I agree with the emotional oomph behind this, and the thesis that the ban betrays the values. That matters, and it hasn’t gotten the attention that it deserves IMO.
At the same time, I don’t think this essay will have the effect that you desire because it’s missing some things that are important to understand about why things have unfolded the way they have.
To be clear upfront, I don’t have any opinion on the ban itself, and I feel fondly towards Said because I recognize pieces of myself in him—for better and for worse. In this comment I’m speaking from a place of “here’s what it looks like from this perspective”, and not actually asserting any of the criticisms or defenses of anyone.
Anyway, quickly picking at it, line by line:
Said, no less socially perceptive,
Honoring the spirit of Said, what evidence do you have for this claim?
Yes, it is disappointing when a post doesn’t land in the comment section the way I wanted it to, but it’s obviously not because commenters are culpably withholding their illumination of my precious ideas.
On the contrary, this is not at all obvious. People often culpably withhold their illumination of ideas that challenge them. Take any political argument ever.
(As for “implying that they are superior in their dismissal of your irrational and dumb ideas”, I suppose it’s true that when someone rejects an idea, that creates a logical implication that the rejecter thinks they’re more rational than the idea-proposer on that topic. It’s a weirdly petty implication to focus on, though. Who cares?)
Approximately everyone cares. That’s who. Even those who try to not care because they think they shouldn’t.
Criticism isn’t easy for you to take, right? If someone seems to be handling it easily, what do you think is actually going on behind the scenes beliefs they consciously claim to hold?
Handling it well doesn’t mean “not caring”. It means not being thrown off by this. If someone rejects an idea of mine, and they’re right to do it, that means they caught something I missed. It means they’re capable of seeing things that I do not. This matters! I want to notice this!
What is most striking about the second perspective’s list of reasons that critical commenters make Less Wrong unrewarding to interact with is what it does not say.
It doesn’t say the commenters are wrong!
[...]
We can infer that bad arguments and strawmanning are not seen by user reports as a pervasive problem on Less Wrong. (If they were, the second perspective would have mentioned it.)
This tells you that they can’t see the problem clearly enough to articulate it.
I know I have been criticized in ways which were factually incorrect on the face, by people who couldn’t articulate the actual problem because they were in no position to criticize… which were nonetheless gesturing at a real thing I was doing wrong.
It’s true that posting on Less Wrong can be “unrewarding”—but that’s because the rewards are real and therefore have to be earned.
The big problem is that this misses the most important type of reward altogether.
There’s the reward of the pat on the head, and then there’s the reward of becoming lesswrong. That’s the one that matters, and isn’t covered here.
The process of learning to be less wrong, when done right, feels less wrong. Feels good, relative to the baseline you’re leaving.
It’s absolutely possible to foster a culture in which people enjoy being called out and corrected. For now, I’ll leave “What does this require, which is different from LW as it stands?” and “which is different from what Said does?” as an exercise for the reader, because the important part is that more is possible. Humility can feel good. How?
The reason Said needed to be banned, at least according to the perspectives that enacted this ban, is that the community norms here either failed to foster the humility in the community needed to learn from Said—or else failed to foster the humility in Said needed to learn from the community.
What is missing in the norms, and what would it look like to facilitate this learning? Why don’t people already like learning when they’re wrong, here? Why don’t people already like teaching people that they’re wrong, here?
The only way I can read it as “an implicit claim that [Hoffman] violated some social norm” “for which he deserves to be punished” is if there’s a social norm against making posts that can be criticized,
Oh, no. Said is absolutely attempting to punished the according-to-him deserved because Hoffman violated Said’s norms.
Brief overview of the conversation, then we’ll go through it line by line:
“[quotes] hm”
“What’s your best guess as to what I meant here?”
“I assumed you meant what you wrote. It does not seem mysterious or confusing, just contradictory. (If you meant something other than what you wrote, well, I guess you’ll want to clarify.)”
“In case my point was obscure—time travel stories aren’t real, and Robinson Crusoe is also fictional.”
Said didn’t even make any substantive comment. He just juxtaposed quotes as if that’s all that’s needed. But he didn’t get the response “Ah, good point. I guess my whole post is wrong then”, or even “Ah, I see the confusion. Let me clarify” that he would have gotten if “all that’s needed” was correct.
