Comparing this to that other Vassar/Metz interview from 2020, it sure doesn’t seem that there’s been any progress whatsoever in the six years since. I would suggest curtailing this project, @Zack_M_Davis.
My issue with this is, you can’t stop someone from writing a book. Did you think a professional journalist is going to shrug and give up if the group they’re profiling successfully coordinates not to talk to them? If I didn’t volunteer to be the star cooperative source, the book just gets written with David Gerard in that role, which is even worse.
First, I think your interventions are not going to make the book much better at all. You are not getting through to the guy, and it’s not as if, merely because he talked to you, he’s now going to not talk to Gerard or whoever anyway.[1] And after he’s had all those conversations, he’s going to include only the parts that let him paint whatever narrative he’s already decided is most juicy. Inasmuch as your segments would appear there, it would only be in those capacities that help him in that task.
Second, participation legitimizes it. If nobody from the community were willing to talk to him, he’d have to publish a book which mostly contains perspectives of people unrelated to the community or on its fringes. I. e.: much worse sources, less accurate information, less credibility attached to those sources. It would be much easier to win the information war against that book, to dismiss it as lacking valuable content.[2]
Interacting with the guy just feeds him information for making his narrative more convincing, while likely barely changing what that narrative is going to be. E. g., now he can put quotes in his book in which a bunch of people from the community literally call it a “doomsday cult”, and as was noted, he is not going to include any of the relevant implied caveats.
Third, this is plainly a waste of your time.
I mean, thank you for your sacrifice, the interview was entertaining to read and I appreciate the effort. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep doing this.
Which is the third type of intervention you don’t seem to be considering here. If you want to make the book’s impact less bad, you can try to make it better, or you can try to prevent it from being written, or you can prepare to launch a counteroffensive and dismantle it after it’s published.
it’s not as if, merely because he talked to you, he’s now going to not talk to Gerard or whoever anyway
I mean, he should talk to Gerard. There’s a lot to dislike about lazy “both sides” journalism where the reporter writing a story about X just quotes a pro-X person and an anti-X person and calls it a day, but you do want to at least talk to some anti-X people as part of the process!
I worry that my other comment that you quote, read in isolation, might have left you or other readers with the impression that my goal is to protect “the community”’s reputation. To clarify, I don’t really care about that. (As suggested in the other comment, I do think it’s plausible that someone whose goal was to protect the community’s reputation would do well to talk to Metz in order to prevent the void of sources from being filled with hostile actors like Gerard, but someone playing that strategy should speak much less candidly than I do.)
I care about public knowledge—the construction of maps that reflect territories. As part of that, if someone is researching a topic I know a lot about, I’m happy to chat with them and take my own recording and publish my own transcript. If the person I was chatting with writes a bad book, I feel like that’s not my fault. If someone else wants to write a better book, I’m happy to chat with them, too, or they’re welcome to draw on the published transcript of my conversation with the worse author. I would never talk to a journalist who wouldn’t agree to me publishing my own recording!
I worry that my other comment that you quote, read in isolation, might have left you or other readers with the impression that my goal is to protect “the community”’s reputation. To clarify, I don’t really care about that.
Then you yourself are a hazard to the community. You are helping destroy it by talking to Cade Metz.
If the person I was chatting with writes a bad book, I feel like that’s not my fault.
One of the many flaws with “rationalist” thinking is that rationalists won’t recognize that whether you make something easier or harder will drastically affect how much you get—even if the final decision to do it is made by someone whom you have no control over at all.
If you build a crypto system that is useful for money laundering, rationalists will say “Oh, I wanted it built for something else, people chose to use it for money laundering. It’s their own choice, I have nothing to do with it.”
If you build a system for prediction markets and people use it for gambling, rationalists will say “it is people’s own choice to use it for gambling. We have nothing to do with it!”
Rationalists will propose a banned products store where you can buy dangerous things and say “if you choose to buy something that kills you there, it’s your own fault”. (Mercifully, at least Eliezer doesn’t believe this one.) See also: rationalist calls for abolishing the FDA.
If you do things that make abuse or misuse of the system much easier, a significant amount of fault is yours for setting up the system that way, even if the person who will ultimately do the deed is someone you don’t control. You are not absolved from responsibility just because it’s someone else’s own choice.
“It’s Metz who will be telling the lies. Poor old me is just committed to truth and is not responsible for what I made it easier for Metz to do” is abdication of responsibility. It absolutely is your fault, even if Metz is also contributing.
Rationalists will propose a banned products store where you can buy dangerous things and say “if you choose to buy something that kills you there, it’s your own fault.”
