesn’t match the real you/your real beliefs.)
But basically, the whole lens of “military unit of abused children that carry out a genocidal war” feels false/disingenuous/inappropriate to me, given my priors. Like, to look at a nerd in a community of nerds proposing a group house modeled after the aesthetic of Dragon Army and have those nodes trigger seems (to me) to be waaaaaaaay miscalibrated, just as it would be miscalibrated to hear about Uber and immediately think of coordinated kidnappings to feed sex trafficking organizations.
But you may live in a meaningfully Different World.
One interesting thing about Tumblr and the SJsphere in particular is that because its members come disproportionately from marginalized communities, it has this sort of natural prior of “people often turn out to be abusers, every situation has to be made abuser-proof or else it will be a catastrophe.” I once dated someone I knew on Tumblr who did a weird test on me where (sorry, won’t give more details) they deliberately put me in a situation where I could have abused them to see what I would do. When they told me about this months later, I was pretty offended—did I really seem so potentially abusive that I had to be specifically cleared by some procedure? And people explained to me that there’s this whole other culture where somebody being an abuser is, if not thenorm, at least high enough to worry about with everyone.
I’m not sure what percent of the population is more like me vs. more like my date. But I think there’s a failure mode where someone from a high-trust culture starts what they think is a perfectly reasonable institution, and someone from a low-trust culture says “that’s awful, you didn’t make any effort to guard against abusers!” And then the person from the high-trust culture gets angry, because they’re being accused of being a potential abuser, which to them sounds as silly as being accused of being a potential terrorist (if you told your Muslim friend you wouldn’t hang out with him without some safeguards in case he turned out to be a terrorist, my guess is he’d get pretty upset). And then the person from the low-trust culture gets angry, because the person has just dismissed out of hand (or even gotten angry about) a commonsense attempt to avoid abuse, and who but an abuser would do something like that?
In my world and my experience, there is so-close-to-literally-zero-threat from people proposing stuff like Dragon Army that it’s hard to empathize with your concerns even when I deliberately boot up empathy and think about all the times I’ve been wrong or overconfident. Ender’s Game is much more salient (to me and people like me) as a story about bright kids having a destiny and being treated with respect/given agency, and cool near-future technology, and Paying Steep Personal Costs To Literally Save The World. The specific aspects that you lift out are equally valid and present and are indeed occasionally discussed, but they’re not what naturally comes to mind. Those concerns are in the realm of terrorism, where it’s so rare that (for a median person in middle-class America) worrying about it is ~objectively wrong, as opposed to being in the realm of car accidents, where it happens to people all the time and ordinary people need to be on guard.
I think I’m getting that that’s not your experience, but I still don’t understand why. And I don’t know how to address your concerns within your perspective without spending time in a way that feels like a disproportionate waste, as well as “confessing” to dangerousness that is false in my own frame.
i.e. it feels like if I validate your concerns sufficiently to pass your ITT and then assuage them, people watching in my culture will be like, “wait. Wait wait. Why’s he talking so much about abuse and violence? Why didn’t he just dismiss that out-of-hand? Doth he protest too much? Maybe he is crazy, why else would he validate this stuff/have it so close to the forefront of his mind? I mean, normal people don’t think about/go on about all of this so much...this is a bad sign...”
Interpretive labor request: I’d like people to try to read this comment (and for that matter pretty much all my comments) under the assumption that a demon has cast a spell on me to make me word things in a way that sounds more like scapegoating than I mean, and on you to interpret them that way whenever there’s any potential ambiguity. This isn’t an excuse for failures on my part to be clear, it’s just a request. If you see ways in which the demon has tricked me, I want that information so I can fix the problem.
Duncan, thanks for the interpretive labor you’re extending. I agree that given what I seem to you to be saying, you’re in a difficult position here.
I want to restate that my threat model was not primarily that things like the Dragon Army house resort to violence. (It didn’t!) It’s more that the appeal of proposals like Dragon Army is a really bad sign about the broader culture’s coordination protocols. We live in a world where violence is increasingly being compressed into tail events. Accordingly, I’m worried about ambient cultural protocols favoring violence leading to sudden phase transitions.
I’m not claiming that you are an especially important causal node in that phase transition. I am claiming that your project’s framing was important evidence about the state of that system.