Nor did Said show any signs of surprise. He didn’t say “Wait, you don’t see a problem here?” or “Oh, I misread?”. Instead, he doubles down on the presupposition that his interpretation is the only correct one, by conflating the meaning with the words used to convey the meaning. Said responded with “I assumed you meant what you wrote”. He didn’t respond with “I assumed you were intending for a relatively literal interpretation” or “Maybe we attach different meanings to the same words”.
Said is behaving exactly the way one would expect someone to behave if Hoffman is violating the norm of not saying obviously stupid shit. “Dude, I don’t even have to say anything for it to be obvious what’s wrong here. That’s how dumb it is. No, it’s not possible that the problem is on my side. I’m literally reading the meaning straight from your words with no interpretive layer, and if I read things wrong you should have written them right. Norm violation number 2!”
This is very different from someone who is offering an explanation that he expects the author to not have seen, or that he expects an author worthy of feeling welcome at LW to have not seen. And that communication of “You are not worthy of feeling welcome at LW” is exactly what “social punishment” is, right? The word “criticism”, as you’re using it, papers over the distinction between “here’s an error in your object level reasoning” and “here’s an error in thinking you even belong here, loser”.
If I read that same post and thought that Hoffman deserved to be in LW but couldn’t square such a seemingly obvious mistake with the idea that he shouldn’t be shunned off of LW, I’d ask. “Doesn’t this fall apart as soon as we notice you’re talking about fiction? What am I missing?”.
That’s the same information conveyed without the contempt. That does a better job teaching people like Hoffman, conditional on Hoffman being the one that’s missing something. And a better job teaching people in Said’s shoes, conditional on Said being the one that’s missing something.
The only question left is whether the implicit claims in the contempt are correct—a topic, which I’ll note, is kinda off limits to discuss explicitly in the comment section of this post. For in order for Said to speak plainly, he’d have to say “This is such a basic error that you do not belong here”. And in order for Hoffman to respond in kind, he’d have to say “No, u”.
But we can’t handle that, can we? We’re not going to resolve that one with either side saying “Okay, you were right” or “I was wrong”—are we?
What do you expect to unfold when these disagreements can’t be hashed out in the light? Is there any surprise that things have unfolded the way they have?
Achmiz is privately making a negative character judgment about the interlocutor as a person, even if Achmiz didn’t say that. Such an inference might well be correct, but it’s hard to see why it’s a moderation issue.
Well, it’s a moderation issue when correcting such incorrect judgements itself becomes a moderation issue.
Is it a moderation issue when someone says “You’re such an idiot, Said. No one respects you. You act like your judgements matter, and they don’t. You are too emotionally cowardly to face what you know yourself to be, and as a result you fail to meet the bar to be worthy of contributing here”?
If your answer is “no”, what moderation is left? What do you expect to happen to one more essentially unmoderated forum?
If your answer is “yes”, then what happens to the marketplace of ideas when you tax representation unevenly?
Punishing Achmiz and only Achmiz for frequently finding authors’ replies insufficient (because people suspect, rightly or wrongly, that Achmiz is privately judging them) would be incoherent,
That’s not the issue, at all.
No one has a problem with “finding authors replies insufficient”. I find your replies here insufficient. Yet you know I respect you. You can tell, ahead of time, even, that I want you here, posting this stuff. And I bet this makes it significantly easier and more pleasant to deal with even before we get into how that relates to the epistemics.
The problem is that Said jumps from “finding authors replies insufficient” to leaning on the status ledger that we’ve kinda sorta agreed to not lean on, and can’t within-moderation respond to with seemingly-appropriate force in kind. And he leans on it in ways that don’t read as “fair”.
To the extent I make a good point here, you will learn on the margin “Oh, Jimmy knows shit”. Even if I do it respectfully, if I make the point that you were missing more than you had realized, you’ll learn “Oh, I don’t know as much as I thought I did”. To the extent that I don’t succeed in making these points, those updates don’t happen. So either way, any updates will feel fair, because you chose them.
Tell people what they’re supposed to think on the status ledger, and they’ll be inclined to push back. Ban the pushback, and pressure will build until something gives.
I’d like the dam to not fail as much as anyone. “Dam failing is bad!” is true, and I think actually does need to be said here—so strong upvote.
At the same time, water pressure gonna do what water pressure gonna do. “Dam shouldn’t fail” doesn’t have much traction on me because it’s just physics. Actual goodness is served by routing water efficiently such that pressure to abandon our values never builds in the first place. This requires modifying our values to be more internally consistent, and noticing where they are failing us.
