I’m glad you took the time to respond here, and there is a lot I like about this comment. In particular, I appreciate this comment for:
Being specific without losing sight of the general message of the parent comment.
Sharing how you see your situation at the outset, which puts the tone of the comment in context.
Identifying clear points of disagreement where possible.
There are, however, some points of disagreement I’d like to raise and some possible deleterious consequences I’d like to flag.
I share the concern raised by habryka about the illusion of transparency, which may be increasing your confidence that you are interpreting the intended meaning (and intended consequences) of Jennifer’s words. I’ll go into (possibly too much) detail on one very short example of what you’ve written and how it may involve some misreading of Jennifer’s comment. You quote Jennifer:
Perhaps you could explain “epistemic hygiene” to me in mechanistic detail, and show how I’m messing it up?
and respond:
Again the trap; …
I was also confused about what you meant by epistemic hygiene when finishing the essays. Elsewhere someone asked whether they were one of the ones doing the bad thing you were gesturing towards, which is another question/insecurity I shared (I do not recall how you responded to that question). It is hopefully clear that when I say this here, in this way, that it is not a trap for you. It’s statement of my confusion embedded in a broader point and I hope you feel no obligation to respond. The point of this exposition isn’t to get clarity on that point, it’s to (hopefully) inspire a shift of perspective. Your comment struck me is very high heat; that heat reflects a particular perspective. I don’t know exactly what that perspective is, but it seems to me that you saw Jennifer’s comments as threats. To the extent that you see a comment as a threat, the individual components of the comment take on more sinister airs. I tend to post in a calm tone, so most people have difficulty maintaining perspectives that see me as a threat. The perspective I’m hoping to affect in you is one of collaboration. I am hoping to leverage my nonthreatening way of raising the same confusion as Jennifer so that it is more natural to see that question of Jennifer’s in a nonthreatening light. In doing so, I’m hoping to provide a method by which her comment as a whole takes on a less threatening tone (Again, I expect this characterization of your perspective to be wrong in important ways—you may not see her comment as precisely “threatening”)
Framing her question as a trap also implies that it was “set”, i.e. that putting you in a weakened position was part of her intent (although you might not have intended to imply this). It’s possible that Jennifer had this intention, but I don’t know and I suspect that you don’t either. Perhaps you meant that it was a trap in the normative sense, i.e. that because Jennifer included that question you are placed (whether Jennifer intends it or not) in a no-win situation; that it’s a statement about you (i.e. you have been trapped even if no one is a hunter setting traps). In the context of your high-heat comment, however, I as a reader expect that you believe Jennifer intended it as a trap.
I mentioned that I was trying to shift your perspective to one of collaboration, but I never gave the motivation for why. What are some of the negative consequences of the high-heat framing? I expect that you will get less of the kind of feedback you want on your posts. I tend to avoid social conflict—particularly social conflict that is high in heat. This neuroticism makes me disinclined to converse with people who adopt high-heat tones, in part because I worry that I will get a high-heat reaction. I do not think I would attempt to convey a broad-scope confusion/disagreement with you of the type that Jennifer did here. I would probably choose to nitpick or simply not respond instead, letting the general confusion remain (in part I do this here; quibbling over tone instead of trying to resolve the major points of confusion with your post. I might try to figure out how to describe my confusion with your post and ask you later). Now, I don’t think you should be optimizing solely to get broad-scope-disagreement/confusion responses from neurotic people like me, but I expect you to want to know how your responses are received. The high heat from this comment, even though it is not directed at me, makes me (very slightly) afraid of you.
This relates back to Elizabeth’s comment elsewhere, where she says
I expect this feeling to be common, and for that lack of feedback to be detrimental to your model building even if you start out far above average.
I do not expect that I would give you the type of feedback that Jennifer has given you here (i.e. the question the validity of your thesis variety). Mostly this is a fault of mine, but high heat responses are part of what I fear when I do not respond (there are lots of other things too, so don’t please do not update strongly on times when I do not respond).
It’s likely that this comment should have contained (or simply been entirely composed of) questions, since it instead relied on a fair bit of speculation on my part (although I tried to make most of my statements about my reading of your comment rather than your comment itself). I’m including some of those questions here instead of doing the hard work of rewriting my comment to include them in more natural places (along with some other questions I have). I also don’t think it would be productive to respond to all of these at once, so respond only to the ones that you feel like:
Did you find my response nonthreatening?
Do you feel a difference in reaction to my stating confusion at epistemic hygiene and Jennifer stating confusion at that point?
Was my description of how I was trying to change your perspective as I was trying to change your perspective trust-increasing? (I am somewhat concerned that it will be perceived as manipulative)
Do you find my characterization of your perspective, where Jennifer’s comment is/was a threat, accurate?
Is a more collaborative perspective available to you at this moment?
