Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Nov 18, 2023, 3:20 PM

  7 points

  1

  in reply to: Bezzi’s comment on: So­cial Dark Matter

  Are the base rates for actual transition so low that you can have thousands of people in your extended social circle and still never hear of one?

  Yes.

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Nov 18, 2023, 3:26 AM

  25 points

  5

  in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: So­cial Dark Matter

  Ah, thanks for pointing this out. There’s an unstated assumption: you stumbled across some dark matter, that was basically hidden.

  If you have a full-on psychotic break, you’re likely going to resemble the caricatured stereotype of a schizophrenic, and get noticed. But that’s not quite the thing I’m trying to gesture at in the OP.

  If somebody overhears you talking to your voices in the shower, the voices you’ve been talking to for decades while remaining a high-functioning individual, they’re likely to leap to the conclusion that, since you have SYMPTOM of SCHIZOPHRENIA, you closely resemble the caricatured stereotype.

  (This is the fearful swerve—people overupdating and dumping all of their other relevant experiential data of you, because the dark matter label overwhelms them and they forget that their new hypothesis needs to explain all the previous data too.)

  The point being something like “if all that you have learned is that person has [trait], when you thought they didn’t, you might be in danger of jumping to an unjustified conclusion (and creating a tragedy, as a result).”

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Nov 18, 2023, 12:33 AM

  18 points

  12

  in reply to: Bezzi’s comment on: So­cial Dark Matter

  (Also, people keep critically misunderstanding Scott’s point. Scott isn’t saying the conservatives don’t live around him. The whole point is that they do live around him and he does pass them on the street and he does go to the same grocery stores and gas stations. He doesn’t knowingly interact with them because of his social bubble, but they are there, just like trans folk are definitely around Bezzi a lot (though I totes grant Bezzi’s point that there aren’t many visibly transitioning ones). That’s what the phrase “dark matter” is being used to indicate, both in Scott’s post and in mine.)

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Nov 18, 2023, 12:20 AM

  14 points

  7

  in reply to: Bezzi’s comment on: So­cial Dark Matter

  This thread continues to fail to distinguish between “visibly trans” and “non-visibly trans” people, which is depressing since it’s, y’know, the point.

  Bezzi: you’re trying to say that you don’t know and have never met any trans people, and you keep doubling down on “I know this because I haven’t encountered any of the visible markers of trans people,” and I, uh. Encourage you to put 17 and 23 together?

  

  Most trans folk are still not transitioning.

  Another way of saying this: slow down and ask yourself “what do I think I know, and why do I think I know it?” and recognize that the evidence you have is systematically skewed, and you need to start with some other prior.

  (If nothing else, this thread is useful as a real-time, object-level example of the subject matter under discussion.)

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Nov 17, 2023, 10:54 PM

  15 points

  1

  in reply to: trevor’s comment on: So­cial Dark Matter

  Yes, I have taken commissions in the past (the CFAR handbook rewrite being one, paid for by Lightcone, and Staying Split being another, paid for by an individual).

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Nov 17, 2023, 6:13 PM

  17 points

  10

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: So­cial Dark Matter

  I think that there isn’t just one bag of people breaking rules, and some number of the marbles in that bag are “for good reasons” and some number “for bad reasons.” I think there are clusters, and types, and certain kinds of rule-breaking are predictive of other kinds of rule-breaking.

  I think that me not wearing shoes at university is evidence that I might also disdain sports, but not evidence that I might steal.

  I think that trying to think in terms of “for bad reasons” and “for good reasons” as two flavors in one bucket is likely to lead one to make wrong updates. Like, the model is oversimplified and causes fearful swerves.

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Nov 17, 2023, 6:11 PM

  7 points

  0

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: So­cial Dark Matter

  (In my usage, which may or may not be standard, if something feels like a Bayesian update for each of two different mutually exclusive directions, you sort of cancel out the overlap and then only refer to the net remainder as the thing for which you have Bayesian evidence. Like, if it independently seems like a 3 update to the west, and a 5 update to the east, when you consider each separately, you say “a Bayesian update of 2 to the east” or similar.)

