Criticism is a pretty thankless job. People mostly do it for the status reward, but consider if you detect some potentially fatal flaw in an average post (not written by someone very high status), but you’re not sure because maybe the author has a good explanation or defense, or you misunderstood something. What’s your motivation to spend a lot of effort to write up your arguments? If you’re right, both the post and your efforts to debunk it are quickly forgotten, but if you’re wrong, then the post remains standing/popular/upvoted and your embarrassing comment is left for everyone to see. Writing up a quick “clarifying” question makes more sense from a status/strategic perspective, but I rarely do even that nowadays because I have so little to gain from it, and a lot to lose including my time (including expected time to handle any back and forth) and personal relations with the author (if I didn’t word my comment carefully enough). (And this was before today’s decision, which of course disincentivizes such low-effort criticism even more.)
A few more quick thoughts as I’m not very motivated to get into a long discussion given the likely irreversible nature of the decision:
If you get rid of people like Said or otherwise discourage low-effort criticism, you’ll just get less criticism not better criticism.
Low-effort and even “unproductive” criticism is an important signal, as it tells me at least one pair of eyes went over the post and this is the best they came up with (under low effort), and the authors’ response also tells me something about their attitude towards potential flaws in their ideas. (Compare with posts that have 0 or near 0 comments which isn’t uncommon even from relatively high profile authors like Will MacAskill.)
Turning into Sneer club doesn’t seem like a realistic failure mode for LW. The places like that on the web seem to be deliberately molded that way by their founders/admins. Fully turning into Linkedin also seems unlikely. For example I think any posts by Eliezer will always attract plenty of criticisms due to the status rewards available if someone pointed out a real flaw.
I think in some sense both making top-level posts and criticism are thankless jobs. What is your motivation to spend a lot of effort to write up your arguments in top-level post form in the first place? I feel like all the things you list as making things unrewarding apply to top-level posts just as much as writing critical comments (especially in as much as you are writing on a topic, or on a forum, where people treat any reasoning error or mistake with grave disdain and threats of social punishment).
If you get rid of people like Said or otherwise discourage low-effort criticism, you’ll just get less criticism not better criticism.
I don’t buy this. I am much more likely to want to comment on LessWrong (and other forums) if I don’t end up needing to deal with comment-sections that follow the patterns outlined in the OP, and I am generally someone who does lots of criticism and writes lots of critical comments. Many other commenters who I think write plenty of critique have reported similar.
Much of LessWrong has a pretty great reward-landscape for critique. I know that if I comment on a post by Steven Byrnes, or Buck, or Ryan Greenblatt or you, or Scott Alexander or many others, with pretty intense critique, that I will overall end up probably learning something, while also having a pretty good shot at correcting the public record on some important mistakes, and also ending up with real status and credibility within our extended ecosystem. Indeed, you personally come to mind as someone who I have come to respect largely as a result of writing good critiques and comments.
This is generally not the case with Said in my experience. It is very rare that I have a good time responding to any of his critiques, or reading the resulting comment threads. It burns an enormous amount of motivation, and by my best judgement of the situation the critiques do not end up particularly important or relevant when I try to evaluate the work many years later with more distance from the local discussion. They aren’t always wrong, but rarely have the structure of making my understanding actually much deeper.
By far the most likely way you end up with less critique is to make commenting on LessWrong feel generally unrewarding, drag everything into matches of attrition, and create an overall highly negative reward landscape for almost any kind of real or detailed contribution (whether top-level post or critique). If you want more critique, I think the goal is not to never punish critique, but to reward good critique. I am pretty happy with a bunch of things we’ve done for that over the years (like the annual review), and I would like to do more.
Top-level posts are not self-limiting (from a status perspective) in the way I described for a critical comment. If you come up with a great new idea, it can become a popular post read and reread by many over the years and you can become known for being its author. But if you come up with a great critical comment that debunks a post, the post will be downvoted and forgotten, and very few people will remember your role in debunking it.
I agree this is largely true for comments (largely by necessity of how comment visibility works)[1]. Indeed one thing I frequently encourage good commenters to do is to try to generalize their comments more and post them as top-level posts.
Dialogues were also another attempt at making it so that critique is less self-limiting, by making it so that a more conversation can happen at the same level as a post. I don’t think that plan succeeded amazingly well (largely because dialogues ended up hard to read, and hard to coordinate between authors), but it is a thing I care a lot about and expect to do more work on.