If it is, do you find it changes your emotional reaction to Jennifer’s comment?
Do you feel that your comment was high heat?
If so, what goals did the high heat accomplish for you?
And, do you believe they were worth the costs?
Did you find my comment welcome?
I share dxu’s perception that you are Feeling Bad and want to extend you some sympathy (my expectation is that you’ll enjoy a parenthetical here—all the more if I go meta and reference dxu’s parenthetical—so here it is with reference and all).
I was also confused about what you meant by epistemic hygiene when finishing the essays.
In part, this is because a major claim of the OP is “LessWrong has a canon; there’s an essay for each of the core things (like strawmanning, or double cruxing, or stag hunts).” I didn’t set out to describe and define epistemic hygiene within the essay, because one of my foundational assumptions is “this work has already been done; we’re just not holding each other to the available existing standards found in all the highly upvoted common memes.”
It is hopefully clear that when I say this here, in this way, that it is not a trap for you.
This is evidence I wasn’t sufficiently clear. The “trap” I was referring to was the bulleted dynamic, whereby I either cede the argument or have to put forth infinite effort. I agree that it wasn’t at all likely deliberately set by Jennifer, but also there are ways to avoid accidentally setting such traps, such as not strawmanning your conversational partner.
(Strawmanning being, basically, redefining what they’re saying in the eyes of the audience. Which they then either tacitly accept or have to actively overturn.)
I think that, in the context of an essay specifically highlighting “people on this site often behave in ways that make it harder to think,” doing a bunch of the stuff Jennifer did is reasonably less forgivable than usual. It’s one thing to, I dunno, use coarse and foul language; it’s another thing to use it in response to somebody who’s just asked that we maybe swear a little less. Especially if the locale for the discussion is named LessSwearing (i.e. the person isn’t randomly bidding for the adoption of some out-of-the-blue standard).
Your comment struck me is very high heat; that heat reflects a particular perspective. I don’t know exactly what that perspective is, but it seems to me that you saw jessica’s comments as threats.
Yes. I do not think it was a genuine attempt to engage or converge with me (the way that Said, Elizabeth, johnswentsworth, supposedlyfun, and even agrippa were clearly doing or willing to do), so much as an attempt to condescend, lecture, and belittle, and the crowd of upvotes seemed to indicate either general endorsement of those actions, or a belief that it’s fine/doesn’t matter/isn’t a dealbreaker. This impression has not shifted much on rereads, and is reminiscent of exactly the prior experiences on LW that caused me to feel the need to write the OP in the first place.
Did you find my response nonthreatening?
Yes.
Do you feel a difference in reaction to my stating confusion at epistemic hygiene and jessica stating confusion at that point?
Yes.
Was my description of how I was trying to change your perspective as I was trying to change your perspective trust-increasing? (I am somewhat concerned that it will be perceived as manipulative)
It was trust-increasing and felt cooperative throughout.
Do you find my characterization of your perspective, where Jennifer’s comment is/was a threat, accurate?
For the most part, yes.
Is a more collaborative perspective available to you at this moment?
I’m not quite sure what you’re asking, here. I can certainly access a desire to collaborate that is zero percent contingent on agreement with my claims.
If it is, do you find it changes your emotional reaction to Jennifer’s comment?
No, or at least not yet. supposedlyfun, for example, seems at least as “hostile” as Jennifer on the level of agreement, but at least bothered to cut out paragraphs they estimated would be likely to be triggering, and mention that fact. That’s a costly signal of “look, I’m really trying to establish a handshake, here,” and it engendered substantial desire to reciprocate. You, too, are making such costly signals. If Jennifer chose to, that would reframe things somewhat, but in Jennifer’s second comment there was a lot of doubling down.
Do you feel that your comment was high heat?
Yes.
If so, what goals did the high heat accomplish for you?
This presupposes that it was … sufficiently strategic, or something?
Goals that were not necessarily well-achieved by the reply:
Putting object-level critique in a public place, so the norm violations didn’t go unnoticed (I’m not confident anyone else would have objected to the objectionable stuff)
Demonstrating that at least one person will in fact push back if someone does the epistemically sloppy bullying thing (I regularly receive messages thanking me for this service)
And, do you believe they were worth the costs?
I don’t actively believe this, no. It seems like it could still go either way. I would be slightly more surprised by it turning out worth it, than by it turning out not worth it.
This is an example of the illusion of transparency issue. Many salient interpretations of what this means (informed by the popularposts on the topic, that are actually not explicitly on this topic) motivate actions that I consider deleterious overall, like punishing half-baked/wild/probably-wrong hypotheses or things that are not obsequiously disclaimed as such, in a way that’s insensitive to the actual level of danger of being misleading. A more salient cost is nonsense hogging attention, but that doesn’t distinguish it from well-reasoned clear points that don’t add insight hogging attention.
