because the comments are exhausting and costly in approximately the ways I’m gesturing at.
(We have some disagreement but more overlap than disagreement.)
As I understand Ben Pace, he’s saying something like “I want people to take more risks so that we find more gold”, and you’re replying with something like “I think people will take more risks if we make the space more safe, by policing things like strawmanning.”
It seems central to me to somehow get precise and connected to reality, like what specific rules you’re suggesting policing (strawmanning? projecting? Everything in the Sequences?), and maybe look at some historic posts and comments and figure out which bits you would police and which you wouldn’t. (I’m really not sure if this is in the ‘overlap’ space or the ‘disagreement’ space.)
Strong-upvote as well for the specificity request; the place where I most strongly expect attempts at “increasing standards” to fail is the point where people realize that broad agreement about direction does not necessarily translate to finer agreement about implementation, and I expect this is best avoided by sharing gears-level models as quickly and as early during the initial discussion as possible. As I wrote in another comment:
Finally, note that at no point have I made an attempt to define what, exactly, constitute “epistemic violations”, “epistemic standards”, or “epistemic hygiene”. This is because this is the point where I am least confident in my model of Duncan, and separately where I also think his argument is at its weakest. It seems plausible to me that, even if [something like] Duncan’s vision for LW were to be realized, there would be still be substantial remaining disagreement about how to evaluate certain edge cases, and that that lack of consensus could undermine the whole enterprise.
(Though my model of Duncan does interject in response to this, “It’s okay if the edge cases remain slightly blurry; those edge cases are not what matter in the vast majority of cases where I would identify a comment as being epistemically unvirtuous. What matters is that the central territory is firmed up, and right now LW is doing extremely poorly at picking even that low-hanging fruit.”)
((At which point I would step aside and ask the real Duncan what he thinks of that, and whether he thinks the examples he picked out from the Leverage and CFAR/MIRI threads constitute representative samples of what he would consider “central territory”.))
I note that I’ve already put something like ten full hours into creating exactly these types of examples, and that fact sort of keeps getting ignored/people largely never engage with them.
Perhaps you are suggesting a post that does that-and-nothing-but-that?
Perhaps you are suggesting a post that does that-and-nothing-but-that?
I think I am suggesting “link to things when you mention them.” Like, if I want to argue with DanielFilan about whether or not a particular garment “is proper” or not, it’s really not obvious what I mean, whereas if I say “hey I don’t think that complies with the US Flag Code”, most of the work is done (and then we figure out whether or not section j actually applies to the garment in question, ultimately concluding that it does not).
Like, elsewhere you write:
The standard is: don’t violate the straightforward list of rationality 101 principles and practices that we have a giant canon of knowledge and agreement upon.
I currently don’t think there exists a ‘straightforward list of rationality 101 principles and practices’ that I could link someone to (in the same way that I can link them to the Flag Code, or to literal Canon Law). Like, where’s the boundary between rationality 101 and rationality 102? (What fraction of rationality 101 do the current ‘default comment guidelines’ contain?)
Given the absence of that, I think you’re imagining much more agreement than exists. Some like the “Double crux” style, but Said disliked it back in 2018 [1][2] and presumably feels the same way now. Does that mean it’s in the canon, like you suggest in this comment, or not?
[Edit: I recall that at some point, you had something that I think was called Sabien’s Rules? I can’t find it with a quick search now, but I think having something like that which you can easily link to and people can either agree with or disagree with will clarify things compared to your current gesturing at a large body of things.]
As I understand Ben Pace, he’s saying something like “I want people to take more risks so that we find more gold”, and you’re replying with something like “I think people will take more risks if we make the space more safe, by policing things like strawmanning.”
It seems central to me to somehow get precise and connected to reality, like what specific rules you’re suggesting policing (strawmanning? projecting? Everything in the Sequences?), and maybe look at some historic posts and comments and figure out which bits you would police and which you wouldn’t. (I’m really not sure if this is in the ‘overlap’ space or the ‘disagreement’ space.)
Strong-upvote as well for the specificity request; the place where I most strongly expect attempts at “increasing standards” to fail is the point where people realize that broad agreement about direction does not necessarily translate to finer agreement about implementation, and I expect this is best avoided by sharing gears-level models as quickly and as early during the initial discussion as possible. As I wrote in another comment:
I note that I’ve already put something like ten full hours into creating exactly these types of examples, and that fact sort of keeps getting ignored/people largely never engage with them.
Perhaps you are suggesting a post that does that-and-nothing-but-that?
I think I am suggesting “link to things when you mention them.” Like, if I want to argue with DanielFilan about whether or not a particular garment “is proper” or not, it’s really not obvious what I mean, whereas if I say “hey I don’t think that complies with the US Flag Code”, most of the work is done (and then we figure out whether or not section j actually applies to the garment in question, ultimately concluding that it does not).
Like, elsewhere you write:
I currently don’t think there exists a ‘straightforward list of rationality 101 principles and practices’ that I could link someone to (in the same way that I can link them to the Flag Code, or to literal Canon Law). Like, where’s the boundary between rationality 101 and rationality 102? (What fraction of rationality 101 do the current ‘default comment guidelines’ contain?)
Given the absence of that, I think you’re imagining much more agreement than exists. Some like the “Double crux” style, but Said disliked it back in 2018 [1] [2] and presumably feels the same way now. Does that mean it’s in the canon, like you suggest in this comment, or not?
[Edit: I recall that at some point, you had something that I think was called Sabien’s Rules? I can’t find it with a quick search now, but I think having something like that which you can easily link to and people can either agree with or disagree with will clarify things compared to your current gesturing at a large body of things.]
Sabien’s Sins is linked in the OP (near the end, in the list of terrible ideas).
I will probably make a master linkpost somewhere in my next four LW essays. Thanks.
Where? Is it the quoted lines?
Huh, not sure how I missed that; thanks for pointing it out.
Indeed, my opinion of “double crux” has not improved since the linked comments were written.