The popular comments section on the frontpage has also changed this situation a non-trivial amount. It is now the case that if you write a very good critique that causes a post to be downvoted, that this will still result in your comment getting a lot of visibility on the frontpage. Indeed, just this very moment we have a critique by sunwillrise with a bunch more karma than the post it is replying to prominent on the frontpage:
I disagree. Posts seem to have an outsized effect and will often be read a bunch before any solid criticisms appear. Then are spread even given high quality rebuttals… if those ever materialize.
I also think you’re referring to a group of people who write high quality posts typically and handle criticism well, while others don’t handle criticism well. Despite liking many of his posts, Duncan is an example of this.
As for Said specifically, I’ve been annoyed at reading his argumentation a few times, but then also find him saying something obvious and insightful that no one else pointed out anywhere in the comments. Losing that is unfortunate. I don’t think there’s enough “this seems wrong or questionable, why do you believe this?”
Said is definitely more rough than I’d like, but I also do think there’s a hole there that people are hesitant to fill.
So I do agree with Wei that you’ll just get less criticism, especially since I do feel like LessWrong has been growing implicitly less favorable towards quality critiques and more favorable towards vibey critiques.
That is, another dangerous attractor is the Twitter/X attractor, wherein arguments do exist but they matter to the overall discourse less than whether or not someone puts out something that directionally ‘sounds good’. I think this is much more likely than the sneer attractor or the linkedin attractor.
I also think that while the frontpage comments section has been good for surfacing critique, it encourages the “this sounds like the right vibe” substantially. As well as a mentality of reading the comments before the post, encouraging faction mentality.
FWIW I feel like I get sufficient status reward for criticism and this moderation decision basically won’t affect my behavior
This defended a paper where I was lead author, which got 8 million views on Twitter and was possibly the most important research output by my current employer, against criticism that it was p-hacking
This got me a bounty of $700 or so (which I think I declined or forgot about?) and citation in a follow-up post
This ratioed the OP by 3:1 and induced a thoughtful response by OP that helped me learn some nontrivial stats facts
This got 73 karma and was the most important counterpoint to what I still think are mostly wrong and overrated views on nanotech
This got 70 karma and only took about an hour to write, and could have been 5 minutes if I were a better writer
Now it’s true that most of these comments are super long and high effort. But it’s possible to get status reward for lower effort comments too, e.g. this, though it feels more like springing a “gotcha”. Many of the examples of Said’s critiques in the post at least seemed either deliberately inflammatory or unhelpful or targeted at some procedural point that isn’t maximally relevant.
As for risking being wrong, this is the only “bad” recent comment of mine I can remember, and I think you have to be pretty risk averse to be totally discouraged from commenting. If 30% of my comments were wrong I would probably feel discouraged but if it were 15% I’d just be less confident or hedge more. Probably the main change I’ll make is to shift away from this uncommon and very marginal type of comment that imposes costs on the author and might be wrong, to just downvote and move on.
What’s your motivation to spend a lot of effort to write up your arguments? If you’re right, both the post and your efforts to debunk it are quickly forgotten, but if you’re wrong, then the post remains standing/popular/upvoted and your embarrassing comment is left for everyone to see
If you didn’t have the motivation to write your arguments, why did you waste your time reading the post? If you debunk the author’s post, they’re unlikely to forget it. If you debunk numerous posts, then you may acquire a reputation. If you debunk a popular post, then many people see the debunking. You’ve also spared yourself the labor of debunking future posts based on the initial flawed idea. The reward for delivering valid and empathetic criticism is cultivating a community of truth seekers in which you and others may be willing and able to participate. Do you lack that vision? Do you have that outled elsewhere? Do you not care about developing community? Do you simply have better things to do and want to freeload on the community that others build?
Writing up a quick “clarifying” question makes more sense from a status/strategic perspective, but I rarely do even that nowadays because I have so little to gain from it, and a lot to lose including my time (including expected time to handle any back and forth)
You took the time to read the post, but you won’t write a “quick” clarifying question because you’re worried about wasting your time, and you think you have little to gain by understanding the content, so you’re depending on commenters like Said to do the job? If you have the time for just the initial question but not the back and forth, just write the first question and read the response. It takes little more time to put a brief friendly signal at the top of the comment than to leave it out. One may also practice writing in a non-contemptuous manner until it comes naturally, learn to skim posts and read only those clearly likely to be worth responding to. It is possible to deliver low-effort criticism without being a flagrant asshole about it.