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Nov 17, 2023, 5:35 PM

  24 points

  11

  in reply to: Bezzi’s comment on: So­cial Dark Matter

  I think this conversation is failing to reliably distinguish between “being trans” in the sense of experiencing substantial gender dysphoria and/​or adopting the self-label trans, and “being trans” in the sense of taking visible steps to socially or medically transition.

  I buy Bezzi’s self-report that they never see people who have visibly taken steps to transition; there’s no reason for Bezzi to be confused about this.

  I think people are pushing back because (of the true fact that) many trans people are not taking visible steps to transition, especially in enclaves where it’s unheard of.

  So this is actually rather tightly analogous to the perception of queer folk in the 1950′s … one could (validly) say that they’ve never seen anyone acting queer, but it would be an overstep to conclude from this that one does not regularly interact with queer people.

  Presumably, no one in this thread disagrees that:

  • Bezzi would notice (in most though definitely not all cases) someone who had socially or medically transitioned

  • Bezzi would not notice (in most though definitely not all cases) someone who was “quietly trans” and taking no steps to change the situation

  This post is, in large part, about “the latter category is WAY bigger than one would naively think.” You’ve met them. You just didn’t clock them.

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Nov 17, 2023, 4:26 PM

  14 points

  2

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: So­cial Dark Matter

  Hmmmm, I see that Ben is getting some disagreement/​pushback below, but I want to stand in defense of part of the thing I understand him to be saying.

  (Or rather, I think Ben’s bucketing two things and the disagreement is pushing back on the whole bucket when it should be pushing back on the bucket error + one of the things.)

  In my culture, we’re much better at noticing that X is bad in an absolute sense even if it’s overwhelmingly good in context, or net justified, or whatever. Like, in Duncan culture it’s straightforwardly obvious and commonplace to note that surgery is cutting into people with knives and lasers, and that kinda sucks, regardless of the fact that surgery can lead to miraculously positive outcomes.

  I think that Ben is correct to point out something like “this is an update on deviousness,” and I think Ben is correct to point out something like “this is an update on being willing to cross social barriers.”

  But I think it’s not correct to leap from that to “this is an update on a fundamental or intrinsic deviousness characteristic.” The deviousness of someone tying themselves in knots to avoid social sanction for behavior that’s actually harmless is not quiiiiiiiiiite the same as the deviousness of a con artist weaving a web of lies around a mark. It’s got a thorough and sufficient explanation in the combination of the internal pressures arising in the person, and the social pressures exerted upon them from the outside, and so we don’t have to (or have reason to) posit an additional drive-to-deviousness.

  (You could perhaps productively replace the word “devious” with “furtive” and have a more empathetic and accurate sentence.)

  Indeed, under the claims of the OP, there are a lot more people than you, Ben, presently think, being furtive in this and similar ways. Like, probably at least an order of magnitude more than you think (most people in at least one or two ways and some people in several big ways).

  And that’s … kind of the key? Being like “ah, I have stumbled across this One Lone Rare-Seeming Instance of Furtiveness, I should make a large character update” is a mistake. The evidence “wow, this person is willing to deceive and buck social norms” feels extraordinary, and thus supportive of an extraordinary shift in your perceptions of their character.

  But it is not, in fact, extraordinary. It’s much more typical-of-humans than your observations (if left unexamined) have led you to think.

  I’m running out of time to finish this comment, so I’ll just say “there’s another bucket error around ‘bad behavior’” and hope you can connect the dots … it is not actually the case that violating one specific social norm for specific reason is a substantial update that someone is a Breaking Social Boundaries Type Pokemon in general. I think that discovering the fact that someone has a severe disagreement with a universal-seeming social boundary justifies forming the hypothesis that they’re actually bad, but one should split and commit and will much-more-often-than-not (I claim) subsequently realize that nah, the bulk of my previous experiences of this person are representative; I don’t need to throw out my whole model of them; this exception is in fact an exception.

