“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...
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.
“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.