If you get rid of people like Said or otherwise discourage low-effort criticism, you’ll just get less criticism not better criticism.
How do you know? Have you gathered data on this topic? Have you moderated a community? Have you observed the course of a substantial number of comparable moderation decisions in the past? What exactly is your model of the overall community reaction to such moderation decisions that leads you to this conclusion?
Low-effort and even “unproductive” criticism is an important signal
A signal of what? Important to whom? Are you really interested in what a low-effort troll would have to say in response to what you happen to write and post online?
For example I think any posts by Eliezer will always attract plenty of criticisms due to the status rewards available if someone pointed out a real flaw.
If posts worth criticicizing, due to their intellectual quality and interest of the community, will receive their due criticism, then why can’t weak and uninteresting posts can be ignored or engaged with by a charitable volunteer as a teacher might respond to a student in order to develop their capabilities? Targeting weak and forgettable posts for unwarranted criticism increases their prominence in a quite mechanistic fashion due to the high-variance upvotes, the intrigue of seeing why a comment was strongly downvoted, the fact that the LessWrong homepage boosts new and highly upvoted comments, and because the author may feel attacked and respond in an endless comment chain. There are selection effects on who stays in the community under these conditions. Solve for the equilibrium.
What’s your motivation to spend a lot of effort to write up your arguments? If you’re right, both the post and your efforts to debunk it are quickly forgotten, but if you’re wrong, then the post remains standing/popular/upvoted and your embarrassing comment is left for everyone to see.
If you’re right, the author and those who read the comments gain a better understanding; if you’re wrong, you do. I think framing criticism as a status contest hurts your motivation to comment more than it helps, here.
I think these status motivations/dynamics are active whether or not you consciously think of them, because your subconscious is already constantly making status calculations. It’s possible consciously framing things this way makes it even worse, “hurts your motivation to comment” even more, but it seems unavoidable if we want to explicitly discuss these dynamics. (Sometimes I do deliberately avoid bringing up status in a discussion due to such effects, but here the OP already talked about status a bunch, and it seems like an unavoidable issue anyway.)
status motivations/dynamics are active whether or not you consciously think of them
It’s more useful to frame this in terms of particular norms, because different contexts activate different norms. It’s possible to deliberatively cultivate or suppress specific norms in specific contexts (including those that take the form of status calculations, which is not all of them), shaping them in the long run rather than passively acknowledging their influence.
This is very indirect and so the feedback loops are terrible, it seems that usually you’d need to intervene at the background dynamics that would encourage/discourage the norms on their own (such as prevailing framings and terminology, making different actions or incentives more salient), not even intervening by encouraging/discouraging the norms directly.
I’m skeptical that it’s possible to use norms to suppress status calculations, and even more skeptical that it’s possible without huge cost/effort, beyond what typical LW members would be willing to pay. It’s hard for me to think of any groups or communities whose members have managed to suppress their status motivations/calculations. (It seems a lot more feasible/productive to exploit or redirect such motivations in various ways.) But if you have more to say about this, I’d be very curious to hear you out.
Not suppress status calculations of course, my point is about uses of being specific about particular norms that contribute to such status calculations (as well as norms that are not about status calculations). This should enable some agency in shaping incentives (by influencing specific norms according to their expected effects), rather than settling to cynically pointing out that status calculations are an immutable part of human nature, at least for most people. That is, the content of the status calculations is not immutable.
(It seems a lot more feasible/productive to exploit or redirect such motivations in various ways.)
Probably you are thinking about a particular application of norm-shaping that wouldn’t work, while I was responding to what I perceived as a framing suggesting a general dismissal of norm-shaping as a useful thing to consider. This parenthetical sure seems to thicken the plot. (Maybe you are somehow intending the same point, in a way I’m not seeing, while also being skeptical of me making the same point, meaning that you are not seeing that I’m making the same point, possibly because it wouldn’t be a good response to your own intended point that I’m misunderstanding...)
Social motivations seem unavoidable, but I don’t see why those social motivations would be unavoidably in terms of a single-dimensional “global status” score. Some of my earliest posts on lesswrong are my attempt to guess at plausible mechanisms of social motivation and I continue to not be convinced that this single dimensional status view is obligatory, rather than merely socially self-reinforcing.