The specific problem DA exemplified to me was the conflation—again, not specific to you—of getting things done with attacking the enemy such that even projects as obviously peaceful as living well together in a house end up using a military paradigm to project seriousness. The poverty of other paradigms is deeply worrying to me. (Likewise “Rationality Dojo” in hindsight seems like a bad sign, even though I’m not particularly worried about people beating me up with rationality techniques.)
Similarly, it’s not terribly worrying to me that one person in the community, with a high level of physicality, used Punch-Bug as an example when advocating a higher harm threshold. What seemed really terrible was that with a bunch of comments already, several of them approving comments from other prominent people who I respect, no one seemed to be attending to the systemic dangers of a game institutionalizing injustice with respect to physical violence. (Possibly pretty mild, although your post was at best ambiguous to me on this point and I don’t think it’s OK to expect people to reliably round potential threats down. This is a secondary factor that substantially increased my visceral sense of threat when writing my initial comment—a sense that vagueness about the level of violence proposed felt a bit like testing the waters with plausible deniability. This is not a confident assertion that that was your intention—just, that’s how it pattern-matched to me. Again, if I believe your assurances that you’d never initiate a substantially abnormal level of violence, then I’m not worried about direct threat from you, but get a lot more worried about what the normal level of violence is likely to become within the next decade.)
Posts I’ve written about how we seem to be using fundamentally adversarial operating protocols and moving towards a war of all against all:
Noting that my salience for Ender’s Game (which I like a lot, but not like Duncan likes it) wasn’t about kids treated with respect and given agency. It’s about a system that ruthlessly manipulates and exploits and lies to those kids, especially Ender, despite it taking a huge toll on all concerned, because the world needs saving and it’s time to be the SOBs that do what it takes to get them ready and motivated, and get results. And then the sequels are about him dealing with the consequences of that, plus some Mormonism.
Duncan makes it clear that the reason he doesn’t punch people hard is because he doesn’t think he can get away with that right now
To be fair, he does suggest that people who don’t want to play Punch Bug be accommodated with permission to live in a ghetto instead
I want to note that one and only one side of this debate has argued for initiating physical violence here. The side doing that is not mine.
You’ve been careful to avoid directly calling me any names, but you’ve made multiple statements that would come from someone who believes I’m a violent xenophobic sadist ten times more frequently than they would come from someone who believes I’m a good, kind, welcoming, and careful person; they are clear and strong Bayesian evidence and readers will overwhelmingly interpret them as such. And that’s just this thread, as opposed to the times you stated explicitly on FB that you feared for your physical safety because I and my house were in your neighborhood.
More broadly, notice that you’ve ended up retracting or walking back multiple negative claims about me, but have yet to err on the side of being too charitable or saying something too nice. All of the mistakes that you yourself have acknowledged thus far point in the same direction, which in mechanical terms is what we mean by the word “bias.”
Duncan makes it clear that the reason he doesn’t punch people hard is because he doesn’t think he can get away with that right now
On rereading I don’t see direct textual support for this, so I’ll edit. Thanks for pointing out the error.
the times you stated explicitly on FB that you feared for your physical safety because I and my house were in your neighborhood.
I explicitly stated the opposite when I noticed there appeared to be ambiguity on that point. I can see how the presence of that ambiguity in the first place would be unpleasant for you. On the whole I regret that interaction, except insofar as it persuaded me to spend less time on Facebook.
(I also upvoted Duncan’s direct response, it was much easier to evaluate and respond to than most of the other criticism I got on this and related threads. I’d like to encourage more criticism like this, tagging specifics. At this point I’m seriously considering the hypothesis that this would have gone better—and better for me—in a forum moderated by Duncan.)
This seems to me to be an example of something I might call “weaponized disingenuousness.” The book Ender’s Game is well-known in both our broader culture and our specific, narrow subculture, and was specifically referenced in my Dragon Army post. This comment, though, acts as if that fact is either unknown or irrelevant, and as if the mere presence of the word “army” overrides the highly relevant context, and cannot be in any way metaphorical or tongue-in-cheek.
(That context being that we’re all taking part in a community focused on the long-term thriving of humanity, and that “Dragon Army” is an overt reference to a group of school-age children in a laser tag league, in training for a pan-cultural mission to defend the entire human race from an extraterrestrial existential threat, and therefore not really a model that should trigger the nodes “gonna attack the neighbors.” I’m particularly intrigued by the implication that Ben is in my outgroup; if so, it’s by his choice, not mine; my circle of concern by default includes him.)