Let us not resist the pressure to abandon our values, but to notice the pressure, and what it says about our values as we’ve been understanding them.
Pace, for example, characterizes Achmiz as “holding extreme disdain and disrespect for interlocutors while being committed to never saying anything explicitly or even denying that it is the case.” [...] … But It’s Hard to Believe That Open Disdain Would Be Better
Right, so he’s good at noticing the norm about saying this stuff in the open and doesn’t say it in the open. Nor does he attempt to pretend his perspective is different than what it is, so people notice. This is good! He’s respecting the rules, being as honest as he’s allowed to be, and people are objecting to his actual beliefs! The ones he’s not even allowed to argue for!!!
Because they’re not allowed to argue back, sure. But man, what would you do if you were to realize that most people on LW are morons who don’t belong because they don’t even care to make sure they get basic shit right? How would you feel if no one could argue you out of your growing contempt, because instead of countering its correctness with arguments, they just got upset at you for daring to look down at them when that’s where they’re speaking from?
Once you realize that you’re in fact better than everyone else, such norms really paint you into a corner about what you can do about it.
Which is a problem if you’re correct about being better than everyone else and if you’re incorrect. We can’t even figure out how much of column A how much of column B, because we can’t talk about it.
Am I … somehow wrong about that? Have I been deceiving and gaslighting people this whole time by engaging with the substance of their ideas and trying to keep my thoughts about how stupid and dishonest they are to myself?
Yes, but you’re following the norms. And that’s probably good because it’s really hard to tell people that they’re stupid and dishonest in a way that they register as rewarding enough to sign up to learn from.
Engaging with the substance of the ideas is a big part of doing it skillfully, and it’s good to notice when you don’t have the skills to pull something off… but yes. There is a skill in telling people how stupid and dishonest they are in such a way that they realize you’re right and thank you for it. And furthermore it is a rationality skill. A skill in noticing what you’re really saying and believing, and whether it is as justified as you think it is. A skill in noticing how their beliefs are formed, whether they might be right in ways you’re not tracking about things you don’t realize they’re saying, and whether saying the things you think should be said actually does what you think it should.
I am not a polite person and am not committed to never saying anything explicitly nor denying that it is the case, so if it would help, I’m happy to clarify that I hold extreme disdain and disrespect for the entirety of the Less Wrong moderation team and a decent fraction of the userbase for general reasons that are neatly exemplified by the concrete case of their relentless persecution of Said Achmiz.
What a polite and respectful way to say that.
To the extent that I might qualify as part of the userbase for which you hold some amount of disdain/disrespect, thanks for respecting me enough to say it. That’s what’s important to me.
Your post here seems like a good example of the kind of straightforward aggression that is permissible, and I notice that it takes an amount of both skill and time that it is prohibitive.
“Criticism will be accepted, so long as every other line rhymes, each line contains a prime number of words, and there are no typos. Response time 1 year”.
Rather, I am writing to the world in defense of a principle that I’ve spent the last decade of my life [44] fighting for: that the truth matters, and specifically, that the truth matters more than people’s feelings
Thank you. Sincerely.
The one little addition I’d like to make is that feelings are about reality as well, and as such embody statements with truth values. Knowing what to make of these matters immensely, because otherwise we cannot orient to what the challenge actually is.
I love many parts of this comment, most notably your analysis of the Said / Benquo interaction.
One model I need for understanding the situation about Said, that I don’t have and don’t see above, is an understanding of common knowledge creation in many-person forums. It seems to me that in one-on-one interaction, communication worth attempting is communication that tries to be wanted by, and received by, the person one is communicating with (as you, Jimmy, argue in the parent-comment). In certain sorts of many-person forums, such as LW or the math community, there are upsides for group processing in making it apparent that some [things posing as agreed on by a community, that might otherwise be taken as newly established norms or things to build on] are not in fact agreed on / established / vetted. And such moves can aid the group even when not received-as-helpful by the poster whose work is being commented on. One common ~norm for such situations is something like: “please go ahead and point out false claims and arguments that violate local validity semantics, even when the person you’re responding to doesn’t like it.” Oli’s counterpoint seems to me to roughly be: (paraphrased) “in the context of LW, this norm would let anyone DDOS anyone, and shut down any conversation, and so such comments aren’t prosocial unless paired with taste.” (I am uncertain whether this argument is true.)
