this is extremely good post. it example and illustrate the sort of mental-moves i believe is needed for rational thinking, of the variety of “know thyself”. those things are even harder then normal to communicate, and i find this post manage to do that, and manage to give me useful information, and give me example of how such introspection can happen. i really impressed!
Jasnah Kholin
Karma: 101
somewhere (i can’t find it now) some else wrote that if he will do that, Said always can say it’s not exactly what he means.
In this case, i find the comment itself not very insulting—the insult is in the general absent of Goodwill between Said and Duncan, and in the refuse to do interpretive labor. so any comment of “my model of you was <model> and now i just confused” could have worked.
my model of Duncan avoided to post it here from the general problems in LW, but i wasn’t surprised it was specific problem. I have no idea what was Said’s model of Duncan. but, i will try, with the caveat that the Said’s model of Duncan suggested is almost certainly not true :
I though that you avoid putting it in LW because there will be strong and wrong pushback here against the concept of imaginary injury. it seem coherent with the crux of the post. now, when I learn the true, i simply confused. in my model, what you want to avoid is exactly the imaginary injury described in the post, and i can’t form coherent model of you.
i suspect Said would have say i don’t pass his ideological Turning test on that, or continue to say it’s not exact. I submit that if i cannot, it’s not writing not-insultingly, but passing his ideological turning test.
i think we have very different models of things, so i will try to clarify mine. my best bubble site example is not in English, so i will give another one—the emotional Labor thread in MetaFilter, and MetaFilter as whole. just look on the sheer LENGTH of this page!
https://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor
there are much more then 3 comments from person there.
from my point of view, this rule create hard ceiling that forbid the best discussions to have. because the best discussions are creative back-and-forth. my best discussions with friends are - one share model, one ask questions, or share different model, or share experience, the other react, etc. for way more then three comments. more like 30 comments. it’s dialog. and there are lot of unproductive examples for that in LW. and it’s quite possible (as in, i assign to it probability of 0.9) that in first-order effects, it will cut out unproductive discussions and will be positive.
but i find rules that prevent the best things from happening as bad in some way that i can’t explain clearly. something like, I’m here to try to go higher. if it’s impossible, then why bother?
I also think it’s VERY restrictive rule. i wrote more then three comments here, and you are the first one to answer me. like, i’m just right now taking part in counter-example to “would find it surprising if you needed more than 3 comments per day to share examples, personal experiences, intuitions and relations.”
i shared my opinions on very different and unrelated parts of this conversation here. this is my six comment. and i feel i reacted very low-heat. the idea i should avoid or conserve those comments to have only three make me want to avoid comment on LW altogether. the message i get from this rule is like… is like i assumed guilty of thing i literately never do, and so have very restricted rules placed on me, and it’s very unfriendly in a way that i find hard to describe.
like, 90% of the activity this rule will restrict is legitimate, good comments. this is awful false positive ratio. even if you don’t count the you-are-bad-and-unwelcome effect i feel from it and you, apparently, not.
i don’t think it will go more productive. explaining harder is not my default mode. my default mode is more close to your suggestions, and so i can tell from experience it’s NOT productive. what happen next is Fabricated Options, and refusal to react rationally to evidence.
like, i can remember ONE time when i got sensible reaction. and there are locally-infamous situation when socialist politician agreed that their proposal was tried and the results was bad, only to use the same proposal afterwards.
the standard failure mode i have with socialists in discussion is ignoring or outright denying bad consequences. the good version is accepting the price and prefer this version, or having wildly different frame and so different model and predictions. and most of political discussions are bad—capitalists tend to replay in slogans and ignore evidence of socialists policies working, too.
maybe it’ss different worlds or inverting every advise situation. because when i read the title, i was sure the post will be about explaining capitalism harder, because in my experience, this is the helpful thing people need to do more, while your proposal for different strategy is the current, inefficient one.
i find the fact that you see comments as criticism, and not expanding and continuing the building, is indicative of what i see as problematic. good comments should most of the time not be critisim. be part of the building.
the dynamic that is good in my eyes, is one when comments are making the post better not by criticize it, but by sharing examples, personal experiences, intuitions, and the relations of those with the post.
counting all comments as prune instead of bubble disincentivize bubble-comments. this is what you want?