I think the standard 2-dimensional dominance/prestige model of social status (which can be simplified into just prestige here since dominance mostly doesn’t apply to LW) has a lot going for it, and balances well between complexity and realism/explanatory power. But I would be happy to consider a more complex and realistic model if the situation calls for it (i.e., the simpler model misses something important in the current situation). Can you explain more what you think it’s missing here, if anything? (I did skim your post but nothing jumped out at me as adding a lot of value here.)
I buy that prestige is a meaningful and common first PCA dimension in communities where it’s already common, which does seem likely to be most groups. I don’t mean to convey anything beyond ongoing irritation at people assuming the mental parts are fundamentally unable to be reconfigured for something less trapped than a type that collapses to a single global ordering. One basic change would be having a per-relationship personal rating of “your prestige with me”, or even ” your prestige with me on a topic”. But also, I find it frustrating that a single status dimension is still common parlance when prestige/dominance is available. I’m not saying anything immediately relevant, I’m complaining that you said people are always making status calculations, and that that seems oversimplified and overconfident. Moreover if you’re correct, I see it as a problem to be fixed.
But also, I find it frustrating that a single status dimension is still common parlance when prestige/dominance is available. I’m not saying anything immediately relevant, I’m complaining that you said people are always making status calculations, and that that seems oversimplified and overconfident.
I used “status” instead of “prestige/dominance” because it’s shorter and I think most people on LW already know the prestige/dominance model of status and will understand that I’m not referring to a scalar quantity by “status”. People use single words to refer to quantities that are more complex than scalars all the time. For example when I say “he’s really artistic” I obviously don’t mean to suggest that there’s just a single dimension of artistry.
To try to guess at why you made this complaint, maybe you’re thinking that a lot of people do have an over-simplified single-dimensional model of status, and by using “status” I’m feeding into or failing to help correct this mistake. If so, can you point to some clear evidence of such mistakes, i.e., beyond just people using the word “status”?
you’ll just get less criticism not better criticism.
I believe this is simply false: instead of criticism like “Your idea is stupid and wrong,” you will get criticism like “you have failed to elaborate on this detail of your brilliant and insightful idea,” which is markedly better.
This comment seems overly sarcastic/snarky, or if not, written in a way that seems weirdly ambiguous. I think it would be good for you to phrase it more straightforwardly (at the present, any response would have to start with disentangling the ambiguity/irony/sarcasm, and also risk potential embarrassment as a result of misunderstanding).
Criticism is a pretty thankless job. People mostly do it for the status reward, but consider if you detect some potentially fatal flaw in an average post (not written by someone very high status), but you’re not sure because maybe the author has a good explanation or defense, or you misunderstood something. What’s your motivation to spend a lot of effort to write up your arguments? If you’re right, both the post and your efforts to debunk it are quickly forgotten, but if you’re wrong, then the post remains standing/popular/upvoted and your embarrassing comment is left for everyone to see. Writing up a quick “clarifying” question makes more sense from a status/strategic perspective, but I rarely do even that nowadays because I have so little to gain from it, and a lot to lose including my time (including expected time to handle any back and forth) and personal relations with the author (if I didn’t word my comment carefully enough). (And this was before today’s decision, which of course disincentivizes such low-effort criticism even more.)
A few more quick thoughts as I’m not very motivated to get into a long discussion given the likely irreversible nature of the decision:
If you get rid of people like Said or otherwise discourage low-effort criticism, you’ll just get less criticism not better criticism.
Low-effort and even “unproductive” criticism is an important signal, as it tells me at least one pair of eyes went over the post and this is the best they came up with (under low effort), and the authors’ response also tells me something about their attitude towards potential flaws in their ideas. (Compare with posts that have 0 or near 0 comments which isn’t uncommon even from relatively high profile authors like Will MacAskill.)
Turning into Sneer club doesn’t seem like a realistic failure mode for LW. The places like that on the web seem to be deliberately molded that way by their founders/admins. Fully turning into Linkedin also seems unlikely. For example I think any posts by Eliezer will always attract plenty of criticisms due to the status rewards available if someone pointed out a real flaw.
