Jake, you may have the potential to become a productive long-term contributor to this site. You definitely have the potential to alienate all your readers and get yourself downvoted into oblivion, since that’s already happening. Why is it happening?
First, you’re political, you have a strong political agenda. That inherently causes you problems regardless of the agenda, because political activists make demands, and everyone is already busy living their lives. People are not strolling through life waiting for someone to grab them by the throat and shout the truth at them. So you definitely need to go much slower here, rather than dumping a reading list on everyone and saying “these authors solved politics”, while simultaneously saying that the truth about these matters is obvious and simple.
Second, your immediate response to getting into difficulty is to start arguing, at considerable length, that the site should function differently, that it should be possible to make posts of unlimited length, that the people who downvoted you are authoritarians and communist idiots, etc. You are exhibiting an instant persecution complex. That is something you must outgrow if you want to be politically effective, and not just a righteous street preacher ignored by passers-by.
That inherently causes you problems regardless of the agenda, because political activists make demands, and everyone is already busy living their lives.
It’s like a low-information mind saying “I’m sick and tired of having AIDS, take your virus-destroying nanobot offer and go bother someone else!” I guess in that situation, you kind of scratch your head, and then say something like “OK, Darwin at work. Seeya.”
Well, see, currently you don’t have any empirical evidence that your nanobot cure won’t kill me swiftly and I suspect it would, so your apparent insistence that I inject myself with it right here on the spot sounds a lot like those black plague merchants to me. I would be in favor of testing the nanobot cure (assuming the nanobots aren’t self replicating), but please don’t start the testing with life humans.
You don’t get to make a claim and then place the burden on others to step up and shoot holes in it. Unlike people, bold claims start out guilty and remain so until proven innocent.
Instead, start by providing reasonably non-ambiguous ways to measure constructs like “properly-functioning”, “freedom” and “production”, then show research or analyses supporting the correlation you want to claim. (The short form of the foregoing: “citation needed”.)
Drop the second part of the claim which is pure emotional appeal and metaphor (“machinery”, “supreme”, “violent”), but otherwise content-free.
Assuming the correlation exists, also investigate alternative explanations, acknowledging when one of these cannot be ruled immediately out by argument or by observation, so that further tests are needed.
I don’t want to say too much about the pros and cons of the LW interface, except that entry barriers do help to keep out spammers, crackpots, cultists, and others who would only come to talk, not to listen. It’s proving possible to talk with you, so, we’ll see how that ends up. I’ll let other people who have more insight into the logic of LW’s existing arrangements defend them.
I’m more interested in how your politics will play out here. I see you as a representative of a faction of opinion I’ll call Rational Transhuman Freedom. You mention Hayek and Ron Paul, but you also talk about nanobots and AGIs, and you’re big on rationality. It’s extropian Objectivism.
I have had to ask myself, what is the political sensibility of Less Wrong? I don’t mean the affiliations named in a poll, I mean the political agenda that is implicitly being expressed by people’s attitudes and priorities. In this regard, I find the emphasis on identifying which charities are the most important and effective to be the best clue. People just don’t debate policy, and how the state should act, at all. Instead they debate what the most effectively altruistic use of their spare change would be. I don’t actually know how to characterize this as a political attitude—perhaps it’s pre-political, it’s a sign of a community not yet forced to engage with the state and with political ideologies—but it’s certainly not hipster apathy.
Of course there is also an aversion to political discussion, as a big distraction, as the topic where people are most likely to become stupid, and as just not a productive way to test one’s rationality skills. On the Singularity side, there is also yet another transpolitical attitude present, a sort of monastic-slash-alchemical desire to not become entangled with the fallen world of mundane affairs, in favor of performing the great working whereby a friendly demiurge will be invoked to set it right. The world can be awful but that doesn’t mean you should run off and join the melee, because it has always been like this, and the real change will only come from superintelligence.
However, there truly are people here who are eager to use rationality to make a better world right now, and this is where LW might eventually develop some explicit stances regarding pre-Singularity politics. I consider the recent posts about Leverage Research to be one emerging political current (it had precursors, e.g. in Giles’s series on “Altruist Support”); it’s a maximalist expression of the impulse behind the discussion about optimal charities. Jake, when it comes to people making a political choice, I think this is the real competitor to the faction of Rational Transhuman Freedom,and it will be very interesting to see how that dialogue plays out, if the discussion ever manages to rise to that level.