(3) i didn’t watch the movie, nor i plan to watch it, but i read the plot summary in Wikipedia. and I see it as caution against escalation. the people there consistently believe that you should revenge on 1 point offense at 4 points punishment. and this create escalation cycle.
while i think most of Duncan’s writing is good, the thing when i think he consistently create bad situations, is in unproportional escalations of conflict, and inability to just let things be.
once upon a time if i saw someone did something 1 point bad and someone reacting in 3 point bad thing, i would think the first one is 90% of the problem. with time, i find robustness more and more important, and now i see the second one more problematic. as such. i disagree with your description of the movie.
the plot is one people doing something bad, other refuse to punish him, and a lot of people that escalate things, and so, by my standards, doing bad things. LOT of bad things. to call it a chin reaction is to not assign the people that doing bad unproportional escalating things agency over their bad choices. it’s strange for me, as i see this agency very clearly.
“I do generally wish Duncan did more of this and less trying to set-the-record straight in ways that escalate in IMO very costly ways”
strongly agree.
I actually DO believe you can’t write this in not-insulting way. I find it the result of not prioritizing developing and practicing those skills in general.
while i do judge you for this, i judge you for this one time, on the meta-level, instead of judging any instance separately. as i find this behavior orderly and predictable.
So this is the fourth time I am trying to write a comment. This comment is far from ideal, but I feel like I did the best as my current skill in writing in English and understanding such situations allow.
1. I find 90% of the practical problems to be Drama. as in, long, repetitive, useless arguments. if it was facebook and Duncan blocked Said, and then proceeded to block anyone that was too much out of line by Duncan-standards, it would have solved 90% of Duncan-related problems. if he would have given up already on making LW his kind of garden, it would have solved another 9%.
2. In my ideal Garden, Said would have been banned long ago. but it is my believe (and i have like five posts waiting to be written to explain my framework and evidence on that, if i will actually write them) that LW will never be something even close to my or Duncan’s Garden (there is 80%-90% similarity in our definitions of garden, by my model of Duncan).
In this LessWrong, he may remain and not be blocked. It is also good that more people will ignore his comments that predictably start a useless argument. aka—if i will write something about introspective, i expect Said comment to be useless. a also expect most third and after comments in thread to be useless.
In better LW, those net-negative comments would have been ignored, downvoted, and maybe deleted by mods. while the good ones upvoted and got reactions.
3. Duncan, I will be sad if you leave LW. I really enjoy and learn from your posts. I also believe LW will never be your Garden. i would like you to just give up already on changing LW, but still remain here and write. I wish you could have just… care less about comments, assume that 90% of what is important in LW is posts, not comments. Ignore most comments, answer only to those that you deem good and written in Goodwill. LessWrong is not YOUR version of Garden, and will never be. but it has good sides, and you (hopefully) can choose to enjoy the good parts and ignore the bad ones. while now it looks to me like you are optimized toward trying things you object to and engage with them, in hope to change LW to be more to your standards.
“This puts a new spin on the increasing tendency of employees to change employers and even careers. Rather than a sign of disloyalty or fickleness, it’s just the natural result of an economy efficiently incentivizing and engaging in valuable information exchange”
this is very interesting idea! sadly, i have no idea how to check it.
Interesting! reading this post make me realize I have somehow opposite opinion. the people I respect are often the people that are good at untangling big-scary-questions, so they will not be like that. It’s very much Bucket Errors—If i will think on X I will have to do uncomfortable thing Y. so the mental move that helped me was to untangle.
for example, when i thought about the possibility of break up i was practically panicking. it was very irrational, disentangles from the territory emotion—the break up itself was swift and easy and I’m pretty sure i should have done in sooner except i still have no idea when.
but the mental move that let me to think about that was to say to myself that I DON’T HAVE TO BREAK UP. now, it’s not exactly like that. i told myself we can stay together for a year. and then it was extremely clear i want to plan for this break up. and then during something like one week break up become the only possible option.
in the same way, I didn’t break up by having uncomfortable conversation. I just… didn’t. it’ harder to describe, but there are people that i can have emotionally vulnerable and deep conversations and people i don’t. and the right move is not to have the conversations with people that it hard to have them. but to have connections with those with whom it’s not hard to have those conversations.
for this move to work it have to be honest. for example, I’m staying at my job despite the real possibility i will be able to earn more in other place because it’s comfortable and moving jobs is very high cost emotionally to me. i did told myself year ago that if they don’t give me the promotion they promised i leave (and i believe this is why i actually got it), but I’m still here. and I’m not sure your framing will see that as the right choice, despite the fact i did stare into the abyss and precommited to search for different job if i don’t get the promotion.
there is two things here, to acknowledge something, and to change it. and you sorta conflating them here. for example, there are ultra-orthodox people here (Haredim) with some cult-like live. and there was forums (and i assume there are facebook groups) for Haredim-against-their-will. people who stare into the abyss, decided religion is a lie, and then decided it’s not worth to losing all their family and friends and work place, and it’s better to pretend.