  (With the same caveat in the OP that some actions really are dealbreakers, and if you discover that someone is taking a dealbreaking action you previously thought they were incapable of, then sure, that’s a big update. But people in the 1950′s were wrong about the dealbreaking awfulness of putting a peepee in someone’s butt, and so one should be at least wary of one’s own confidence about how dealbreaky given behaviors are, if one hasn’t yet thought it through and is just regurgitating what society gave you. I paused and actually thought about rape and molestation and decided that they were really really bad, but not necessarily/​absolutely/​obviously/​always worse than, say, getting your face punched multiple times until your nose breaks and your eyes swell up. This is near society’s conclusion, but importantly different, and the similarity is because society and I both saw (some amount of) the same true thing, not because I just accepted the party line.)

So­cial Dark Matter

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Apr 30, 2023, 8:00 PM

  41 points

  13

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Moder­a­tion notes re: re­cent Said/​Dun­can threads

  It is only safe for you to have opinions if the other people don’t dislike them?

  I think you’re trying to set up a really mean dynamic where you get to say mean things about me in public, but if I point out anything frowny about that fact you’re like “ah, see, I knew that guy was Bad; he’s making it Unsafe for me to say rude stuff about him in the public square.”

  (Where “Unsafe” means, apparently, “he’ll respond with any kind of objection at all.” Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was “I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.”)

  *shrug

  I won’t respond further, since you clearly don’t want a big back-and-forth, but calling people a weird bug and then pretending that doesn’t in practice connote disgust is a motte and bailey.

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Apr 30, 2023, 5:21 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)’s comment on: Lo­cat­ing Ful­crum Experiences

  @Raemon FYI there isn’t internet at our place since ~26h ago so Logan probably hasn’t looked at this or any other responses yet.

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Apr 30, 2023, 9:48 AM

  16 points

  0

  in reply to: PoignardAzur’s comment on: De­mon Threads

  My objection is that it doesn’t distinguish between [unpleasant fights that really should in fact be had] from [unpleasant fights that shouldn’t]. It’s a very handy term for delegitimizing any protracted conflict, which is a boon to those who’d like to get away with really shitty behavior by hijacking politeness norms.

  “There was a Muggle once named Mohandas Gandhi,” Harry said to the floor. “He thought the government of Muggle Britain shouldn’t rule over his country. And he refused to fight. He convinced his whole country not to fight. Instead he told his people to walk up to the British soldiers and let themselves be struck down, without resisting, and when Britain couldn’t stand doing that any more, we freed his country. I thought it was a very beautiful thing, when I read about it, I thought it was something higher than all the wars that anyone had ever fought with guns or swords. That they’d really done that, and that it had actually worked.” Harry drew another breath. “Only then I found out that Gandhi told his people, during World War II, that if the Nazis invaded they should use nonviolent resistance against them, too. But the Nazis would’ve just shot everyone in sight. And maybe Winston Churchill always felt that there should’ve been a better way, some clever way to win without having to hurt anyone; but he never found it, and so he had to fight.” Harry looked up at the Headmaster, who was staring at him. “Winston Churchill was the one who tried to convince the British government not to give Czechoslovakia to Hitler in exchange for a peace treaty, that they should fight right away—”

  “I recognize the name, Harry,” said Dumbledore. The old wizard’s lips twitched upward. “Although honesty compels me to say that dear Winston was never one for pangs of conscience, even after a dozen shots of Firewhiskey.”

  “The point is,” Harry said, after a brief pause to remember exactly who he was talking to, and fight down the suddenly returning sense that he was an ignorant child gone insane with audacity who had no right to be in this room and no right to question Albus Dumbledore about anything, “the point is, saying violence is evil isn’t an answer. It doesn’t say when to fight and when not to fight. It’s a hard question and Gandhi refused to deal with it, and that’s why I lost some of my respect for him.”

  “And your own answer, Harry?” Dumbledore said quietly.

  “One answer is that you shouldn’t ever use violence except to stop violence,” Harry said. “You shouldn’t risk anyone’s life except to save even more lives. It sounds good when you say it like that. Only the problem is that if a police officer sees a burglar robbing a house, the police officer should try to stop the burglar, even though the burglar might fight back and someone might get hurt or even killed. Even if the burglar is only trying to steal jewelry, which is just a thing. Because if nobody so much as inconveniences burglars, there will be more burglars, and more burglars. And even if they only ever stole things each time, it would—the fabric of society—” Harry stopped. His thoughts weren’t as ordered as they usually pretended to be, in this room. He should have been able to give some perfectly logical exposition in terms of game theory, should have at least been able to see it that way, but it was eluding him. Hawks and doves—“Don’t you see, if evil people are willing to risk violence to get what they want, and good people always back down because violence is too terrible to risk, it’s—it’s not a good society to live in, Headmaster! Don’t you realize what all this bullying is doing to Hogwarts, to Slytherin House most of all?”