In short, the aforementioned deep concern cannot be labeled rational unless there are other, unmentioned cruxes in the mix. The implication is unjustified by the words Ben spent justifying it.
(That doesn’t mean that there may not have been reasons for concern that aren’t mentioned here, of course.)
Given the dogged way in which Ben is promoting claims of the form “Duncan/Duncan’s views are violent and dangerous/will lead to violence and danger/will make the world worse,” though, and the fact that he’s never bothered to check whether any of his representations or stereotypes of me are accurate or pass my ITT (or to hash things out at all, really; he refused my last offer to participate in a conversation facilitated by a moderator who was already explicitly on his side) all the while throwing them around on the internet with the weight of his reputation behind them and no acknowledgement of uncertainty or incomplete information in sight …
… given all that, the available space of hypotheses in which he is all of [neutrally well-intentioned], [clear-thinking and perceptive], and [attempting to be straightforward in his arguments rather than deceptive or manipulative] is rapidly dwindling. I already suspect that at least one of the above must be false; I’m the type of human who often misses things and gets things wrong, so that’s not strong evidence of anything, but it’s looking like the safe bet so far.
I don’t mean to claim that you’re uniquely terrible here. You’re just unusually clear and honest about messages our culture seems to be nearly saturated with. I’m upset about that, not about you. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to make this more clear.
My sense of what you were trying to with Dragon Army is: you noticed that organizations with structured expectations and clear lines of authority can sometimes do things that disorganized humans can’t, and tried to create one based in part on thinking the problem through, and in part on examples you’d either seen work or heard of working. This seems basically admirable.
Unfortunately, a very large number of our stories about such things are about organized killing:
This seems to me like it is literally a story about how humanity bands together to attack the neighbors, by creating an abusive environment in which promising children are trained / filtered to create an elite fighting force. (Of course there are mitigating factors—the neighbors attacked first and are very scary and we’re asked to believe for plot reasons that abusing a bunch of children really is the least-bad option, although it’s not clear to me that the reader should fully believe the characters making these claims.)
The second book in the Ender’s Game series deals with the first book’s protagonist coming to terms with the genocide he was manipulated into committing in the first book. The third book is titled “Xenocide.”
I am fascinated by this conversation/disagreement about Ender’s Game. I think it might be really important. I am upvoting both comments.
Some things it makes me consider:
a) When is violence / attacking the outgroup justified?
b) Would it have been abusive if the children hadn’t been lied to? (I lean no. But given that they were lied to, I lean yes.)
c) Is it OK to sometimes frame “the default ways of the universe” as a kind of outgroup, in order to motivate action ‘against’ them? Ender’s Game was about another sentient lifeform. But in ways, the universe has “something vaguely resembling” anthropomorphizable demons that tend to work against human interests. (We, as a community, have already solidified Moloch as one. And there are others.) In a way, we ARE trying to mobilize ourselves ‘against the outgroup’—with that outgroup being kind of nebulous and made-up, but still trying to point at real forces that threaten our existence/happiness.
Q for benquo:
How do you feel about sports (or laser tag leagues)?
To clarify, I’m not saying that forming an army is always the wrong choice; I’m just saying that it’s one that makes sense when you want to attack the outgroup. Often attacking the outgroup is the correct move! That’s why biological and cultural evolution equipped us with that ability. On (c), I don’t like the “OK vs not OK” framing. It’s more that any particular mode of organization is going to capture some cognitive and coordination efficiencies at the price of limiting the kinds of things it can do somehow. Militaries are optimized to randomize* the target, which is pretty much the opposite of what we’d like to do with the future of humanity, unless we’re up against an utility-minimizer.
Play-fighting like laser tag and sports seems basically good; I haven’t prioritized it in my life and I’m probably paying some cognitive cost for not getting much of that.
* This is more literally true of weapons than of militaries, but militaries are optimized for the ability to credibly promise to randomize arbitrary targets, sometimes subject to particular rules of engagement, sometimes optimizing directly for “credibly” in social reality via intimidation tactics rather than actual force-projection capacity.
