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.
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.