I would find this simply unfunny if it was the basics of black nationalist or nazi bodybuilder discourse, but lets face it, lesswrongers are not black nationalists or nazi bodybuilders. The aesthetics of an object should ideally reflect its true nature; the minimalistic and monochromatic design of this website reflects the nature of this movement well. This post, not so much.
So, I find it very stupid to downvote an expression of an aesthetic/tonal preference, which is why I strong-upvoted this comment to restore normalcy (to +2). This is what two-axis voting is for!
Do people feel the comparisons are needlessly inflammatory? Because I don’t. They’re probably apt descriptions of what Jensen pattern-matches this post to.
Yeah, I think “cringing” is something a person does, and is not a property of a thing itself, and to impart it as a property of the thing itself is to commit the mind-projection fallacy.
Not a crux for me! What’s “fashionable” amongst a group also has strong reliability, yet what’s “fashionable” is something that radically changes very quickly and is primarily a fact about what the people have currently determined is fashionable, and not a fact about the piece of creative work that they’re looking at.
Not to mention that one’s ability to correctly identify how the word ought to be applied is not the same thing as endorsement; there are studies showing that e.g. everyone can identify the “popular” kids, and there’s tremendous interrater reliability on that identification, and yet this is utterly uncorrelated with who those same raters say they actually like or want to spend time with.
I think “cringy” isn’t analogous to “fashionable.” Instead, I would say “cringy” is analogous to “acting so as to care about what’s fashionable.”
Yes, it might change what action specifically is cringy. But it’s always cringy to do something that non-subtly signals how much you’re a part of an in-group.
Used that way, it’s not mind-killing at all to make people aware that they’re signalling in-groupiness in a non-subtle way and therefore predictably turning off lots of people.
You’re misreading me denotationally if you think I said that cringey and fashionable are the same. I used fashion as an example to argue that just because something has a reliable referent in the minds of a population at a given time, doesn’t mean it’s a property that isn’t largely content-free and determined in a fairly arbitrary and fickle way.
it’s always cringy to do something that non-subtly signals how much you’re a part of an in-group
No Lukas, that’s false. For instance, I sometimes let people know that I went to music school for 7 years and have lots of music school friends, which comes along with the (true) implication that I’m part of an in-group of musicians — an in-group that I’ve dedicated a chunk of my life to — and normally the reaction either one of disinterest, or one of interest and enthusiasm, but not cringe.
I used fashion as an example to argue that just because something has a reliable referent in the minds of a population at a given time, doesn’t mean it’s a property that isn’t largely content-free and determined in a fairly arbitrary and fickle way.
I think I understood that part.
No Lukas, that’s false. For instance, I sometimes let people know that I went to music school for 7 years and have lots of music school friends, which comes along with the (true) implication that I’m part of an in-group of musicians — an in-group that I’ve dedicated a chunk of my life to — and normally the reaction either one of disinterest, or one of interest and enthusiasm, but not cringe.
You’re right that this example doesn’t seem cringy. But if you shared a meme that said “seven ways you can tell someone went to music school” – that would be cringy.
So, my hypothesis is that cringiness is largely about signalling in-group membership in an “on the nose” way that only appeals to that in-group.
By contrast, saying “I went to music school for 7 years” is something you can make conversation with to someone who didn’t go to music school.
This pattern may not capture all instances of cringiness, but I think it captures quite a lot of it. And, like with “caring about fashion,” “caring about belonging of the in-group and bonding with other in-group members through cringiness” is an identifiable meta trait that people can pursue reliably even when the underlying signals keep changing.
Cringe is an emotion that really has no place on a rationality forum. The cringe should be examined first and subsequently buttressed by statements that justify the reader’s first line of defense.
But if you shared a meme that said “seven ways you can tell someone went to music school” – that would be cringy.
That wouldn’t seem cringy to me. Instead my reaction to it would be some mixture of affection and curiosity. Something like “oh I’m not part of this ingroup, but this meme is a way for them to connect over shared experiences and I can certainly relate to bonding with people through shared experiences; probably seeing this meme will make some former music school people happy and I feel glad for them. I’m curious about the kinds of unique experiences that people who went to music school had and I haven’t had, maybe this meme will help me understand some of those”.
If I’m reading this right, you object to Jensen’s initial comment that uses “cringy” and that your objection is largely due to the fact that “cringy” is a property mostly about the observer (as opposed to the thing itself).
