LesserWrong is dead to me. Trust nothing here; it is not truth-tracking.
PDV
Karma: 151
I think this is extremely bad. Letting anyone, no matter how prominent, costlessly remove/silence others is toxic to the principle of open debate.
At minimum, there should be a substantial penalty for banning and deleting comments. And not a subtraction, a multiplication. My first instinct would be to use the fraction of users you have taken action against as a proportional penalty to your karma, for all purposes. Or, slightly more complex, take the total “raw score” of karma of all users you’ve taken action against, divide by the total “raw score” of everyone on the site, double it, and use that as the penalty factor. If Eliezer actually only bans unhelpful newbies, then this will be a small penalty. If he starts taking repeated action against many people otherwise regarded as serious contributors, then it will be a large penalty.
The intended use case of this may be positive, but let’s be real: even among rationalists, status incentives always win out. Put on your David Monroe/ialdabaoth hats and remember that for a group rationality project, priorities 1, 2, and 3 must be defanging social incentives to corrupt group epistemics.
I don’t think it’s an interesting experiment. The outcome is obvious: it will be abused to silence competing points of view.
If the intention is sound, the value it adds is minimal. Anyone can be kind as long as they are trying to be kind.
I’m pretty sure that the standard Eliezer requires to post here is hostile to good epistemics.
I did not see this comment until this moment (the comment display when there are more than 100 of them is really screwy). I will break off for the next day.
Explicit claims are more honest, and thus better, than implicit claims. Claiming status explicitly opens you up to someone else contesting it; claiming status implicitly makes it harder to be criticized.
This probably maps cleanly to Ask/Guess Culture. I’m certainly an Ask partisan. (On that front. I am not strongly opinionated on Ask vs. Tell vs. other novel variations).
This is an accurate description of my mental state in this situation.
I consider this a factual dispute about minds and Goodhart’s Law, rather than a difference of subjective categorization, so this response is a non sequitur to me.
It is good to have great things in your life. It is not necessarily good to have things you feel are great in your life; those feelings are not necessarily accurate. Many things that feel really good are metaphorical junk food. They are the Symbolic Representation of The Thing. Anything that quickly generates emotional attachment is most likely to be Goodharting, optimizing for feeling great and generating attachment, rather than being great.
Personally, I am willing to keep them in my life as long as I trust other, harder-to-fake signals that they are value-aligned with me, or at least the values I consider core. (Though one of those values is not wanting to be manipulated except towards my own best interests.)
An element that’s easy to leave out in a description, but which I understand to be fairly critical, is the deliberate over-the-top nature of it. You don’t just say “That is your doom”, you go DOOOOOM, DOOMY DOOMY DOOM between one person receiving doom and the next. I believe its function is to both allow for people to be more extreme than they would if they didn’t have the vague feeling that anything could be taken as exaggeration, and simultaneously to lessen the emotional impact of the criticism.
It’s somewhat broader than that. It’s not necessary for the environment to insist on NVC, as long as it treats NVC as high-status and… I’m going to say “aspirationally normative” and hope that makes sense. See Val’s comment here. That is, from my standpoint, an obvious social attack, enabled by NVC being, not necessarily normative, but treated as aligned with a general goal. As long as I accept the framing that NVC is good, I have no recourse but to take the status hit and accept the implicit premise that I need to demonstrate I’m not morally/epistemically/socially inferior.
I do believe that is possible to use NVC ethically. (It is also probably possible to Circle ethically.) But Hagbard’s Law still applies; communication is only possible between equals, whether it’s ostensibly nonviolent or not. If there is a power struggle in progress, all signals are distorted; all utterances are going to be received as moves in the power game first, communication second.
It’s a implicit claim of social/moral/epistemic superiority.
(Correct. We definitely seem to be on the same page here.)
I’ve had a hard time with people using emotional/social rapport-building tools in communication, because it feels like it’s exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply.
Yes, this. Extremely this.
I happen to believe that “learn the skill already“ is far safer than “denounce it wherever it occurs”, especially when the skill is something as universal as *exerting social pressure*.
I don’t think learning the social pressure manipulation skill is sufficient. The counterskill, resisting social pressure, is much harder to learn and much harder to execute.
I consider you to be bullying me. NVC and most related practice are morally-disguised bullying, a framework in which anyone who does not conform to the norm (and never mind the personal cost) is constantly socially attacked.
I am a dom, and while I dislike nearly everyone in the BDSM scene, it’s not for reasons at all related to this. I am unaware of any writing on BDSM from anyone I’ve heard of saying that BDSM is “praised as a way to be a better person”; when it’s held up as better, it’s on hedonistic grounds, not moral ones. Which is a critical piece of the problem; the difference between “you really should try this, you’re missing out” and “you really should try this, you’re weaker and worse because you don’t” is enormous in terms of what social pressure it exerts.
Also, I don’t appreciate the social posturing/attack in your latter paragraph.
You are correct that Val’s last paragraph is a problem in the same way the quoted section was.
EDIT: Your description of me is wrong in most details, but I don’t think reaching the correct top-level conclusion was a coincidence.
Could you elaborate on what the hell “being seen” means? My experience with the term is somewhere between meaninglessness and “a distraction mentioned while someone’s covertly socially attacking”.
If you don’t want to leave public traces, others must assume that we wouldn’t like what we saw if the traces were public.