These are competing utopianisms. Probably they express different aspects of the human utility function. Partisans of the Freedom agenda can be very eloquent when they talk about suffering caused by government, but the flip side of their political methodology is that you’re not allowed to use government to solve problems either, and this is what galls the defenders of more familiar, “statist” ideas of governance. Pursuing the Freedom agenda ends up mostly being about giving individuals a chance to flourish under their own power.
The other utopianism, exemplified by Leverage’s plan for the world, is the one that wants to solve everyone’s problems. Leverage does not presently talk about coercion. Instead, they are psychological utopians, who think that if they’re smart enough, they can figure out how to get everyone to work together and behave decently towards each other. Advocates of Freedom are willing to talk about the wonders of spontaneous order, but politically they leave the details to the market and to civil society; their agenda is to starve the beast, topple Leviathan, pare back the state. As I said, it remains to be seen how this polarity will play out here, but certainly history shows that it can become a deadly rivalry.
Another intellectual challenge that might show up for you here is the critique of libertarianism produced by “Mencius Moldbug”, who is making a serious effort to revive pre-democratic ideas about how society ought to work. Mencius’s argument is that given human nature, there must always be authority, and we are better off when we have a political culture which accepts this, and understands that the good life is to be found by having good rulers. Vladimir_M is a Mencius reader, and there must be others here.
I believe it’s rational to allow them to talk. I’m a free speech absolutist.
No you are not. You do not believe that random strangers should be able to enter your house at their convenience so that they may loudly share their opinions with you in your living room. Lesswrong is similarly not obliged to provide a forum for content that provides negative utility to its users.
Seriously, dude, calm down. I agree with your politics (the majority, albeit a small majority, of LW is libertarian) and I still find you obnoxious. If convincing people that your politics is best is your goal, consider how that goal is best met: Is that answer really writing walls of aggressive text on a site that has a small and overtly apolitical userbase?
This is not a political forum. Politics is generally considered off-topic here, and statements of political views will generally be downvoted immediately regardless of other content, largely for reasons outlined in this post.
that proclaimed itself as a “Crocker’s Rules” adherent.
“Crocker’s Rules” (if they can even apply to an entire forum) do not apply here. Do not assume someone is following Crocker’s Rules in a discussion unless they have declared it in a parent comment. See Crocker’s Rules.
I generally thought the consensus at LW was that adhering to Crocker’s rules was a beneficial thing.
I think it’s a beneficial thing. That being said, I believe it does state specifically, somewhere in the FAQ, that a poster has to declare Crocker’s Rule over their discussion before it’s okay to state things rudely. And even then, unnecessary, uncalled-for rudeness is not okay.
A lot of it boils down to this: most people, including us on LW however hard we try to improve our rationality, are neither free of emotions nor in perfect control of them. What I mean by that is “rudeness” and things that come across as excessively critical leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. Including mine. The discussion may be interesting, and my ideal strategy is to respond anyway in a calm, polite manner (and hope the other person will do likewise.) However, there’s still a primitive, emotional part of my brain that sees sentences unilaterally criticizing something and flinches away. It’s not a good thing. It’s not rational. But it’s human nature, and as of yet we haven’t delved deep enough to change it.
Examples of things my aforesaid primitive emotional brain finds painful to read:
The hipster attitude toward politics might be what I encounter in a brainless beer-filled bar full of drunk idiots.
and
intellectually weak downvoters.
(As an aside, I don’t actually downvote people at all as a general rule, mainly because of the phenomena I’ve observed in myself, where if one of my posts gets downvoted I suddenly start feeling like everyone hates me. Even a little bit of this persecution complex kind of thing is not conducive to me actually wanting to have a reasonable discussion.)
Also, I haven’t read Hayek or any of the other people you mentioned. The area generally referred to as “politics” is not something my brain is structured to find interesting. Still, I would be interesting in hearing why you hold the views you do, i.e. what evidence about the world you have considered in order to settle on those particular views. (This came across rather fragmented in the series of back-and-forth posts.)
I’m sad to say that I don’t think your definition of rationality is very close to my own. I tend to think that death and human suffering is something that should be identified and avoided, for instance.
