This post was a disaster. The only thing I think we can all agree on is that there’s a lot of propaganda here and we didn’t do a great job distilling each other’s propaganda-framed views, especially given that presumably some of the propaganda must be true. Everyone seems to think that others posted propaganda. Without clear grounding in data that can’t be easily obtained, and whose measurement methods are themselves in question, I don’t think we’re going to be able to resolve this.
What this post has done is inspire me to think about how to express the philosophies underlying my political views in ways that can be discussed on lesswrong more directly. One of them is that I appreciate a “friendly thunderdome”, as inspired by, eg, braver angels, street epistemology, changing the conversation, etc—if we’re all going to post what we believe in contexts where we worry each others’ views are propaganda, then we’ll need to use the very best tools and be frequently reminding each other what they are, as well as offering guarded understanding. Valentine’s frequent responses that he’s not willing to accept others’ framing, especially given that his responses were in response to their attempts to criticize his framing, could be acceptable, but I suspect everyone needs to be willing to update their framings with more precise description as needed.
He said he expected more rationality and “defense against the dark arts”.
I can’t help but wonder how much the phrase “dark arts” is an accidental euphemism for something; I’m sure that people who see such concerns as invalid would think me criticizing their reasoning unreasonably. But phrasings don’t merely matter, they also reveal hidden connection. What makes the arts dark? What about darkness makes an art bad? In what way is the word vector for “dark” connected to the word vector for “evil”? I do not accept the claim that multiword names do not contain echoes of their components; I know there are those here who do. The fact that this very analysis may be seen as “wokeness” and thereby dismissed is of concern to me—I think there’s an ELK problem in our own brains here.
If anything, I think the key insight here is that we need to be able to translate between each others’ frames on the fly. If someone comes in with a frame you dislike, it needs to come with a promise that a conflicting frame is welcome.
This post was a disaster. The only thing I think we can all agree on is that there’s a lot of propaganda here and we didn’t do a great job distilling each other’s propaganda-framed views, especially given that presumably some of the propaganda must be true. Everyone seems to think that others posted propaganda. Without clear grounding in data that can’t be easily obtained, and whose measurement methods are themselves in question, I don’t think we’re going to be able to resolve this.
What this post has done is inspire me to think about how to express the philosophies underlying my political views in ways that can be discussed on lesswrong more directly. One of them is that I appreciate a “friendly thunderdome”, as inspired by, eg, braver angels, street epistemology, changing the conversation, etc—if we’re all going to post what we believe in contexts where we worry each others’ views are propaganda, then we’ll need to use the very best tools and be frequently reminding each other what they are, as well as offering guarded understanding. Valentine’s frequent responses that he’s not willing to accept others’ framing, especially given that his responses were in response to their attempts to criticize his framing, could be acceptable, but I suspect everyone needs to be willing to update their framings with more precise description as needed.
He said he expected more rationality and “defense against the dark arts”.
I can’t help but wonder how much the phrase “dark arts” is an accidental euphemism for something; I’m sure that people who see such concerns as invalid would think me criticizing their reasoning unreasonably. But phrasings don’t merely matter, they also reveal hidden connection. What makes the arts dark? What about darkness makes an art bad? In what way is the word vector for “dark” connected to the word vector for “evil”? I do not accept the claim that multiword names do not contain echoes of their components; I know there are those here who do. The fact that this very analysis may be seen as “wokeness” and thereby dismissed is of concern to me—I think there’s an ELK problem in our own brains here.
If anything, I think the key insight here is that we need to be able to translate between each others’ frames on the fly. If someone comes in with a frame you dislike, it needs to come with a promise that a conflicting frame is welcome.
Solidarity forever.