It’s almost as though the issue were accountability.
A blog is almost a perfect medium for personal accountability. It belongs to you, not your employer, and not the hivemind. The archives are easily searchable. The posts are permanently viewable. Everything embarrassing you’ve ever written is there. If there’s a comment section, people are free to come along and poke holes in your posts. This leaves people vulnerable in a certain way. Not just to trolls, but to critics.
I do want accountability. I do want criticism. I want to be made less wrong and more right. I want a community that helps me become more the person I want to be. This project seems well-suited to getting that, and terribly important for getting communal intellectual norms right.
And yet, I’m not going to cross-post everything on my blog to LessWrong. Here’s why.
Sometimes I’m writing something where I’m fairly sure of the conceptual framework. In this case, most moderately intelligent, informed criticism will be helpful. But if I’m writing not to explain but to explore—or just using a nonstandard model and not taking great care to lead people in baby steps—criticism has to meet a much higher standard to be helpful. If I’m engaged in the act of concept-formation, I’m trying to point to the center of a cluster of things, and get other people to look there and report what they see. If someone responds by literal-mindedly assessing my initial pointer’s fit to reality instead of taking a look at where I’m pointing and reporting what they see, they actively pull attention away from where it needs to go.
This is not the same as how certain I am that my conclusion is correct. If I’m uncertain about the facts or the inferences I’m drawing from them, detail-oriented criticism is helpful. If I’m uncertain about the basic conceptual framework, I don’t understand the thing well enough to evaluate criticism, and I need collaborative seeing first.
I’m worried that this will be obscured by the superficially similar thing you’re pointing to here:
You can preempt embarrassment by declaring that you’re doing something shitty anyhow.
I don’t currently trust, based on experience, that the level of discourse at Less Wrong will be an interesting place to work out the ideas I can only barely point to on the verbal level. I don’t see moving my whole intellectual life here. I feel some need to hold onto my own blog where I play with things unaccountably. I think it’s important to have space for unaccountable displays of personality as part of the exploration process.
That said, I want more accountability, I want more spaces with accountability, and I plan to post things where I have some hope that criticism and accountability will help move the ball forward.
Maybe we could start tagging such stuff with epistemic status: exploratory or epistemic status: exploring hypotheses or something similar? Sort of the opposite of Crocker’s rules, in effect. Do you guys think this is a community norm worth adding?
We have a couple concepts around here that could also help if they turned into community norms on these sorts of posts. For example:
triangulating meaning: If we didn’t have a word for “bird”, I might provide a penguin, a ostrich, and an eagle as the most extreme examples which only share their “birdness” in common. If you give 3+ examples of the sort of thing you’re talking about, generally people will be able to figure out what the 3 things have in common, and can narrow things down to more or less the same concept you are trying to convey to them.
Principle of Charity: I think we pretty much have this one covered. We do have a bad nitpicking habit, though, which means...
Steel manning: If I’m trying to build up an idea, but it’s only in the formative stages, it’s going to have a lot of holes, most of which will be fairly obvious. This means making a lot of sweeping generalizations while explaining.
These are literally just the first couple things that popped into my head, so feel free to suggest others or criticize my thoughts.
In general, it seems like such discussions should be places to share related anecdotes, half-baked thoughts on the matter, and questions. Criticism might be rephrased as questions about whether the criticism applies in this instance. Those who don’t “get” what is being gestured at might be encouraged to offer only questions.
I remember some study about innovation, which found that a disproportionate amount happened around the water cooler. Apparently GPS was invented by a bunch of people messing around and trying to figure out if they could triangulate Sputnik’s position, and someone else wondering whether they could do the reverse and triangulate their own position from satellites with known orbits. We need places for that sort of aimless musing if we want to solve candle problems.
More broadly, we could start applying some of these norms to Discussion. After all, it’s supposed to be for, you know, discussion. :p I think it’s long overdue.
I think this is key:
I do want accountability. I do want criticism. I want to be made less wrong and more right. I want a community that helps me become more the person I want to be. This project seems well-suited to getting that, and terribly important for getting communal intellectual norms right.
And yet, I’m not going to cross-post everything on my blog to LessWrong. Here’s why.
Sometimes I’m writing something where I’m fairly sure of the conceptual framework. In this case, most moderately intelligent, informed criticism will be helpful. But if I’m writing not to explain but to explore—or just using a nonstandard model and not taking great care to lead people in baby steps—criticism has to meet a much higher standard to be helpful. If I’m engaged in the act of concept-formation, I’m trying to point to the center of a cluster of things, and get other people to look there and report what they see. If someone responds by literal-mindedly assessing my initial pointer’s fit to reality instead of taking a look at where I’m pointing and reporting what they see, they actively pull attention away from where it needs to go.
This is not the same as how certain I am that my conclusion is correct. If I’m uncertain about the facts or the inferences I’m drawing from them, detail-oriented criticism is helpful. If I’m uncertain about the basic conceptual framework, I don’t understand the thing well enough to evaluate criticism, and I need collaborative seeing first.
I’m worried that this will be obscured by the superficially similar thing you’re pointing to here:
I don’t currently trust, based on experience, that the level of discourse at Less Wrong will be an interesting place to work out the ideas I can only barely point to on the verbal level. I don’t see moving my whole intellectual life here. I feel some need to hold onto my own blog where I play with things unaccountably. I think it’s important to have space for unaccountable displays of personality as part of the exploration process.
That said, I want more accountability, I want more spaces with accountability, and I plan to post things where I have some hope that criticism and accountability will help move the ball forward.
Maybe we could start tagging such stuff with epistemic status: exploratory or epistemic status: exploring hypotheses or something similar? Sort of the opposite of Crocker’s rules, in effect. Do you guys think this is a community norm worth adding?
We have a couple concepts around here that could also help if they turned into community norms on these sorts of posts. For example:
triangulating meaning: If we didn’t have a word for “bird”, I might provide a penguin, a ostrich, and an eagle as the most extreme examples which only share their “birdness” in common. If you give 3+ examples of the sort of thing you’re talking about, generally people will be able to figure out what the 3 things have in common, and can narrow things down to more or less the same concept you are trying to convey to them.
Principle of Charity: I think we pretty much have this one covered. We do have a bad nitpicking habit, though, which means...
Steel manning: If I’m trying to build up an idea, but it’s only in the formative stages, it’s going to have a lot of holes, most of which will be fairly obvious. This means making a lot of sweeping generalizations while explaining.
These are literally just the first couple things that popped into my head, so feel free to suggest others or criticize my thoughts.
In general, it seems like such discussions should be places to share related anecdotes, half-baked thoughts on the matter, and questions. Criticism might be rephrased as questions about whether the criticism applies in this instance. Those who don’t “get” what is being gestured at might be encouraged to offer only questions.
I remember some study about innovation, which found that a disproportionate amount happened around the water cooler. Apparently GPS was invented by a bunch of people messing around and trying to figure out if they could triangulate Sputnik’s position, and someone else wondering whether they could do the reverse and triangulate their own position from satellites with known orbits. We need places for that sort of aimless musing if we want to solve candle problems.
More broadly, we could start applying some of these norms to Discussion. After all, it’s supposed to be for, you know, discussion. :p I think it’s long overdue.
Related: https://vimeo.com/89936101