I don’t see you as having come close to establishing, beyond the (I claim weak) argument from the single-word framing, that the actual amount or parts of structure or framing that Dragon Army has inherited from militaries are optimized for attacking the outgroup to a degree that makes worrying justified.
This definitely doesn’t establish that. And this seems like a terrible context in which to continue to elaborate on all my criticisms of Duncan’s projects, so I’m not going to do that.
My main criticisms of Dragon Army are on the Dragon Army thread, albeit worded conservatively in a way that may not make it clear how these things are related to the “army” framing. If you want to discuss that, some other venue seems right at this point, this discussion is already way too broad in scope.
Since Benquo says he thinks sports are good, I’d be curious whether he is also worried about sports teams with names that suggest violence. Many teams are named after parties in a violent historical conflict or violent animals: Patriots, Braves, Panthers, Raptors, Bulls, Sharks, Warriors, Cavaliers, Rangers, Raiders, Blackhawks, Predators, Tigers, Pirates, Timberwolves...
I have a vague and unspecified concern (which might be unfair, and which I hope you will call out if you find it to be unfair) that this might be the beginnings of a drift across the line into scoring points, or the start of a snowball rolling downhill.
Like, you’re almost certainly just genuinely curious about the gears of benquo’s model. The word “army” raised a flag … does the word “warriors” raise a similar flag? This is an entirely valid question for finding the boundaries of benquo’s beliefs.
But I would be sad if other people piled on after this comment with a whole bunch of “do you think [innocuous thing] is bad or not?” comments. I fear something like, the conversation turning into an inquisition? A sense that the crowd gets to demand that benquo’s model defend itself, but the crowd isn’t symmetrically required to defend its model?
I want to firmly reiterate that I think there’s literally zero to object to in the above comment, both in content and tone; it’s more about a (very weak) gut-level intuition about what comes after it. I also note the possibility that these four paragraphs may not be worth the space I’ve spent on them—that this concern is too trivial to have taken up this much time. But since (boy howdy) this has been quite the week for things spiraling out of control, I am more motivated than usual to raise the ghost-of-a-concern before it becomes an actual concern. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have said anything.
Just wanted to say I appreciate the above comment a lot – the comment here is exactly the sort of thing I struggle the most with how to respond to (either when wearing a mod hat or just as a conversational participant), since there’s nothing wrong (either technically or in spirit), and yet it’s (at least sometimes, often enough to notice) the spark of something beginning to spiral.
And if we weren’t already knee deep in a thread that’s done some spiralling, I often feel the most helpless when I see the first such comment in a thread, and saying anything about it feels likely to do more harm than good.
[noticing that me responding to this in this way could also be the beginnings of some kind of spiral, but I’m hoping it’s the good kind]
This is the sort of thing that motivated the Demon Thread concept, and part of my goal there was to get the concept enough in the zeitgeist that there’s a critical mass of people who, early on in a thread, see a comment like that, or notice themselves about to make a comment like that, and just… shift their tone a little to ensure it goes well without having to draw attention to it.
Writing this out is leading me to notice that a particular flaw in the term “Demon Seed” that I used there, which is in itself a bit of an inflammatory term, which makes it a poor handle to use to refer to the sort of comment that’s first in the chain, that’s perfectly fine except for being slightly shaped in a way that might build into a pattern.
I think part of what’s going on here is that “armies are for organized violence” feels very similar to “armies are the outgroup and people associated with them should be scapegoated,” especially to people in the actor mode. I don’t actually think the latter, though, just the former.
I liked Ender’s Game a lot, and I’m enjoying Orson Scott Card’s new Fleet School series, which has a really good treatment of friendship and trust. The fictional Dragon Army wasn’t inherently bad, it was just a military unit of elite child-soldiers. That’s a very specific sort of thing, and one should be pretty careful in generalizing leadership lessons from it to nonabusive peacetime conditions like the ones Duncan set up for his group house.
To be honest, I think Eliezer’s “Rationality Dojo” framing was somewhat unfortunate in hindsight. Some sorts of adversarial intelligence are going to be part of a well-rounded human mind, but framing that as coextensive with rationality seems … bad.
Sports is a zero-sum contest, so names that suggest adversarial players seem appropriate.
