That’s pretty much what he did here, except perhaps the tone isn’t quite so modest and has a bit of that status-regulation-blind thing Eliezer often has going on.
If you were feeling uncharitable, you could say that the “lack of status regulation emotions” thing is yet another concept in a long line of concepts that already had names before Eliezer/someone independently discovers them and proceeds to give them a new LW name.
you could say that the “lack of status regulation emotions” thing [...] already had names [...]
It’s sillier than that. It’s attempting to invent a new, hitherto undescribed emotion to explain behavior that’s covered perfectly well by the ordinary vocabulary of social competence, which includes for example words like “tact”. There are also words to describe neurological deviations resulting among other things in a pathological lack of tact, but they too have little to do with emotion.
(Strictly speaking, there are status-regulation emotions, and they are called things like shame and envy. But that clearly isn’t what Eliezer was talking about.)
But what Eliezer is describing is not a “new, hitherto undescribed emotion”, it’s really just a chronic, low-intensity activation of well-known emotional states like shame and embarrassment. Many people nowadays believe that ‘microaggressions’ exist and are a fairly big factor in folks’ self-esteem and even their ordinary functioning. But that too used to be a “new, undescribed phenomenon”! So why would we want to reject what Eliezer calls “status regulation” which is even less radical, being just a minor twist on what was previously known?
In the Facebook post that sparked this, Mysterious Emotion X is clearly described in terms of other-regulation: a “status slapdown emotion”. Shame and embarrassment, chronic and low-grade or otherwise, are directed at self-regulation, so they aren’t a good fit. Envy (and “a sense that someone else has something that I deserve more”, which sounds to me like resentment) is specifically excluded, so it’s not that either.
I’m pretty skeptical of the microaggression model too, but this isn’t the place to be talking about that, if there exists such a place.
Well, same difference really. An other-regarding ‘status slapdown’ emotion can be described fairly easily as a low-intensity mixture of outrage and contempt, both of which are well-known emotions and not “undescribed” at all. It could be most pithily characterized as the counter emotion to loyalty or devotion, which involves an attribution of higher status based on social roles or norms.
I don’t think either of those work. The situation in which this applies, according to Eliezer, is quite specific: another person makes a status claim which you feel is undeserved, so you feel Mysterious Emotion X toward them. It’s neither chronic nor low-grade: the context here was of HJPEV schooling his teachers and the violently poor reception that met among some readers of HPMOR. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t mind… but I was once the iniquitous little shit that Harry’s being. I expect these readers are identifying with McGonagall instead.) He’s also pretty clear about believing this to be outside the generally accepted array of human emotions: he mentions envy, hate, and resentment among others as things which this is not, which pretty much covers the bases in context.
More than the specific attribution, though, it’s the gee-whiz tone and intimation of originality that rubs me the wrong way. If he’d described it in terms of well-known emotions or even suggested that you could, my objection would evaporate. But he didn’t.
I don’t think that the thing Eliezer called “lack of status regulation emotions” that makes some people angry when they read how Harry in HPMOR interacts with teachers is what commonly called ego or lack of ego.
Fair enough. “Lack of status regulation emotions” is a bit more narrow, perhaps? Either way I see them as very similar concepts, and in the context of HPMOR readers’ anger especially so.
If someone who is high status lacks status regulation emotions they will be nice to a person with low status who seeks help from them and treats them as an equal.
That’s the opposite behavior of what’s commonly called having an ego.
More generally, someone who lacks status-regulating emotions won’t have a fragile, hypersensitive ego, i.e. what most people (though by no means all) usually mean by “having a massive ego” or an “ego problem”. Note that by this definition, many people whose self-esteem is founded in clear and verifiable achievements would be said to “lack status-regulating emotions”. In many circumstances, it’s not viewed as a negative trait.
I’ve had experience with what I think is the same thing that Eliezer called “lack of status regulation emotions”, and I do think it’s more than “narcissisticly big ego” and more than “unmotivated and unfortunate status blindness”.
It’s not that I couldn’t see the normal status levels. It’s just that I thought they were stupid and irrelevant (hah!) so I just went off my own internal status values. If you could back up your arguments, you had my respect. If you couldn’t and got defensive instead, you didn’t. And I wasn’t gonna pretend to respect someone just because everyone else thought I was out of line. Because.… well, they’re wrong. And I was totally unaware of this at the time because it was just baked into the background of how I saw things.
Good things did come of it, but I definitely stepped on toes, and in those cases it definitely came off like “big ego”.
And in a sense it was, just not in the straightforwardly narcissistic “I’m smarter than you so I don’t have to treat you with respect” way. Just in the “I’m smarter at the ‘not acting smarter than I am’ game, and that is why I don’t have to treat you with respect” way, which, although better, isn’t all that laudable either.
Ah, if the status regulation emotions go both ways, perhaps.