The actually serious problem is when this is a symptom of not distinguishing epistemic status of ideas on part of the author, but then it’s not at all clear that punishing publication of such thoughts helps the author fix the problem. The personal skill of tagging epistemic status of ideas in one’s own mind correctly is what I think of as epistemic hygiene, but I don’t expect this to be canon, and I’m not sure that there is no serious disagreement on this point with people who also thought about this. For one, the interpretation I have doesn’t specify community norms, and I don’t know what epistemic-hygiene-the-norm should be.
I’m glad you took the time to respond here, and there is a lot I like about this comment. In particular, I appreciate this comment for:
Being specific without losing sight of the general message of the parent comment.
Sharing how you see your situation at the outset, which puts the tone of the comment in context.
Identifying clear points of disagreement where possible.
There are, however, some points of disagreement I’d like to raise and some possible deleterious consequences I’d like to flag.
I share the concern raised by habryka about the illusion of transparency, which may be increasing your confidence that you are interpreting the intended meaning (and intended consequences) of Jennifer’s words. I’ll go into (possibly too much) detail on one very short example of what you’ve written and how it may involve some misreading of Jennifer’s comment. You quote Jennifer:
and respond:
I was also confused about what you meant by epistemic hygiene when finishing the essays. Elsewhere someone asked whether they were one of the ones doing the bad thing you were gesturing towards, which is another question/insecurity I shared (I do not recall how you responded to that question). It is hopefully clear that when I say this here, in this way, that it is not a trap for you. It’s statement of my confusion embedded in a broader point and I hope you feel no obligation to respond. The point of this exposition isn’t to get clarity on that point, it’s to (hopefully) inspire a shift of perspective. Your comment struck me is very high heat; that heat reflects a particular perspective. I don’t know exactly what that perspective is, but it seems to me that you saw Jennifer’s comments as threats. To the extent that you see a comment as a threat, the individual components of the comment take on more sinister airs. I tend to post in a calm tone, so most people have difficulty maintaining perspectives that see me as a threat. The perspective I’m hoping to affect in you is one of collaboration. I am hoping to leverage my nonthreatening way of raising the same confusion as Jennifer so that it is more natural to see that question of Jennifer’s in a nonthreatening light. In doing so, I’m hoping to provide a method by which her comment as a whole takes on a less threatening tone (Again, I expect this characterization of your perspective to be wrong in important ways—you may not see her comment as precisely “threatening”)
Framing her question as a trap also implies that it was “set”, i.e. that putting you in a weakened position was part of her intent (although you might not have intended to imply this). It’s possible that Jennifer had this intention, but I don’t know and I suspect that you don’t either. Perhaps you meant that it was a trap in the normative sense, i.e. that because Jennifer included that question you are placed (whether Jennifer intends it or not) in a no-win situation; that it’s a statement about you (i.e. you have been trapped even if no one is a hunter setting traps). In the context of your high-heat comment, however, I as a reader expect that you believe Jennifer intended it as a trap.
I mentioned that I was trying to shift your perspective to one of collaboration, but I never gave the motivation for why. What are some of the negative consequences of the high-heat framing? I expect that you will get less of the kind of feedback you want on your posts. I tend to avoid social conflict—particularly social conflict that is high in heat. This neuroticism makes me disinclined to converse with people who adopt high-heat tones, in part because I worry that I will get a high-heat reaction. I do not think I would attempt to convey a broad-scope confusion/disagreement with you of the type that Jennifer did here. I would probably choose to nitpick or simply not respond instead, letting the general confusion remain (in part I do this here; quibbling over tone instead of trying to resolve the major points of confusion with your post. I might try to figure out how to describe my confusion with your post and ask you later). Now, I don’t think you should be optimizing solely to get broad-scope-disagreement/confusion responses from neurotic people like me, but I expect you to want to know how your responses are received. The high heat from this comment, even though it is not directed at me, makes me (very slightly) afraid of you.
This relates back to Elizabeth’s comment elsewhere, where she says
I do not expect that I would give you the type of feedback that Jennifer has given you here (i.e. the question the validity of your thesis variety). Mostly this is a fault of mine, but high heat responses are part of what I fear when I do not respond (there are lots of other things too, so don’t please do not update strongly on times when I do not respond).
It’s likely that this comment should have contained (or simply been entirely composed of) questions, since it instead relied on a fair bit of speculation on my part (although I tried to make most of my statements about my reading of your comment rather than your comment itself). I’m including some of those questions here instead of doing the hard work of rewriting my comment to include them in more natural places (along with some other questions I have). I also don’t think it would be productive to respond to all of these at once, so respond only to the ones that you feel like:
Did you find my response nonthreatening?
Do you feel a difference in reaction to my stating confusion at epistemic hygiene and Jennifer stating confusion at that point?