Do you, Jimmy, have a proposed model of how visible common-knowledge ~vetting should work?
Yeah, I do. The same problem exists in one on one situations, actually.
So, “communication that is wanted and received” is often the right play in a one on one thing. It’s what I’m aiming for here, and wouldn’t change if this conversation were in private. You can’t really get through to people if they don’t wanna hear you, so talking at people who aren’t interested is a big failure mode and all that. Sure.
At the same time, there is another function of private speech, which is filtering.
Say we’re interacting one on one, and I’m coming off like an arrogant jerk. This gets in the way of the interaction because arrogance makes people dumb, so you can’t take my words seriously and we can’t actually do things. To the extent that you care about being able to interact with me, you have reason to find a way to communicate that I’ll want to hear. “I’m struggling to interact with you. Would you like to help me figure out how to go about this?” rather than “You’re an arrogant idiot”, perhaps.
Sure.
But what if you don’t have reason to care that much, or I’m pushing back against your attempts to help me get along with you? What do you do? “If I have nothing nice to say, I don’t say anything?”
That’s the most common response, among people who try hard at these things, but it’s missing a lot. One of the most significant relationships for my development came from what can be caricatured as “You dumb” “no u, because X” “No u, because response to X”.
If you would have watched that conversation and the immediate aftermath, it would be easy to conclude “See, wasted time. Shouldn’t have offered what wasn’t wanted”, because neither of us changed our mind on the topic of discussion and we both agreed to go our separate ways and stop interacting.
But what ended up happening is that he reached out again because he could see that I wasn’t actually dumb (even if he thought I overreached on points) and the situation was symmetric in that respect. If either of us had gotten upset and run away, then that’s the filter working as intended. Dumb worthless people running away when shown what they are. But the fact that we didn’t dodge this conflict is what demonstrated that we were both able to face what the other person thought they saw, and either counter it legitimately or else find the humility to update.
The extra ingredient here is
“I’m gonna show you [what I see to be] the truth, including the truth of how worthwhile you are as a person, and find out if this is something you want to hear, at the level of effort I’m willing to put in to make it palatable”
It’s a filtering move. If he runs away, good. That’s what I want, given that he’s not interested in humbling himself far enough to find the truth that I can see, at the costs I’m willing to pay to make it seeable. If he doesn’t run away, good. Now I can see that he actually wanted to hear this, and that enables useful interaction. Most will fail the filter if you filter aggressively like that, but damn you’re missing a lot if you don’t give people the chance to prove you wrong about what they’re interested in hearing.
Tell me I’m being an arrogant jerk, and if my perspective is more compelling than yours here I can just share it and win you over. If it’s not, I’ll feel it. And then I’ll have to choose whether to dodge—to which you can keep hammering me, until I decide differently—or accept your points, or run away myself. No matter what happens, you win.… unless… you are actually dodging yourself. Because inviting conflict doesn’t help you avoid recognizing your own wrongness. But you wouldn’t want to do that anyway, right? :P
The whole impulse to “be a jerk”/”Tell people they’re wrong on the internet”/”engage in status BS instead of cooperative truth tracking” comes from perception (or perceived ability to claim) that the other person’s self concept is delusional to the point that it is interfering with cooperative truth seeking, and that pushing back is the necessary impetus to work towards a solution.
The problem, as I see it, is that we’re so starved of examples of people “fighting” in ways that prove productive—fighting playfully, with engagement rather than flinching and upsetness driving the boat—that we’ve come to believe that the rational thing is to avoid such conflict and emotions, instead of learning how to have them productively. Instead of learning how to engage in them such that they resolve, how to engage in them such that the unworthy filter themselves out, etc.
I write in depth about these dynamics in my sequence “Beneath Psychology”. The short version is that we need Security so that we can negotiate for Respect, so that we can even get started making progress on the object level. But we conflate lack of Respect with lack of Security, in part because we’re motivated to cover up our own insecurity and “disrespectful!” is one way to do it, and we miss the ways in which Security is downstream of actual clarity, so we end up doing insecurity at the process of resolving disagreements on Respect, which is the exact thing that blocks resolution of disagreements/updating on evidence.
And all of this dissolves once you see the pieces for what they are. Because, for example, instead of “He’s disrespecting me!”, it’s just “And? Am I worthy of it or not? I can show up and we’ll find out, if I want. Do I want that?”
Honoring the spirit of Said, what evidence do you have for this claim?