But Eliezer seemed to be referring to how people got angry at how Harry didn’t treat McGonagall in a manner befitting her higher status—this can be attributed to lack of status regulation emotions on the part of Harry, or Harry having a massive ego.
Harry also doesn’t have respect due to status regulation but that’s not enough to get someone reading the story angry. I personally found it quite funny. But then I also don’t put much value on that kind of status. It’s the kind of people with a strong status related emotions who get annoyed by the story.
If someone who is high status lacks status regulation emotions they will be nice to a person with low status who seeks help from them and treats them as an equal.
This is a nice differentiation that I can relate to well. I also do not seem to possess status regulating emotions either (at least enough to notice myself). And I do treat all people the same (mostly cheritable) independent of their status. Actually I discovered the concept of status quite late (Ayla and the Clan of the Cave Bear if I remember right) and couldn’t make sense of it for quite some time.
Yeah I’ve read that and I feel like it’s a miss (at least for me). It’s an all together too serious and non-self deprecating take on the issue. I appreciate that in that post Eliezer is trying to correct a lot of mis perceptions at once but my problem with that is
a)a lot of people won’t actually know about all these attacks (I’d read the rational wiki article, which I don’t think is nearly as bad as Eliezer says (that is possibly due to its content having altered over time!)), and responding to them all actually gives them the oxygen of publicity.
b)When you’ve made a mistake the correct action (in my opinion ) is to go “yup, I messed up at that point”, give a very short explanation of why, and try to move on. Going into extreme detail gives the impression that Eliezer isn’t terribly sorry for his behaviour. Maybe he isn’t, but from a PR perspective it would be better to look sorry. Sometimes it’s better to move on from an argument rather than trying to keep having it!
Further to that last point, I’ve foudn that Eliezer often engages with dissent by having a full argument with the person who is dissenting. Now this might be a good strategy from the point of view of persuading the dissenter: if I come in and say cyronics sux then a reasoned response might change my mind. But by engaging so thoroughly with dissent when it occurs it actually makes him look more fighty.
I’m thinking here about how it appears to outside observers: just as with a formal debate the goal isn’t to convince the person you are arguing with, it is to convince the audience, with PR the point isn’t to defeat the dissenter with your marvellous wordplay, it is to convince the audience that you are more sane than the dissenter.
Obviously these are my perceptions of how Eliezer comes across, I could easily be an exception.
that status-regulation-blind thing Eliezer often has going on.
Maybe he should have it going on, and damn the consequences. Sometimes you have to get up and say, these are the facts, you are wrong. Not the vapid temporising recommended by thakil.
There are some times when a fight is worth having, and sometimes when it will do more harm than good. With regards to this controversy, I think that the latter approach will work better than the former. I could, of course, be wrong.
I am imaging here a reddit user who has vaguely heard of less wrong, and then reads rational wiki’s article on the basilisk (or now, I suppose, an xkcd reader who does similar). I think that their take away from that reddit argument posted by Eliezer might be to think again about the rational wiki article, but I don’t think they’d be particularly attracted to reading more of what Eliezer has written. Given that I rather enjoy the vast majority of what Eliezer has written, I feel like that’s a shame.
To you really think that’s how people discover websites?
I think it’s much more likely that someone clicks on a link to a LW post. If the post is interesting he might browse around LW and if he finds interesting content he will come back.
Not everyone. But I think an xkcd comic about the AI box experiment would be an opportunity to let everyone know about less wrong, not to have another argument about the basilisk which is a distraction.
The expression “Damn the consequences” is generally, and in this case, a hyperbole. The consequences being dismissed are those the speaker considers worthy of dismissal in the face of the consequences that truly matter.
A non-figurative version of my comment would be that in the case at hand, putting the actual facts out, as clearly and forthrightly as possible, is the most important thing to do, and concern with supposed reputational damage from saying what is right and ignoring what is irrelevant would be not merely wasted motion, but actively harmful.
But then, I’ll excuse quite a lot of arrogance, in someone who has something to be arrogant about.
If it decreases the number of people who take you seriously and therefore learn bout the substance of your ideas its a bad strategy
And if it increases the number of people who take you seriously, and therefore learn about the substance of your ideas, it’s a good strategy. I’m sure we can all agree that if something were bad, it would be bad, and if it were good, it would be good. Your point?
I think there are potential benefits to both methods, and I also don’t think that they’re necessarily mutually exclusive strategies. At the moment, I would lean towards pure honesty and truth oriented explanation as being most important as well. I also think that he could do all of that while stilll minimizing the ‘status smackdown response’, which in that reddit post he did a little of, but I think it’s possible that he could have done a little more while still retaining full integrity with regards to telling it like it is.
But whatever happens, anything is better than that gag order silliness.
