This feels like a fragile strategy, in the sense that it’s good conditional on a specific theory of change / model about cultural evolution (that the malicious energy in those tweets will help people snap out of the deep preference falsification the anti-anti-normativity people talk about) and bad if that’s false (in the straightforward virtue-ethical sense of being cruel and sloppy with the truth). I feel like there’s a tension here with your writings about robust and gracefully failing strategies, pessimization/polarization, etc. Like, it feels like the maliciousness in the tweets is purposely pessimizing polite / leftist people’s feelings. Curious how you resolve that tension.
(Also, less important, if you say one reason that you’re not calling the tweets reprehensible is that the post-liberal norms will be different, does that mean you think that there’s a decent chance that the correct post-liberal norms will say they’re fine?)
To be clear, my claims aren’t meant to be conditional on the idea that these tweets will be helpful. I do not consider the DoD account to be doing a robustly good thing, and that’s related to why I’m not making tweets like that myself.
Instead, the thing I’m doing is more like inaction: people want me to say “this is reprehensible”, and I am declining to make such a statement. In general, inaction is often a more robust strategy than action (especially when the “null policy” is as obvious as “decline to make a statement”).
I think the main way that this strategy might be non-robust is if I’m declining to criticize the right while also getting triggered by analogous behavior from leftists and calling them names. To some extent I’ve made this mistake over the last year by e.g. not speaking up more about ways that Trump is behaving badly (e.g. various kinds of corruption), and I intend to fix that.
On a psychological level, I’ve spent the last few years trying to carve out space to be publicly honest about very controversial topics, and forceful on issues where it does matter, without wildly lashing out at the cowardice and malfeasance of the vast majority of Western elites. There’s something here reminiscent of Scott Alexander’s description in Kolmogorov complicity: “A medieval monk being told God doesn’t exist probably has a lot of questions. He’s likely to go kind of crazy for a while, crave the worldview-shards that he needs to rebuild his fractured philosophy.” I think I steered well clear of the “going crazy” attractor, but did have a period where I was doing more lashing out than I currently endorse. However, on a meta level I still endorse erring in that direction rather than the direction of being too careful (because almost everyone like me errs in the latter direction not the former).
I really do appreciate advice on how to balance this better, but unfortunately most of the advice that I receive roughly boils down to “be more careful”, which can easily function as a general-purpose suppressant of novel thinking. For example, when ML researchers looked at old LessWrong arguments about AGI, they could find arbitrarily many ways to dismiss it for not being careful enough. Similarly, at OpenAI I remember many cases of people trying to convince others to be more careful in order to preserve their political capital, where actually the thing that was going on was mostly them being scared of Sam getting mad at them. (And Tyler Cowen very recently critiqued AI safety for not being careful enough, in such a one-sided way that even his own commenters called him out.)
Appreciate this reply! Your clarification makes sense. I’m reassured hearing you talk about your efforts to avoid polarization (e.g. with respect to Trump). I think you’ve done an impressive/inspiring job with it overall, at least in your online presence (like in the exchange with Kelsey).
Although I do think there’s something deeper here that you’re missing about the exchange about the tweets upthread, especially with this “inaction” concept. My advice definitely wouldn’t be “be more careful”, if anything it would be more in the direction of doing more—I think there’s a deeper distinction here. I’m hesitant to go into more detail since it obviously includes a little bit of “vibe analysis” (i.e. is a little invasive by default discourse norms). Maybe I’ll DM you.
Basically, I do feel there’s an energy in your initial repliesof “defensiveness” or something? (not sure if you even disagree, but e.g. not checking the tweets, not mentioning that you only retweeted one tweet by that account and that you weren’t super familiar with the account, not fully showing how you actually feel about the tweets, etc. Like, I imagine it would’ve felt too vulnerable to justify yourself to what felt like a disproportionate attack, or there was some feeling of solidarity with that twitter user, or something). And this extends into the specific vibe when refusing to call the tweets reprehensible.
Defensiveness obviously isn’t immoral, but it’s not “inaction”. A “hackles raised”/”defensive” energy is something one is actively “doing to” the social field, it’s not an absence of action. It’s a purposeful increase in internal/relational tension, and an increase in the strength of one’s boundaries to reduce vulnerability (i.e. let less information through, like conspicuously not mentioning relevant stuff). So this to me looks like adversariality, i.e. polarization.
And to be clear, I’m not making a left-wing “silence is complicity” point here (e.g. just not replying to the thread would have felt completely fine to me) - it’s just that “explicitly refusing to say something and elaborating on why for 5 paragraphs and ignoring everything else that’s relevant” and “simply not saying something” are not the same social act at all.