I think in some sense both making top-level posts and criticism are thankless jobs. What is your motivation to spend a lot of effort to write up your arguments in top-level post form in the first place? I feel like all the things you list as making things unrewarding apply to top-level posts just as much as writing critical comments (especially in as much as you are writing on a topic, or on a forum, where people treat any reasoning error or mistake with grave disdain and threats of social punishment).
I don’t buy this. I am much more likely to want to comment on LessWrong (and other forums) if I don’t end up needing to deal with comment-sections that follow the patterns outlined in the OP, and I am generally someone who does lots of criticism and writes lots of critical comments. Many other commenters who I think write plenty of critique have reported similar.
Much of LessWrong has a pretty great reward-landscape for critique. I know that if I comment on a post by Steven Byrnes, or Buck, or Ryan Greenblatt or you, or Scott Alexander or many others, with pretty intense critique, that I will overall end up probably learning something, while also having a pretty good shot at correcting the public record on some important mistakes, and also ending up with real status and credibility within our extended ecosystem. Indeed, you personally come to mind as someone who I have come to respect largely as a result of writing good critiques and comments.
This is generally not the case with Said in my experience. It is very rare that I have a good time responding to any of his critiques, or reading the resulting comment threads. It burns an enormous amount of motivation, and by my best judgement of the situation the critiques do not end up particularly important or relevant when I try to evaluate the work many years later with more distance from the local discussion. They aren’t always wrong, but rarely have the structure of making my understanding actually much deeper.
By far the most likely way you end up with less critique is to make commenting on LessWrong feel generally unrewarding, drag everything into matches of attrition, and create an overall highly negative reward landscape for almost any kind of real or detailed contribution (whether top-level post or critique). If you want more critique, I think the goal is not to never punish critique, but to reward good critique. I am pretty happy with a bunch of things we’ve done for that over the years (like the annual review), and I would like to do more.
Top-level posts are not self-limiting (from a status perspective) in the way I described for a critical comment. If you come up with a great new idea, it can become a popular post read and reread by many over the years and you can become known for being its author. But if you come up with a great critical comment that debunks a post, the post will be downvoted and forgotten, and very few people will remember your role in debunking it.
I agree this is largely true for comments (largely by necessity of how comment visibility works)[1]. Indeed one thing I frequently encourage good commenters to do is to try to generalize their comments more and post them as top-level posts.
And as far as I can tell this is an enormously successful mechanism for getting highly-upvoted posts on LessWrong. Indeed, I would classify the current second most-upvoted post of all time on LessWrong as a post of this kind: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer
Dialogues were also another attempt at making it so that critique is less self-limiting, by making it so that a more conversation can happen at the same level as a post. I don’t think that plan succeeded amazingly well (largely because dialogues ended up hard to read, and hard to coordinate between authors), but it is a thing I care a lot about and expect to do more work on.
The popular comments section on the frontpage has also changed this situation a non-trivial amount. It is now the case that if you write a very good critique that causes a post to be downvoted, that this will still result in your comment getting a lot of visibility on the frontpage. Indeed, just this very moment we have a critique by sunwillrise with a bunch more karma than the post it is replying to prominent on the frontpage:
Though I do think it’s been changing and we’ve made some improvements on this dimension, see my last paragraph
I disagree. Posts seem to have an outsized effect and will often be read a bunch before any solid criticisms appear. Then are spread even given high quality rebuttals… if those ever materialize.
I also think you’re referring to a group of people who write high quality posts typically and handle criticism well, while others don’t handle criticism well. Despite liking many of his posts, Duncan is an example of this.
As for Said specifically, I’ve been annoyed at reading his argumentation a few times, but then also find him saying something obvious and insightful that no one else pointed out anywhere in the comments. Losing that is unfortunate. I don’t think there’s enough “this seems wrong or questionable, why do you believe this?”
Said is definitely more rough than I’d like, but I also do think there’s a hole there that people are hesitant to fill.
So I do agree with Wei that you’ll just get less criticism, especially since I do feel like LessWrong has been growing implicitly less favorable towards quality critiques and more favorable towards vibey critiques. That is, another dangerous attractor is the Twitter/X attractor, wherein arguments do exist but they matter to the overall discourse less than whether or not someone puts out something that directionally ‘sounds good’. I think this is much more likely than the sneer attractor or the linkedin attractor.