there is to see something, and there is to act on it, and it’s two different things. and your framing is too much on the side of forcing yourself to do something as the only option, when I see forcing yourself to do things as form of self harm (like in Forcing yourself to keep your identity small is self-harm), and prefer ways that does not include forcing yourself, and that I don’t see in your map (but see in the territory).
also, I noticed now that I wrote a lot about where I disagree, and it’s misleading. I VERY MUCH agreeing that do the hard thing is very important life skill. I just prefer to un-abyss the abyss before you stare at it.
regarding the third point, my interpretation of this part was very different: “I don’t have this for any other human flaw—people with terrible communication skills, traumatized people who lash out, anxious, needy people who will try to soak the life out of you, furious dox-prone people on the internet—I believe there’s an empathic route forward. Not so with frame control.”
I read is as “I’m not very vulnerable to those types of wrongness, that all have the same absolute value in some linear space, but I’m vulnerable to frame control, and believe the nuclear option is justified and people should feel OK while using it”.
I, personally, not especially vulnerable to frame control. my reaction to the examples are in the form of “there is a lot to unpack here, but let’s just burn the whole suitcase”. they struck me as manipulative, and done with Badwill. as such, they set alarm in my mind, and in such cases, this alarm neutralize 90% of the harm.
my theory regarding things like that, all the cluster of hard-to-pinpoint manipulations, is that understanding it is power. i read a lot and now i tend to recognize such things. as such, I’m not especially vulnerable to that, and don’t have the burn-it-with-fire reaction. i have more of a “agh, this person, it’s impossible to talk to them” reaction. I find dox-prone, needy, lash-out people much more problematic to deal with.
i have zero personal knowledge of the writer, but the feeling i get from the post is that she will agree with me. she will tell me that if I can be around frame controller and not being harmed is OK, and if can’t be around needy person it’s OK. I will avoid the needy one, and she the frame-controller. I less sure she will agree with me about the way different people can tolerate different vectors of badness different, and allowing one kind force everyone vulnerable to it be harmed or avoid the place.
but the general feeling i got is not “writer is good at spotting and we should burn it with fire” and more “you should listen to the part of you that telling you that SOMETHING IS WRONG, and it’s legitimate to take it seriously and act on it”. and it promote culture that acknowledge that as legitimate, allow such person to avoid other persons, not trying to guilt-trip them or surprise them with the frame-controller presence or do other unfriendly things people do sometimes.
as in, I didn’t see burn-with-fire-frame-controllers promoted as community strategy, but as personal strategy. personal strategy that now may encounter active resistance from the community, and should not encounter such resistance.
what you refer to as Dark Arts here? do you consider slurs Dark Art? the word Bulshit?
there is one main problem with this argument, and this that people who want to cross Fence aren’t safe on their current position.
for example, high-commitment communities is “safe” social default, one very old that survived from before we were humans. but, as Ozy wrote, “One of the most depressing facts about high-commitment communities is that they almost all cover up child sexual abuse.”
this is the safety of the Fence. this “safety” sucks.
the sister that went no-contact with her rapist father is the black sheep of the family. she is the radical, the revolutionist. all her family think she is bad daughter and she should not deny her father his granddaughter. her sister, who send her little boy unsupervised to his grandfather, even after he start to wetting himself again—she is the conservative, who respect the status quo.
i want to be the black-sheep sister. i can’t see the other option as anything but abomination.
***
different argument: what is the fence? because if you ask me, cheating in unhappy marriage IS the fence, the conservative view. the unconservative view is you can just divorce. very new, was definitely not like that during most of the history. while constant cheating, sometimes with “self-respecting woman have husband and lover” as folk-wisdom idiom, was the norm in some times and places.
so how can you be respectful of the fence, with you don’t know what side is the conservative one?