Robust “inaction” (on the social field) would be something closer to idealized “perfectly fluid” equanimous/grounded behavior of just letting the information that naturally comes up for you flow out. E.g. changing the frame and being like “oh, yeah I don’t like these tweets I guess” (assuming that’s true) and “this is a bit much though, combing through a twitter account that I retweeted one tweet of. I don’t think this would be done if it was equivalent controversial left-wing tweets like “kill all men”″, or something. (Completely fictional example, I’m sure you’d say something different). Obviously this is more difficult, maybe prohibitively so, especially when one is getting downvoted by a lot of people—but then maybe better not to reply since doing so is already energetically participating in the collective polarization pattern (like the Ben Hoffman piece you linked earlier), no matter what the semantic content of the words is.
(And I’m not necessarily claiming your interlocutors were any better—but reality doesn’t grade on a curve)
This is all a bit vague and unorganized (it’s the hottest day of the year in London and I’m very sluggish) - but hopefully you can roughly see what I mean.
Defensiveness obviously isn’t immoral, but it’s not “inaction”. A “hackles raised”/”defensive” energy is something one is actively “doing to” the social field, it’s not an absence of action. It’s a purposeful increase in internal/relational tension, and an increase in the strength of one’s boundaries to reduce vulnerability (i.e. let less information through, like conspicuously not mentioning relevant stuff). So this to me looks like adversariality, i.e. polarization.
Yepp, this basically seems right (and insightfully phrased). I do consider my original reply (the “Is there something specific” one) to be pretty defensive, and a mistake for that reason (as was Zack Davis’ original reply upthread).
I think the main problem with my other replies is that they weren’t direct enough in owning that defensiveness. For example, me saying “in hindsight when I asked the question I was implicitly conflating “distasteful” with something stronger like “reprehensible”.” was a kinda half-assed (and still defensive) attempt to say something like “lol that was a silly question for me to ask, point taken” and wrap up the thread. Obviously it totally failed to do that.
(Having said that, I don’t endorse “maybe better not to reply since doing so is already energetically participating in the collective polarization pattern”. People reread LessWrong for a long time, and ducking out is rightly seen as some evidence that you have no response to give. Better I think to just wait longer before replying, or take more time on a reply.)
There’s something broader going on here where I would like to figure out a more trusting attitude towards LessWrong. One part of that is just becoming less defensive on an emotional levle, but another is that there’s a bit of a clash in epistemic approaches. One way I’ve previously summarized it is that I’m more like a diffusion model and other rationalists are more like sequence models. That is, I’m starting off by trying to become confident about the highest-order bits, in a way that is locally less careful but IMO globally more careful (c.f. my comment above on “general-purpose suppressant of novel thinking”). I do think this lack of local carefulness has led me astray in the past (as I’ll recount in some upcoming parts of my retrospective) and fixing it is one of my main priorities, but it also feels very helpful in jumping out of memetic traps. Probably the main action item here is to try to learn from people who have been both controversial and rigorous, like Charles Murray (other suggestions welcome).
pretty defensive, and a mistake for that reason (as was Zack Davis’ original reply upthread).
What do you think would have been the superior play for me in that situation? When someone is deploying a “distasteful” epithet without specifics, I think asking for specifics (forcing them to take a stand on which side of the fact/value boundary the distaste is supposedly on) is the natural follow-up. (And then after he answered that fact-beliefs themselves aren’t culpable, there was nothing to do except thank him for answering the question.)
Both your questions and mine felt very pointed. I think questions can be asked from a stance of genuine curiosity, versus a stance of “justify yourself!”, and the difference is very noticeable and also changes the dynamics of the resulting conversation significantly.
If I’d had that curious stance, for example, I would have scrolled the DoD feed and then agreed that it was distasteful, saving myself from what has turned out to be a fairly unproductive and time-consuming thread.
I think the main problem with my other replies is that they weren’t direct enough in owning that defensiveness
Yeah, I had something like this intuition as well but wanted to keep it simple in my original comment. One might more precisely say that there’s some intrinsic adversariality in any ideological conflict, but the lever is more about not being reactive about it, processing it before putting it back into the world, making it conscious/overt so our system-2 can deal with it, etc. And that this generally leads to less intense polarization (since it will be more about high-level beliefs and less (though still nonzero) about deep gut-level emotions).
(Having said that, I don’t endorse “maybe better not to reply since doing so is already energetically participating in the collective polarization pattern”. People reread LessWrong for a long time, and ducking out is rightly seen as some evidence that you have no response to give. Better I think to just wait longer before replying, or take more time on a reply.)