  In particular, I note that the set of people with vocal distaste for demon threads seems to strongly disoverlap with the set of people I’ve seen actually effectively come to the aid of someone being bullied. The disoverlap isn’t total, but it’s a really good predictor in my personal experience.

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Apr 30, 2023, 9:16 AM

  22 points

  13

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Moder­a­tion notes re: re­cent Said/​Dun­can threads

  I’ve tried for a bit to produce a useful response to the top-level comment and mostly failed, but I did want to note that

  “Oh, it sort of didn’t occur to me that this analogy might’ve carried a negative connotation, because when I was negatively gossiping about Duncan behind his back with a bunch of other people who also have an overall negative opinion of him, the analogy was popular!”

  is a hell of a take. =/​

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Apr 29, 2023, 7:45 AM

  11 points

  8

  in reply to: LoganStrohl’s comment on: Lo­cat­ing Ful­crum Experiences

  Claim: this sequence is almost one hundred percent about studying something other than your mind, and what’s happening is a confusion between tools and purposes.

  At a very coarse/​gross level of understanding, the way that we gather information about objects is by hurling other objects at them, and watching the interaction. This is one way to think about light—we throw trillions of tiny photons at an object, and the way they bounce off gives us information about the object (its location, shape, surface properties, etc).

  Ditto sound waves, now that I think of it (the photon analogy is from Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe).

  The key point is that we never quite interact directly with the object. We do on human scales; there’s a thing we call “direct interaction” that makes sense to talk about. But actually what’s going on is that we’re perceiving photons that are out there hurtling through the void, and constructing understanding via extrapolation about what those photons interacted with a fraction of a second earlier.

  We don’t talk about “studying the photons” when we describe looking at an object, though. We gloss over that step, handwave it away.

  This sequence is, I think, about looking at things other than your brain.

  But it focuses on the analogue of the photons themselves. It’s looking through your own phenomenology, to understand what’s really going on out there. It’s saying (roughly) “notice how these photons bounce off this way, and these other photons bounce off that way, and these other photons get absorbed, and see what you can reasonably conclude about the object, given those facts.”

  So there’s a heavy focus on your own perceptions, and your emotional reactions, and so forth, but it’s in service of understanding the object that is upstream of [your brain reacting in such a way].

  ---

  Honestly, I was somewhat surprised to hear @Raemon ’s complaint, and at first bewildered/​taken aback, because it hadn’t even occurred to me that this sequence might be mistaken for being about minds/​brains. But of course it does talk a lot about the internals of one’s experience, so I understand the confusion! Ray’s complaint isn’t coming out of nowhere!

  But to tack on yet another analogy, I feel sort of like just … reassuring the complaint away? In the same way that, if I were teaching a parkour class and a student was like, wait, why are we doing pushups and stretches, I thought we were here to do vaults, I would be like yes, yes, don’t worry, we are absolutely getting to the vaults, but this is important preparation for the vaults, and will help you build up the strength and physical vocabulary necessary to be non-lost once we start working on the vaults, which is coming right up, actually.

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Apr 27, 2023, 4:42 AM

  −2 points

  0

  in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: Moder­a­tion notes re: re­cent Said/​Dun­can threads

  “Let’s imagine that these unspecified details, which could be anywhere within a VERY wide range, are specifically such that the original point is ridiculous, in support of concluding that the original point is ridiculous” does not seem like a reasonable move to me.

  Separately:

  https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​WsvpkCekuxYSkwsuG/​​overconfidence-is-deceit

  What links here?

