I think for reasons of not needlessly rending the social fabric, I don’t want to be more specific. I feel the need to register the warning, and I’m happy with people weighting or discounting it based on how much they trust my assessments generally, including the context that I worked at CFAR for three years and overlapped with much of the present staff.
Duncan Sabien (Inactive)
Karma: 13,840
Just noting for the audience that I would not recommend this, and would strongly discourage my friends and family members from going to it. There’s sort of nothing I can do about the fact that this is inherently rude, and clashes with the largely-positive tone of all the other discussion, but it feels rather important to represent this fact, especially as someone with slightly more context and grounded understanding than most.
(I have had zero interaction with CFAR since the end of my three years working there in 2019 and can make no confident predictions about the object-level experience, but I do not trust and indeed am substantially wary of the motives, methods, and competence of (some members of) the team creating the experience. I would not want anyone I love to put themselves in a vulnerable state under the care of (some of) these particular people, as I have justified reason to believe that duty-of-care will not be reliably discharged. I’ll note that when plans for something like this were first proposed circa 2021, I directly told at least one of the people I’m concerned about that I thought they should absolutely not participate in anything like this, and that I believed they would cause harm by doing so and should leave the project to others.)
Note also that the CFAR handbook exists and is free to all.
Yes, there are efforts; they are unfortunately controlled by the publisher and not the sort of thing we can outsource or influence. Renegade translations seem morally good to me, if people are moved to create them, provided that they actually try to do a good job.
Languages that the book is being translated into include (85% probability on any member of this list; I’m a bit brain-dead this weekend): Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Dutch, and Bulgarian. We’re working on translating the online supplementals into at least those first four.
(“Why such a strange list?” you might ask. Well, the list isn’t done; the publisher is still wrangling contracts in other nations/regions. Contracts come in when they come in. German, for instance, is highly likely to eventually get a translation—or at least, we’d be quite excited to see one, given Germany’s prominence in the EU. But again, out of our hands. We put most of our prioritization energy into making sure there would be a Chinese-language translation, as that seemed super obviously the most important non-English-speaking audience.)
A reply pretty near the top that also feels relevant to this overall point:
...shouldn’t usually be this apologetic when they express dissent...
I think we shouldn’t encourage a norm of people being this apologetic by default.Again the post does not recommend this. I am not going to respond further, because you are not actually talking to me or my post, but rather to a cardboard cutout you have superimposed over both.
(The recommendation is not to be apologetic, and it is not contingent on whether the commentary is dissenting or not. You keep leaping from conversation A to conversation B, and I am not interested in having conversation B, nor do I defend the B claims.)
Your mistake is here:
An obligation is a duty/commitment to which a person is morally/legally bound.
...wherein you decide that the word “obligation” means strictly and only a narrow technical thing, and then build an argument based off of that flawed premise.
(When done intentionally/adversarially, this is called “strawmanning.”)
You go on to make a lot of other strong claims about what constitutes an obligation, most of which do not match ordinary usage.
The fact that you believe or wish that these match the majority or even exclusive usage of the word doesn’t actually make it so. Words mean what they are used to mean, in practice, and my use of “obligated” and “obligation” in the above (especially with the clear caveats in the original post) is sound.
(Other parts of your reply contain “vehement agreement,” such as when you say “For example, we may gain an inflated sense of the social costs of not responding,” which is a sentiment explicitly stated within the original post: “It’s easy to get triggered or tunnel-visioned, and for the things happening on the screen to loom larger than they should, and larger than they would if you took a break and regained some perspective” and “we-as-monkeys are prone to exaggerate, in our own minds, how much [the audience’s] aggregate opinion matters.”)
I think it’s quite representative of a swath of people. I think there are, in absolute terms, many many people following this sort of algorithm. I furthermore think things would be better if more people followed it.
But my own experiences lead me to believe it’s a minority, and likely not even a plurality, of people, and that it’s not easy to get more people to adopt something-like-this.
You may enjoy reading this
How many hours are burned tracking echoes?
SO MANY oh my god. And it’s also a vector for various kinds of scurrilous behavior, e.g. I have seen people (whether intentionally or unintentionally) rapidly switch back and forth between “how dare you say X when you knew it would produce Effect Y two echoes down the line” and “I’m just being direct and honest!” Like, a vague and unspecified duty to kinda-sorta maybe track an unknown number of echoes allows for a lot of something similar to motte-and-bailey.
If it’s a vicious circle, isn’t the case the only place I can make certain non-violence is prime is in my mind and in my behaviours? Isn’t this the first step in trying to temper the war culture so that non-war behaviours can thrive more clearly and without having to be cut with war-preparation?
My own answer to this is to pretty ruthlessly filter. These days, I spend my time in an environment where the-people-who-will-make-war in that way are not present, and it’s amazing how much good can flourish under those circumstances.
(I’ve only partially responded to your comment, but those were the top thoughts that were easy to write down.)
Setting aside questions of appropriateness, which can include concerns about hurt feelings and community health, is the connection I was drawing between the Obligated to Respond post and the “800 pound gorilla” comment relevant, accurate, or illuminating?
No. The “if —> then” of the comment is valid, in that if your characterization were at all reasonable, then yes, that would in fact be relevant contextual information for the reader, just as it’s important for, I dunno, readers of various books on polyamory to know that the authors have failed marriages and abuse accusations.