(it’s like what Duncan said, but from different angle)
“From another perspective, if this were obvious, more people would have discovered it, and if it were easy, more people would do it, and if more people knew and acted in accordance with the below, the world would look very different.”
so, i know another person who did the same, and i tried that for some time, and i think this is interesting question i want to try to answer.
so, this other person? her name is Basmat. and it sorta worked for her. she saw she is read as contrarian and received with adversity, and people attribute to her things she didn’t said. and decided to write very long posts that explained her worldview and include what she definitely doesn’t mean. she was ruling out everything else. and she become highly respected figure in that virtual community. and… she still have people how misunderstood her. but she had much more legitimacy in shutting them up as illegitimate trolls that need not be respected or addressed.
see, a lot of her opinions where outside the Overton window. and even in internet community that dedicated for it, there was some wave-of-moderation. one that see people like her as radicals and dogmatic and bad and dangerous. and the long length… it changed the dynamic. but it mostly was costly, and as such trustworthy, signal, she is not dogmatic. that she can be reasoned with. this is one of my explanations for that.
but random people still misunderstood her, in exactly the same ways she ruled out! it was the members of the community, who know her, that stopped to do that. random guests—no.
why? my theory us there are things that language designed to make hard to express. the landscape is such to make easy to misunderstand or misrepresent certain opinions, in Badwill, to sound much worst then they are.
and this related to my experience. which is—most people don’t want to communicate in Goodwill. they don’t try to understand what I’m trying to point at. they try to round my position to the most stawmanish one they reasonably can, and then attack it.
i can explain lengthly what i mean, and this will make it worst, as i give them more words that can be misrepresented.
and what i learned is to be less charitable, is to filter those people out ruthlessly, because it is waste of time to engage. if i make the engagement in little pieces with opportunity for such person feedback, and ask if i was understood and if he disagree, if i make Badwill strategies hard—they will refuse to engage.
and if i clarify and explain and rule out everything else in Goodwill, they just find new and original ways to distort what i just said.
i still didn’t read the whole post, but i know my motivation such that i wrote this comment now and will not if i postpone it. but i want to say—in my experience, such strategy work ONLY in Close Garden. in Open Garden, with too many people acting in Badwill, it’s losing strategy.
( i planned to write also about length and that 80%-90% of the people will just refuse to engage with long enough text or explanation, but exhausted my writing-in-English energy for now. it is much more important factor that the dynamic i described, but i want to filter such people so i mostly ignore it. in real world though, You Have Four Words, and most people will simply refuse to listen to read you, in my experience)
edit after i read all the post:
so i was pleasantly surprised of the post. we have very similar models of the dynamics of conversions here. i have little to add beside—I agree!
this is what make the second part so bewildering—we have totally opposite reactions. but, maybe it can be solved by putting a number on it?
if i want to communicate idea that is very close to politically-charged one, 90% of people will be unable to hear it no matter how i will say that. 1% will hear no matter what. and another 9% will listen, if it is not in public, if they already know me, if they are in the right emotional space for that.
also, 30%-60% of the people will pretend they are listening to me in good faith only to make bad faith attacks and gotchas.
which is to say—i did the experiment. and my conclusion was i need to filter more. that i want to find and avoid the bad-faith actors, the sooner—the better. that in almost all cases i will not be able to have meaningful conversion.
and like, it work, sorta! if i feel extremely Slytherin and Strategic and decided my goal is to convince people or make then listen to my actual opinion, i sorta can. and they will sorta-listen. and sorta-accept. but people that can’t do the decoupling thing or just trust me—i will not have the sort of discussion i find value in. i will not be able to have Goodwill discussion. i will have Badwill discussion when i carefully avoid all the traps and as a prize get you-are-not-like-the-other-X badge. it’s totally unsatisfying, uninteresting experience.
what i learned from my experience is that work is practically always don’t worth it, and it’s actually counter-productive in a lot of times, as it make sorting Badwill actors harder.
now i prefer that people who are going to round my to the closest strawman to demonstrate it sooner, and avoid them fast, and search for the 1%.
because those numbers? i pulled them right from my ass, but they are wildly different in different places. and it depends on the local norms ( which is why i hate the way Facebook killed the forums in Hebrew—it’s destroyed Closed Gardens, and the Open Garden sucks a lot. and there are very little Closed Gardens that people are creating again). but hey can be more like 60%-40% in certain places. and certain places already filtered for people that think that long posts are good, that nuances are good. and certain places filtered for lower resolution and You Have Four Words and every discussion will end with every opinion rounded up for one of the three opinions there, because it simply have no place for better resolutions.
it’s not worth it to try to reason with such people. it’s better to find better places.
all this is very good when people try to understand you in Goodwill. it’s totally worth it then. but it not move people from Badwill to Goodwill, from Mindkilled to not. it’s can make dialog with mindkilled people sorta not-awful, if you pour in a lot of time and energy. like, much more then i can in English now. but it’s not worth it.
do you think it worth it? do you think about situations, like this with $ORGANIZATION that you have to have this dialog? i feel like we have different kinds of dialogs in mind. and we definitely have very different experiences. I’m not even sure that we are disagreeing on something, and yet, we have very similar descriptions and very different prescriptions...