So does pretty much everyone on LW. We just disagree on methods. Remember that anyone who has a different opinion that you holds that opinion (usually) for what they consider to be a good reason, and can often pull up evidence to why they think it’s a effective belief or opinion. Maybe in some of the cases where you disagree with many LWers, you really do have information that they lack...but lack of knowledge is not the same thing as “intellectual weakness”, and accusing people of ignorance as if it’s a moral failing is not going to make them feel kindly towards the discussion. There are an awful lot of fascinating things to learn about aside from politics, and never enough time to learn everything...the fact that some people have read books about physics instead of Hayek is not a moral failing.
That being said, I believe it does state specifically, somewhere in the FAQ, that a poster has to declare Crocker’s Rule over their discussion before it’s okay to state things rudely. And even then, unnecessary, uncalled-for rudeness is not okay.
Strictly speaking, once someone has declared Crocker’s Rules all rudeness is called for.
Under Crocker’s Rules, rudeness is ignored, and is thus a waste of bandwidth. Therefore, if one posts a comment consisting of nothing but rudeness, one might as well not post at all.
Under Crocker’s Rules, rudeness is ignored, and is thus a waste of bandwidth. Therefore, if one posts a comment consisting of nothing but rudeness, one might as well not post at all.
Where by “consisting of nothing but rudeness” you also mean “consisting of rudeness that itself does not also represent information”?
Sort of, except that I’d amend “information” to “useful information”, because, mathematically speaking, rudeness does represent information (in that it takes up bytes on the network). But when an ideally Crockered (if that’s a word) reader encounters rudeness, he ignores it, thus reducing its informational content to zero.
For example, when one reads something like, “only a total moron like yourself would commit the obvious ad hoc fallacy in line 5 of your argument, and also, you smell”, he interprets it as ”...ad hoc fallacy in line 5...”, and is able to respond accordingly (or update his beliefs, as needed).
I generally thought the consensus at LW was that adhering to Crocker’s rules was a beneficial thing.
No. I don’t respect Crocker’s rules from either side (that is someone declaring Crocker’s rules does not completely remove social consequences for treating them thus).
The bit in the parentheses. Other readers of the message and even the Crocker’s declarer often still take offense if Crocker’s rules are actually followed. Most of the declaration of Crocker’s rules seems to be about the signal of strength that the utterance gives.
In the interests of charity, I usually interpret the declaration as primarily an attempt at precommitting to an endorsed course of action (that is, wanting “honest” feedback) rather than at signalling to others that one practices that course of action (and thus has the various admirable properties that implies), but I’ll admit that the evidence seems to point more strongly to the latter.
Jake, you may have the potential to become a productive long-term contributor to this site. You definitely have the potential to alienate all your readers and get yourself downvoted into oblivion, since that’s already happening. Why is it happening?
First, you’re political, you have a strong political agenda. That inherently causes you problems regardless of the agenda, because political activists make demands, and everyone is already busy living their lives. People are not strolling through life waiting for someone to grab them by the throat and shout the truth at them. So you definitely need to go much slower here, rather than dumping a reading list on everyone and saying “these authors solved politics”, while simultaneously saying that the truth about these matters is obvious and simple.
Second, your immediate response to getting into difficulty is to start arguing, at considerable length, that the site should function differently, that it should be possible to make posts of unlimited length, that the people who downvoted you are authoritarians and communist idiots, etc. You are exhibiting an instant persecution complex. That is something you must outgrow if you want to be politically effective, and not just a righteous street preacher ignored by passers-by.
I like this sentence.
x
Well, see, currently you don’t have any empirical evidence that your nanobot cure won’t kill me swiftly and I suspect it would, so your apparent insistence that I inject myself with it right here on the spot sounds a lot like those black plague merchants to me. I would be in favor of testing the nanobot cure (assuming the nanobots aren’t self replicating), but please don’t start the testing with life humans.
x
You don’t get to make a claim and then place the burden on others to step up and shoot holes in it. Unlike people, bold claims start out guilty and remain so until proven innocent.
Instead, start by providing reasonably non-ambiguous ways to measure constructs like “properly-functioning”, “freedom” and “production”, then show research or analyses supporting the correlation you want to claim. (The short form of the foregoing: “citation needed”.)