Um, subjectively he just seems socially sharper in private emails than public comments. (Honoring the spirit of Said, I should note that my subjective perception of private correspondence is worthless as public evidence, but that’s my answer.) This is the part where his persecutors say, “A-ha, so you admit we were right about the weaponized obtuseness!” And that’s the part where I say, “Okay, but ‘weaponized obtuseness’ is just your pathologization of ordinary politeness, and you people obviously don’t want to hear the rude version.”
he just seems socially sharper in private emails than public comments
Interesting.
I think it makes sense though, for the reasons you gesture at. I have at times responded to charges of “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole” with “Except I’m also asserting that I’m not the asshole and that you are. Can you tell me I’m wrong now?”. Funny that no one can say “Yes” :P
It’s definitely a mistake to write Walters off as “missing the social signals that The Dudes sees”, because sometimes Walter is the only one that remembers when rules matter.
Honoring the spirit of Said, I should note that my subjective perception of private correspondence is worthless as public evidence,
Eh, it’s pretty clear to me that this isn’t something you’d lie about. And now, to anyone who trusts my trust in you. And to anyone who has similar trust in Anna, since she did the “Agree” thing.
That kind of thing won’t reach everyone, but I don’t think it has to.
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 agree with the emotional oomph behind this, and the thesis that the ban betrays the values. That matters, and it hasn’t gotten the attention that it deserves IMO.
At the same time, I don’t think this essay will have the effect that you desire because it’s missing some things that are important to understand about why things have unfolded the way they have.
To be clear upfront, I don’t have any opinion on the ban itself, and I feel fondly towards Said because I recognize pieces of myself in him—for better and for worse. In this comment I’m speaking from a place of “here’s what it looks like from this perspective”, and not actually asserting any of the criticisms or defenses of anyone.
Anyway, quickly picking at it, line by line:
Honoring the spirit of Said, what evidence do you have for this claim?
On the contrary, this is not at all obvious. People often culpably withhold their illumination of ideas that challenge them. Take any political argument ever.
Approximately everyone cares. That’s who. Even those who try to not care because they think they shouldn’t.
Criticism isn’t easy for you to take, right? If someone seems to be handling it easily, what do you think is actually going on behind the
scenesbeliefs they consciously claim to hold?Handling it well doesn’t mean “not caring”. It means not being thrown off by this. If someone rejects an idea of mine, and they’re right to do it, that means they caught something I missed. It means they’re capable of seeing things that I do not. This matters! I want to notice this!
This tells you that they can’t see the problem clearly enough to articulate it.
I know I have been criticized in ways which were factually incorrect on the face, by people who couldn’t articulate the actual problem because they were in no position to criticize… which were nonetheless gesturing at a real thing I was doing wrong.
The big problem is that this misses the most important type of reward altogether.
There’s the reward of the pat on the head, and then there’s the reward of becoming less wrong. That’s the one that matters, and isn’t covered here.
The process of learning to be less wrong, when done right, feels less wrong. Feels good, relative to the baseline you’re leaving.
It’s absolutely possible to foster a culture in which people enjoy being called out and corrected. For now, I’ll leave “What does this require, which is different from LW as it stands?” and “which is different from what Said does?” as an exercise for the reader, because the important part is that more is possible. Humility can feel good. How?
The reason Said needed to be banned, at least according to the perspectives that enacted this ban, is that the community norms here either failed to foster the humility in the community needed to learn from Said—or else failed to foster the humility in Said needed to learn from the community.
What is missing in the norms, and what would it look like to facilitate this learning? Why don’t people already like learning when they’re wrong, here? Why don’t people already like teaching people that they’re wrong, here?
Oh, no. Said is absolutely attempting to punished the according-to-him deserved because Hoffman violated Said’s norms.
Brief overview of the conversation, then we’ll go through it line by line:
“[quotes] hm”
“What’s your best guess as to what I meant here?”
“I assumed you meant what you wrote. It does not seem mysterious or confusing, just contradictory. (If you meant something other than what you wrote, well, I guess you’ll want to clarify.)”
“In case my point was obscure—time travel stories aren’t real, and Robinson Crusoe is also fictional.”
Said didn’t even make any substantive comment. He just juxtaposed quotes as if that’s all that’s needed. But he didn’t get the response “Ah, good point. I guess my whole post is wrong then”, or even “Ah, I see the confusion. Let me clarify” that he would have gotten if “all that’s needed” was correct.
