And also the vehemence with which these viewpoints seemed to be held and defended.
I agree there’s something like vehemence and it’s made all the conversations unpleasant and stressful. Someone countered to me that if you perceive someone to be threatening the very integrity of your ability to have conversations, it’s appropriate to break frame and get up in arms. I’m not convinced it’s warranted here, but maybe...
“Tone and degree of charity are very important too” is a perspective I’d like to see represented more among LW users. (But if I’m in the minority, that’s fine and I don’t object to communities keeping their defining features if the majority feels that they are benefitting.)
I’m not sure about the exact proportion of people’s perspectives. There definitely is a cluster of people (myself included) who think “tone”, etc. are significant. (This group also might be more averse to getting into online conflicts.) I’m also concerned about the number of people who would counterfactually engage more on LessWrong, except they dislike the conversations they’ll end up in currently.
There are a bunch of conversations going on about the topic right (some in semi-private which might be public soonish). There’s support (at least on the LW team) for an Archipelago type solution where people can opt-in into one of 2 or 3 norm sets. (Though that doesn’t quite fix site-level things like the karma notifier settings.) One of those spaces should have much more “civility.”
Maybe I expressed it poorly, but what I meant was just that rationality is not an end in itself.
Yeah, that’s reasonable. I think that many people, while agreeing with that (or something close to it), get very afraid as soon as someone says it that because they fear it’s going to be used to justify distinctly not-rational/damages the whole endeavor of being rational. I have some of this fear myself.
It seems to me that rationality is extremely fragile and vulnerable, such that even though rationality might serves other goals, you have to be very uncompromising with regards to rationality, especially core things like hiding information from yourself (I was lightly opposed to the negative karma hiding myself) even if it that has appararant costs.
But it’s hard. I think there are tricky questions to answer, but the conversation currently can be civil/happen without vehemence.
There are a bunch of conversations going on about the topic right (some in semi-private which might be public soonish).
Cool! And I appreciate the difficulty of the task at hand. :)
When I model these conversations, one failure mode I’m worried about is that the “more civility” position gets lumped together with other things that Lesswrong is probably right to be scared of.
So, the following is to delineate my own views from things I’m not saying:
I could imagine being fine with Bridgewater culture in many (but not all) contexts. I hate that in “today’s climate” it is difficult to talk about certain topics. I think it’s often the case that people complaining about tone or about not feeling welcome shouldn’t expect to have their needs accommodated.
And yet I still find some features of what I perceive to be “rationalist culture” very off-putting.
I don’t think I phrased it as well in my first comment, but I can fully get behind what Raemon said elsewhere in this thread:
Some of the language about “holding truth sacred” [...] has came across to me with a tone of single-minded focus that feels like not being willing to put an upper bound on a heart transplant, rather than earnestly asking the question “how do we get the most valuable truthseeking the most effective way?”
So it’s not that I’m saying that I’d prefer a culture where truth-seeking is occasionally completely abandoned because of some other consideration. Just that the side that superficially looks more virtuous when it comes to truth-seeking (for instance because they boldly proclaim the importance of not being bothered by tone/tact, downvote notifications, etc.) isn’t automatically what’s best in the long run.
Edited to add: I admit it’s a delicate balance to walk. But sometimes, people are inconsiderate in a way that definitely harms discussions. The principle of charity isn’t just a thing in philosophy to make people feel good; there’s also some methodological use to it. Likewise with trying to understand that other people have different minds from one’s own. There has to be a way to point out inconsiderateness that doesn’t get met with a response a la “tact doesn’t matter because truth is the only virtue.”
It seems to me that rationality is extremely fragile and vulnerable, such that even though rationality might serves other goals, you have to be very uncompromising with regards to rationality, especially core things like hiding information from yourself (I was lightly opposed to the negative karma hiding myself) even if it that has appararant costs.
I agree with that. But people can have very different psychologies. Most people are prone to overconfidence, but some people are underconfident and beat themselves up too much over negative feedback. If the site offers an optional feature that is very useful for people of the latter type, it’s at least worth considering whether that’s an overall improvement. I wasn’t even annoyed that people didn’t like the feature; it was more about the way in which the person argued. Generally, more display of awareness of people having different psychologies would please me. :)
I agree there’s something like vehemence and it’s made all the conversations unpleasant and stressful. Someone countered to me that if you perceive someone to be threatening the very integrity of your ability to have conversations, it’s appropriate to break frame and get up in arms. I’m not convinced it’s warranted here, but maybe...
I’m not sure about the exact proportion of people’s perspectives. There definitely is a cluster of people (myself included) who think “tone”, etc. are significant. (This group also might be more averse to getting into online conflicts.) I’m also concerned about the number of people who would counterfactually engage more on LessWrong, except they dislike the conversations they’ll end up in currently.
There are a bunch of conversations going on about the topic right (some in semi-private which might be public soonish). There’s support (at least on the LW team) for an Archipelago type solution where people can opt-in into one of 2 or 3 norm sets. (Though that doesn’t quite fix site-level things like the karma notifier settings.) One of those spaces should have much more “civility.”
Yeah, that’s reasonable. I think that many people, while agreeing with that (or something close to it), get very afraid as soon as someone says it that because they fear it’s going to be used to justify distinctly not-rational/damages the whole endeavor of being rational. I have some of this fear myself.
It seems to me that rationality is extremely fragile and vulnerable, such that even though rationality might serves other goals, you have to be very uncompromising with regards to rationality, especially core things like hiding information from yourself (I was lightly opposed to the negative karma hiding myself) even if it that has appararant costs.
But it’s hard. I think there are tricky questions to answer, but the conversation currently can be civil/happen without vehemence.
Cool! And I appreciate the difficulty of the task at hand. :)
When I model these conversations, one failure mode I’m worried about is that the “more civility” position gets lumped together with other things that Lesswrong is probably right to be scared of.
So, the following is to delineate my own views from things I’m not saying:
I could imagine being fine with Bridgewater culture in many (but not all) contexts. I hate that in “today’s climate” it is difficult to talk about certain topics. I think it’s often the case that people complaining about tone or about not feeling welcome shouldn’t expect to have their needs accommodated.
And yet I still find some features of what I perceive to be “rationalist culture” very off-putting.
I don’t think I phrased it as well in my first comment, but I can fully get behind what Raemon said elsewhere in this thread:
So it’s not that I’m saying that I’d prefer a culture where truth-seeking is occasionally completely abandoned because of some other consideration. Just that the side that superficially looks more virtuous when it comes to truth-seeking (for instance because they boldly proclaim the importance of not being bothered by tone/tact, downvote notifications, etc.) isn’t automatically what’s best in the long run.
Edited to add: I admit it’s a delicate balance to walk. But sometimes, people are inconsiderate in a way that definitely harms discussions. The principle of charity isn’t just a thing in philosophy to make people feel good; there’s also some methodological use to it. Likewise with trying to understand that other people have different minds from one’s own. There has to be a way to point out inconsiderateness that doesn’t get met with a response a la “tact doesn’t matter because truth is the only virtue.”
I agree with that. But people can have very different psychologies. Most people are prone to overconfidence, but some people are underconfident and beat themselves up too much over negative feedback. If the site offers an optional feature that is very useful for people of the latter type, it’s at least worth considering whether that’s an overall improvement. I wasn’t even annoyed that people didn’t like the feature; it was more about the way in which the person argued. Generally, more display of awareness of people having different psychologies would please me. :)