Drop the second part of the claim which is pure emotional appeal and metaphor (“machinery”, “supreme”, “violent”), but otherwise content-free.
Assuming the correlation exists, also investigate alternative explanations, acknowledging when one of these cannot be ruled immediately out by argument or by observation, so that further tests are needed.
x
x
I don’t want to say too much about the pros and cons of the LW interface, except that entry barriers do help to keep out spammers, crackpots, cultists, and others who would only come to talk, not to listen. It’s proving possible to talk with you, so, we’ll see how that ends up. I’ll let other people who have more insight into the logic of LW’s existing arrangements defend them.
I’m more interested in how your politics will play out here. I see you as a representative of a faction of opinion I’ll call Rational Transhuman Freedom. You mention Hayek and Ron Paul, but you also talk about nanobots and AGIs, and you’re big on rationality. It’s extropian Objectivism.
I have had to ask myself, what is the political sensibility of Less Wrong? I don’t mean the affiliations named in a poll, I mean the political agenda that is implicitly being expressed by people’s attitudes and priorities. In this regard, I find the emphasis on identifying which charities are the most important and effective to be the best clue. People just don’t debate policy, and how the state should act, at all. Instead they debate what the most effectively altruistic use of their spare change would be. I don’t actually know how to characterize this as a political attitude—perhaps it’s pre-political, it’s a sign of a community not yet forced to engage with the state and with political ideologies—but it’s certainly not hipster apathy.
Of course there is also an aversion to political discussion, as a big distraction, as the topic where people are most likely to become stupid, and as just not a productive way to test one’s rationality skills. On the Singularity side, there is also yet another transpolitical attitude present, a sort of monastic-slash-alchemical desire to not become entangled with the fallen world of mundane affairs, in favor of performing the great working whereby a friendly demiurge will be invoked to set it right. The world can be awful but that doesn’t mean you should run off and join the melee, because it has always been like this, and the real change will only come from superintelligence.
However, there truly are people here who are eager to use rationality to make a better world right now, and this is where LW might eventually develop some explicit stances regarding pre-Singularity politics. I consider the recent posts about Leverage Research to be one emerging political current (it had precursors, e.g. in Giles’s series on “Altruist Support”); it’s a maximalist expression of the impulse behind the discussion about optimal charities. Jake, when it comes to people making a political choice, I think this is the real competitor to the faction of Rational Transhuman Freedom,and it will be very interesting to see how that dialogue plays out, if the discussion ever manages to rise to that level.
These are competing utopianisms. Probably they express different aspects of the human utility function. Partisans of the Freedom agenda can be very eloquent when they talk about suffering caused by government, but the flip side of their political methodology is that you’re not allowed to use government to solve problems either, and this is what galls the defenders of more familiar, “statist” ideas of governance. Pursuing the Freedom agenda ends up mostly being about giving individuals a chance to flourish under their own power.
The other utopianism, exemplified by Leverage’s plan for the world, is the one that wants to solve everyone’s problems. Leverage does not presently talk about coercion. Instead, they are psychological utopians, who think that if they’re smart enough, they can figure out how to get everyone to work together and behave decently towards each other. Advocates of Freedom are willing to talk about the wonders of spontaneous order, but politically they leave the details to the market and to civil society; their agenda is to starve the beast, topple Leviathan, pare back the state. As I said, it remains to be seen how this polarity will play out here, but certainly history shows that it can become a deadly rivalry.
Another intellectual challenge that might show up for you here is the critique of libertarianism produced by “Mencius Moldbug”, who is making a serious effort to revive pre-democratic ideas about how society ought to work. Mencius’s argument is that given human nature, there must always be authority, and we are better off when we have a political culture which accepts this, and understands that the good life is to be found by having good rulers. Vladimir_M is a Mencius reader, and there must be others here.
x
x
No you are not. You do not believe that random strangers should be able to enter your house at their convenience so that they may loudly share their opinions with you in your living room. Lesswrong is similarly not obliged to provide a forum for content that provides negative utility to its users.
x
Seriously, dude, calm down. I agree with your politics (the majority, albeit a small majority, of LW is libertarian) and I still find you obnoxious. If convincing people that your politics is best is your goal, consider how that goal is best met: Is that answer really writing walls of aggressive text on a site that has a small and overtly apolitical userbase?