Do you think the same is true of “mind-killy” from logan’s comment?
This seems hypocritical to me. I think that your real objection is something else, possibly that you just really don’t like “cringy” for some other reason (perhaps you cringe at its usage?)
(I wrote a bunch more words but deleted them—let’s see how nondefensive {offensive?} writing works out for me).
No, I would agree with Logan that calling something “cringy” is mindkilly, since it instills a strong sense of defensiveness in the accused. I’m not even sure that the cringiness I felt was rooted in the fact the post seemed fake, but it was real nonetheless. For this particular post, it seems that the average lesswronger doesn’t think it seems cringy but I doubt I am alone in thinking this way.
Aesthetics of rationality—what an interesting concept!
On one hand, it intuitively make sense. For example, obscurantist writing feels clearly anti-rationalist to me.
On the other hand, it feels like using this perspective too much leads to Hollywood rationality. The rational color scheme is grayscale, the rational font is sans-serif, the rational music is a rhythmic march, the rational speech is stark and technical, the rational taste is Soylent, the rational sex position is missionary, the rational emotion is boredom, the rational writing style is textbook.
Also, the objection against sounding like a black nationalist or a nazi bodybuilder sounds to me more like classism than like a concern about rationality. (Although, some classes are statistically more rational than others.) Should we uphold the educated middle class norms of discourse? Maybe. Maybe not. Status is a concern, but so is fun. And I think the language did not hurt the clarity of the message, it rather helped it.
Here I think the following words of Constantine the Philosopher are appropriate:
Which is interesting, because Gwern.net/LW2 (there’s a lot of overlap in their design) look little like Overcoming Bias does or LW1 did, and those were the heydays of rationalists. (In designing Gwern.net, I’ve tended to look to English Wikipedia & Art Deco, rather than anything one might associate with the Greco-Romans or the Logical Positivists—IMO, these websites do not look like Isotype or Bauhaus.)
Sorry, this is cringy.
I would find this simply unfunny if it was the basics of black nationalist or nazi bodybuilder discourse, but lets face it, lesswrongers are not black nationalists or nazi bodybuilders. The aesthetics of an object should ideally reflect its true nature; the minimalistic and monochromatic design of this website reflects the nature of this movement well. This post, not so much.
So, I find it very stupid to downvote an expression of an aesthetic/tonal preference, which is why I strong-upvoted this comment to restore normalcy (to +2). This is what two-axis voting is for!
Do people feel the comparisons are needlessly inflammatory? Because I don’t. They’re probably apt descriptions of what Jensen pattern-matches this post to.
i downvoted Jensen’s comment because i think “this is cringy” is a super extra mind-killy sort of concept and i want less of it around.
Yeah, I think “cringing” is something a person does, and is not a property of a thing itself, and to impart it as a property of the thing itself is to commit the mind-projection fallacy.
I think the interrater reliability of “cringyness” would be surprisingly high.
Not a crux for me! What’s “fashionable” amongst a group also has strong reliability, yet what’s “fashionable” is something that radically changes very quickly and is primarily a fact about what the people have currently determined is fashionable, and not a fact about the piece of creative work that they’re looking at.
Not to mention that one’s ability to correctly identify how the word ought to be applied is not the same thing as endorsement; there are studies showing that e.g. everyone can identify the “popular” kids, and there’s tremendous interrater reliability on that identification, and yet this is utterly uncorrelated with who those same raters say they actually like or want to spend time with.
I think “cringy” isn’t analogous to “fashionable.” Instead, I would say “cringy” is analogous to “acting so as to care about what’s fashionable.”
Yes, it might change what action specifically is cringy. But it’s always cringy to do something that non-subtly signals how much you’re a part of an in-group.
Used that way, it’s not mind-killing at all to make people aware that they’re signalling in-groupiness in a non-subtle way and therefore predictably turning off lots of people.
You’re misreading me denotationally if you think I said that cringey and fashionable are the same. I used fashion as an example to argue that just because something has a reliable referent in the minds of a population at a given time, doesn’t mean it’s a property that isn’t largely content-free and determined in a fairly arbitrary and fickle way.
No Lukas, that’s false. For instance, I sometimes let people know that I went to music school for 7 years and have lots of music school friends, which comes along with the (true) implication that I’m part of an in-group of musicians — an in-group that I’ve dedicated a chunk of my life to — and normally the reaction either one of disinterest, or one of interest and enthusiasm, but not cringe.
