We’re talking about establishing a particular norm for LW.
Niceness is a continuous variable and everyone has a certain threshold on that axis (threshold which “intuition determines”) below which things are “not nice” and above which things are “nice”. The problem, of course, is that everyone has her own and that’s no good for a social norm. Some common threshold will have to be established, most likely by those who will take it upon themselves to enforce that norm. Also most likely the common threshold will be very similar to the personal thresholds of the enforcers.
Whether something should be construed as an “attack” is in the eyes of the beholder.
Nope, sorry, I don’t buy the “a victim is always right about being a victim” approach.
saying “No not really” does nothing to change that underlying perception.
That depends on whether that person is willing to update on the evidence :-P
Are you perhaps arguing that as long as people don’t have a unified formal definition of niceness, nice behavior is not possible? That would seem unlikely.
Even if everyone has a different threshold… well, everyone has their own upvote and downvote buttons, right? So the worst case is that some comments would get upvoted by some users for being nice enough and downvoted by other users for not being nice enough. Doesn’t seem that horrible.
And over time, people will adjust to the average. And those who will still find this community unbearably rude or unbearably polite will leave.
In real life, this problem is usually solved by creating subcultures; different groups having different norms. Being too rude will get you ejected from the group. Being too polite may make you leave the group voluntarily. Groups that eject too many people end up have few members. Groups that retain too many rude people end up having mostly rude members.
It would be a nice experiment to have a website that would support this “organic” grouping of people; where LW wouldn’t be one group, but rather an ecosystem of groups. But I’m afraid we are unlikely to ever see this happen. So we are stuck with having LW as one group.
In real life, sometimes the ejecting of rude members from the group is done by a local boss (a formal owner of the place, or a high-status member of the group), but sometimes the group splits “organically”—some people stop talking to some other people, and after some time we see that what was originally one group now became two groups. It could be interesting to try modelling this by a web platform. (Mere blocking is not enough, because in the group other people see when X is ignoring Y. Also, avoiding someone in real life is not a binary decision.) But I am not expecting to see this in near future.
I don’t think that LW is one group in any meaningful sense. There’s this website. There’s Slack. There’s IRC. There’s the facebook group. There are local meetups with often have their own mailing list.
There are also various diaspora groups that don’t exist under the LW brand.
Are you perhaps arguing that as long as people don’t have a unified formal definition of niceness, nice behavior is not possible? That would seem unlikely.
I think there are two distinct ways to think of niceness.
One is that being nice is about doing things motivated by positive emotions like compassion and gratitude. The other is that being nice is about conforming to a list of social standards, not picking fights and avoiding confrontation.
I think the first version of niceness is very valuable. On the other hand the second version leads to supressed emotions, passive-aggressiveness and anxiousness. In the first model people hug each other while in the second model people often avoid physical contact.
At the community camp where most people run around with free hug and crockers rule stickers, the first kind of niceness is valued while the second kind isn’t.
I’m in favor of moving this website to having more of the first kind of niceness, but I get weary when you start talking about politness with is mostly associated with the second type of niceness.
Are you perhaps arguing that as long as people don’t have a unified formal definition of niceness, nice behavior is not possible?
No, not at all. I’m arguing that there will be behaviour about which people will not be able to agree whether it’s nice or not.
It would be a nice experiment to have a website that would support this “organic” grouping of people; where LW wouldn’t be one group, but rather an ecosystem of groups. But I’m afraid we are unlikely to ever see this happen.
Why unlikely? There are at many ways to move in this direction, for example the establishment of LW subreddits which will develop their own, possibly different, cultural norms. For another example, killfile equivalents or some sufficiently flexible tagging system will allow people to define their own personal “groupings of people” all of which could coexist on LW.
there will be behaviour about which people will not be able to agree whether it’s nice or not.
And some of them will downvote it, and some of them will upvote it.
There are at many ways to move in this direction, for example the establishment of LW subreddits which will develop their own, possibly different, cultural norms.
I suspect that mere “moves in this direction” will not be enough. May improve things, but not enough.
My reasoning is roughly this:
People have complex social instints, finely tuned by evolution. Sometimes we coordinate in groups by using small signals, such as face expressions, body posture, tone of voice, looking away or otherwise not paying attention when someone is speaking, sitting closer to some people and further away from others, etc. Some of these actions include plausible deniability; for example one can signal boredom with a debate by looking away, but when confronted, they can verbally deny being bored. This mechanism allows different intensity of interaction.
When using a web interface, most of these options are missing; sometimes replaced by crude approximations that fail in some important aspect. (For example, what is the equivalent of “looking away when someone keeps debating stuff you consider super boring”? Merely not reading and not participating in the discussion is too invisible: you don’t have feedback about who is reading and who is skipping which comments. Downvoting feels too aggressive; it is more like shouting “shut up”.) Another important aspect is that in real life most kinds of reactions are simple, so if they require some inconvenient action online, it’s not the same thing.
It is these situations where our instinct offers us a real-life solution, but there is no sufficiently corresponding action in the web forum, that make online discussions develop in many frustrating ways that wouldn’t happen in real life. (Also other dissimilarities, e.g. creating sockpuppets, etc.)
This is why I think it would be an interesting project to develop a web interface that would allows us to act as closely to our instinctive social behavior as possible. The hypothesis is that it would make the discussions much less frustrating for many participants. But crude approximations will not work, precisely because they are crude.
(I am not saying that our social interactions in real life are the best possible mode of communication. There is a space for improvement. I am saying that we are unable to get even there.)
I suspect that mere “moves in this direction” will not be enough.
Not enough for what?
develop a web interface that would allows us to act as closely to our instinctive social behavior as possible.
You seem to want, basically, video conferencing. Or, if you prefer a more future-y way of doing that, telepresence in virtual reality.
The hypothesis is that it would make the discussions much less frustrating for many participants.
You are taking a very one-sided view. Online discussions are not just hobbled and maimed discussions in person—they have disadvantages, but they also have a lot of advantages. They are different and that makes them occupy a different, useful niche in the panoply of ways humans communicate.
Sometimes you want to talk in person, but sometimes you don’t and email or chat are the preferred way.
I don’t buy the “a victim is always right about being a victim” approach.
I’m pretty sure dxu wasn’t appealing to that. Just saying that different people will have different ideas about whether any given thing is an attack. (And then, more specifically, that a hardnosed “object to anything that looks wrong” conversational style will, whatever the intentions of the person doing it, likely upset some of the people it’s done to and thereby make it less likely, not more likely, that mutual understanding will be achieved.)
Just saying that different people will have different ideas about whether any given thing is an attack.
I’m pretty sure dxu wasn’t talking about different people in general, but specifically meant that the one on the receiving end of the maybe-an-attack has the right to declare it an attack or not. See the following dxu’s sentence.
And, of course, there is the obvious right of everyone to have her own opinion, but I’m reading dxu as saying that the opinion of the originator of the maybe-an-attack is… “less equal” than the opinion of the target.
likely upset some of the people it’s done to
That’s a rather weak claim. Most everything is likely to upset some people.
The options I had, writing that sentence, were: obviously-too-strong claim; obviously-too-weak claim; absurdly fussily qualified and quantified claim. None of them was perfect, so I chose the one that looked least bad to me.
Sure. What I meant was that presumably, “attacks” are considered damaging for a reason—namely, that they make discussion more unpleasant. This “unpleasantness”, however, is a subjective matter, and whether a particular remark generates an unpleasant feeling is entirely up to (the brain of) the “target”, as it were. So I suppose my reply to Lumifer would be something along the lines of
Nope, sorry, I don’t buy the “a victim is always right about being a victim” approach.
If we’re talking about effects on the victim (“victim” is not the word I would have used, by the way), as a matter of causal fact, then yes, in fact, it is. You could try to argue, of course, that the “victim” overreacted and shouldn’t have felt attacked by that remark, but the fact of the matter is that he/she did in fact feel attacked.
Of course, just because someone feels attacked doesn’t mean you did something wrong when addressing them—it’s entirely possible, for example, that the person in question really is overly sensitive, and that a large fraction of people would not have taken umbrage to your remark. This possibility grows markedly less likely, however, when several users independently claim to find a particular poster’s comments unpleasant as a whole.
I should also point out that comments, especially long comments, take some effort to write. When confronted with such a comment, I’ve noticed that Lumifer generally does not address the entirety of the comment, instead selectively quoting several sentences from various points in the comment and then snarking at those. When someone does this, it feels (at least to me) as if they’re not actually taking the other poster seriously; if I put a lot of effort into a post and write several paragraphs for you to read and then your reply consists of one-liner responses that are more condescending than informative, it feels as though the effort I’m putting into the discussion is not being reciprocated, which makes me less likely to continue the discussion.
EDIT: An example of the above would be Lumifer’s reply to your (gjm’s) comment, which simply reads:
The options I had, writing that sentence
That’s good evidence that your sentence has problems :-)
Snarky one-liner? Check. Does not actually address the main point? Check. More condescending than informative? Check. This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about, and it was found in the immediate next comment in the chain. You don’t even have to look for this sort of thing from Lumifer; that’s how often it happens.
Lumifer generally does not address the entirety of the comment, instead selectively quoting several sentences from various points in the comment and then snarking at those.
There is a reason for that. Addressing the entirety of the comment usually requires that your answer be longer than the comment you’re replying to. That leads to large walls’o’text of fisking very very quickly and the whole thing implodes shortly afterwards.