That’s pretty much what he did here, except perhaps the tone isn’t quite so modest and has a bit of that status-regulation-blind thing Eliezer often has going on.
It’s not status blindness, it’s ego.
You could call it that, yeah.
If you were feeling uncharitable, you could say that the “lack of status regulation emotions” thing is yet another concept in a long line of concepts that already had names before Eliezer/someone independently discovers them and proceeds to give them a new LW name.
It’s sillier than that. It’s attempting to invent a new, hitherto undescribed emotion to explain behavior that’s covered perfectly well by the ordinary vocabulary of social competence, which includes for example words like “tact”. There are also words to describe neurological deviations resulting among other things in a pathological lack of tact, but they too have little to do with emotion.
(Strictly speaking, there are status-regulation emotions, and they are called things like shame and envy. But that clearly isn’t what Eliezer was talking about.)
But what Eliezer is describing is not a “new, hitherto undescribed emotion”, it’s really just a chronic, low-intensity activation of well-known emotional states like shame and embarrassment. Many people nowadays believe that ‘microaggressions’ exist and are a fairly big factor in folks’ self-esteem and even their ordinary functioning. But that too used to be a “new, undescribed phenomenon”! So why would we want to reject what Eliezer calls “status regulation” which is even less radical, being just a minor twist on what was previously known?
In the Facebook post that sparked this, Mysterious Emotion X is clearly described in terms of other-regulation: a “status slapdown emotion”. Shame and embarrassment, chronic and low-grade or otherwise, are directed at self-regulation, so they aren’t a good fit. Envy (and “a sense that someone else has something that I deserve more”, which sounds to me like resentment) is specifically excluded, so it’s not that either.
I’m pretty skeptical of the microaggression model too, but this isn’t the place to be talking about that, if there exists such a place.
Well, same difference really. An other-regarding ‘status slapdown’ emotion can be described fairly easily as a low-intensity mixture of outrage and contempt, both of which are well-known emotions and not “undescribed” at all. It could be most pithily characterized as the counter emotion to loyalty or devotion, which involves an attribution of higher status based on social roles or norms.
I don’t think either of those work. The situation in which this applies, according to Eliezer, is quite specific: another person makes a status claim which you feel is undeserved, so you feel Mysterious Emotion X toward them. It’s neither chronic nor low-grade: the context here was of HJPEV schooling his teachers and the violently poor reception that met among some readers of HPMOR. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t mind… but I was once the iniquitous little shit that Harry’s being. I expect these readers are identifying with McGonagall instead.) He’s also pretty clear about believing this to be outside the generally accepted array of human emotions: he mentions envy, hate, and resentment among others as things which this is not, which pretty much covers the bases in context.
More than the specific attribution, though, it’s the gee-whiz tone and intimation of originality that rubs me the wrong way. If he’d described it in terms of well-known emotions or even suggested that you could, my objection would evaporate. But he didn’t.
I don’t think that the thing Eliezer called “lack of status regulation emotions” that makes some people angry when they read how Harry in HPMOR interacts with teachers is what commonly called ego or lack of ego.
Fair enough. “Lack of status regulation emotions” is a bit more narrow, perhaps? Either way I see them as very similar concepts, and in the context of HPMOR readers’ anger especially so.
If someone who is high status lacks status regulation emotions they will be nice to a person with low status who seeks help from them and treats them as an equal.
That’s the opposite behavior of what’s commonly called having an ego.
More generally, someone who lacks status-regulating emotions won’t have a fragile, hypersensitive ego, i.e. what most people (though by no means all) usually mean by “having a massive ego” or an “ego problem”. Note that by this definition, many people whose self-esteem is founded in clear and verifiable achievements would be said to “lack status-regulating emotions”. In many circumstances, it’s not viewed as a negative trait.
I’ve had experience with what I think is the same thing that Eliezer called “lack of status regulation emotions”, and I do think it’s more than “narcissisticly big ego” and more than “unmotivated and unfortunate status blindness”.
It’s not that I couldn’t see the normal status levels. It’s just that I thought they were stupid and irrelevant (hah!) so I just went off my own internal status values. If you could back up your arguments, you had my respect. If you couldn’t and got defensive instead, you didn’t. And I wasn’t gonna pretend to respect someone just because everyone else thought I was out of line. Because.… well, they’re wrong. And I was totally unaware of this at the time because it was just baked into the background of how I saw things.
Good things did come of it, but I definitely stepped on toes, and in those cases it definitely came off like “big ego”.
And in a sense it was, just not in the straightforwardly narcissistic “I’m smarter than you so I don’t have to treat you with respect” way. Just in the “I’m smarter at the ‘not acting smarter than I am’ game, and that is why I don’t have to treat you with respect” way, which, although better, isn’t all that laudable either.
Ah, if the status regulation emotions go both ways, perhaps.