The text of the very post you cite is arguing against that stance.
Saying “People who buy dangerous products deserve to get hurt!” is not tough-minded. It is a way of refusing to live in an unfair universe. Real tough-mindedness is saying, “Yes, sulfuric acid is a horrible painful death, and no, that mother of five children didn’t deserve it, but we’re going to keep the shops open anyway because we did this cost-benefit calculation.”
The point is NOT that “If you made your own choices then they’re your own fault”. The point is “there’s an actual cost of people who realistically will make these mistakes, who will be harmed, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise, or slip into justifying it.”
Systemic actions and personal actions are different. The analogies you give are all systemic:
crypto system
prediction market
banned products store
things that make abuse or misuse of the system much easier
setting up the system
But the action you are critiquing is not systemic, it is talking to a journalist. Systemic analogies are misleading. Instead I’m thinking about analogous actions where someone takes a small individual action that indirectly negatively impacts a group’s reputation, but only because of the poor choices of other people. Hmm.
How about this very comment I’m making? Davis’s essay discusses the New York Times. By replying to this comment I’m making the essay slightly more visible. Other people may read it and have a worse opinion of the New York Times. Some of them will make unreasonably large updates. So now, am I a hazard to the New York Times? Am I helping Davis to destroy it? Are you? Nah. When people read stuff I didn’t write and think things I don’t think, that’s their problem, not mine.
(and what if someone reads your comment and has a lower opinion of rationalists as a result?)
See Against Responsibility for more on where I’m coming from. Related is Asymmetric Justice—it’s especially pernicious if Davis is blamed for Metz telling lies but doesn’t get credit for inspiring me to be more honest.
Zack didn’t claim that so much good is done by talking to Metz that even if Metz lies we would come out ahead comparatively. He said that he doesn’t care about the harm caused by Metz.
Where you are getting the position that Davis doesn’t care about harm caused by Metz? I don’t see this. In this thread, Davis said:
I worry that my other comment that you quote, read in isolation, might have left you or other readers with the impression that my goal is to protect “the community”’s reputation. To clarify, I don’t really care about that.
That is a normal position held by billions of people on the planet who also don’t really care about protecting the reputation of this community. No doubt there are many communities whose reputation you don’t care about protecting, just this one community whose reputation you do care about protecting. That’s fine by me, but you’re not defending universal human values here, you’re defending your idiosyncratic values, so leave space for others with different values.
I don’t really care about protecting the reputation of this community. It’s not a terminal value of mine. I don’t have a vow or deontology committing me to it. I have some virtue-of-loyalty, but to people, not communities. I don’t expect this community to protect my reputation, so there is no acausal trade. Instrumentally I expect the future to go best if all communities have accurate reputations. That is not the same as “protecting” a reputation.
That is a normal position held by billions of people on the planet who also don’t really care about protecting the reputation of this community.
You only need to care about hurting the community if you are hurting the community. Billions of people on this planet (why do you exclude Martians?) don’t harm the reputation of this community, so they don’t need to care. Zack, by talking to Metz, does harm it and therefore is obliged to care.
Caring about how your own actions hurt others is not an optional choice.
Where you are getting the position that Davis doesn’t care about harm caused by Metz?
The above is exactly not caring about the harm caused by Metz (or rather, by him enabling Metz).
Eh, fair enough, thanks. I have to admit you have a point: to some quantitative extent, I’m a hazard to the community’s reputation. If the community would be destroyed if it had a sufficiently bad reputation, then I’m helping destroy it (to some quantitative extent) by speaking candidly with someone who will predictably use the information they gain to lower the community’s reputation.
(I’m saying “to some quantitative extent” because, as I explained in another comment, I think the effect sizes here are pretty small, but as you correctly point out in another comment, that doesn’t justify rounding down to zero: someone who litters in a park is making the park less nice, even if any single piece of trash doesn’t ruin the park.)
I don’t care! I just don’t care very much about covering for the community’s reputation! I care about telling the truth in public, which includes doing meta-journalism like this post. I think I care about the community’s reputation a little bit, such that I would engage in some strategic concealment if “destruction” were actually at hand—but on the current margin, no, I’m not going to stop “littering”. What are you going to do about it? Lobby the admins of this website and the organizers of local meetup groups to ban me (a 9x Curated, 4x Best of Less Wrong, 3x Less Online invited author) for insufficient loyalty? Fine! Do your worst! I’m long past the point of being controlled by you people.
I don’t care! I just don’t care very much about covering for the community’s reputation!