Nor did Said show any signs of surprise. He didn’t say “Wait, you don’t see a problem here?” or “Oh, I misread?”. Instead, he doubles down on the presupposition that his interpretation is the only correct one, by conflating the meaning with the words used to convey the meaning. Said responded with “I assumed you meant what you wrote”. He didn’t respond with “I assumed you were intending for a relatively literal interpretation” or “Maybe we attach different meanings to the same words”.
Said is behaving exactly the way one would expect someone to behave if Hoffman is violating the norm of not saying obviously stupid shit. “Dude, I don’t even have to say anything for it to be obvious what’s wrong here. That’s how dumb it is. No, it’s not possible that the problem is on my side. I’m literally reading the meaning straight from your words with no interpretive layer, and if I read things wrong you should have written them right. Norm violation number 2!”
This is very different from someone who is offering an explanation that he expects the author to not have seen, or that he expects an author worthy of feeling welcome at LW to have not seen. And that communication of “You are not worthy of feeling welcome at LW” is exactly what “social punishment” is, right? The word “criticism”, as you’re using it, papers over the distinction between “here’s an error in your object level reasoning” and “here’s an error in thinking you even belong here, loser”.
If I read that same post and thought that Hoffman deserved to be in LW but couldn’t square such a seemingly obvious mistake with the idea that he shouldn’t be shunned off of LW, I’d ask. “Doesn’t this fall apart as soon as we notice you’re talking about fiction? What am I missing?”.
That’s the same information conveyed without the contempt. That does a better job teaching people like Hoffman, conditional on Hoffman being the one that’s missing something. And a better job teaching people in Said’s shoes, conditional on Said being the one that’s missing something.
The only question left is whether the implicit claims in the contempt are correct—a topic, which I’ll note, is kinda off limits to discuss explicitly in the comment section of this post. For in order for Said to speak plainly, he’d have to say “This is such a basic error that you do not belong here”. And in order for Hoffman to respond in kind, he’d have to say “No, u”.
But we can’t handle that, can we? We’re not going to resolve that one with either side saying “Okay, you were right” or “I was wrong”—are we?
What do you expect to unfold when these disagreements can’t be hashed out in the light? Is there any surprise that things have unfolded the way they have?
Well, it’s a moderation issue when correcting such incorrect judgements itself becomes a moderation issue.
Is it a moderation issue when someone says “You’re such an idiot, Said. No one respects you. You act like your judgements matter, and they don’t. You are too emotionally cowardly to face what you know yourself to be, and as a result you fail to meet the bar to be worthy of contributing here”?
If your answer is “no”, what moderation is left? What do you expect to happen to one more essentially unmoderated forum?
If your answer is “yes”, then what happens to the marketplace of ideas when you tax representation unevenly?
That’s not the issue, at all.
No one has a problem with “finding authors replies insufficient”. I find your replies here insufficient. Yet you know I respect you. You can tell, ahead of time, even, that I want you here, posting this stuff. And I bet this makes it significantly easier and more pleasant to deal with even before we get into how that relates to the epistemics.
The problem is that Said jumps from “finding authors replies insufficient” to leaning on the status ledger that we’ve kinda sorta agreed to not lean on, and can’t within-moderation respond to with seemingly-appropriate force in kind. And he leans on it in ways that don’t read as “fair”.
To the extent I make a good point here, you will learn on the margin “Oh, Jimmy knows shit”. Even if I do it respectfully, if I make the point that you were missing more than you had realized, you’ll learn “Oh, I don’t know as much as I thought I did”. To the extent that I don’t succeed in making these points, those updates don’t happen. So either way, any updates will feel fair, because you chose them.
Tell people what they’re supposed to think on the status ledger, and they’ll be inclined to push back. Ban the pushback, and pressure will build until something gives.
I’d like the dam to not fail as much as anyone. “Dam failing is bad!” is true, and I think actually does need to be said here—so strong upvote.
At the same time, water pressure gonna do what water pressure gonna do. “Dam shouldn’t fail” doesn’t have much traction on me because it’s just physics. Actual goodness is served by routing water efficiently such that pressure to abandon our values never builds in the first place. This requires modifying our values to be more internally consistent, and noticing where they are failing us.
Let us not resist the pressure to abandon our values, but to notice the pressure, and what it says about our values as we’ve been understanding them.