But Eliezer seemed to be referring to how people got angry at how Harry didn’t treat McGonagall in a manner befitting her higher status—this can be attributed to lack of status regulation emotions on the part of Harry, or Harry having a massive ego.
Harry also doesn’t have respect due to status regulation but that’s not enough to get someone reading the story angry. I personally found it quite funny. But then I also don’t put much value on that kind of status. It’s the kind of people with a strong status related emotions who get annoyed by the story.
This is a nice differentiation that I can relate to well. I also do not seem to possess status regulating emotions either (at least enough to notice myself). And I do treat all people the same (mostly cheritable) independent of their status. Actually I discovered the concept of status quite late (Ayla and the Clan of the Cave Bear if I remember right) and couldn’t make sense of it for quite some time.
Status blindness is a disability, pride is a mortal sin.
:)
Yeah I’ve read that and I feel like it’s a miss (at least for me). It’s an all together too serious and non-self deprecating take on the issue. I appreciate that in that post Eliezer is trying to correct a lot of mis perceptions at once but my problem with that is
a)a lot of people won’t actually know about all these attacks (I’d read the rational wiki article, which I don’t think is nearly as bad as Eliezer says (that is possibly due to its content having altered over time!)), and responding to them all actually gives them the oxygen of publicity. b)When you’ve made a mistake the correct action (in my opinion ) is to go “yup, I messed up at that point”, give a very short explanation of why, and try to move on. Going into extreme detail gives the impression that Eliezer isn’t terribly sorry for his behaviour. Maybe he isn’t, but from a PR perspective it would be better to look sorry. Sometimes it’s better to move on from an argument rather than trying to keep having it!
Further to that last point, I’ve foudn that Eliezer often engages with dissent by having a full argument with the person who is dissenting. Now this might be a good strategy from the point of view of persuading the dissenter: if I come in and say cyronics sux then a reasoned response might change my mind. But by engaging so thoroughly with dissent when it occurs it actually makes him look more fighty.
I’m thinking here about how it appears to outside observers: just as with a formal debate the goal isn’t to convince the person you are arguing with, it is to convince the audience, with PR the point isn’t to defeat the dissenter with your marvellous wordplay, it is to convince the audience that you are more sane than the dissenter.
Obviously these are my perceptions of how Eliezer comes across, I could easily be an exception.
Maybe he should have it going on, and damn the consequences. Sometimes you have to get up and say, these are the facts, you are wrong. Not the vapid temporising recommended by thakil.
Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.
Depends what the consequences are. Ignoring human status games can have some pretty bad consequences.
There are some times when a fight is worth having, and sometimes when it will do more harm than good. With regards to this controversy, I think that the latter approach will work better than the former. I could, of course, be wrong.
I am imaging here a reddit user who has vaguely heard of less wrong, and then reads rational wiki’s article on the basilisk (or now, I suppose, an xkcd reader who does similar). I think that their take away from that reddit argument posted by Eliezer might be to think again about the rational wiki article, but I don’t think they’d be particularly attracted to reading more of what Eliezer has written. Given that I rather enjoy the vast majority of what Eliezer has written, I feel like that’s a shame.
To you really think that’s how people discover websites?
I think it’s much more likely that someone clicks on a link to a LW post. If the post is interesting he might browse around LW and if he finds interesting content he will come back.
Not everyone. But I think an xkcd comic about the AI box experiment would be an opportunity to let everyone know about less wrong, not to have another argument about the basilisk which is a distraction.
“Damn the consequences” seems like an odd thing to say on a website that’s noted for its embrace of utilitarianism.
The expression “Damn the consequences” is generally, and in this case, a hyperbole. The consequences being dismissed are those the speaker considers worthy of dismissal in the face of the consequences that truly matter.
A non-figurative version of my comment would be that in the case at hand, putting the actual facts out, as clearly and forthrightly as possible, is the most important thing to do, and concern with supposed reputational damage from saying what is right and ignoring what is irrelevant would be not merely wasted motion, but actively harmful.
But then, I’ll excuse quite a lot of arrogance, in someone who has something to be arrogant about.
If it decreases the number of people who take you seriously and therefore learn bout the substance of your ideas its a bad strategy
And if it increases the number of people who take you seriously, and therefore learn about the substance of your ideas, it’s a good strategy. I’m sure we can all agree that if something were bad, it would be bad, and if it were good, it would be good. Your point?
I think there are potential benefits to both methods, and I also don’t think that they’re necessarily mutually exclusive strategies. At the moment, I would lean towards pure honesty and truth oriented explanation as being most important as well. I also think that he could do all of that while stilll minimizing the ‘status smackdown response’, which in that reddit post he did a little of, but I think it’s possible that he could have done a little more while still retaining full integrity with regards to telling it like it is.
But whatever happens, anything is better than that gag order silliness.