Yeah if there’s one takeaway I have from this it’s that this post isn’t long enough. Oliver should have ran a Said sequence, directly addressing your and Zack and Duncan’s perspectives one by one. It’s the only way to ensure due process.
I think this is actually correct in the sense that any legible general non-site-consensus considerations that led to this post having a nontrivial amount of content should’ve been standalone posts unrelated to the case of Said (perhaps on the topic of motivations for possible site policies in general), made sufficiently in advance to settle whatever impression they leave. And conversely, a post like this shouldn’t need to be long, or else it’s probably not making a good case from principles already established on the site.
I think case-law is generally better than legislative law, so I disagree that it is generally a good idea to establish precedent for complicated calls like this without any actual specific case to ground that precedent in. Having a concrete case that you abstract for the purpose of future decisions is just too useful (and also just has a strong track record as being a really important component of functional judicial systems).
And then beyond that, of course digging into the details of something like this is always going to be long. Documents and arguments produced in even minor lawsuits often span hundreds of pages, as it turns out reality just has a huge amount of detail. Even after you have established better principles, actually applying those principles still takes a lot of time and evidence.
I do think it would be good to have some of the above more factored out for the future, though IDK, case-law seems to work fine by just referencing past cases as the source of a principle. I did consider titling this post something like “LessWrong v. Said” to make it feel easier to cite in the future, but it ultimately felt too much like LARPing the legal system.
Case law did come to mind, the point is that any takeaways worth keeping should be able to stand on their own, without the inciting illustration. Their absence doesn’t necessarily make the case weak or premature, and the background dynamics of case law causes the general principles made salient in earlier cases to keep getting reexamined in new contexts. As a result, any principles that still stand much later would also stand on their own, abstracted from specific cases.
So for example there’s discussion of affective conflationary alliance attractors that doesn’t need any case law, and could just be referenced from this post (if there was a standalone post discussing it), making it shorter. This is the kind of refactoring I’m gesturing at in my above (distortionary) steelmanning of lc’s point.
Ah, yeah, I agree that stuff like the conflationary alliance attractor explanation sure seem like they can stand on their own, I was thinking more of stuff like the “What does this mean for the rest of us?” section.
I might end up making a standalone post with those concepts in a few weeks when things have settled down, and doing so won’t feel like re-opening this thread.
Yeah if there’s one takeaway I have from this it’s that this post isn’t long enough. Oliver should have ran a Said sequence, directly addressing your and Zack and Duncan’s perspectives one by one. It’s the only way to ensure due process.
I think this is actually correct in the sense that any legible general non-site-consensus considerations that led to this post having a nontrivial amount of content should’ve been standalone posts unrelated to the case of Said (perhaps on the topic of motivations for possible site policies in general), made sufficiently in advance to settle whatever impression they leave. And conversely, a post like this shouldn’t need to be long, or else it’s probably not making a good case from principles already established on the site.
I think case-law is generally better than legislative law, so I disagree that it is generally a good idea to establish precedent for complicated calls like this without any actual specific case to ground that precedent in. Having a concrete case that you abstract for the purpose of future decisions is just too useful (and also just has a strong track record as being a really important component of functional judicial systems).
And then beyond that, of course digging into the details of something like this is always going to be long. Documents and arguments produced in even minor lawsuits often span hundreds of pages, as it turns out reality just has a huge amount of detail. Even after you have established better principles, actually applying those principles still takes a lot of time and evidence.
I do think it would be good to have some of the above more factored out for the future, though IDK, case-law seems to work fine by just referencing past cases as the source of a principle. I did consider titling this post something like “LessWrong v. Said” to make it feel easier to cite in the future, but it ultimately felt too much like LARPing the legal system.
Case law did come to mind, the point is that any takeaways worth keeping should be able to stand on their own, without the inciting illustration. Their absence doesn’t necessarily make the case weak or premature, and the background dynamics of case law causes the general principles made salient in earlier cases to keep getting reexamined in new contexts. As a result, any principles that still stand much later would also stand on their own, abstracted from specific cases.
So for example there’s discussion of affective conflationary alliance attractors that doesn’t need any case law, and could just be referenced from this post (if there was a standalone post discussing it), making it shorter. This is the kind of refactoring I’m gesturing at in my above (distortionary) steelmanning of lc’s point.
Ah, yeah, I agree that stuff like the conflationary alliance attractor explanation sure seem like they can stand on their own, I was thinking more of stuff like the “What does this mean for the rest of us?” section.
I might end up making a standalone post with those concepts in a few weeks when things have settled down, and doing so won’t feel like re-opening this thread.