But the “if” doesn’t hold, making the leap to the “then” moot. And although the paragraph starts with a gesture in the direction of split-and-commit (“I would posit that if you mean this literally”) it does not proceed to act as if both possibilities are live; it clearly focuses on the one possibility that it presupposes is true.
I lean toward ask culture for reasons similar to this, but I’m wary of there being something like a Chesterton’s Fence that I’m not fully accounting for.
I mean it in the sense of “fake frameworks” or models that are wrong-but-useful à la Newtonian mechanics. Sorry, that might’ve been a bit too local-culture-jargon-y. “Ask culture and guess culture aren’t real things; they’re constellations we’ve imagined over top of the actual stars and the underlying reality is way messier than the model.”
to demand that people reading an article be apologetic if they ever disagree in the comments
This piece does not recommend this. That interpretation is explicitly ruled out (and pretty clearly) by the words of the piece itself. It’s not only not supported by the above, it’s directly contradicted.
So … you’ve changed the conversation from A to B, presumably unintentionally and without noticing that you did it. And I think this is “not the author’s problem.”
I think this is a great example. Thanks for thinking of it and putting it here.
I don’t ask for unreasonable things. I do ask for reasonable things with the understanding that people don’t like saying no, but aren’t obligated to say yes. The more demanding the ask, the more I consider the social implications. There is a cost to asking or being asked, but that’s the expected way to communicate.
I think you’re much closer to the-thing-people-have-chosen-to-cluster-under-the-label-guess culture than you think! This is pretty close to a description of basic guess culture perspective, with the main asky part just being an acknowledgement that people aren’t obligated to say yes.
(I will note, in agreement with you, that Ask/Guess is not a true dichotomy, and that the above is evidence in favor of that.)
This can definitely work! But it’s often hard to do adroitly; there are situations where it comes off basically the same as not responding at all (e.g. in the eyes of the chunk of the audience that’s inclined to view non-response as cowardice, this sometimes comes off as cowardice plus trying to dodge the consequences of cowardice).
I deleted it for such poor reading comprehension and adversarially selective quotation of the Facebook post in question—
(which is over 2200 words long and has tons of relevant context that softens the impression of the above text, which also didn’t contain the added bolding that pushes it in an even more straw direction)
—that it was inescapably either malice or negligence sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from malice. I would’ve greatly preferred that DirectedEvolution take the hint rather than reposting elsewhere, but since that hint was not taken I am now banning DirectedEvolution from being able to do any similarly shitty psychologizing on my future posts (and lodging this brief defense of myself, which I would have preferred not to have to write in the first place, and was with the original deletion trying to avoid needing to write).
From that same Facebook post:I’m just going to blurt words and blame the lack of artistry and sophistication on insomniac COVID delirium
...
And yeah, it’s actually fine 99.9% of the time, the thing I’m saying here isn’t, like, “it’s impossible to coordinate or cooperate with humans.” I drive on roads. I shop at grocery stores. I engage in chitchat with Uber drivers and people at the airport.
And from discussion beneath it:
re: felt sense of strong fear, it’s not that I’m actually, like, nervous-system activated at all times? I do not walk around feeling viscerally anxious, for the most part. I think I *do* shift into high-alert faster and on smaller bits of evidence than most people.
DirectedEvolution’s overt attempt to categorize me as mentally ill, and my models suspect based purely on that categorization, is unjustified and not particularly welcome, LessWrong’s enthusiasm for upvoting shitty behavior notwithstanding.
(I also found a bunch of the reasoning in the four bullet points to be pretty poor, but that just made me unenthusiastic about trying to bridge gaps; it was the last paragraph that earned intended-to-be-silent deletion.)
One thing I didn’t have time for in the post proper is that ask culture (or something like it) is crucial for diplomacy—diplomatic cosmopolitan contexts require that everyone set aside their knee-jerk assumptions about what “everyone knows” or what X “obviously means,” etc. I think part of why it came about (/has almost certainly been reinvented thousands of times) is that people wanted to interact nondestructively with people whose cultural assumptions greatly differed from their own.
Thinking about thinking, tinkering with your mental and emotional algorithms, shaking up your worldview, adopting new perspectives and new strategies, spending a lot of time zeroing in and ruminating on your problems and goals and values and considering them in contact with other people and with suggestions about how to see them and think of them and change them. Setting aside your normal ways of doing things.
Becoming more mud, in other words.
This is already inherently vulnerable, but it gets moreso when you’re doing it in an isolated retreat context surrounded by other people for multiple days in which there is a clear status differential between the instructors and the participants.
There are ways to do this that are more responsible and careful, and there are ways to do this that are less responsible and careful. Separately, a person or group can have the intent to do such a thing responsibly and carefully, and this is not the same as being able to do this responsibly and carefully.
(If you’ve seen a person or group try for X and fail repeatedly in multiple novel ways despite multiple rounds of figuring out what went wrong and fixing it in each specific case, it’s wise to be wary of their latest attempt at X. Sometimes people exhibit a curiously robust capacity to keep generating brand-new ways to get X wrong, and my desire to register a warning here is partially downstream of my belief that something like that is true, here.)