If you had at any point bothered to investigate the person whose character and opinions you were confidently summarizing left and right, you would know that I have tattooed on my hand “What would Ender do?” and yes, that includes the lessons of Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide and the times that Ender repeatedly put his life on the line to forestall the repeat of history’s mistakes, and to protect the last survivor of the Formic race. You have no need to educate me on the lessons of the Ender saga; that still doesn’t make Dragon Army itself, nor what Ender did with the soldiers in it any kind of flag of threat against you or anyone. If I’d named my project “Colonel Graff Did Nothing Wrong,” then sure.
The next time you want to demonstrate upsetness with a zeitgeist and not with an individual, try avoiding making repeated libelous strawmans of that specific individual’s positions and beliefs.
I’m not saying that your house was a specific threat to any particular person. The actual criticism of the house paradigm is not something I trust this forum to deal with well, and my track record of explaining that sort of thing without causing you or someone else to construe it as a *personal attack* is not very good, so I’m reluctant to go into it here.
What I was responding to in the above comment was your claim that the Dragon Army brand shouldn’t trigger anyone’s threat detection. This doesn’t make any sense to me given the content of Ender’s Game. If you’d instead said, “yes, I can see how naming something after the military unit of abused children that carries out a genocidal war would trigger someone’s threat-detection, but I promise I’m genre-savvy about this because I’ve read the sequels and internalized their lessons,” I wouldn’t necessarily believe the claim, but I’d understand what I was being asked to believe.
I genuinely don’t understand how your comment was meant to be reassuring, and while I can come up with some hypotheses, I basically don’t expect that I can share those hypotheses in a way that doesn’t actually start another heated exchange.
My real crux here is something like Bayes.
I think you and I disagree strongly about the base rates of threat à la Scott Alexander’s “different worlds.” From your perspective, I imagine I’m coming across like someone saying that muggings never happen, because I grew up in an affluent suburb and am typical minding that everywhere else is just like that; from my perspective, it feels like your priors are skewed similar to those of parents who are anxiously preoccupied about child abductions because of overexposure in the news, and who don’t attend to base rates.
In other words, I don’t think I disagree with your actions given high priors of threat and need-to-defend; I just disagree that those priors are appropriate.
(I note that you’ve mentioned being missed or mischaracterized several times, so I’m sensitive to the possibility that I’m addressing a stereotype that doesn’t match the real you/your real beliefs.)
But basically, the whole lens of “military unit of abused children that carry out a genocidal war” feels false/disingenuous/inappropriate to me, given my priors. Like, to look at a nerd in a community of nerds proposing a group house modeled after the aesthetic of Dragon Army and have those nodes trigger seems (to me) to be waaaaaaaay miscalibrated, just as it would be miscalibrated to hear about Uber and immediately think of coordinated kidnappings to feed sex trafficking organizations.
But you may live in a meaningfully Different World.
In my world and my experience, there is so-close-to-literally-zero-threat from people proposing stuff like Dragon Army that it’s hard to empathize with your concerns even when I deliberately boot up empathy and think about all the times I’ve been wrong or overconfident. Ender’s Game is much more salient (to me and people like me) as a story about bright kids having a destiny and being treated with respect/given agency, and cool near-future technology, and Paying Steep Personal Costs To Literally Save The World. The specific aspects that you lift out are equally valid and present and are indeed occasionally discussed, but they’re not what naturally comes to mind. Those concerns are in the realm of terrorism, where it’s so rare that (for a median person in middle-class America) worrying about it is ~objectively wrong, as opposed to being in the realm of car accidents, where it happens to people all the time and ordinary people need to be on guard.
I think I’m getting that that’s not your experience, but I still don’t understand why. And I don’t know how to address your concerns within your perspective without spending time in a way that feels like a disproportionate waste, as well as “confessing” to dangerousness that is false in my own frame.
i.e. it feels like if I validate your concerns sufficiently to pass your ITT and then assuage them, people watching in my culture will be like, “wait. Wait wait. Why’s he talking so much about abuse and violence? Why didn’t he just dismiss that out-of-hand? Doth he protest too much? Maybe he is crazy, why else would he validate this stuff/have it so close to the forefront of his mind? I mean, normal people don’t think about/go on about all of this so much...this is a bad sign...”
Interpretive labor request: I’d like people to try to read this comment (and for that matter pretty much all my comments) under the assumption that a demon has cast a spell on me to make me word things in a way that sounds more like scapegoating than I mean, and on you to interpret them that way whenever there’s any potential ambiguity. This isn’t an excuse for failures on my part to be clear, it’s just a request. If you see ways in which the demon has tricked me, I want that information so I can fix the problem.