I also think that while the frontpage comments section has been good for surfacing critique, it encourages the “this sounds like the right vibe” substantially. As well as a mentality of reading the comments before the post, encouraging faction mentality.
FWIW I feel like I get sufficient status reward for criticism and this moderation decision basically won’t affect my behavior
This defended a paper where I was lead author, which got 8 million views on Twitter and was possibly the most important research output by my current employer, against criticism that it was p-hacking
This got me a bounty of $700 or so (which I think I declined or forgot about?) and citation in a follow-up post
This ratioed the OP by 3:1 and induced a thoughtful response by OP that helped me learn some nontrivial stats facts
This got 73 karma and was the most important counterpoint to what I still think are mostly wrong and overrated views on nanotech
This got 70 karma and only took about an hour to write, and could have been 5 minutes if I were a better writer
Now it’s true that most of these comments are super long and high effort. But it’s possible to get status reward for lower effort comments too, e.g. this, though it feels more like springing a “gotcha”. Many of the examples of Said’s critiques in the post at least seemed either deliberately inflammatory or unhelpful or targeted at some procedural point that isn’t maximally relevant.
As for risking being wrong, this is the only “bad” recent comment of mine I can remember, and I think you have to be pretty risk averse to be totally discouraged from commenting. If 30% of my comments were wrong I would probably feel discouraged but if it were 15% I’d just be less confident or hedge more. Probably the main change I’ll make is to shift away from this uncommon and very marginal type of comment that imposes costs on the author and might be wrong, to just downvote and move on.
If you didn’t have the motivation to write your arguments, why did you waste your time reading the post? If you debunk the author’s post, they’re unlikely to forget it. If you debunk numerous posts, then you may acquire a reputation. If you debunk a popular post, then many people see the debunking. You’ve also spared yourself the labor of debunking future posts based on the initial flawed idea. The reward for delivering valid and empathetic criticism is cultivating a community of truth seekers in which you and others may be willing and able to participate. Do you lack that vision? Do you have that outled elsewhere? Do you not care about developing community? Do you simply have better things to do and want to freeload on the community that others build?
You took the time to read the post, but you won’t write a “quick” clarifying question because you’re worried about wasting your time, and you think you have little to gain by understanding the content, so you’re depending on commenters like Said to do the job? If you have the time for just the initial question but not the back and forth, just write the first question and read the response. It takes little more time to put a brief friendly signal at the top of the comment than to leave it out. One may also practice writing in a non-contemptuous manner until it comes naturally, learn to skim posts and read only those clearly likely to be worth responding to. It is possible to deliver low-effort criticism without being a flagrant asshole about it.
How do you know? Have you gathered data on this topic? Have you moderated a community? Have you observed the course of a substantial number of comparable moderation decisions in the past? What exactly is your model of the overall community reaction to such moderation decisions that leads you to this conclusion?
A signal of what? Important to whom? Are you really interested in what a low-effort troll would have to say in response to what you happen to write and post online?
If posts worth criticicizing, due to their intellectual quality and interest of the community, will receive their due criticism, then why can’t weak and uninteresting posts can be ignored or engaged with by a charitable volunteer as a teacher might respond to a student in order to develop their capabilities? Targeting weak and forgettable posts for unwarranted criticism increases their prominence in a quite mechanistic fashion due to the high-variance upvotes, the intrigue of seeing why a comment was strongly downvoted, the fact that the LessWrong homepage boosts new and highly upvoted comments, and because the author may feel attacked and respond in an endless comment chain. There are selection effects on who stays in the community under these conditions. Solve for the equilibrium.
If you’re right, the author and those who read the comments gain a better understanding; if you’re wrong, you do. I think framing criticism as a status contest hurts your motivation to comment more than it helps, here.
I think these status motivations/dynamics are active whether or not you consciously think of them, because your subconscious is already constantly making status calculations. It’s possible consciously framing things this way makes it even worse, “hurts your motivation to comment” even more, but it seems unavoidable if we want to explicitly discuss these dynamics. (Sometimes I do deliberately avoid bringing up status in a discussion due to such effects, but here the OP already talked about status a bunch, and it seems like an unavoidable issue anyway.)
Making status calculations at all times is a choice you have the right to make, but in my opinion it’s a bad one.
It’s more useful to frame this in terms of particular norms, because different contexts activate different norms. It’s possible to deliberatively cultivate or suppress specific norms in specific contexts (including those that take the form of status calculations, which is not all of them), shaping them in the long run rather than passively acknowledging their influence.