I think I understood that part.
You’re right that this example doesn’t seem cringy. But if you shared a meme that said “seven ways you can tell someone went to music school” – that would be cringy.
So, my hypothesis is that cringiness is largely about signalling in-group membership in an “on the nose” way that only appeals to that in-group.
By contrast, saying “I went to music school for 7 years” is something you can make conversation with to someone who didn’t go to music school.
This pattern may not capture all instances of cringiness, but I think it captures quite a lot of it. And, like with “caring about fashion,” “caring about belonging of the in-group and bonding with other in-group members through cringiness” is an identifiable meta trait that people can pursue reliably even when the underlying signals keep changing.
Cringe is an emotion that really has no place on a rationality forum. The cringe should be examined first and subsequently buttressed by statements that justify the reader’s first line of defense.
That wouldn’t seem cringy to me. Instead my reaction to it would be some mixture of affection and curiosity. Something like “oh I’m not part of this ingroup, but this meme is a way for them to connect over shared experiences and I can certainly relate to bonding with people through shared experiences; probably seeing this meme will make some former music school people happy and I feel glad for them. I’m curious about the kinds of unique experiences that people who went to music school had and I haven’t had, maybe this meme will help me understand some of those”.
If I’m reading this right, you object to Jensen’s initial comment that uses “cringy” and that your objection is largely due to the fact that “cringy” is a property mostly about the observer (as opposed to the thing itself).
Do you think the same is true of “mind-killy” from logan’s comment?
This seems hypocritical to me. I think that your real objection is something else, possibly that you just really don’t like “cringy” for some other reason (perhaps you cringe at its usage?)
(I wrote a bunch more words but deleted them—let’s see how nondefensive {offensive?} writing works out for me).
No, I would agree with Logan that calling something “cringy” is mindkilly, since it instills a strong sense of defensiveness in the accused. I’m not even sure that the cringiness I felt was rooted in the fact the post seemed fake, but it was real nonetheless. For this particular post, it seems that the average lesswronger doesn’t think it seems cringy but I doubt I am alone in thinking this way.
Aesthetics of rationality—what an interesting concept!
On one hand, it intuitively make sense. For example, obscurantist writing feels clearly anti-rationalist to me.
On the other hand, it feels like using this perspective too much leads to Hollywood rationality. The rational color scheme is grayscale, the rational font is sans-serif, the rational music is a rhythmic march, the rational speech is stark and technical, the rational taste is Soylent, the rational sex position is missionary, the rational emotion is boredom, the rational writing style is textbook.
Also, the objection against sounding like a black nationalist or a nazi bodybuilder sounds to me more like classism than like a concern about rationality. (Although, some classes are statistically more rational than others.) Should we uphold the educated middle class norms of discourse? Maybe. Maybe not. Status is a concern, but so is fun. And I think the language did not hurt the clarity of the message, it rather helped it.
Here I think the following words of Constantine the Philosopher are appropriate:
ⱈⱁⱋⱘ ⱄⰾⱁⰲⰵⱄⱏ ⱂⱔⱅⱐ ⰻⰸⰴⱃⰵⱋⰻ
ⱄⱏ ⱃⰰⰸⱆⰿⱁⰿⱐ ⱄⰲⱁⰻⰿⱐ ⰳⰾ̅ⰰⱅⰻ,
ⰴⰰ ⰻ ⰲⱐⱄⰵ ⰱⱃⰰⱅⱐⱑ ⱃⰰⰸⱆⰿⱑⱙⱅⱏ,
ⱀⰵⰶⰵ ⱅⱐⰿⱘ ⱄⰾⱁⰲⰵⱄⱏ ⱀⰵⱃⰰⰸⱆⰿⱐⱀⱏ.
I would rather say five words
Speaking with my mind
That all brethren can understand
Than myriad words incomprehensible
You’re half right…
Gwern’s site design is extremely “rationalist” to me, though I don’t see that as a bad thing. The site itself looks beautiful.
Which is interesting, because Gwern.net/LW2 (there’s a lot of overlap in their design) look little like Overcoming Bias does or LW1 did, and those were the heydays of rationalists. (In designing Gwern.net, I’ve tended to look to English Wikipedia & Art Deco, rather than anything one might associate with the Greco-Romans or the Logical Positivists—IMO, these websites do not look like Isotype or Bauhaus.)