In my experience to keep a manageable conversation going for more than a couple of rounds you need to severely prune the topics and keep the whole thing on a (possibly meandering) track. Of course both sides can/should do this: I don’t expect that every point I raised will be addressed in the reply. As to snarking, well… :-)
Re EDIT:
Snarky one-liner? Check.
I like snarky one-liners.
Does not actually address the main point? Check.
Nope. It actually addresses the main point of the post it’s replying to.
More condescending than informative? Check.
Not condescending. Snarky (see above). Condescending would have been “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it”.
Maybe, but it looks to me more like good evidence that some things don’t fit nicely into soundbites. LW has traditionally been one of the better places around for discussing such things. Making it less so is, I think, another drawback of your preferred discussion style.
Your wounds are self-inflicted. My preferred discussion style is not binding on anyone and anyway, I’m a believer in the “Things should be as simple as possible but not simpler” maxim. The issue is, rather, balancing making your point clearly and correctly against writing a wall’o’text that no one reads. That’s not an easy balance to strike. I often say “It’s complicated” and cut off large chunks of discussion space for exactly this reason.
balancing making your point clearly and correctly against writing a wall’o’text that no one reads
Which was exactly the tradeoff I made in a way you complained about. I dare say you’d have made a different complaint if I’d made the tradeoff a different way.
So if “my wounds” means the fact that I said something that, taken literally, wasn’t very informative: yeah, self-inflicted, and I’m not bothered by those particular wounds.
But if it means the fact that I said something that called forth a bit of mockery from an LW regular who likes mocking things: nope, not self-inflicted in any useful sense.
(I wouldn’t have used the word “wounds” myself. Far too dramatic.)
[EDITED to add:]
My preferred discussion style is not binding on anyone
Of course. But the fact that leaving any loophole is liable to result in a dismissive comment from you is … not binding on anyone, that wouldn’t make any sense, but it affects everyone on LW. How much it affects any given person depends on how much they care about getting dismissive comments. It doesn’t bother me much, but I bet it bothers some other people more.
Which was exactly the tradeoff I made in a way you complained about.
The problem wasn’t that you made a trade-off, the problem was that you failed at it—you chose the “not wall’o’text” path, but did not make your point clearly and correctly.
But the fact that leaving any loophole is liable to result in a dismissive comment from you
It has nothing to do with loopholes. Express your meaning clearly and it will be fine. But if that meaning is a misshapen piece of jelly weakly flopping around, well, I will be tempted to poke it with a stick :-/
Perhaps. Or perhaps (as it seemed to me) there wasn’t a way of making my point clearly and correctly without too much wall-o’-text.
if that meaning is a misshapen piece of jelly weakly flopping around
Which, it seems to me, it wasn’t and you have given no reason to think it was. What you have (quite correctly but, in my view, pointlessly) complained about is that an uncharitably literal reading of what I wrote is very vague. True enough; I think the only way to avoid vagueness and wrongness was more wall-o’-text than I was prepared to waste people’s time with.
Of course, the ensuing discussion has produced more text and more timewasting than if I’d just written the long and boring version in the first place. Perhaps what I write will tend further in the wall-o’-text direction in future. If so, it will be wordier and more boring, and the only real benefit will be that it will be a bit less vulnerable to one particular sort of bad-faith objection. I do not think that would be a benefit to LW.
Descending briefly to the object level, let me at this point state the original claim[1] more carefully:
[1] It may be worth an explicit reminder that it wasn’t a statement of my opinion but an attempt to indicate what sort of thing someone else had been saying. My elaboration here will be on both dxu’s original comment and my sketchy and incomplete summary of what s/he was saying.
Suppose you adopt the approach dxu summarized as “when I see a weakness, I must attack immediately”. Then discussions in which someone other than you makes some statement that doesn’t have all its details firmly nailed down are liable to feature sniping from you when the other guy makes some such statement. Since actually most discussion, even here, involves plenty of such statements, this doesn’t have to happen a very large fraction of the time for it to be quite common.
Such discussions tend not to be much fun for the other party, for several reasons. They may feel personally attacked, which is an unpleasant feeling whether or not any sort of personal attack is actually intended. They may find that they have to devote an order of magnitude more time to the discussion than would be necessary without your bloody-mindedness. They may fear getting a reputation for long-windedness and pedantry, when in fact all they are doing is attempting to forestall your sniping.
(Lots of “They may …” there. I suggest that maybe half of all people you do it to will find the experience unpleasant; maybe 1⁄4 of the time when you do it they will find themselves devoting far more time to the discussion than it warrants in itself; maybe 1⁄4 of people you do it to will for some time afterward feel at least some temptation to write defensively.)
You might argue that such a discussion is worth the unpleasantness because it results in clarifying what the other guy meant (or exposing his fuzzy thinking, if what he meant is not susceptible of clarification). But that may well not be the outcome. Much of the time (probably more than half) the other guy will decline to get into a lengthy and possibly unpleasant argument; in these cases, no clarification ensues, whatever productive discussion you could have had instead is forestalled, and no one wins. When they are willing to engage, there is a danger (let’s say, again, p>0.5) that the other guy gets annoyed and defensive—I am stipulating here that there is no chance at all that you would do such a thing—and what follows is more ego-fight than useful discussion, and again the loss exceeds the gain. The rest of the time, perhaps you do in fact get a useful clarification; very good, but I suggest that in these cases—where the other guy did mean something specific, was able to figure out what it was, and was disposed to be helpful—a less aggressive approach would also have elicited the clarification.
The fact is that almost all discussion outside academic journals (and plenty inside them) involves plenty of statements that don’t have all their details firmly nailed down, and that could be sniped at in this fashion. So once this pattern is noticed (which of course it has been, here on LW) -- especially when, as here, the person doing the sniping is very active and clearly has time to do a lot of sniping if he chooses—many participants (let’s say >= 10% of active participants, probably more) will feel some pressure to choose between writing defensively (at the cost of extra effort, increased boredom for their readers, reduced clarity for those not reading with aggressive uncharity, etc.) and getting sniped at unpleasantly. Result: some combination of boring defensive writing, and reduced participation (hence, less interesting stuff on LW).
The overall result is—in dxu’s view, as I understand it, and also as it happens in mine—that your conversational style is bad for LW. It’s probably good for you, though: sniping is fun, and is an effective way to pick up karma if you happen to care about that. Chalk up one more victory for Moloch.
perhaps (as it seemed to me) there wasn’t a way of making my point clearly and correctly without too much wall-o’-text
In such situations I usually choose to not say anything and let it go.
When both of your options lose, the only way to win is not to play :-)
Result: some combination of boring defensive writing, and reduced participation (hence, less interesting stuff on LW).
Since we’ve been talking about trade-offs, let me point out that there is one here, too. Let’s imagine a wonderful world where people like me are absent and everyone is very nice, highly supportive and full of praise. Gold stars for everyone! What kind of writing would you expect to get?
My cynical side says that you will get a whole lot of badly written, unfocused, lazy, vague, incoherent crap. You might well get increased participation because yay praise and hugs for little effort, but thoughtful people would leave, for obvious reasons. That doesn’t look like a good outcome.
As usual, balance is important. You want to prune (and disincentivise) crap and you want to promote (and incentivise) interesting, insightful writing. The exact location of the proper balancing point is, of course, debatable :-)
One more thing—it might be helpful to think of LW as an ecosystem. An ecosystem likes and need diversity. That, in turn, implies that LW needs different kinds of people who will fill different roles. Some people (like me) will snap and bite. Some people will nurture and grow. Some people will dump the minutiae of their daily lives onto LW. Some people will think for a year and then make a single post. Some people are interested in neural nets, some are interested in ponies, some are interested in how to lose weight and pick up girls, and some are interested in how to make sure LW doesn’t become an example of Lotka-Volterra equations.
When both of your options lose, the only way to win is not to play :-)
What if, instead of trying to win, you’re actually trying to advance the discussion in a meaningful way? Some people aren’t here to win verbal sparring matches.
where people like me are absent
Please keep in mind that no one actually wants that. Some people would just prefer you tone it down. Like, you could, for example, cut down on stuff like this:
Seriously, what purpose does this sort of rhetoric serve? I understand this is your posting style, but if you write stuff like this you don’t get to claim your comments aren’t “attacks” (EDIT: or “condescending”, for that matter).
My cynical side says that you will get a whole lot of badly written, unfocused, lazy, vague, incoherent crap. You might well get increased participation because yay praise and hugs for little effort, but thoughtful people would leave, for obvious reasons. That doesn’t look like a good outcome.
This… seriously does not follow. I have read comment threads from before you joined LW, as well as comment threads that occurred after you joined but that you simply did not post in. Most of these threads were not, as you put it, “incoherent crap”, primarily because there are people on this site who are just as capable of pointing out flaws as you are, but don’t do it in such a grating fashion. (Examples of these people include: TheOtherDave, wedrifid, shminux, Vaniver, etc.)
Some people (like me) will snap and bite.
I’ll be honest here: I have not seen a single other poster with a rhetorical style even remotely resembling yours. If you’re a member of this “ecosystem”, you’re a species of one.
Monocultures are bad, mmkay?
What are you even arguing, here? That the presence of people like yourself is somehow necessary to keep LW from devolving into a monoculture? If so, I have to disagree—and it’s hard to see how you could be arguing anything else.