****
it was very validating to read Varieties Of Argumentative Experience. because, most discussions sucks. it’s just the way things are.
I can accept that you can accidentally suck the discussion, but not move it higher on the discussion pyramid.
****
about this example - downvoted the first and third, and upvoted the second. my map say that the person that wrote it assign high probability for $ORGANIZATION being bad actor as part of complicated worldview about how humans work, and that comment didn’t make him to update this probability at all, or maybe have epsilon update.
he have actually different model. he actually think $ORGANIZATION is bad actor, and it’s good that he can share his model. do you wish for Less Wrong that you can’t share that model? do you find this model obviously wrong? i can’t believe you want people who think people are bad actors should pretend they don’t think so, but it’s failure mode i saw and highly dislike.
the second comment is highly valuable, and the ability to see and to think Bulshit like the author did is highly valuable skill that I’m learning now. i didn’t think about that. i want to have constantly-running background process that is like that commenter. Shoulder Advisor, as i believe you would have described it.
״And how much is it actually mind-killing in the first place?״
a lot. as in—dumber then 7 years old kid.
i remember this time i said to smart women, with PhD, that good intentions lead to hell. and then she said that i said that I’m in hell because of her. this was ridiculous failure of reading comprehension. after that i started to notice such instances.
my country have major political battle now, and i wrote to woman on facebook that i talked to in the past, and she sounded less human that chatGPT. i have someone else, who i know in real live, behave very stupidly and uncharitably, because i didn’t support some argument-solider, despite the fact i actually agreed with his position.
the mind-killing effect is STRONG.
i want to write not short post that explains my own map of the sazen-adjusting part of ConceptSpace, so i postpone my longer response until i will write it. my map of it all now is that you throw bunch of very different things into this one concept, that i separate to different concepts—that should be treated differently. when i unpack folk wisdom i feel like now i understand it BETTER—but my core understanding remain the same. if someone will tell me Duncan is writer and teacher (And not Second Foundation Rationalist—which is how i think about you) i will suspect it unfriendly attempt at deception—or more likely, stupid joke, that play exactly on the fact this description is the sort that described in folk wisdom as “half true—whole lie”
folk wisdom, in my experience, is much more similar to the lossy compression picture then the sazen one—when i gained understanding, i feel like the fold wisdom pointer point exactly in the right direction, and what was missed is the emotional understanding. the picture representing it will be black-white version of the same picture. (and i don’t call it lossy compression, nor i find this concept useful). it’s different from the sazen as the picture that contains some distinct features that let you recognize it if you know what someone is talking about.
but i don’t want to start this discussion now—it’s better that i will write my own post first.
I was sazened by the word Sazen when i saw Duncan use it on facebook, and though i understood it. to my defense i say that now i believe this word does not carve reality at the joints, and that folk wisdom and what-sazen-should-mean are two different, distinct things.
so i thought about you comment and i understand why we think about that in different ways.
in my model of the world, there is important concept—Goodwill. there are arrows that point toward it, things that create goodwill—niceness, same side politically, personal relationship, all sort of things. there are also things that destroy goodwill, or even move it to the negative numbers.
there are arrows that come out of this Goodwill node in my casual graph. things like System1 understand what actually said, tend to react nicely to things, able to pass ITT. some things you can get other ways—people can be polite to people they hate, especially on the internet. but there are things that i saw only as result of Goodwill. and System1 correct interpretation is one of them/ maybe it’s possible—but i never saw it. and the politeness you get without Goodwill, is shallow. people’s System1 notice that in body language, and even in writing.
now, you can dial back on needless insulting and condescension. those are adversarial moves that can be chose consciously or avoided, even with effort. but from my point of view, when there is so little Goodwill left, the chance for good discussion already lost. it can only be bad and very bad. avoiding very bad is important! but my aim in such situations is to leave the discussion when the goodwill come close to zero, and have mental alarm screaming at me if i ever in the negative numbers of feel like the other person have negative numbers of Goodwill toward me.
so, basically, in my model of the world, there is ONE node, Goodwill. in the world, there is no different things. you write: “even if there’s no risk that yelling at people (or whatever) will directly cause you to straw-man them.”. but in my model, such situation is impossible! yelling at people WILL cause you to strawman them.
in my model of the world, this fact is not public knowledge, and my model regarding that is important part of what i want to communicate when I’m talking about Goodwill.
thanks for the conversion! it’s the clearest way i ever described my concept of Goodwill, and it was useful for my to formulate that in words.
I already have them in my reading list, but after that post i plan to epub them and read them soon.