Right, so he’s good at noticing the norm about saying this stuff in the open and doesn’t say it in the open. Nor does he attempt to pretend his perspective is different than what it is, so people notice. This is good! He’s respecting the rules, being as honest as he’s allowed to be, and people are objecting to his actual beliefs! The ones he’s not even allowed to argue for!!!
Because they’re not allowed to argue back, sure. But man, what would you do if you were to realize that most people on LW are morons who don’t belong because they don’t even care to make sure they get basic shit right? How would you feel if no one could argue you out of your growing contempt, because instead of countering its correctness with arguments, they just got upset at you for daring to look down at them when that’s where they’re speaking from?
Once you realize that you’re in fact better than everyone else, such norms really paint you into a corner about what you can do about it.
Which is a problem if you’re correct about being better than everyone else and if you’re incorrect. We can’t even figure out how much of column A how much of column B, because we can’t talk about it.
Yes, but you’re following the norms. And that’s probably good because it’s really hard to tell people that they’re stupid and dishonest in a way that they register as rewarding enough to sign up to learn from.
Engaging with the substance of the ideas is a big part of doing it skillfully, and it’s good to notice when you don’t have the skills to pull something off… but yes. There is a skill in telling people how stupid and dishonest they are in such a way that they realize you’re right and thank you for it. And furthermore it is a rationality skill. A skill in noticing what you’re really saying and believing, and whether it is as justified as you think it is. A skill in noticing how their beliefs are formed, whether they might be right in ways you’re not tracking about things you don’t realize they’re saying, and whether saying the things you think should be said actually does what you think it should.
What a polite and respectful way to say that.
To the extent that I might qualify as part of the userbase for which you hold some amount of disdain/disrespect, thanks for respecting me enough to say it. That’s what’s important to me.
Your post here seems like a good example of the kind of straightforward aggression that is permissible, and I notice that it takes an amount of both skill and time that it is prohibitive.
“Criticism will be accepted, so long as every other line rhymes, each line contains a prime number of words, and there are no typos. Response time 1 year”.
Thank you. Sincerely.
The one little addition I’d like to make is that feelings are about reality as well, and as such embody statements with truth values. Knowing what to make of these matters immensely, because otherwise we cannot orient to what the challenge actually is.
I love many parts of this comment, most notably your analysis of the Said / Benquo interaction.
One model I need for understanding the situation about Said, that I don’t have and don’t see above, is an understanding of common knowledge creation in many-person forums. It seems to me that in one-on-one interaction, communication worth attempting is communication that tries to be wanted by, and received by, the person one is communicating with (as you, Jimmy, argue in the parent-comment). In certain sorts of many-person forums, such as LW or the math community, there are upsides for group processing in making it apparent that some [things posing as agreed on by a community, that might otherwise be taken as newly established norms or things to build on] are not in fact agreed on / established / vetted. And such moves can aid the group even when not received-as-helpful by the poster whose work is being commented on. One common ~norm for such situations is something like: “please go ahead and point out false claims and arguments that violate local validity semantics, even when the person you’re responding to doesn’t like it.” Oli’s counterpoint seems to me to roughly be: (paraphrased) “in the context of LW, this norm would let anyone DDOS anyone, and shut down any conversation, and so such comments aren’t prosocial unless paired with taste.” (I am uncertain whether this argument is true.)
Do you, Jimmy, have a proposed model of how visible common-knowledge ~vetting should work?
Yeah, I do. The same problem exists in one on one situations, actually.
So, “communication that is wanted and received” is often the right play in a one on one thing. It’s what I’m aiming for here, and wouldn’t change if this conversation were in private. You can’t really get through to people if they don’t wanna hear you, so talking at people who aren’t interested is a big failure mode and all that. Sure.
At the same time, there is another function of private speech, which is filtering.
Say we’re interacting one on one, and I’m coming off like an arrogant jerk. This gets in the way of the interaction because arrogance makes people dumb, so you can’t take my words seriously and we can’t actually do things. To the extent that you care about being able to interact with me, you have reason to find a way to communicate that I’ll want to hear. “I’m struggling to interact with you. Would you like to help me figure out how to go about this?” rather than “You’re an arrogant idiot”, perhaps.
Sure.
But what if you don’t have reason to care that much, or I’m pushing back against your attempts to help me get along with you? What do you do? “If I have nothing nice to say, I don’t say anything?”