  • jimmy's comment on Moder­a­tion notes re: re­cent Said/​Dun­can threads by Raemon (May 8, 2023, 4:52 AM; 8 points)

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Apr 26, 2023, 5:16 AM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Moder­a­tion notes re: re­cent Said/​Dun­can threads

  … well, then regardless of whether you agree with the author in question about whether or not my comments are good/​important/​whatever, the fact that he holds this view casts very serious doubt on your thesis. Wouldn’t you agree?

  Said is asking Ray, not me, but I strongly disagree.

  Point 1 is that a black raven is not strong evidence against white ravens. (Said knows this, I think.)

  Point 2 is that a behavior which displeases many authors can still be pleasant or valuable to some authors. (Said knows this, I think.)

  Point 3 is that benquo’s view on even that specific comment is not the only author-view that matters; benquo eventually being like “this critical feedback was great” does not mean that other authors watching the interaction at the time did not feel “ugh, I sure don’t want to write a post and have to deal with comments like this one.” (Said knows this, I think.)

  (Notably, benquo once publicly stated that he suspected a rough interaction would likely have gone much better under Duncan moderation norms specifically; if we’re updating on benquo’s endorsements then it comes out to “both sets of norms useful,” presumably for different things.)

  I’d say it casts mild doubt on the thesis, at best, and that the most likely resolution is that Ray ends up feeling something like “yeah, fair, this did not turn out to be the best example,” not “oh snap, you’re right, turns out it was all a house of cards.”

  (This will be my only comment in this chain, so as to avoid repeating past cycles.)

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Apr 25, 2023, 9:00 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Moder­a­tion notes re: re­cent Said/​Dun­can threads

  Strong disagree that I’m describing a deeply dysfunctional gym; I barely described the gym at all and it’s way overconfident/​projection-y to extrapolate “deeply dysfunctional” from what I said.

  There’s a difference between “hey, I want to understand the underpinnings of this” and the thing I described, which is hostile to the point of “why are you even here, then?”

  Edit: I view the votes on this and the parent comment as indicative of a genuine problem; jimmy above is exhibiting actually bad reasoning (à la representativeness) and the LWers who happen to be hanging around this particular comment thread are, uh, apparently unaware of this fact. Alas.

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Apr 24, 2023, 11:56 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Moder­a­tion notes re: re­cent Said/​Dun­can threads

  Just noting that “What specifically did it get wrong?” is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, and is one I would have (in most cases) been willing to answer, patiently and at length.

  That I was unwilling in that specific case is an artifact of the history of Zack being quick to aggressively misunderstand that specific essay, in ways that I considered excessively rude (and which Zack has also publicly retracted).

  Given that public retraction, I’m considering going back and in fact answering the “what specifically” question, as I normally would have at the time. If I end up not doing so, it will be more because of opportunity costs than anything else. (I do have an answer; it’s just a question of whether it’s worth taking the time to write it out months later.)

• Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)Apr 24, 2023, 3:39 PM

  9 points

  7

  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Moder­a­tion notes re: re­cent Said/​Dun­can threads

  Cranks ask questions of people they think are wrong, in order to try and expose the weaknesses in their arguments. They signal aloofness, because their priority is on being seen as an authority who deserves similar or higher status (at least on the issue at hand) as the person they’re addressing. They already expect the author they’re questioning is fundamentally confused, and so they don’t waste their own time trying to figure out what the author might have meant. The author, and the audience, are lucky to have the crank’s attention, since they’re obviously collectively lost in confusion and need a disinterested outsider to call attention to that fact.

  And this attitude is particularly corrosive to feelings of trust, collaboration, “jamming together,” etc. … it’s like walking into a martial arts academy and finding a person present who scoffs at both the instructors and the other students alike, and who doesn’t offer sufficient faith to even try a given exercise once before first a) hearing it comprehensively justified and b) checking the sparring records to see if people who did that exercise win more fights.

  Which, yeah, that’s one way to zero in on the best martial arts practices, if the other people around you also signed up for that kind of culture and have patience for that level of suspicion and mistrust!

  (I choose martial arts specifically because it’s a domain full of anti-epistemic garbage and claims that don’t pan out.)

  But in practice, few people will participate in such a martial arts academy for long, and it’s not true that a martial arts academy lacking that level of rigor makes no progress in discovering and teaching useful things to its students.