What if, instead of trying to win, you’re actually trying to advance the discussion in a meaningful way?
I didn’t define “win” as winning at verbal sparring. If your goal is to advance discussion in a meaningful way and the short version fails at that while the long version is too long, the same reasoning applies.
Like, you could, for example, cut down on stuff like this.
But I don’t wanna! X-) I like expressive, sparkly, prickly, highly saturated, slightly ambiguous language. I can easily produce polite, bland, dry, and technically correct writing, but there is not much fun in that and I’m not writing an academic paper. “Tone it down to beige”—no, thank you.
This… seriously does not follow.
I am not talking about myself. I’m talking about the balance between discouraging and promoting in general. I certainly don’t claim I’m the only force that’s keeping LW from drowning in crap.
you’re a species of one
There is the classic Shrek’s answer to Fiona’s outraged “What kind of knight ARE you?”...
But really, are you telling me, on LW, that I’m too weird? :-)
What are you even arguing, here?
That applying a single standard of expected behaviour to everyone is not a particularly useful approach, but rather a “be careful what you wish for” case.
If your goal is to advance discussion in a meaningful way and the short version fails at that while the long version is too long, the same reasoning applies.
And what if the short version only fails when the person you’re interacting with is more interested in point-scoring than engaging with your actual meaning? So that, e.g., if you say “some people will do X” they’ll derail the discussion into a side-argument about how “some” could mean “only one person ever” even though even the most halfhearted application of the principle of charity would make it clear that if you meant “only one person ever” you would have used different words?
I can easily produce polite, bland, dry, and technically correct writing, but there is not much fun in that
But no one here is suggesting that you (or anyone else who doesn’t want to) should be doing that.
There are plenty of LW participants whose writing is immediately recognizable as theirs, and not bland and boring and beige. Only two are immediately recognizable on account of their dismissiveness and rudeness to others. You are one; the other … well, let’s just say that he goes by many names.
The point here is not that you are “too weird”. Weird is fine. The point is that it is possible to be weird without being obnoxious.
The above is harsher than I’d like to be. I consider your contributions overall a clear net benefit to LW, and your karma strongly suggests that others do too (unless of course LW is stuffed with your sockpuppets, but I’m guessing not). But they would be a bigger and clearer net benefit if you were to turn the dismissive sniping down one notch; and no, doing so would not make LW a monoculture. But it might be marginally less fun for you, and if that’s all you care about then there’s not much anyone else can do about it.
a single standard of expected behaviour
That’s importantly ambiguous. Interpretation one: “we shouldn’t expect everyone here to behave exactly the same way”. Perfectly true and perfectly irrelevant; no one is expecting that. Interpretation two: “there’s no norm we should expect of everyone here”. Perfectly ridiculous; there are plenty of expectations applied to everyone, on LW and everywhere else.
We expect people not to reply with total non sequiturs (unless doing so in some particular case is hilarious or something). We expect people not to issue death threats. We expect people not to use LW to spam advertisements for their penis enlargement pills. We expect people to post in English unless there is a special reason not to. All these, and plenty more that I’m sure you can come up with yourself, are part of a “single standard of expected behaviour”, which is not at all the same thing as a monoculture; and there’s nothing wrong with that.
what if the short version only fails when the person you’re interacting with is more interested in point-scoring than engaging with your actual meaning?
Where is the button for awarding Reddit Gold? Because I need it right now.
This is exactly what I mean by talking about “passive agressivity” on LW. There are already enough genuine misunderstandings, so we don’t need to create another layer of difficulty by trying to score some meaningless points.
The point is that it is possible to be weird without being obnoxious.
But there is the danger that becoming less obnoxious would be the first step on the slippery slope leading to braindead conformity and posting kitten videos...
And what if the short version only fails when the person you’re interacting with is more interested in point-scoring than engaging with your actual meaning?
Well, if you believe that I don’t see why do you bother with various versions at all. If you think the person you’re talking to is uninterested in your actual meaning, why, go find someone who is.
if you were to turn the dismissive sniping down one notch
Sniping, yes, dismissive, no. The ultimate dismissal is just ignoring a post or a person. And my snarking on LW is already turned down a notch or two. But, generally speaking, I’m not great at creating a helpful and supportive atmosphere, but quite good at taking things apart (that was part of the point of mentioning an ecosystem). If someone is attached to the thing I took apart, some unhappiness is unavoidable.
I generally don’t. In this particular discussion, I am beginning to wonder. (But the point at which I began to wonder was after I wrote what I did, which I suppose is the answer to “why do you bother with various versions at all”. Also, there are other readers.)
I’m not great at [...] but quite good at [...]
And—I repeat myself, but why not? -- I think taking things apart is a valuable service, and the voting on your comments suggests that other LW participants agree. I just think LW would be improved a little if you were slightly nicer about it.
(Which, for the avoidance of doubt, does not mean any of the following: “You must be brainwashed to be just like everyone else.” “Now, children, why can’t we just all get along?” “Let’s all sing Kumbaya and everything will be fairies and unicorns and rainbows.”)
Very reasonable question, albeit awkward to answer because making predictions about other people is kinda rude and kinda creepy.
I certainly don’t expect Lumifer to stop enjoying being snarky at people on LW. Neither do I expect him to make a radical shift from doing whatever he finds amusing to some kind of optimization of everyone’s net utility. But I do think it’s possible that he will make a small update to his estimate of how other people react to his snarky dismissals, and that there will be a small corresponding change in behaviour. That would, in my judgement, make LW a marginally better place.
I also hope that some people who are upvoting snarky dismissiveness may become slightly less inclined to do so. I don’t at all begrudge Lumifer his upvotes, but I think he’s often getting them for the wrong comments. More to the point, I think an environment where snarky dismissiveness gets lots of upvotes will encourage other people to move in the snarkily dismissive direction, which I think would be bad for LW.
Ok. Assume, for a moment, that Lumifer is judicious about when to be snarkily dismissive—that is, he is snarkily dismissive when he thinks it is the appropriate response.
In that case, would it be fair to say that the issue you take is not necessarily with his snarky dismissiveness, but rather his skipping the intermediate mental steps in explaining why somebody is wrong? That is, he is making leaps of logic that the audience can’t necessarily follow? (This might explain some of the upvotes, as well; they’re not upvoting his snarkiness, but his dismissal of something they also dismiss for similar reasons which nobody ever conveys to those who don’t know what those reasons are.)
In that case, instead of engaging him on a tone argument, it might be more productive to suggest he is losing some of his audience, who he could otherwise convince, by dismissing things without apparent cause.
There’s probably a competing needs access issue here; Lumifer’s commentary might be useful to a subset of people, while harmful (or at least non-useful) to another subset of people. The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate the usefulness of his commentary to the subset of people to whom his commentary is helpful, but rather to expand the usefulness of his commentary to those who don’t already know what his objections imply/what his true objections are.
(As for making predictions of people—you don’t improve your models of other people by never making predictions.)
In that case, would it be fair to say that the issue you take is [...] he is making leaps of logic that the audience can’t necessarily follow?
Maybe that’s part of the problem sometimes. But no, I don’t think it’s the main problem. In my own interactions with Lumifer, I am much more often annoyed by rudeness than by incomprehension. And my impression of his interaction with others is that they’re mostly the same.
(I do from time to time find Lumifer’s comments unhelpfully terse and seek clarification. But I don’t find those annoying in the same way as I do the snarky dismissals.)
I would say that, conditional on Lumifer’s snarky dismissiveness being “judicious” in the sense you describe, the objection I sometimes have is that he is incorrect in thinking it “the correct response”.
you don’t improve your models of other people by never making predictions
Of course. But you don’t need to make the predictions out loud in public, and often it’s a bad idea to—e.g., because of the “monkey brain jerking around” issue Lumifer mentioned: talking about what someone else is going to do in the future on account of what you’ve said is apt to feel like a status manoeuvre; there are other reasons too.
In my own interactions with Lumifer, I am much more often annoyed by rudeness than by incomprehension. And my impression of his interaction with others is that they’re mostly the same.
I find it rude when people don’t make eye contact. It made New England an interesting place for me to live. Was I wrong to try to make eye contact, or were they wrong to avoid it? And whose mores should win in a place where both cultures coincide?
Of course. But you don’t need to make the predictions out loud in public, and often it’s a bad idea to—e.g., because of the “monkey brain jerking around” issue Lumifer mentioned: talking about what someone else is going to do in the future on account of what you’ve said is apt to feel like a status manoeuvre; there are other reasons too.
Do you regard being predictable as being a low-status signal, and do you think society at large shares this view?
Not necessarily either, of course, but in practice it’s probably easier for you to learn that New Englanders may avoid eye contact even if they are friendly than for half the population of New England to change their habits.
Do you regard being predictable as being a low-status signal
I think most of us are inclined to treat being manipulable as a low-status signal, and being predictable manipulable even more so. This is why, if you want to encourage someone to change their behaviour, it is often more effective to talk about it with them in private.
(In this case, the discussion was already going on in public when I first saw it.)
Not necessarily either, of course, but in practice it’s probably easier for you to learn that New Englanders may avoid eye contact even if they are friendly than for half the population of New England to change their habits.
You miss my point. Rudeness is culturally contextual. You’re insisting, here, that your social mores take precedent. It’s entirely possible they’re the majority mores, but Lumifer’s overall positive karma should be taken as evidence against that.