This is antisocial. Hurting the community and saying you don’t care is like robbing a bank and saying “I just don’t care much about whether the bank gets to keep its money”.
Refraining from harming others is not supposed to be an optional matter of personal preference.
Zach is adhering to a coherent notion of morality here. I think I agree that what he’s doing is antisocial (according to a relatively common notion of “antisocial”).
But Zach (I believe) disputes that being antisocial in this sense is bad. Indeed my impression is that he thinks the opposite—being prosocial in this way is the active source of a lot of harm and evil in the world.
Right. Telling the bank robber he’s being antisocial doesn’t work, because he already knows that. What you need is a police force to throw the robber in jail. Then people who don’t want to go to jail won’t even try to rob the bank. That was what the meetup ban suggestion was about. If even that fails to deter potential snitches and your internet community can’t escalate any further (because the local non-internet police insist on maintaining their monopoly on violence), then your community might not be able to successfully protect its reputation.
Yes, of course. I’m not a monster—at least, not according to my moral intuition. But sometimes there’s not an obvious morally right or wrong answer when the interests of multiple parties are at stake. In the case of “my interest in having candid conversations with people and doing cool meta-journalism blogging” versus “the community’s interest in protecting its collective reputation”, the latter just does not seem compelling to my moral intuition. If that makes me a monster with respect to your moral intuition, well, that’s when you need the police.
ut sometimes there’s not an obvious morally right or wrong answer when the interests of multiple parties are at stake.
But “I don’t care much about the interests of the other party” is not a necessary part of comparing those interests.
If you don’t care much about the interests of the other party, the outcome of comparing their interests to yours will, of course, be that you always win.
You seem to be treating this as some kind of personal injury which you are entitled to demand the immediate cessation of, whereas Zack’s perspective could be summarized as “Lèse-majesté doesn’t violate the NAP”. The Metz transcripts describe at greath length why Zack does not respect the community’s majesté, so you may have better luck persuading him if you adopt a perspective in which people are not entitled to a good reputation.
I worry that my other comment that you quote, read in isolation, might have left you or other readers with the impression that my goal is to protect “the community”’s reputation
Nah, I know your general disposition towards that. But I did get the impression from the transcript that you’re talking to Metz in an attempt to shift the impact of his book from one you consider more negative to one you consider more positive in some way. I am saying I don’t think this will work, that he’ll only use the information and credibility you lend him to twist his readers’ minds further away from the truth. It would be better if the book were a sad little thing filled with vicious rants from uninformed onlookers, so that nobody could end up mistaken that it’s of any value.
FWIW, I also think the effect sizes here are really small. Indeed, I think you’re not getting to the guy so much that he’s not even going to be able to competently use the information you give him to strike at the community or whatever. If you feel that you’re getting back your time’s worth by being able to make cool meta-journalism posts out of it, I guess knock yourself out – those posts have been entertaining. (Though I’m not sure how much of that you’re going to extract from Metz either; as I’d pointed out, it’s all starting to read very same-y.)
Comparing this to that other Vassar/Metz interview from 2020, it sure doesn’t seem that there’s been any progress whatsoever in the six years since. I would suggest curtailing this project, @Zack_M_Davis.
In a comment elsewhere, you argue:
First, I think your interventions are not going to make the book much better at all. You are not getting through to the guy, and it’s not as if, merely because he talked to you, he’s now going to not talk to Gerard or whoever anyway.[1] And after he’s had all those conversations, he’s going to include only the parts that let him paint whatever narrative he’s already decided is most juicy. Inasmuch as your segments would appear there, it would only be in those capacities that help him in that task.
Second, participation legitimizes it. If nobody from the community were willing to talk to him, he’d have to publish a book which mostly contains perspectives of people unrelated to the community or on its fringes. I. e.: much worse sources, less accurate information, less credibility attached to those sources. It would be much easier to win the information war against that book, to dismiss it as lacking valuable content.[2]
Interacting with the guy just feeds him information for making his narrative more convincing, while likely barely changing what that narrative is going to be. E. g., now he can put quotes in his book in which a bunch of people from the community literally call it a “doomsday cult”, and as was noted, he is not going to include any of the relevant implied caveats.
Third, this is plainly a waste of your time.
I mean, thank you for your sacrifice, the interview was entertaining to read and I appreciate the effort. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep doing this.
Indeed, the guy prides himself on looking at things “from all sides”.
Which is the third type of intervention you don’t seem to be considering here. If you want to make the book’s impact less bad, you can try to make it better, or you can try to prevent it from being written, or you can prepare to launch a counteroffensive and dismantle it after it’s published.