This is not a political forum. Politics is generally considered off-topic here, and statements of political views will generally be downvoted immediately regardless of other content, largely for reasons outlined in this post.
“Crocker’s Rules” (if they can even apply to an entire forum) do not apply here. Do not assume someone is following Crocker’s Rules in a discussion unless they have declared it in a parent comment. See Crocker’s Rules.
Of course they can so apply. Simply make it a condition of entry...
I think I was mostly wondering about the grammar. I agree you can do that.
x
I think it’s a beneficial thing. That being said, I believe it does state specifically, somewhere in the FAQ, that a poster has to declare Crocker’s Rule over their discussion before it’s okay to state things rudely. And even then, unnecessary, uncalled-for rudeness is not okay.
A lot of it boils down to this: most people, including us on LW however hard we try to improve our rationality, are neither free of emotions nor in perfect control of them. What I mean by that is “rudeness” and things that come across as excessively critical leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. Including mine. The discussion may be interesting, and my ideal strategy is to respond anyway in a calm, polite manner (and hope the other person will do likewise.) However, there’s still a primitive, emotional part of my brain that sees sentences unilaterally criticizing something and flinches away. It’s not a good thing. It’s not rational. But it’s human nature, and as of yet we haven’t delved deep enough to change it.
Examples of things my aforesaid primitive emotional brain finds painful to read:
and
(As an aside, I don’t actually downvote people at all as a general rule, mainly because of the phenomena I’ve observed in myself, where if one of my posts gets downvoted I suddenly start feeling like everyone hates me. Even a little bit of this persecution complex kind of thing is not conducive to me actually wanting to have a reasonable discussion.)
Also, I haven’t read Hayek or any of the other people you mentioned. The area generally referred to as “politics” is not something my brain is structured to find interesting. Still, I would be interesting in hearing why you hold the views you do, i.e. what evidence about the world you have considered in order to settle on those particular views. (This came across rather fragmented in the series of back-and-forth posts.)
So does pretty much everyone on LW. We just disagree on methods. Remember that anyone who has a different opinion that you holds that opinion (usually) for what they consider to be a good reason, and can often pull up evidence to why they think it’s a effective belief or opinion. Maybe in some of the cases where you disagree with many LWers, you really do have information that they lack...but lack of knowledge is not the same thing as “intellectual weakness”, and accusing people of ignorance as if it’s a moral failing is not going to make them feel kindly towards the discussion. There are an awful lot of fascinating things to learn about aside from politics, and never enough time to learn everything...the fact that some people have read books about physics instead of Hayek is not a moral failing.
Strictly speaking, once someone has declared Crocker’s Rules all rudeness is called for.
It’s accepted. That doesn’t mean it’s called for.
Under Crocker’s Rules, rudeness is ignored, and is thus a waste of bandwidth. Therefore, if one posts a comment consisting of nothing but rudeness, one might as well not post at all.
Where by “consisting of nothing but rudeness” you also mean “consisting of rudeness that itself does not also represent information”?
Sort of, except that I’d amend “information” to “useful information”, because, mathematically speaking, rudeness does represent information (in that it takes up bytes on the network). But when an ideally Crockered (if that’s a word) reader encounters rudeness, he ignores it, thus reducing its informational content to zero.
For example, when one reads something like, “only a total moron like yourself would commit the obvious ad hoc fallacy in line 5 of your argument, and also, you smell”, he interprets it as ”...ad hoc fallacy in line 5...”, and is able to respond accordingly (or update his beliefs, as needed).
No. I don’t respect Crocker’s rules from either side (that is someone declaring Crocker’s rules does not completely remove social consequences for treating them thus).
http://xkcd.com/592/
Reasons?
The bit in the parentheses. Other readers of the message and even the Crocker’s declarer often still take offense if Crocker’s rules are actually followed. Most of the declaration of Crocker’s rules seems to be about the signal of strength that the utterance gives.
In the interests of charity, I usually interpret the declaration as primarily an attempt at precommitting to an endorsed course of action (that is, wanting “honest” feedback) rather than at signalling to others that one practices that course of action (and thus has the various admirable properties that implies), but I’ll admit that the evidence seems to point more strongly to the latter.