I often upvote Lumifer’s comments simply because they contain good content (while downvoting the ones that are pure snark). I strongly suspect that many other LW users vote similarly. That Lumifer’s comments are often upvoted should not, therefore, be taken as an indication that people appreciate their tone (and I suspect that Lumifer’s karma ratio—which is currently at 80%--is so low at least in part because of the tone he/she uses).
(On a somewhat related note: I have noticed a rather strange phenomenon occurring, where one of Lumifer’s comments initially receives a large number of downvotes, sometimes falling all the way to −5, before a sudden surge of upvotes, usually a day or two later, brings it back up to around +4 or so. This is not the sort of pattern one would normally expect to see, and yet I have seen it happen multiple times, which leads me to think someone else may be gaming the system.)
That Lumifer’s comments are often upvoted should not, therefore, be taken as an indication that people appreciate their tone (and I suspect that Lumifer’s karma ratio—which is currently at 80%--is so low at least in part because of the tone he/she uses).
Approval of tone, and finding a comment on the whole useful, are distinct things.
I’m not insisting on anything. I am expressing the opinion that LW would, overall, function a little better if Lumifer were slightly less abrasive. Contrariwise, Lumifer is expressing the opinions that (1) he doesn’t wanna and (2) actually LW would be worse overall if he were all nice and gentle. I don’t see much of the way of insistence here on either side.
Am I misunderstanding what you mean by “insisting”?
It’s entirely possible they’re the majority mores
The thing about mores is that to some extent they’re trying to solve coordination problems, and they do that better when people are more willing to adopt common mores—and if you have a large majority on one side then, annoying though it may be for the other guys, it probably works best overall for them to do most of the adapting.
(Which isn’t—as I’ve said elsewhere in the thread—to say that total uniformity is called for. Just a certain level of accommodation. Now, Lumifer’s said that he’s already being less snarky and dismissive on LW than he would naturally prefer to be; so perhaps we’re actually at the optimum after all. I am inclined to think not, but of course I can see Lumifer’s situation only from the outside.)
Lumifer’s positive karma
His snarkiest comments are frequently on negative scores. (Scarcely ever because of me, for what it’s worth.) So while there’s little question that Lumifer is a valuable and valued member of the LW community, I don’t think we can infer from his high karma that his snarking is either valuable or valued.
[EDITED to add:] Personally, I value some of it but not all. (And no, the distinction is not whether he’s snarking at me or at others.) I’m quite sure that the optimum level of Lumifer-snark is well above zero.
Now, Lumifer’s said that he’s already being less snarky and dismissive on LW than he would naturally prefer to be
Not quite.
I have found out, empirically, that if I embrace the dark side and let my snark flow unimpeded, it grows. Grows both in width, taking over conversations, and in depth, as its teeth extend and become sharper. After a while I decided I don’t like that and that my snark needs to be limited and controlled.
So it’s not that I naturally prefer to be more snarky, but rather that there is a “natural” escalation which I’m deliberately keeping in check.
Am I misunderstanding what you mean by “insisting”?
Yes. You’re also ignoring the issue of cultural mores in favor of a perspective in which niceness and functionality are non-subjective qualities, the subjectivity of which was my point which you claim not to have missed.
The thing about mores is that to some extent they’re trying to solve coordination problems, and they do that better when people are more willing to adopt common mores—and if you have a large majority on one side then, annoying though it may be for the other guys, it probably works best overall for them to do most of the adapting.
“Rudeness” isn’t a coordination problem, except insofar as it’s a coordination problem of taste.
Forgot. I don’t write linearly, I bounce between different sections, and sometimes I forget things.
“Insisting” in this case meaning, roughly, “argue for over more than one iteration”. Insistence in the sense of “continuing to do something”, as opposed to the sense of “forcefully argue”.
OK. Then it seems that “insisting that [my] social mores take precedence” seems actually to mean making more than one comment in which I argue that if Lumifer took one step in the direction of (what happen to be) my social mores then LW would be (by standards I think both Lumifer and I endorse) a slightly better place.
I’m quite happy to agree that I did that, and I think it’s obvious that there’s nothing wrong with doing so by any reasonable standards.
(Note that I have not at any point said e.g. “Lumifer, you should be less dismissive because that would be nicer”. I have said “Lumifer, you should be less dismissive because your dismissiveness is likely to make others enjoy LW less and reduce the likelihood of mutual understanding in discussions”. Maybe I’ve slipped up somewhere and appealed to values that Lumifer doesn’t share with me; my intention has been not to do so.)
a perspective in which niceness and functionality are non-subjective qualities
I doubt it, since that is not in fact my perspective.
“Rudeness” isn’t a coordination problem
You said above that you find it rude when people don’t make (what you think is enough) eye contact. Some other people find it rude when people do make (what they think is excessive) eye contact. In a population where people don’t make eye contact by default, everyone is reasonably comfortable and making eye contact can be used as a signifier for, say, intimacy. In a population where people do make eye contact by default, everyone is reasonably comfortable and avoiding eye contact can be used as a signifier for, say, mistrust. Discomfort and miscommunication are liable to follow (as you found in New England) when there is a mismatch. Surely this is precisely a coordination problem.
Similarly for, e.g., a norm of always pointing out any mistakes or infelicities when you see them versus a norm of letting things slide. LW is in fact quite a lot further toward the first of those than most communities, of course; Lumifer’s preference is further still in that direction, and that’s roughly what this discussion is about. Again, this is a coordination problem; a community can sit pretty much anywhere along that line and manage OK, but if there’s a big mismatch then again you get discomfort and miscommunication.
I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, I’m defending my right to have a mind which doesn’t exactly conform to other people’s notions of what it should be :-/
Evidently, my mind has a snarky module which can easily be swapped for the cooperate-bot module (you’ll usually find it labeled “anti-Moloch” or “something something charitable”) and that’s a minor surgery, I’ll be out of the clinic in no time. And then I’ll be allowed into the rainbows-and-unicorns land where everyone shall live happily ever after.
It would be interesting to speculate on how “LW would be a slightly better place if you were one notch less snarky” seems to have turned into “you want to change the workings of my brain to make me exactly what you think it should be, and you think that doing so would make everyone happy”, but I am much too polite to do so and will merely remark that no, of course I was not taking exception to the form or content of your mind; only (mildly) to some of your actions.
I think you’re both having different arguments than you think you are. Illusion of transparency, and all that.
I suspect Gjm’s true argument is something along the lines of “Lumifer has a tendency to dismiss people’s positions without explanation.” But instead he is making a tone argument, because he is noticing his reaction to your style of commentary rather than the nature of your style of commentary.
Which is not to say your dismissals are wrong, but it often requires a lot of reading between the lines, when reading your comments, to figure out what your reasons actually are. And if somebody isn’t familiar with the specific argument you’re implicitly referencing with your “snarky one-liners”, they may fail to be able to understand what your objection actually is. Gjm is also very uncomfortable guessing at people’s motivations/reasons (he considers it rude), so you two have an even wider communication gap.
Human interactions are complicated, there are usually multiple factors at play. It is true that from gjm’s point of view I sometimes dismiss people’s positions “arbitrarily”. But it is also true that my style breaks the rules of the polite society in gjm’s corner of the world and that makes him less comfortable. Plus there are status signals involved and the monkey brain is, of course, jerking around in response to them.
they may fail to be able to understand what your objection actually is
That’s a fair point.
Gjm is also very uncomfortable guessing at people’s motivations/reasons
Not guessing, but publicly stating. I am pretty sure that he—like all people—builds models of people in his head all the time. But bringing out these models into the open is too direct and explicit: gentlemen do not do that.
On the last point there, Lumifer is right and OrphanWilde wrong: I don’t consider it in any way improper to build mental models of other people, and so far as I can tell I understand Lumifer’s one-liners as well as anyone else does. (Which is not to say I always understand them correctly; but if not then his wounds are, as he might put it, self-inflicted.)
The other half of Lumifer’s commentary, attempting to explain what I dislike about his posting style, is so far as I can tell quite badly wrong, but I don’t think it would be productive to argue it further. (It very rarely is after one party has decided to go full Bulver on the other.)
The other half of Lumifer’s commentary, attempting to explain what I dislike about his posting style, is so far as I can tell quite badly wrong, but I don’t think it would be productive to argue it further. (It very rarely is after one party has decided to go full Bulver on the other.)
You should notice now that what he was interpreting you as saying isn’t what you were intending to convey, as demonstrated by the fact that you felt a need to clarify; likewise, by the fact that you didn’t notice what his argument was actually about, you were likewise not getting what he was trying to communicate.
Your wounds here are, as Lumifer might put it, self-inflicted. And accusing the other party of going “full Bulver” isn’t exactly conducive to the sort of respectful discussion you claim to want to reify here, which is really just a subset of the overall tone of discussion. You called Lumifer out, and, by my reckoning, have more or less admitted that the thread was at least in part a response to him and his style of commentary. More, for somebody who considers it incredibly rude and status-gamey to make predictions about people, your first response to Lumifer was a post-hoc prediction that he’d be the one to respond. Given that you regard such behavior as a status play, I can’t help but interpret this entire bloody discussion in that framework.
[ETA: Correction: It was Villiam who did the above.]
You’re playing at being the mature, responsible person, telling somebody who is ill-behaved that their behavior is problematic. But you’re not actually being a mature, responsible person here, as evidenced by the fact that you chose to insert a parting shot in your “I don’t want to argue about this anymore.”