This is very indirect and so the feedback loops are terrible, it seems that usually you’d need to intervene at the background dynamics that would encourage/discourage the norms on their own (such as prevailing framings and terminology, making different actions or incentives more salient), not even intervening by encouraging/discouraging the norms directly.
I’m skeptical that it’s possible to use norms to suppress status calculations, and even more skeptical that it’s possible without huge cost/effort, beyond what typical LW members would be willing to pay. It’s hard for me to think of any groups or communities whose members have managed to suppress their status motivations/calculations. (It seems a lot more feasible/productive to exploit or redirect such motivations in various ways.) But if you have more to say about this, I’d be very curious to hear you out.
Not suppress status calculations of course, my point is about uses of being specific about particular norms that contribute to such status calculations (as well as norms that are not about status calculations). This should enable some agency in shaping incentives (by influencing specific norms according to their expected effects), rather than settling to cynically pointing out that status calculations are an immutable part of human nature, at least for most people. That is, the content of the status calculations is not immutable.
Probably you are thinking about a particular application of norm-shaping that wouldn’t work, while I was responding to what I perceived as a framing suggesting a general dismissal of norm-shaping as a useful thing to consider. This parenthetical sure seems to thicken the plot. (Maybe you are somehow intending the same point, in a way I’m not seeing, while also being skeptical of me making the same point, meaning that you are not seeing that I’m making the same point, possibly because it wouldn’t be a good response to your own intended point that I’m misunderstanding...)
Ok, I think we’re not disagreeing, I just misunderstood your comment. Thanks for clarifying.
Social motivations seem unavoidable, but I don’t see why those social motivations would be unavoidably in terms of a single-dimensional “global status” score. Some of my earliest posts on lesswrong are my attempt to guess at plausible mechanisms of social motivation and I continue to not be convinced that this single dimensional status view is obligatory, rather than merely socially self-reinforcing.
I think the standard 2-dimensional dominance/prestige model of social status (which can be simplified into just prestige here since dominance mostly doesn’t apply to LW) has a lot going for it, and balances well between complexity and realism/explanatory power. But I would be happy to consider a more complex and realistic model if the situation calls for it (i.e., the simpler model misses something important in the current situation). Can you explain more what you think it’s missing here, if anything? (I did skim your post but nothing jumped out at me as adding a lot of value here.)
I buy that prestige is a meaningful and common first PCA dimension in communities where it’s already common, which does seem likely to be most groups. I don’t mean to convey anything beyond ongoing irritation at people assuming the mental parts are fundamentally unable to be reconfigured for something less trapped than a type that collapses to a single global ordering. One basic change would be having a per-relationship personal rating of “your prestige with me”, or even ” your prestige with me on a topic”. But also, I find it frustrating that a single status dimension is still common parlance when prestige/dominance is available. I’m not saying anything immediately relevant, I’m complaining that you said people are always making status calculations, and that that seems oversimplified and overconfident. Moreover if you’re correct, I see it as a problem to be fixed.
I used “status” instead of “prestige/dominance” because it’s shorter and I think most people on LW already know the prestige/dominance model of status and will understand that I’m not referring to a scalar quantity by “status”. People use single words to refer to quantities that are more complex than scalars all the time. For example when I say “he’s really artistic” I obviously don’t mean to suggest that there’s just a single dimension of artistry.
To try to guess at why you made this complaint, maybe you’re thinking that a lot of people do have an over-simplified single-dimensional model of status, and by using “status” I’m feeding into or failing to help correct this mistake. If so, can you point to some clear evidence of such mistakes, i.e., beyond just people using the word “status”?
the latter seems right, I don’t have a handy link, but I’ll be on the lookout for concrete examples and come back to this, eta 2 weeks, / or * 2
I believe this is simply false: instead of criticism like “Your idea is stupid and wrong,” you will get criticism like “you have failed to elaborate on this detail of your brilliant and insightful idea,” which is markedly better.
This comment seems overly sarcastic/snarky, or if not, written in a way that seems weirdly ambiguous. I think it would be good for you to phrase it more straightforwardly (at the present, any response would have to start with disentangling the ambiguity/irony/sarcasm, and also risk potential embarrassment as a result of misunderstanding).