I mean, he should talk to Gerard. There’s a lot to dislike about lazy “both sides” journalism where the reporter writing a story about X just quotes a pro-X person and an anti-X person and calls it a day, but you do want to at least talk to some anti-X people as part of the process!
I worry that my other comment that you quote, read in isolation, might have left you or other readers with the impression that my goal is to protect “the community”’s reputation. To clarify, I don’t really care about that. (As suggested in the other comment, I do think it’s plausible that someone whose goal was to protect the community’s reputation would do well to talk to Metz in order to prevent the void of sources from being filled with hostile actors like Gerard, but someone playing that strategy should speak much less candidly than I do.)
I care about public knowledge—the construction of maps that reflect territories. As part of that, if someone is researching a topic I know a lot about, I’m happy to chat with them and take my own recording and publish my own transcript. If the person I was chatting with writes a bad book, I feel like that’s not my fault. If someone else wants to write a better book, I’m happy to chat with them, too, or they’re welcome to draw on the published transcript of my conversation with the worse author. I would never talk to a journalist who wouldn’t agree to me publishing my own recording!
Then you yourself are a hazard to the community. You are helping destroy it by talking to Cade Metz.
One of the many flaws with “rationalist” thinking is that rationalists won’t recognize that whether you make something easier or harder will drastically affect how much you get—even if the final decision to do it is made by someone whom you have no control over at all.
If you build a crypto system that is useful for money laundering, rationalists will say “Oh, I wanted it built for something else, people chose to use it for money laundering. It’s their own choice, I have nothing to do with it.”
If you build a system for prediction markets and people use it for gambling, rationalists will say “it is people’s own choice to use it for gambling. We have nothing to do with it!”
Rationalists will propose a banned products store where you can buy dangerous things and say “if you choose to buy something that kills you there, it’s your own fault”. (Mercifully, at least Eliezer doesn’t believe this one.) See also: rationalist calls for abolishing the FDA.
If you do things that make abuse or misuse of the system much easier, a significant amount of fault is yours for setting up the system that way, even if the person who will ultimately do the deed is someone you don’t control. You are not absolved from responsibility just because it’s someone else’s own choice.
“It’s Metz who will be telling the lies. Poor old me is just committed to truth and is not responsible for what I made it easier for Metz to do” is abdication of responsibility. It absolutely is your fault, even if Metz is also contributing.
The text of the very post you cite is arguing against that stance.
The point is NOT that “If you made your own choices then they’re your own fault”. The point is “there’s an actual cost of people who realistically will make these mistakes, who will be harmed, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise, or slip into justifying it.”
What? I specifically stated that Eliezer didn’t buy into it, which is what you are quoting.
Systemic actions and personal actions are different. The analogies you give are all systemic:
crypto system
prediction market
banned products store
things that make abuse or misuse of the system much easier
setting up the system
But the action you are critiquing is not systemic, it is talking to a journalist. Systemic analogies are misleading. Instead I’m thinking about analogous actions where someone takes a small individual action that indirectly negatively impacts a group’s reputation, but only because of the poor choices of other people. Hmm.
How about this very comment I’m making? Davis’s essay discusses the New York Times. By replying to this comment I’m making the essay slightly more visible. Other people may read it and have a worse opinion of the New York Times. Some of them will make unreasonably large updates. So now, am I a hazard to the New York Times? Am I helping Davis to destroy it? Are you? Nah. When people read stuff I didn’t write and think things I don’t think, that’s their problem, not mine.
(and what if someone reads your comment and has a lower opinion of rationalists as a result?)
See Against Responsibility for more on where I’m coming from. Related is Asymmetric Justice—it’s especially pernicious if Davis is blamed for Metz telling lies but doesn’t get credit for inspiring me to be more honest.
Zack didn’t claim that so much good is done by talking to Metz that even if Metz lies we would come out ahead comparatively. He said that he doesn’t care about the harm caused by Metz.
Where you are getting the position that Davis doesn’t care about harm caused by Metz? I don’t see this. In this thread, Davis said:
That is a normal position held by billions of people on the planet who also don’t really care about protecting the reputation of this community. No doubt there are many communities whose reputation you don’t care about protecting, just this one community whose reputation you do care about protecting. That’s fine by me, but you’re not defending universal human values here, you’re defending your idiosyncratic values, so leave space for others with different values.