Yeah that’s true, agreed now that you say it—I didn’t think of that option some reason.
I’m more like a diffusion model and other rationalists are more like sequence models. That is, I’m starting off by trying to become confident about the highest-order bits, in a way that is locally less careful but IMO globally more careful (c.f. my comment above on “general-purpose suppressant of novel thinking”
That’s interesting, though I’m not sure I understand it well. What gets lost if I round this off to “more explore cognitive patterns, and less exploit ones”?
This feels like a fragile strategy, in the sense that it’s good conditional on a specific theory of change / model about cultural evolution (that the malicious energy in those tweets will help people snap out of the deep preference falsification the anti-anti-normativity people talk about) and bad if that’s false (in the straightforward virtue-ethical sense of being cruel and sloppy with the truth). I feel like there’s a tension here with your writings about robust and gracefully failing strategies, pessimization/polarization, etc. Like, it feels like the maliciousness in the tweets is purposely pessimizing polite / leftist people’s feelings. Curious how you resolve that tension.
(Also, less important, if you say one reason that you’re not calling the tweets reprehensible is that the post-liberal norms will be different, does that mean you think that there’s a decent chance that the correct post-liberal norms will say they’re fine?)
To be clear, my claims aren’t meant to be conditional on the idea that these tweets will be helpful. I do not consider the DoD account to be doing a robustly good thing, and that’s related to why I’m not making tweets like that myself.
Instead, the thing I’m doing is more like inaction: people want me to say “this is reprehensible”, and I am declining to make such a statement. In general, inaction is often a more robust strategy than action (especially when the “null policy” is as obvious as “decline to make a statement”).
I think the main way that this strategy might be non-robust is if I’m declining to criticize the right while also getting triggered by analogous behavior from leftists and calling them names. To some extent I’ve made this mistake over the last year by e.g. not speaking up more about ways that Trump is behaving badly (e.g. various kinds of corruption), and I intend to fix that.
On a psychological level, I’ve spent the last few years trying to carve out space to be publicly honest about very controversial topics, and forceful on issues where it does matter, without wildly lashing out at the cowardice and malfeasance of the vast majority of Western elites. There’s something here reminiscent of Scott Alexander’s description in Kolmogorov complicity: “A medieval monk being told God doesn’t exist probably has a lot of questions. He’s likely to go kind of crazy for a while, crave the worldview-shards that he needs to rebuild his fractured philosophy.” I think I steered well clear of the “going crazy” attractor, but did have a period where I was doing more lashing out than I currently endorse. However, on a meta level I still endorse erring in that direction rather than the direction of being too careful (because almost everyone like me errs in the latter direction not the former).
I really do appreciate advice on how to balance this better, but unfortunately most of the advice that I receive roughly boils down to “be more careful”, which can easily function as a general-purpose suppressant of novel thinking. For example, when ML researchers looked at old LessWrong arguments about AGI, they could find arbitrarily many ways to dismiss it for not being careful enough. Similarly, at OpenAI I remember many cases of people trying to convince others to be more careful in order to preserve their political capital, where actually the thing that was going on was mostly them being scared of Sam getting mad at them. (And Tyler Cowen very recently critiqued AI safety for not being careful enough, in such a one-sided way that even his own commenters called him out.)
Appreciate this reply! Your clarification makes sense. I’m reassured hearing you talk about your efforts to avoid polarization (e.g. with respect to Trump). I think you’ve done an impressive/inspiring job with it overall, at least in your online presence (like in the exchange with Kelsey).
Although I do think there’s something deeper here that you’re missing about the exchange about the tweets upthread, especially with this “inaction” concept. My advice definitely wouldn’t be “be more careful”, if anything it would be more in the direction of doing more—I think there’s a deeper distinction here. I’m hesitant to go into more detail since it obviously includes a little bit of “vibe analysis” (i.e. is a little invasive by default discourse norms). Maybe I’ll DM you.
You’re welcome to talk about this publicly fwiw, up to you.
Great, thanks.
Basically, I do feel there’s an energy in your initial replies of “defensiveness” or something? (not sure if you even disagree, but e.g. not checking the tweets, not mentioning that you only retweeted one tweet by that account and that you weren’t super familiar with the account, not fully showing how you actually feel about the tweets, etc. Like, I imagine it would’ve felt too vulnerable to justify yourself to what felt like a disproportionate attack, or there was some feeling of solidarity with that twitter user, or something). And this extends into the specific vibe when refusing to call the tweets reprehensible.