If you don’t want to argue about it anymore, stop bloody arguing, and ignore the need to inject attacks in your closing statement.
You’re playing at being the mature, responsible person, telling somebody who is ill-behaved that their behavior is problematic. But you’re not actually being a mature, responsible person here, as evidenced by the fact that you chose to insert a parting shot in your “I don’t want to argue about this anymore.”
What makes you think I didn’t notice what Lumifer’s argument was actually about?
you’re not actually being a mature, responsible person here
I suggest that your assessment of that is strongly coloured by your completely incorrect characterization of the rest of the thread. You’ve already issued one correction—indeed, my first response to Lumifer was not the post-hoc prediction you said it was (which would indeed have been inconsistent with my stated opinions). Here are some more. I didn’t call Lumifer out; dxu did, my entry to the thread was an attempt to correct a misunderstanding. Given that I didn’t start the thread, I’m not sure how I could possibly “admit that the thread was” anything.
you chose to insert a parting shot
I explained why I don’t want to argue about it any more. I’m not sure exactly what you consider immature or irresponsible about that.
I would just like to point out that my entry point into this discussion was actually rather similar to your own, in that I was simply clarifying some of (what I thought were) Viliam’s points. This whole thread actually got started because SquirrelInHell proposed a “niceness norm”, Lumifer (as is his/her wont) began poking at it, and then Viliam took the opportunity to say some things that (I assume) he’s been wanting to say for a while. I do think OrphanWilde’s accusation of you was misplaced, but I would be cautious in accusing anyone else of “starting it”; for the record, I genuinely don’t think this thread was anyone’s “fault”—in fact, I would argue that, if nothing else, this thread allowed several people (including myself) to express some things that might in other contexts have been considered socially impermissible. So it wasn’t entirely a bad thing.
Finally, because I feel like this discussion has been rather grim for a while now, and because this is (after all) the place to discuss the positivity thread, have an emoticon:
I explained why I don’t want to argue about it any more. I’m not sure exactly what you consider immature or irresponsible about that.
“You’re too stupid to have this discussion with” is also an explanation about why you wouldn’t want to argue with somebody. One I’ve used, albeit with different words. But it also flies in the face of your argument about rudeness detracting from Less Wrong.
We’re talking about establishing a particular norm for LW.
Niceness is a continuous variable and everyone has a certain threshold on that axis (threshold which “intuition determines”) below which things are “not nice” and above which things are “nice”. The problem, of course, is that everyone has her own and that’s no good for a social norm. Some common threshold will have to be established, most likely by those who will take it upon themselves to enforce that norm. Also most likely the common threshold will be very similar to the personal thresholds of the enforcers.
Nope, sorry, I don’t buy the “a victim is always right about being a victim” approach.
That depends on whether that person is willing to update on the evidence :-P
Are you perhaps arguing that as long as people don’t have a unified formal definition of niceness, nice behavior is not possible? That would seem unlikely.
Even if everyone has a different threshold… well, everyone has their own upvote and downvote buttons, right? So the worst case is that some comments would get upvoted by some users for being nice enough and downvoted by other users for not being nice enough. Doesn’t seem that horrible.
And over time, people will adjust to the average. And those who will still find this community unbearably rude or unbearably polite will leave.
In real life, this problem is usually solved by creating subcultures; different groups having different norms. Being too rude will get you ejected from the group. Being too polite may make you leave the group voluntarily. Groups that eject too many people end up have few members. Groups that retain too many rude people end up having mostly rude members.
It would be a nice experiment to have a website that would support this “organic” grouping of people; where LW wouldn’t be one group, but rather an ecosystem of groups. But I’m afraid we are unlikely to ever see this happen. So we are stuck with having LW as one group.
In real life, sometimes the ejecting of rude members from the group is done by a local boss (a formal owner of the place, or a high-status member of the group), but sometimes the group splits “organically”—some people stop talking to some other people, and after some time we see that what was originally one group now became two groups. It could be interesting to try modelling this by a web platform. (Mere blocking is not enough, because in the group other people see when X is ignoring Y. Also, avoiding someone in real life is not a binary decision.) But I am not expecting to see this in near future.
I don’t think that LW is one group in any meaningful sense. There’s this website. There’s Slack. There’s IRC. There’s the facebook group. There are local meetups with often have their own mailing list.
There are also various diaspora groups that don’t exist under the LW brand.
I think there are two distinct ways to think of niceness.
One is that being nice is about doing things motivated by positive emotions like compassion and gratitude. The other is that being nice is about conforming to a list of social standards, not picking fights and avoiding confrontation.
I think the first version of niceness is very valuable. On the other hand the second version leads to supressed emotions, passive-aggressiveness and anxiousness. In the first model people hug each other while in the second model people often avoid physical contact.
At the community camp where most people run around with free hug and crockers rule stickers, the first kind of niceness is valued while the second kind isn’t.
I’m in favor of moving this website to having more of the first kind of niceness, but I get weary when you start talking about politness with is mostly associated with the second type of niceness.
This is perfectly true. However, our current ways of communication also lead to supressed emotions, passive-aggressiveness and anxiousness.
I don’t think we have much passive-aggressiveness on LW. People here are usually pretty direct.
No, not at all. I’m arguing that there will be behaviour about which people will not be able to agree whether it’s nice or not.
Why unlikely? There are at many ways to move in this direction, for example the establishment of LW subreddits which will develop their own, possibly different, cultural norms. For another example, killfile equivalents or some sufficiently flexible tagging system will allow people to define their own personal “groupings of people” all of which could coexist on LW.
And some of them will downvote it, and some of them will upvote it.
I suspect that mere “moves in this direction” will not be enough. May improve things, but not enough.
My reasoning is roughly this:
People have complex social instints, finely tuned by evolution. Sometimes we coordinate in groups by using small signals, such as face expressions, body posture, tone of voice, looking away or otherwise not paying attention when someone is speaking, sitting closer to some people and further away from others, etc. Some of these actions include plausible deniability; for example one can signal boredom with a debate by looking away, but when confronted, they can verbally deny being bored. This mechanism allows different intensity of interaction.
When using a web interface, most of these options are missing; sometimes replaced by crude approximations that fail in some important aspect. (For example, what is the equivalent of “looking away when someone keeps debating stuff you consider super boring”? Merely not reading and not participating in the discussion is too invisible: you don’t have feedback about who is reading and who is skipping which comments. Downvoting feels too aggressive; it is more like shouting “shut up”.) Another important aspect is that in real life most kinds of reactions are simple, so if they require some inconvenient action online, it’s not the same thing.
It is these situations where our instinct offers us a real-life solution, but there is no sufficiently corresponding action in the web forum, that make online discussions develop in many frustrating ways that wouldn’t happen in real life. (Also other dissimilarities, e.g. creating sockpuppets, etc.)
This is why I think it would be an interesting project to develop a web interface that would allows us to act as closely to our instinctive social behavior as possible. The hypothesis is that it would make the discussions much less frustrating for many participants. But crude approximations will not work, precisely because they are crude.
(I am not saying that our social interactions in real life are the best possible mode of communication. There is a space for improvement. I am saying that we are unable to get even there.)
Not enough for what?
You seem to want, basically, video conferencing. Or, if you prefer a more future-y way of doing that, telepresence in virtual reality.
You are taking a very one-sided view. Online discussions are not just hobbled and maimed discussions in person—they have disadvantages, but they also have a lot of advantages. They are different and that makes them occupy a different, useful niche in the panoply of ways humans communicate.
Sometimes you want to talk in person, but sometimes you don’t and email or chat are the preferred way.
Because we don’t want to go there.
I’m pretty sure dxu wasn’t appealing to that. Just saying that different people will have different ideas about whether any given thing is an attack. (And then, more specifically, that a hardnosed “object to anything that looks wrong” conversational style will, whatever the intentions of the person doing it, likely upset some of the people it’s done to and thereby make it less likely, not more likely, that mutual understanding will be achieved.)
I’m pretty sure dxu wasn’t talking about different people in general, but specifically meant that the one on the receiving end of the maybe-an-attack has the right to declare it an attack or not. See the following dxu’s sentence.
And, of course, there is the obvious right of everyone to have her own opinion, but I’m reading dxu as saying that the opinion of the originator of the maybe-an-attack is… “less equal” than the opinion of the target.
That’s a rather weak claim. Most everything is likely to upset some people.
dxu, would you care to weigh in?
The options I had, writing that sentence, were: obviously-too-strong claim; obviously-too-weak claim; absurdly fussily qualified and quantified claim. None of them was perfect, so I chose the one that looked least bad to me.
Sure. What I meant was that presumably, “attacks” are considered damaging for a reason—namely, that they make discussion more unpleasant. This “unpleasantness”, however, is a subjective matter, and whether a particular remark generates an unpleasant feeling is entirely up to (the brain of) the “target”, as it were. So I suppose my reply to Lumifer would be something along the lines of
If we’re talking about effects on the victim (“victim” is not the word I would have used, by the way), as a matter of causal fact, then yes, in fact, it is. You could try to argue, of course, that the “victim” overreacted and shouldn’t have felt attacked by that remark, but the fact of the matter is that he/she did in fact feel attacked.