I don’t really care about protecting the reputation of this community. It’s not a terminal value of mine. I don’t have a vow or deontology committing me to it. I have some virtue-of-loyalty, but to people, not communities. I don’t expect this community to protect my reputation, so there is no acausal trade. Instrumentally I expect the future to go best if all communities have accurate reputations. That is not the same as “protecting” a reputation.
You only need to care about hurting the community if you are hurting the community. Billions of people on this planet (why do you exclude Martians?) don’t harm the reputation of this community, so they don’t need to care. Zack, by talking to Metz, does harm it and therefore is obliged to care.
Caring about how your own actions hurt others is not an optional choice.
The above is exactly not caring about the harm caused by Metz (or rather, by him enabling Metz).
Eh, fair enough, thanks. I have to admit you have a point: to some quantitative extent, I’m a hazard to the community’s reputation. If the community would be destroyed if it had a sufficiently bad reputation, then I’m helping destroy it (to some quantitative extent) by speaking candidly with someone who will predictably use the information they gain to lower the community’s reputation.
(I’m saying “to some quantitative extent” because, as I explained in another comment, I think the effect sizes here are pretty small, but as you correctly point out in another comment, that doesn’t justify rounding down to zero: someone who litters in a park is making the park less nice, even if any single piece of trash doesn’t ruin the park.)
I don’t care! I just don’t care very much about covering for the community’s reputation! I care about telling the truth in public, which includes doing meta-journalism like this post. I think I care about the community’s reputation a little bit, such that I would engage in some strategic concealment if “destruction” were actually at hand—but on the current margin, no, I’m not going to stop “littering”. What are you going to do about it? Lobby the admins of this website and the organizers of local meetup groups to ban me (a 9x Curated, 4x Best of Less Wrong, 3x Less Online invited author) for insufficient loyalty? Fine! Do your worst! I’m long past the point of being controlled by you people.
This is antisocial. Hurting the community and saying you don’t care is like robbing a bank and saying “I just don’t care much about whether the bank gets to keep its money”.
Refraining from harming others is not supposed to be an optional matter of personal preference.
Zach is adhering to a coherent notion of morality here. I think I agree that what he’s doing is antisocial (according to a relatively common notion of “antisocial”).
But Zach (I believe) disputes that being antisocial in this sense is bad. Indeed my impression is that he thinks the opposite—being prosocial in this way is the active source of a lot of harm and evil in the world.
Right. Telling the bank robber he’s being antisocial doesn’t work, because he already knows that. What you need is a police force to throw the robber in jail. Then people who don’t want to go to jail won’t even try to rob the bank. That was what the meetup ban suggestion was about. If even that fails to deter potential snitches and your internet community can’t escalate any further (because the local non-internet police insist on maintaining their monopoly on violence), then your community might not be able to successfully protect its reputation.
Do you even believe there is such a thing as right and wrong when no police or similar enforcers are involved?
Yes, of course. I’m not a monster—at least, not according to my moral intuition. But sometimes there’s not an obvious morally right or wrong answer when the interests of multiple parties are at stake. In the case of “my interest in having candid conversations with people and doing cool meta-journalism blogging” versus “the community’s interest in protecting its collective reputation”, the latter just does not seem compelling to my moral intuition. If that makes me a monster with respect to your moral intuition, well, that’s when you need the police.
But “I don’t care much about the interests of the other party” is not a necessary part of comparing those interests.
If you don’t care much about the interests of the other party, the outcome of comparing their interests to yours will, of course, be that you always win.
You seem to be treating this as some kind of personal injury which you are entitled to demand the immediate cessation of, whereas Zack’s perspective could be summarized as “Lèse-majesté doesn’t violate the NAP”. The Metz transcripts describe at greath length why Zack does not respect the community’s majesté, so you may have better luck persuading him if you adopt a perspective in which people are not entitled to a good reputation.
Nah, I know your general disposition towards that. But I did get the impression from the transcript that you’re talking to Metz in an attempt to shift the impact of his book from one you consider more negative to one you consider more positive in some way. I am saying I don’t think this will work, that he’ll only use the information and credibility you lend him to twist his readers’ minds further away from the truth. It would be better if the book were a sad little thing filled with vicious rants from uninformed onlookers, so that nobody could end up mistaken that it’s of any value.
FWIW, I also think the effect sizes here are really small. Indeed, I think you’re not getting to the guy so much that he’s not even going to be able to competently use the information you give him to strike at the community or whatever. If you feel that you’re getting back your time’s worth by being able to make cool meta-journalism posts out of it, I guess knock yourself out – those posts have been entertaining. (Though I’m not sure how much of that you’re going to extract from Metz either; as I’d pointed out, it’s all starting to read very same-y.)