Defensiveness obviously isn’t immoral, but it’s not “inaction”. A “hackles raised”/”defensive” energy is something one is actively “doing to” the social field, it’s not an absence of action. It’s a purposeful increase in internal/relational tension, and an increase in the strength of one’s boundaries to reduce vulnerability (i.e. let less information through, like conspicuously not mentioning relevant stuff). So this to me looks like adversariality, i.e. polarization.
And to be clear, I’m not making a left-wing “silence is complicity” point here (e.g. just not replying to the thread would have felt completely fine to me) - it’s just that “explicitly refusing to say something and elaborating on why for 5 paragraphs and ignoring everything else that’s relevant” and “simply not saying something” are not the same social act at all.
Robust “inaction” (on the social field) would be something closer to idealized “perfectly fluid” equanimous/grounded behavior of just letting the information that naturally comes up for you flow out. E.g. changing the frame and being like “oh, yeah I don’t like these tweets I guess” (assuming that’s true) and “this is a bit much though, combing through a twitter account that I retweeted one tweet of. I don’t think this would be done if it was equivalent controversial left-wing tweets like “kill all men”″, or something. (Completely fictional example, I’m sure you’d say something different). Obviously this is more difficult, maybe prohibitively so, especially when one is getting downvoted by a lot of people—but then maybe better not to reply since doing so is already energetically participating in the collective polarization pattern (like the Ben Hoffman piece you linked earlier), no matter what the semantic content of the words is.
(And I’m not necessarily claiming your interlocutors were any better—but reality doesn’t grade on a curve)
This is all a bit vague and unorganized (it’s the hottest day of the year in London and I’m very sluggish) - but hopefully you can roughly see what I mean.
Thanks for the comment!
Yepp, this basically seems right (and insightfully phrased). I do consider my original reply (the “Is there something specific” one) to be pretty defensive, and a mistake for that reason (as was Zack Davis’ original reply upthread).
I think the main problem with my other replies is that they weren’t direct enough in owning that defensiveness. For example, me saying “in hindsight when I asked the question I was implicitly conflating “distasteful” with something stronger like “reprehensible”.” was a kinda half-assed (and still defensive) attempt to say something like “lol that was a silly question for me to ask, point taken” and wrap up the thread. Obviously it totally failed to do that.
(Having said that, I don’t endorse “maybe better not to reply since doing so is already energetically participating in the collective polarization pattern”. People reread LessWrong for a long time, and ducking out is rightly seen as some evidence that you have no response to give. Better I think to just wait longer before replying, or take more time on a reply.)
There’s something broader going on here where I would like to figure out a more trusting attitude towards LessWrong. One part of that is just becoming less defensive on an emotional levle, but another is that there’s a bit of a clash in epistemic approaches. One way I’ve previously summarized it is that I’m more like a diffusion model and other rationalists are more like sequence models. That is, I’m starting off by trying to become confident about the highest-order bits, in a way that is locally less careful but IMO globally more careful (c.f. my comment above on “general-purpose suppressant of novel thinking”). I do think this lack of local carefulness has led me astray in the past (as I’ll recount in some upcoming parts of my retrospective) and fixing it is one of my main priorities, but it also feels very helpful in jumping out of memetic traps. Probably the main action item here is to try to learn from people who have been both controversial and rigorous, like Charles Murray (other suggestions welcome).
What do you think would have been the superior play for me in that situation? When someone is deploying a “distasteful” epithet without specifics, I think asking for specifics (forcing them to take a stand on which side of the fact/value boundary the distaste is supposedly on) is the natural follow-up. (And then after he answered that fact-beliefs themselves aren’t culpable, there was nothing to do except thank him for answering the question.)
Both your questions and mine felt very pointed. I think questions can be asked from a stance of genuine curiosity, versus a stance of “justify yourself!”, and the difference is very noticeable and also changes the dynamics of the resulting conversation significantly.
If I’d had that curious stance, for example, I would have scrolled the DoD feed and then agreed that it was distasteful, saving myself from what has turned out to be a fairly unproductive and time-consuming thread.
Cool, makes sense!
Yeah, I had something like this intuition as well but wanted to keep it simple in my original comment. One might more precisely say that there’s some intrinsic adversariality in any ideological conflict, but the lever is more about not being reactive about it, processing it before putting it back into the world, making it conscious/overt so our system-2 can deal with it, etc. And that this generally leads to less intense polarization (since it will be more about high-level beliefs and less (though still nonzero) about deep gut-level emotions).
Yeah that’s true, agreed now that you say it—I didn’t think of that option some reason.
That’s interesting, though I’m not sure I understand it well. What gets lost if I round this off to “more explore cognitive patterns, and less exploit ones”?