Duncan, thanks for the interpretive labor you’re extending. I agree that given what I seem to you to be saying, you’re in a difficult position here.
I want to restate that my threat model was not primarily that things like the Dragon Army house resort to violence. (It didn’t!) It’s more that the appeal of proposals like Dragon Army is a really bad sign about the broader culture’s coordination protocols. We live in a world where violence is increasingly being compressed into tail events. Accordingly, I’m worried about ambient cultural protocols favoring violence leading to sudden phase transitions.
I’m not claiming that you are an especially important causal node in that phase transition. I am claiming that your project’s framing was important evidence about the state of that system.
The specific problem DA exemplified to me was the conflation—again, not specific to you—of getting things done with attacking the enemy such that even projects as obviously peaceful as living well together in a house end up using a military paradigm to project seriousness. The poverty of other paradigms is deeply worrying to me. (Likewise “Rationality Dojo” in hindsight seems like a bad sign, even though I’m not particularly worried about people beating me up with rationality techniques.)
Similarly, it’s not terribly worrying to me that one person in the community, with a high level of physicality, used Punch-Bug as an example when advocating a higher harm threshold. What seemed really terrible was that with a bunch of comments already, several of them approving comments from other prominent people who I respect, no one seemed to be attending to the systemic dangers of a game institutionalizing injustice with respect to physical violence. (Possibly pretty mild, although your post was at best ambiguous to me on this point and I don’t think it’s OK to expect people to reliably round potential threats down. This is a secondary factor that substantially increased my visceral sense of threat when writing my initial comment—a sense that vagueness about the level of violence proposed felt a bit like testing the waters with plausible deniability. This is not a confident assertion that that was your intention—just, that’s how it pattern-matched to me. Again, if I believe your assurances that you’d never initiate a substantially abnormal level of violence, then I’m not worried about direct threat from you, but get a lot more worried about what the normal level of violence is likely to become within the next decade.)
Posts I’ve written about how we seem to be using fundamentally adversarial operating protocols and moving towards a war of all against all:
Matching donation fundraisers can be harmfully dishonest
The humility argument for honesty
Against neglectedness considerations
Posts I’ve written laying out a partial model of how we seem to have wound up in a state of permanent wartime mobilization:
Talents
There is a war
Noting that my salience for Ender’s Game (which I like a lot, but not like Duncan likes it) wasn’t about kids treated with respect and given agency. It’s about a system that ruthlessly manipulates and exploits and lies to those kids, especially Ender, despite it taking a huge toll on all concerned, because the world needs saving and it’s time to be the SOBs that do what it takes to get them ready and motivated, and get results. And then the sequels are about him dealing with the consequences of that, plus some Mormonism.
And thus it is not surprising that you were resonating with both me and Ben at different times in this thread.
What have I said about your character?
You’ve been careful to avoid directly calling me any names, but you’ve made multiple statements that would come from someone who believes I’m a violent xenophobic sadist ten times more frequently than they would come from someone who believes I’m a good, kind, welcoming, and careful person; they are clear and strong Bayesian evidence and readers will overwhelmingly interpret them as such. And that’s just this thread, as opposed to the times you stated explicitly on FB that you feared for your physical safety because I and my house were in your neighborhood.
More broadly, notice that you’ve ended up retracting or walking back multiple negative claims about me, but have yet to err on the side of being too charitable or saying something too nice. All of the mistakes that you yourself have acknowledged thus far point in the same direction, which in mechanical terms is what we mean by the word “bias.”
On rereading I don’t see direct textual support for this, so I’ll edit. Thanks for pointing out the error.
I explicitly stated the opposite when I noticed there appeared to be ambiguity on that point. I can see how the presence of that ambiguity in the first place would be unpleasant for you. On the whole I regret that interaction, except insofar as it persuaded me to spend less time on Facebook.
(I am noting places where I am upvoting benquo’s writing.)
(I also upvoted Duncan’s direct response, it was much easier to evaluate and respond to than most of the other criticism I got on this and related threads. I’d like to encourage more criticism like this, tagging specifics. At this point I’m seriously considering the hypothesis that this would have gone better—and better for me—in a forum moderated by Duncan.)