Of course, just because someone feels attacked doesn’t mean you did something wrong when addressing them—it’s entirely possible, for example, that the person in question really is overly sensitive, and that a large fraction of people would not have taken umbrage to your remark. This possibility grows markedly less likely, however, when several users independently claim to find a particular poster’s comments unpleasant as a whole.
I should also point out that comments, especially long comments, take some effort to write. When confronted with such a comment, I’ve noticed that Lumifer generally does not address the entirety of the comment, instead selectively quoting several sentences from various points in the comment and then snarking at those. When someone does this, it feels (at least to me) as if they’re not actually taking the other poster seriously; if I put a lot of effort into a post and write several paragraphs for you to read and then your reply consists of one-liner responses that are more condescending than informative, it feels as though the effort I’m putting into the discussion is not being reciprocated, which makes me less likely to continue the discussion.
EDIT: An example of the above would be Lumifer’s reply to your (gjm’s) comment, which simply reads:
Snarky one-liner? Check. Does not actually address the main point? Check. More condescending than informative? Check. This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about, and it was found in the immediate next comment in the chain. You don’t even have to look for this sort of thing from Lumifer; that’s how often it happens.
There is a reason for that. Addressing the entirety of the comment usually requires that your answer be longer than the comment you’re replying to. That leads to large walls’o’text of fisking very very quickly and the whole thing implodes shortly afterwards.
In my experience to keep a manageable conversation going for more than a couple of rounds you need to severely prune the topics and keep the whole thing on a (possibly meandering) track. Of course both sides can/should do this: I don’t expect that every point I raised will be addressed in the reply. As to snarking, well… :-)
Re EDIT:
I like snarky one-liners.
Nope. It actually addresses the main point of the post it’s replying to.
Not condescending. Snarky (see above). Condescending would have been “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it”.
I don’t. (See, two can play at this game.)
Not snarky enough.
Your move :-P
That’s good evidence that your sentence has problems :-)
Maybe, but it looks to me more like good evidence that some things don’t fit nicely into soundbites. LW has traditionally been one of the better places around for discussing such things. Making it less so is, I think, another drawback of your preferred discussion style.
Your wounds are self-inflicted. My preferred discussion style is not binding on anyone and anyway, I’m a believer in the “Things should be as simple as possible but not simpler” maxim. The issue is, rather, balancing making your point clearly and correctly against writing a wall’o’text that no one reads. That’s not an easy balance to strike. I often say “It’s complicated” and cut off large chunks of discussion space for exactly this reason.
Which was exactly the tradeoff I made in a way you complained about. I dare say you’d have made a different complaint if I’d made the tradeoff a different way.
So if “my wounds” means the fact that I said something that, taken literally, wasn’t very informative: yeah, self-inflicted, and I’m not bothered by those particular wounds.
But if it means the fact that I said something that called forth a bit of mockery from an LW regular who likes mocking things: nope, not self-inflicted in any useful sense.
(I wouldn’t have used the word “wounds” myself. Far too dramatic.)
[EDITED to add:]
Of course. But the fact that leaving any loophole is liable to result in a dismissive comment from you is … not binding on anyone, that wouldn’t make any sense, but it affects everyone on LW. How much it affects any given person depends on how much they care about getting dismissive comments. It doesn’t bother me much, but I bet it bothers some other people more.
The problem wasn’t that you made a trade-off, the problem was that you failed at it—you chose the “not wall’o’text” path, but did not make your point clearly and correctly.
It has nothing to do with loopholes. Express your meaning clearly and it will be fine. But if that meaning is a misshapen piece of jelly weakly flopping around, well, I will be tempted to poke it with a stick :-/
Perhaps. Or perhaps (as it seemed to me) there wasn’t a way of making my point clearly and correctly without too much wall-o’-text.
Which, it seems to me, it wasn’t and you have given no reason to think it was. What you have (quite correctly but, in my view, pointlessly) complained about is that an uncharitably literal reading of what I wrote is very vague. True enough; I think the only way to avoid vagueness and wrongness was more wall-o’-text than I was prepared to waste people’s time with.
Of course, the ensuing discussion has produced more text and more timewasting than if I’d just written the long and boring version in the first place. Perhaps what I write will tend further in the wall-o’-text direction in future. If so, it will be wordier and more boring, and the only real benefit will be that it will be a bit less vulnerable to one particular sort of bad-faith objection. I do not think that would be a benefit to LW.
Descending briefly to the object level, let me at this point state the original claim[1] more carefully:
[1] It may be worth an explicit reminder that it wasn’t a statement of my opinion but an attempt to indicate what sort of thing someone else had been saying. My elaboration here will be on both dxu’s original comment and my sketchy and incomplete summary of what s/he was saying.
Suppose you adopt the approach dxu summarized as “when I see a weakness, I must attack immediately”. Then discussions in which someone other than you makes some statement that doesn’t have all its details firmly nailed down are liable to feature sniping from you when the other guy makes some such statement. Since actually most discussion, even here, involves plenty of such statements, this doesn’t have to happen a very large fraction of the time for it to be quite common.
Such discussions tend not to be much fun for the other party, for several reasons. They may feel personally attacked, which is an unpleasant feeling whether or not any sort of personal attack is actually intended. They may find that they have to devote an order of magnitude more time to the discussion than would be necessary without your bloody-mindedness. They may fear getting a reputation for long-windedness and pedantry, when in fact all they are doing is attempting to forestall your sniping.
(Lots of “They may …” there. I suggest that maybe half of all people you do it to will find the experience unpleasant; maybe 1⁄4 of the time when you do it they will find themselves devoting far more time to the discussion than it warrants in itself; maybe 1⁄4 of people you do it to will for some time afterward feel at least some temptation to write defensively.)
You might argue that such a discussion is worth the unpleasantness because it results in clarifying what the other guy meant (or exposing his fuzzy thinking, if what he meant is not susceptible of clarification). But that may well not be the outcome. Much of the time (probably more than half) the other guy will decline to get into a lengthy and possibly unpleasant argument; in these cases, no clarification ensues, whatever productive discussion you could have had instead is forestalled, and no one wins. When they are willing to engage, there is a danger (let’s say, again, p>0.5) that the other guy gets annoyed and defensive—I am stipulating here that there is no chance at all that you would do such a thing—and what follows is more ego-fight than useful discussion, and again the loss exceeds the gain. The rest of the time, perhaps you do in fact get a useful clarification; very good, but I suggest that in these cases—where the other guy did mean something specific, was able to figure out what it was, and was disposed to be helpful—a less aggressive approach would also have elicited the clarification.
The fact is that almost all discussion outside academic journals (and plenty inside them) involves plenty of statements that don’t have all their details firmly nailed down, and that could be sniped at in this fashion. So once this pattern is noticed (which of course it has been, here on LW) -- especially when, as here, the person doing the sniping is very active and clearly has time to do a lot of sniping if he chooses—many participants (let’s say >= 10% of active participants, probably more) will feel some pressure to choose between writing defensively (at the cost of extra effort, increased boredom for their readers, reduced clarity for those not reading with aggressive uncharity, etc.) and getting sniped at unpleasantly. Result: some combination of boring defensive writing, and reduced participation (hence, less interesting stuff on LW).
The overall result is—in dxu’s view, as I understand it, and also as it happens in mine—that your conversational style is bad for LW. It’s probably good for you, though: sniping is fun, and is an effective way to pick up karma if you happen to care about that. Chalk up one more victory for Moloch.
In such situations I usually choose to not say anything and let it go.
When both of your options lose, the only way to win is not to play :-)
Since we’ve been talking about trade-offs, let me point out that there is one here, too. Let’s imagine a wonderful world where people like me are absent and everyone is very nice, highly supportive and full of praise. Gold stars for everyone! What kind of writing would you expect to get?
My cynical side says that you will get a whole lot of badly written, unfocused, lazy, vague, incoherent crap. You might well get increased participation because yay praise and hugs for little effort, but thoughtful people would leave, for obvious reasons. That doesn’t look like a good outcome.
As usual, balance is important. You want to prune (and disincentivise) crap and you want to promote (and incentivise) interesting, insightful writing. The exact location of the proper balancing point is, of course, debatable :-)
One more thing—it might be helpful to think of LW as an ecosystem. An ecosystem likes and need diversity. That, in turn, implies that LW needs different kinds of people who will fill different roles. Some people (like me) will snap and bite. Some people will nurture and grow. Some people will dump the minutiae of their daily lives onto LW. Some people will think for a year and then make a single post. Some people are interested in neural nets, some are interested in ponies, some are interested in how to lose weight and pick up girls, and some are interested in how to make sure LW doesn’t become an example of Lotka-Volterra equations.
Monocultures are bad, mmkay?
What if, instead of trying to win, you’re actually trying to advance the discussion in a meaningful way? Some people aren’t here to win verbal sparring matches.
Please keep in mind that no one actually wants that. Some people would just prefer you tone it down. Like, you could, for example, cut down on stuff like this:
Seriously, what purpose does this sort of rhetoric serve? I understand this is your posting style, but if you write stuff like this you don’t get to claim your comments aren’t “attacks” (EDIT: or “condescending”, for that matter).
This… seriously does not follow. I have read comment threads from before you joined LW, as well as comment threads that occurred after you joined but that you simply did not post in. Most of these threads were not, as you put it, “incoherent crap”, primarily because there are people on this site who are just as capable of pointing out flaws as you are, but don’t do it in such a grating fashion. (Examples of these people include: TheOtherDave, wedrifid, shminux, Vaniver, etc.)
