I say more in my other response, but basically, I am deeply suspicious of any “I should ban him because he’s not updating” because of how cleanly justification enables pressure to update or “self-ban” and how easily the justification serves as a shield. So like, “If I’m as justified as I think I am, and he’s as beyond reach as I think he is, maybe I should prove it”.
This can sound kinda naive at first glance, because everyone has seen first hand that some people are “unreasonable”, but I’ve pushed on this hard. Like, in my perspective pain is obviously just information and can’t ever actually be a problem… which seems absurd because of the obvious reality of chronic pain and the implication that if I’m right then engagement lead to people with chronic pain perceiving their pain as not a problem, so… What happens when we try it?
After pushing in this direction for the last fifteen years, I’m not finding much room for valid excuses. Every time I fail to get through to people it turns out to be a skill issue on my side, and that skill is in epistemics, and structurally it kinda has to be.
So for example, the only person I’ve ever blocked on any platform is Said. To give myself a little credit, it was for one post in particular which he had already proven he couldn’t handle in a previous exchange on the topic. And it wasn’t “I need to ban him because he’s unreachable”. I would have had a good time going further with it, if it weren’t for my perception that LW didn’t have the stomach for going any further (and to Said’s credit, he did).
But still, according to my own principles, it kinda seems like that too should fall away? Like, if I actually know LW norms to be wrong, they should dissolve on contact with how I relate on this topic. But I didn’t anticipate that I could just poke fun at Said in a loving but teasing way and have the median LW voter notice “Ah, this is what it should look like!”. I anticipated that LW would flinch in the same way I anticipated Said to flinch, and motivatedly not-acknowledge the warmth and implications of their discomfort.
Running that simulation forward, as I write this comment, what I actually anticipate is provoking so much insecurity that if I keep going down that path I either get banned or write off LW myself… which I don’t want to do. So there’s my own flinch. And like “Yeah, so don’t do it, dummy”, which I didn’t. But also I hadn’t fully worked through that flinch because mourning that loss of “At least Less Wrong can be expected to get this… right? Right?” was overwhelming for me. It has been a lot of work for me lower standards until I no longer have contempt for most people, and meeting the people who showed up to early LW meetups was an oasis of much needed relief. So to have that threatened, to me, was a bit hard to take. Still is, I guess.
I’ve been chipping away pieces of it and am somewhat better now, but it’s still my own wrongness and neglecting to mourn is against my own principles that the sequence is about in the first place. I think it would have been better if I let Said make his predictably dumb comments, do my damn mourning, and then respond in a way that demonstrates the principles I was trying to gesture towards… even though it would have been super off topic for that post in particular, and it doesn’t feel like that’s a “fair” standard to hold myself to because it’s a significantly higher bar than Said is holding himself to or whatever. Oops. My bad.
So yeah, totally understandable move. I did something very similar myself, even though I probably wouldn’t have if I was sitting on the other side of the ban hammer. But I still ultimately see it as a failure to live up to ideal truth seeking to do it. And even little violations matter in big ways downstream.
I say more in my other response, but basically, I am deeply suspicious of any “I should ban him because he’s not updating” because of how cleanly justification enables pressure to update or “self-ban” and how easily the justification serves as a shield. So like, “If I’m as justified as I think I am, and he’s as beyond reach as I think he is, maybe I should prove it”.
This can sound kinda naive at first glance, because everyone has seen first hand that some people are “unreasonable”, but I’ve pushed on this hard. Like, in my perspective pain is obviously just information and can’t ever actually be a problem… which seems absurd because of the obvious reality of chronic pain and the implication that if I’m right then engagement lead to people with chronic pain perceiving their pain as not a problem, so… What happens when we try it?
After pushing in this direction for the last fifteen years, I’m not finding much room for valid excuses. Every time I fail to get through to people it turns out to be a skill issue on my side, and that skill is in epistemics, and structurally it kinda has to be.
So for example, the only person I’ve ever blocked on any platform is Said. To give myself a little credit, it was for one post in particular which he had already proven he couldn’t handle in a previous exchange on the topic. And it wasn’t “I need to ban him because he’s unreachable”. I would have had a good time going further with it, if it weren’t for my perception that LW didn’t have the stomach for going any further (and to Said’s credit, he did).
But still, according to my own principles, it kinda seems like that too should fall away? Like, if I actually know LW norms to be wrong, they should dissolve on contact with how I relate on this topic. But I didn’t anticipate that I could just poke fun at Said in a loving but teasing way and have the median LW voter notice “Ah, this is what it should look like!”. I anticipated that LW would flinch in the same way I anticipated Said to flinch, and motivatedly not-acknowledge the warmth and implications of their discomfort.
Running that simulation forward, as I write this comment, what I actually anticipate is provoking so much insecurity that if I keep going down that path I either get banned or write off LW myself… which I don’t want to do. So there’s my own flinch. And like “Yeah, so don’t do it, dummy”, which I didn’t. But also I hadn’t fully worked through that flinch because mourning that loss of “At least Less Wrong can be expected to get this… right? Right?” was overwhelming for me. It has been a lot of work for me lower standards until I no longer have contempt for most people, and meeting the people who showed up to early LW meetups was an oasis of much needed relief. So to have that threatened, to me, was a bit hard to take. Still is, I guess.
I’ve been chipping away pieces of it and am somewhat better now, but it’s still my own wrongness and neglecting to mourn is against my own principles that the sequence is about in the first place. I think it would have been better if I let Said make his predictably dumb comments, do my damn mourning, and then respond in a way that demonstrates the principles I was trying to gesture towards… even though it would have been super off topic for that post in particular, and it doesn’t feel like that’s a “fair” standard to hold myself to because it’s a significantly higher bar than Said is holding himself to or whatever. Oops. My bad.
So yeah, totally understandable move. I did something very similar myself, even though I probably wouldn’t have if I was sitting on the other side of the ban hammer. But I still ultimately see it as a failure to live up to ideal truth seeking to do it. And even little violations matter in big ways downstream.