Was my description of how I was trying to change your perspective as I was trying to change your perspective trust-increasing? (I am somewhat concerned that it will be perceived as manipulative)
Do you find my characterization of your perspective, where Jennifer’s comment is/was a threat, accurate?
Is a more collaborative perspective available to you at this moment?
If it is, do you find it changes your emotional reaction to Jennifer’s comment?
Do you feel that your comment was high heat?
If so, what goals did the high heat accomplish for you?
And, do you believe they were worth the costs?
Did you find my comment welcome?
I share dxu’s perception that you are Feeling Bad and want to extend you some sympathy (my expectation is that you’ll enjoy a parenthetical here—all the more if I go meta and reference dxu’s parenthetical—so here it is with reference and all).
EDIT: jessica → Jennifer. Thanks localdeity.
In part, this is because a major claim of the OP is “LessWrong has a canon; there’s an essay for each of the core things (like strawmanning, or double cruxing, or stag hunts).” I didn’t set out to describe and define epistemic hygiene within the essay, because one of my foundational assumptions is “this work has already been done; we’re just not holding each other to the available existing standards found in all the highly upvoted common memes.”
This is evidence I wasn’t sufficiently clear. The “trap” I was referring to was the bulleted dynamic, whereby I either cede the argument or have to put forth infinite effort. I agree that it wasn’t at all likely deliberately set by Jennifer, but also there are ways to avoid accidentally setting such traps, such as not strawmanning your conversational partner.
(Strawmanning being, basically, redefining what they’re saying in the eyes of the audience. Which they then either tacitly accept or have to actively overturn.)
I think that, in the context of an essay specifically highlighting “people on this site often behave in ways that make it harder to think,” doing a bunch of the stuff Jennifer did is reasonably less forgivable than usual. It’s one thing to, I dunno, use coarse and foul language; it’s another thing to use it in response to somebody who’s just asked that we maybe swear a little less. Especially if the locale for the discussion is named LessSwearing (i.e. the person isn’t randomly bidding for the adoption of some out-of-the-blue standard).
Yes. I do not think it was a genuine attempt to engage or converge with me (the way that Said, Elizabeth, johnswentsworth, supposedlyfun, and even agrippa were clearly doing or willing to do), so much as an attempt to condescend, lecture, and belittle, and the crowd of upvotes seemed to indicate either general endorsement of those actions, or a belief that it’s fine/doesn’t matter/isn’t a dealbreaker. This impression has not shifted much on rereads, and is reminiscent of exactly the prior experiences on LW that caused me to feel the need to write the OP in the first place.
Yes.
Yes.
It was trust-increasing and felt cooperative throughout.
For the most part, yes.
I’m not quite sure what you’re asking, here. I can certainly access a desire to collaborate that is zero percent contingent on agreement with my claims.
No, or at least not yet. supposedlyfun, for example, seems at least as “hostile” as Jennifer on the level of agreement, but at least bothered to cut out paragraphs they estimated would be likely to be triggering, and mention that fact. That’s a costly signal of “look, I’m really trying to establish a handshake, here,” and it engendered substantial desire to reciprocate. You, too, are making such costly signals. If Jennifer chose to, that would reframe things somewhat, but in Jennifer’s second comment there was a lot of doubling down.
Yes.
This presupposes that it was … sufficiently strategic, or something?
Goals that were not necessarily well-achieved by the reply:
Putting object-level critique in a public place, so the norm violations didn’t go unnoticed (I’m not confident anyone else would have objected to the objectionable stuff)
Demonstrating that at least one person will in fact push back if someone does the epistemically sloppy bullying thing (I regularly receive messages thanking me for this service)
I don’t actively believe this, no. It seems like it could still go either way. I would be slightly more surprised by it turning out worth it, than by it turning out not worth it.
Yes.
This is an example of the illusion of transparency issue. Many salient interpretations of what this means (informed by the popular posts on the topic, that are actually not explicitly on this topic) motivate actions that I consider deleterious overall, like punishing half-baked/wild/probably-wrong hypotheses or things that are not obsequiously disclaimed as such, in a way that’s insensitive to the actual level of danger of being misleading. A more salient cost is nonsense hogging attention, but that doesn’t distinguish it from well-reasoned clear points that don’t add insight hogging attention.
The actually serious problem is when this is a symptom of not distinguishing epistemic status of ideas on part of the author, but then it’s not at all clear that punishing publication of such thoughts helps the author fix the problem. The personal skill of tagging epistemic status of ideas in one’s own mind correctly is what I think of as epistemic hygiene, but I don’t expect this to be canon, and I’m not sure that there is no serious disagreement on this point with people who also thought about this. For one, the interpretation I have doesn’t specify community norms, and I don’t know what epistemic-hygiene-the-norm should be.