I’ll be honest here: I have not seen a single other poster with a rhetorical style even remotely resembling yours. If you’re a member of this “ecosystem”, you’re a species of one.
What are you even arguing, here? That the presence of people like yourself is somehow necessary to keep LW from devolving into a monoculture? If so, I have to disagree—and it’s hard to see how you could be arguing anything else.
I didn’t define “win” as winning at verbal sparring. If your goal is to advance discussion in a meaningful way and the short version fails at that while the long version is too long, the same reasoning applies.
But I don’t wanna! X-) I like expressive, sparkly, prickly, highly saturated, slightly ambiguous language. I can easily produce polite, bland, dry, and technically correct writing, but there is not much fun in that and I’m not writing an academic paper. “Tone it down to beige”—no, thank you.
I am not talking about myself. I’m talking about the balance between discouraging and promoting in general. I certainly don’t claim I’m the only force that’s keeping LW from drowning in crap.
There is the classic Shrek’s answer to Fiona’s outraged “What kind of knight ARE you?”...
But really, are you telling me, on LW, that I’m too weird? :-)
That applying a single standard of expected behaviour to everyone is not a particularly useful approach, but rather a “be careful what you wish for” case.
And what if the short version only fails when the person you’re interacting with is more interested in point-scoring than engaging with your actual meaning? So that, e.g., if you say “some people will do X” they’ll derail the discussion into a side-argument about how “some” could mean “only one person ever” even though even the most halfhearted application of the principle of charity would make it clear that if you meant “only one person ever” you would have used different words?
But no one here is suggesting that you (or anyone else who doesn’t want to) should be doing that.
There are plenty of LW participants whose writing is immediately recognizable as theirs, and not bland and boring and beige. Only two are immediately recognizable on account of their dismissiveness and rudeness to others. You are one; the other … well, let’s just say that he goes by many names.
The point here is not that you are “too weird”. Weird is fine. The point is that it is possible to be weird without being obnoxious.
The above is harsher than I’d like to be. I consider your contributions overall a clear net benefit to LW, and your karma strongly suggests that others do too (unless of course LW is stuffed with your sockpuppets, but I’m guessing not). But they would be a bigger and clearer net benefit if you were to turn the dismissive sniping down one notch; and no, doing so would not make LW a monoculture. But it might be marginally less fun for you, and if that’s all you care about then there’s not much anyone else can do about it.
That’s importantly ambiguous. Interpretation one: “we shouldn’t expect everyone here to behave exactly the same way”. Perfectly true and perfectly irrelevant; no one is expecting that. Interpretation two: “there’s no norm we should expect of everyone here”. Perfectly ridiculous; there are plenty of expectations applied to everyone, on LW and everywhere else.
We expect people not to reply with total non sequiturs (unless doing so in some particular case is hilarious or something). We expect people not to issue death threats. We expect people not to use LW to spam advertisements for their penis enlargement pills. We expect people to post in English unless there is a special reason not to. All these, and plenty more that I’m sure you can come up with yourself, are part of a “single standard of expected behaviour”, which is not at all the same thing as a monoculture; and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Where is the button for awarding Reddit Gold? Because I need it right now.
This is exactly what I mean by talking about “passive agressivity” on LW. There are already enough genuine misunderstandings, so we don’t need to create another layer of difficulty by trying to score some meaningless points.
But there is the danger that becoming less obnoxious would be the first step on the slippery slope leading to braindead conformity and posting kitten videos...
Don’t worry, no one here would go that far.
Well, if you believe that I don’t see why do you bother with various versions at all. If you think the person you’re talking to is uninterested in your actual meaning, why, go find someone who is.
Sniping, yes, dismissive, no. The ultimate dismissal is just ignoring a post or a person. And my snarking on LW is already turned down a notch or two. But, generally speaking, I’m not great at creating a helpful and supportive atmosphere, but quite good at taking things apart (that was part of the point of mentioning an ecosystem). If someone is attached to the thing I took apart, some unhappiness is unavoidable.
I generally don’t. In this particular discussion, I am beginning to wonder. (But the point at which I began to wonder was after I wrote what I did, which I suppose is the answer to “why do you bother with various versions at all”. Also, there are other readers.)
And—I repeat myself, but why not? -- I think taking things apart is a valuable service, and the voting on your comments suggests that other LW participants agree. I just think LW would be improved a little if you were slightly nicer about it.
(Which, for the avoidance of doubt, does not mean any of the following: “You must be brainwashed to be just like everyone else.” “Now, children, why can’t we just all get along?” “Let’s all sing Kumbaya and everything will be fairies and unicorns and rainbows.”)
At this point in the conversation I have to ask: Do either of you actually expect to change anybody’s minds?
Very reasonable question, albeit awkward to answer because making predictions about other people is kinda rude and kinda creepy.
I certainly don’t expect Lumifer to stop enjoying being snarky at people on LW. Neither do I expect him to make a radical shift from doing whatever he finds amusing to some kind of optimization of everyone’s net utility. But I do think it’s possible that he will make a small update to his estimate of how other people react to his snarky dismissals, and that there will be a small corresponding change in behaviour. That would, in my judgement, make LW a marginally better place.
I also hope that some people who are upvoting snarky dismissiveness may become slightly less inclined to do so. I don’t at all begrudge Lumifer his upvotes, but I think he’s often getting them for the wrong comments. More to the point, I think an environment where snarky dismissiveness gets lots of upvotes will encourage other people to move in the snarkily dismissive direction, which I think would be bad for LW.
Ok. Assume, for a moment, that Lumifer is judicious about when to be snarkily dismissive—that is, he is snarkily dismissive when he thinks it is the appropriate response.
In that case, would it be fair to say that the issue you take is not necessarily with his snarky dismissiveness, but rather his skipping the intermediate mental steps in explaining why somebody is wrong? That is, he is making leaps of logic that the audience can’t necessarily follow? (This might explain some of the upvotes, as well; they’re not upvoting his snarkiness, but his dismissal of something they also dismiss for similar reasons which nobody ever conveys to those who don’t know what those reasons are.)
In that case, instead of engaging him on a tone argument, it might be more productive to suggest he is losing some of his audience, who he could otherwise convince, by dismissing things without apparent cause.
There’s probably a competing needs access issue here; Lumifer’s commentary might be useful to a subset of people, while harmful (or at least non-useful) to another subset of people. The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate the usefulness of his commentary to the subset of people to whom his commentary is helpful, but rather to expand the usefulness of his commentary to those who don’t already know what his objections imply/what his true objections are.
(As for making predictions of people—you don’t improve your models of other people by never making predictions.)
Maybe that’s part of the problem sometimes. But no, I don’t think it’s the main problem. In my own interactions with Lumifer, I am much more often annoyed by rudeness than by incomprehension. And my impression of his interaction with others is that they’re mostly the same.
(I do from time to time find Lumifer’s comments unhelpfully terse and seek clarification. But I don’t find those annoying in the same way as I do the snarky dismissals.)
I would say that, conditional on Lumifer’s snarky dismissiveness being “judicious” in the sense you describe, the objection I sometimes have is that he is incorrect in thinking it “the correct response”.
Of course. But you don’t need to make the predictions out loud in public, and often it’s a bad idea to—e.g., because of the “monkey brain jerking around” issue Lumifer mentioned: talking about what someone else is going to do in the future on account of what you’ve said is apt to feel like a status manoeuvre; there are other reasons too.
I find it rude when people don’t make eye contact. It made New England an interesting place for me to live. Was I wrong to try to make eye contact, or were they wrong to avoid it? And whose mores should win in a place where both cultures coincide?
Do you regard being predictable as being a low-status signal, and do you think society at large shares this view?
Not necessarily either, of course, but in practice it’s probably easier for you to learn that New Englanders may avoid eye contact even if they are friendly than for half the population of New England to change their habits.
I think most of us are inclined to treat being manipulable as a low-status signal, and being predictable manipulable even more so. This is why, if you want to encourage someone to change their behaviour, it is often more effective to talk about it with them in private.
(In this case, the discussion was already going on in public when I first saw it.)
You miss my point. Rudeness is culturally contextual. You’re insisting, here, that your social mores take precedent. It’s entirely possible they’re the majority mores, but Lumifer’s overall positive karma should be taken as evidence against that.
I often upvote Lumifer’s comments simply because they contain good content (while downvoting the ones that are pure snark). I strongly suspect that many other LW users vote similarly. That Lumifer’s comments are often upvoted should not, therefore, be taken as an indication that people appreciate their tone (and I suspect that Lumifer’s karma ratio—which is currently at 80%--is so low at least in part because of the tone he/she uses).
(On a somewhat related note: I have noticed a rather strange phenomenon occurring, where one of Lumifer’s comments initially receives a large number of downvotes, sometimes falling all the way to −5, before a sudden surge of upvotes, usually a day or two later, brings it back up to around +4 or so. This is not the sort of pattern one would normally expect to see, and yet I have seen it happen multiple times, which leads me to think someone else may be gaming the system.)
Approval of tone, and finding a comment on the whole useful, are distinct things.
I promise you, I didn’t.
I’m not insisting on anything. I am expressing the opinion that LW would, overall, function a little better if Lumifer were slightly less abrasive. Contrariwise, Lumifer is expressing the opinions that (1) he doesn’t wanna and (2) actually LW would be worse overall if he were all nice and gentle. I don’t see much of the way of insistence here on either side.