That’s the most common response, among people who try hard at these things, but it’s missing a lot. One of the most significant relationships for my development came from what can be caricatured as “You dumb” “no u, because X” “No u, because response to X”.
If you would have watched that conversation and the immediate aftermath, it would be easy to conclude “See, wasted time. Shouldn’t have offered what wasn’t wanted”, because neither of us changed our mind on the topic of discussion and we both agreed to go our separate ways and stop interacting.
But what ended up happening is that he reached out again because he could see that I wasn’t actually dumb (even if he thought I overreached on points) and the situation was symmetric in that respect. If either of us had gotten upset and run away, then that’s the filter working as intended. Dumb worthless people running away when shown what they are. But the fact that we didn’t dodge this conflict is what demonstrated that we were both able to face what the other person thought they saw, and either counter it legitimately or else find the humility to update.
The extra ingredient here is
“I’m gonna show you [what I see to be] the truth, including the truth of how worthwhile you are as a person, and find out if this is something you want to hear, at the level of effort I’m willing to put in to make it palatable”
It’s a filtering move. If he runs away, good. That’s what I want, given that he’s not interested in humbling himself far enough to find the truth that I can see, at the costs I’m willing to pay to make it seeable. If he doesn’t run away, good. Now I can see that he actually wanted to hear this, and that enables useful interaction. Most will fail the filter if you filter aggressively like that, but damn you’re missing a lot if you don’t give people the chance to prove you wrong about what they’re interested in hearing.
Tell me I’m being an arrogant jerk, and if my perspective is more compelling than yours here I can just share it and win you over. If it’s not, I’ll feel it. And then I’ll have to choose whether to dodge—to which you can keep hammering me, until I decide differently—or accept your points, or run away myself. No matter what happens, you win.… unless… you are actually dodging yourself. Because inviting conflict doesn’t help you avoid recognizing your own wrongness. But you wouldn’t want to do that anyway, right? :P
The whole impulse to “be a jerk”/”Tell people they’re wrong on the internet”/”engage in status BS instead of cooperative truth tracking” comes from perception (or perceived ability to claim) that the other person’s self concept is delusional to the point that it is interfering with cooperative truth seeking, and that pushing back is the necessary impetus to work towards a solution.
The problem, as I see it, is that we’re so starved of examples of people “fighting” in ways that prove productive—fighting playfully, with engagement rather than flinching and upsetness driving the boat—that we’ve come to believe that the rational thing is to avoid such conflict and emotions, instead of learning how to have them productively. Instead of learning how to engage in them such that they resolve, how to engage in them such that the unworthy filter themselves out, etc.
I write in depth about these dynamics in my sequence “Beneath Psychology”. The short version is that we need Security so that we can negotiate for Respect, so that we can even get started making progress on the object level. But we conflate lack of Respect with lack of Security, in part because we’re motivated to cover up our own insecurity and “disrespectful!” is one way to do it, and we miss the ways in which Security is downstream of actual clarity, so we end up doing insecurity at the process of resolving disagreements on Respect, which is the exact thing that blocks resolution of disagreements/updating on evidence.
And all of this dissolves once you see the pieces for what they are. Because, for example, instead of “He’s disrespecting me!”, it’s just “And? Am I worthy of it or not? I can show up and we’ll find out, if I want. Do I want that?”
Um, subjectively he just seems socially sharper in private emails than public comments. (Honoring the spirit of Said, I should note that my subjective perception of private correspondence is worthless as public evidence, but that’s my answer.) This is the part where his persecutors say, “A-ha, so you admit we were right about the weaponized obtuseness!” And that’s the part where I say, “Okay, but ‘weaponized obtuseness’ is just your pathologization of ordinary politeness, and you people obviously don’t want to hear the rude version.”
Interesting.
I think it makes sense though, for the reasons you gesture at. I have at times responded to charges of “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole” with “Except I’m also asserting that I’m not the asshole and that you are. Can you tell me I’m wrong now?”. Funny that no one can say “Yes” :P
It’s definitely a mistake to write Walters off as “missing the social signals that The Dudes sees”, because sometimes Walter is the only one that remembers when rules matter.
Eh, it’s pretty clear to me that this isn’t something you’d lie about. And now, to anyone who trusts my trust in you. And to anyone who has similar trust in Anna, since she did the “Agree” thing.
That kind of thing won’t reach everyone, but I don’t think it has to.
Jimmy writes:
Could you say more about that part, please?
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.