The evidence is mostly some circles where this sort of thing is more common and a subjective feeling of it helping. Most of my reasoning for thinking this is good is a mix of “some anecdata, but mostly ‘the theory makes a lot of sense to me.’”
(In some close personal relationships, a related social-tech is saying “look, I really need to say out loud how this feels internally to me without having to police myself about whether I’m being fair”, and it definitely feels helpful for what would have been an escalating fight into a cooperative process”)
But, part of the point of this post is to give an opportunity for people to take it as object and argue about it.
The point of it is not especially to make people feel better (I think it adds a slight saving throw for a conversation escalating more than it needs to, but, like, not an overwhelming one)
It’s a rationality norm more than a politeness norm – the point is that it makes it more likely for you to notice that you’re doing a rant/uncharitable/psychologizing, and helping other people notice “oh, yes, that happened” and “oh, I guess in this social scene this is a thing you are supposed to notice and flag as costly and not just do willy-nilly.”
And, I think having a habit of noticing and tacking on a disclaimer makes it more like you go “hmm, do I actually really need to make this a full fledged rant?” (and write it more carefully) or “is this the psychologizing model the only explanation for why this guy is doing/believing this dumb-looking thing?” (and then actually come up with a second theory and realize you were overconfident in your first theory)
It adds scaffolding for other rationality practice.
The thing I most anticipate backfiring, is people only ever doing the rant-with-disclaimer (which I’ve seen sometimes accumulating), without every really trying to pay down the debt. I expect that to be aggravating for people on the receiving end.
So, a thing I consider an unsolved-problem in this current thread is to make the memetic-payload here more naturally include “I am taking on a bit of social debt” by doing this.
Or: the generalized version of this is, “notice when you are doing something you wouldn’t endorse doing all the time, and flag it with a quick observation, and apology if it seems like it’d impose costs on others.” That seems like a generally good metahabit to me.
Taking that literally, there are a tremendous number of acts that might cost others or that might be only appropriate in context. Having to specially flag everything fitting that criteria seems onerous.
More generally, I think it’s important to think through what the next issues become after a norm like this is implemented. I anticipate you’ll have wildly asymmetric self-flagging based on social anxiety, the in-group popularity of the person or their ideas. Specifically, there will be some popular people who can freely rant and psychologize with no flagging, never getting called out, plenty of upvotes and no mod action when it happens online. But now there will be explicit grounds for sanction when less popular people fly against the ingroup and a built in reporting bias reinforcing locally favored views.
To be clear, I think that the sort of self flagging you describe can be contextually very useful. I just resist the idea of making it a blanket, context-free rule.
One think I think might be a useful compromise would be to add a “rant/uncharitable/psychologizing” emoticon as an option for LessWrong comments, possibly along with emoticons related to whether the comment is or is not adding useful context/is relevant/is more helpful than harmful or vice versa. This gives a way for the community to share information about how they perceive comments like these, giving the advantage you were looking for in having such rants be labeled as such. It allows the original ranter to say what they want to say. It gives them feedback on how they’re perceived rather than forcing them to make assumptions. And I think that it’s easier to unfavorably emoticon a high status figure’s post or comment than to actually write out a comment that provides a wider attack surface for punishment.
For in person interactions obviously this is no solution, so take this as all primarily being my opinions on online discourse.
The evidence is mostly some circles where this sort of thing is more common and a subjective feeling of it helping. Most of my reasoning for thinking this is good is a mix of “some anecdata, but mostly ‘the theory makes a lot of sense to me.’”
(In some close personal relationships, a related social-tech is saying “look, I really need to say out loud how this feels internally to me without having to police myself about whether I’m being fair”, and it definitely feels helpful for what would have been an escalating fight into a cooperative process”)
But, part of the point of this post is to give an opportunity for people to take it as object and argue about it.
The point of it is not especially to make people feel better (I think it adds a slight saving throw for a conversation escalating more than it needs to, but, like, not an overwhelming one)
It’s a rationality norm more than a politeness norm – the point is that it makes it more likely for you to notice that you’re doing a rant/uncharitable/psychologizing, and helping other people notice “oh, yes, that happened” and “oh, I guess in this social scene this is a thing you are supposed to notice and flag as costly and not just do willy-nilly.”
And, I think having a habit of noticing and tacking on a disclaimer makes it more like you go “hmm, do I actually really need to make this a full fledged rant?” (and write it more carefully) or “is this the psychologizing model the only explanation for why this guy is doing/believing this dumb-looking thing?” (and then actually come up with a second theory and realize you were overconfident in your first theory)
It adds scaffolding for other rationality practice.
The thing I most anticipate backfiring, is people only ever doing the rant-with-disclaimer (which I’ve seen sometimes accumulating), without every really trying to pay down the debt. I expect that to be aggravating for people on the receiving end.
So, a thing I consider an unsolved-problem in this current thread is to make the memetic-payload here more naturally include “I am taking on a bit of social debt” by doing this.
Or: the generalized version of this is, “notice when you are doing something you wouldn’t endorse doing all the time, and flag it with a quick observation, and apology if it seems like it’d impose costs on others.” That seems like a generally good metahabit to me.
Taking that literally, there are a tremendous number of acts that might cost others or that might be only appropriate in context. Having to specially flag everything fitting that criteria seems onerous.
More generally, I think it’s important to think through what the next issues become after a norm like this is implemented. I anticipate you’ll have wildly asymmetric self-flagging based on social anxiety, the in-group popularity of the person or their ideas. Specifically, there will be some popular people who can freely rant and psychologize with no flagging, never getting called out, plenty of upvotes and no mod action when it happens online. But now there will be explicit grounds for sanction when less popular people fly against the ingroup and a built in reporting bias reinforcing locally favored views.
To be clear, I think that the sort of self flagging you describe can be contextually very useful. I just resist the idea of making it a blanket, context-free rule.
One think I think might be a useful compromise would be to add a “rant/uncharitable/psychologizing” emoticon as an option for LessWrong comments, possibly along with emoticons related to whether the comment is or is not adding useful context/is relevant/is more helpful than harmful or vice versa. This gives a way for the community to share information about how they perceive comments like these, giving the advantage you were looking for in having such rants be labeled as such. It allows the original ranter to say what they want to say. It gives them feedback on how they’re perceived rather than forcing them to make assumptions. And I think that it’s easier to unfavorably emoticon a high status figure’s post or comment than to actually write out a comment that provides a wider attack surface for punishment.
For in person interactions obviously this is no solution, so take this as all primarily being my opinions on online discourse.