Am I misunderstanding what you mean by “insisting”?
The thing about mores is that to some extent they’re trying to solve coordination problems, and they do that better when people are more willing to adopt common mores—and if you have a large majority on one side then, annoying though it may be for the other guys, it probably works best overall for them to do most of the adapting.
(Which isn’t—as I’ve said elsewhere in the thread—to say that total uniformity is called for. Just a certain level of accommodation. Now, Lumifer’s said that he’s already being less snarky and dismissive on LW than he would naturally prefer to be; so perhaps we’re actually at the optimum after all. I am inclined to think not, but of course I can see Lumifer’s situation only from the outside.)
His snarkiest comments are frequently on negative scores. (Scarcely ever because of me, for what it’s worth.) So while there’s little question that Lumifer is a valuable and valued member of the LW community, I don’t think we can infer from his high karma that his snarking is either valuable or valued.
[EDITED to add:] Personally, I value some of it but not all. (And no, the distinction is not whether he’s snarking at me or at others.) I’m quite sure that the optimum level of Lumifer-snark is well above zero.
Not quite.
I have found out, empirically, that if I embrace the dark side and let my snark flow unimpeded, it grows. Grows both in width, taking over conversations, and in depth, as its teeth extend and become sharper. After a while I decided I don’t like that and that my snark needs to be limited and controlled.
So it’s not that I naturally prefer to be more snarky, but rather that there is a “natural” escalation which I’m deliberately keeping in check.
Distinction noted; my apologies for misinterpreting.
Yes. You’re also ignoring the issue of cultural mores in favor of a perspective in which niceness and functionality are non-subjective qualities, the subjectivity of which was my point which you claim not to have missed.
“Rudeness” isn’t a coordination problem, except insofar as it’s a coordination problem of taste.
Is there a reason why you didn’t follow that up by explaining what you did mean by it?
Forgot. I don’t write linearly, I bounce between different sections, and sometimes I forget things.
“Insisting” in this case meaning, roughly, “argue for over more than one iteration”. Insistence in the sense of “continuing to do something”, as opposed to the sense of “forcefully argue”.
OK. Then it seems that “insisting that [my] social mores take precedence” seems actually to mean making more than one comment in which I argue that if Lumifer took one step in the direction of (what happen to be) my social mores then LW would be (by standards I think both Lumifer and I endorse) a slightly better place.
I’m quite happy to agree that I did that, and I think it’s obvious that there’s nothing wrong with doing so by any reasonable standards.
(Note that I have not at any point said e.g. “Lumifer, you should be less dismissive because that would be nicer”. I have said “Lumifer, you should be less dismissive because your dismissiveness is likely to make others enjoy LW less and reduce the likelihood of mutual understanding in discussions”. Maybe I’ve slipped up somewhere and appealed to values that Lumifer doesn’t share with me; my intention has been not to do so.)
I doubt it, since that is not in fact my perspective.
You said above that you find it rude when people don’t make (what you think is enough) eye contact. Some other people find it rude when people do make (what they think is excessive) eye contact. In a population where people don’t make eye contact by default, everyone is reasonably comfortable and making eye contact can be used as a signifier for, say, intimacy. In a population where people do make eye contact by default, everyone is reasonably comfortable and avoiding eye contact can be used as a signifier for, say, mistrust. Discomfort and miscommunication are liable to follow (as you found in New England) when there is a mismatch. Surely this is precisely a coordination problem.
Similarly for, e.g., a norm of always pointing out any mistakes or infelicities when you see them versus a norm of letting things slide. LW is in fact quite a lot further toward the first of those than most communities, of course; Lumifer’s preference is further still in that direction, and that’s roughly what this discussion is about. Again, this is a coordination problem; a community can sit pretty much anywhere along that line and manage OK, but if there’s a big mismatch then again you get discomfort and miscommunication.
I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, I’m defending my right to have a mind which doesn’t exactly conform to other people’s notions of what it should be :-/
Evidently, my mind has a snarky module which can easily be swapped for the cooperate-bot module (you’ll usually find it labeled “anti-Moloch” or “something something charitable”) and that’s a minor surgery, I’ll be out of the clinic in no time. And then I’ll be allowed into the rainbows-and-unicorns land where everyone shall live happily ever after.
It would be interesting to speculate on how “LW would be a slightly better place if you were one notch less snarky” seems to have turned into “you want to change the workings of my brain to make me exactly what you think it should be, and you think that doing so would make everyone happy”, but I am much too polite to do so and will merely remark that no, of course I was not taking exception to the form or content of your mind; only (mildly) to some of your actions.
I think you’re both having different arguments than you think you are. Illusion of transparency, and all that.
I suspect Gjm’s true argument is something along the lines of “Lumifer has a tendency to dismiss people’s positions without explanation.” But instead he is making a tone argument, because he is noticing his reaction to your style of commentary rather than the nature of your style of commentary.
Which is not to say your dismissals are wrong, but it often requires a lot of reading between the lines, when reading your comments, to figure out what your reasons actually are. And if somebody isn’t familiar with the specific argument you’re implicitly referencing with your “snarky one-liners”, they may fail to be able to understand what your objection actually is. Gjm is also very uncomfortable guessing at people’s motivations/reasons (he considers it rude), so you two have an even wider communication gap.
Human interactions are complicated, there are usually multiple factors at play. It is true that from gjm’s point of view I sometimes dismiss people’s positions “arbitrarily”. But it is also true that my style breaks the rules of the polite society in gjm’s corner of the world and that makes him less comfortable. Plus there are status signals involved and the monkey brain is, of course, jerking around in response to them.
That’s a fair point.
Not guessing, but publicly stating. I am pretty sure that he—like all people—builds models of people in his head all the time. But bringing out these models into the open is too direct and explicit: gentlemen do not do that.
On the last point there, Lumifer is right and OrphanWilde wrong: I don’t consider it in any way improper to build mental models of other people, and so far as I can tell I understand Lumifer’s one-liners as well as anyone else does. (Which is not to say I always understand them correctly; but if not then his wounds are, as he might put it, self-inflicted.)
The other half of Lumifer’s commentary, attempting to explain what I dislike about his posting style, is so far as I can tell quite badly wrong, but I don’t think it would be productive to argue it further. (It very rarely is after one party has decided to go full Bulver on the other.)
You should notice now that what he was interpreting you as saying isn’t what you were intending to convey, as demonstrated by the fact that you felt a need to clarify; likewise, by the fact that you didn’t notice what his argument was actually about, you were likewise not getting what he was trying to communicate.
Your wounds here are, as Lumifer might put it, self-inflicted. And accusing the other party of going “full Bulver” isn’t exactly conducive to the sort of respectful discussion you claim to want to reify here, which is really just a subset of the overall tone of discussion. You called Lumifer out, and, by my reckoning, have more or less admitted that the thread was at least in part a response to him and his style of commentary. More, for somebody who considers it incredibly rude and status-gamey to make predictions about people, your first response to Lumifer was a post-hoc prediction that he’d be the one to respond. Given that you regard such behavior as a status play, I can’t help but interpret this entire bloody discussion in that framework. [ETA: Correction: It was Villiam who did the above.]
You’re playing at being the mature, responsible person, telling somebody who is ill-behaved that their behavior is problematic. But you’re not actually being a mature, responsible person here, as evidenced by the fact that you chose to insert a parting shot in your “I don’t want to argue about this anymore.”
If you don’t want to argue about it anymore, stop bloody arguing, and ignore the need to inject attacks in your closing statement.
Logical fallacy: ad hominem tu quoque.
Do point out what argument I claim to invalidate there, if you would.
Or, more pithily: Fallacy fallacy.
What makes you think I didn’t notice what Lumifer’s argument was actually about?
I suggest that your assessment of that is strongly coloured by your completely incorrect characterization of the rest of the thread. You’ve already issued one correction—indeed, my first response to Lumifer was not the post-hoc prediction you said it was (which would indeed have been inconsistent with my stated opinions). Here are some more. I didn’t call Lumifer out; dxu did, my entry to the thread was an attempt to correct a misunderstanding. Given that I didn’t start the thread, I’m not sure how I could possibly “admit that the thread was” anything.
I explained why I don’t want to argue about it any more. I’m not sure exactly what you consider immature or irresponsible about that.
I would just like to point out that my entry point into this discussion was actually rather similar to your own, in that I was simply clarifying some of (what I thought were) Viliam’s points. This whole thread actually got started because SquirrelInHell proposed a “niceness norm”, Lumifer (as is his/her wont) began poking at it, and then Viliam took the opportunity to say some things that (I assume) he’s been wanting to say for a while. I do think OrphanWilde’s accusation of you was misplaced, but I would be cautious in accusing anyone else of “starting it”; for the record, I genuinely don’t think this thread was anyone’s “fault”—in fact, I would argue that, if nothing else, this thread allowed several people (including myself) to express some things that might in other contexts have been considered socially impermissible. So it wasn’t entirely a bad thing.
Finally, because I feel like this discussion has been rather grim for a while now, and because this is (after all) the place to discuss the positivity thread, have an emoticon:
:D
“You’re too stupid to have this discussion with” is also an explanation about why you wouldn’t want to argue with somebody. One I’ve used, albeit with different words. But it also flies in the face of your argument about rudeness detracting from Less Wrong.