I agree that’s the hope. And in a well functioning community of peers that can work. Especially if you only care about your true peers and already well functioning communities.
In practice, how well do you see it working? Does LW live up to this standard as well as you might hope, or do you notice bits here and there where the market for ideas is distorted by other considerations?
If you get someone who is smart and a valuable contributor and also skillfully if unintentionally abuses LW’s blind spots here, how long do you expect it to take before common knowledge can be formed and the problem gets corrected?
It occurs to me (at age 38 with no dayjob, no girlfriend, and no children) that efficient markets in life activities may already sufficiently mitigate this on its own: having more time to burn arguing on the internet than anyone else is its own punishment.
Hah.
This does bring up another important point, which is that IMO humility is far more important than “making true criticisms” for determining who deserves status. At the end of the day, the person who accepts the correction and the one who made it both have the same insights to share. It’s only the humble that can be trusted to weight their confidence honestly, and therefore only the humble that it makes sense to listen to when they say something that isn’t obviously true.
Does LW live up to this standard as well as you might hope, or do you notice bits here and there where the market for ideas is distorted by other considerations?
The distortions I’m most concerned about are the ones discussed in the post. That’s why I wrote the post. (All Goofusia’s parts are abstracted from real-life conversations I’ve had within the past five weeks.)
I’m sure there are other distortions that I’m not seeing. That’s why a culture of vigorous, unfettered discussion is important, so other people can point out the things I can’t see myself.
I’m roughly equally worried about both. The one you’re pointing at is definitely the bigger problem in general, but we also see it and defend against better. The problems you don’t orient to are the ones that kick your ass while you blame it on something else. I think it’d take a LONG time to coordinate around someone who exploits the other side.
The thing that’s interesting to me is that you are a conspicuous outlier in how open to push back you are, which I find admirable and a good thing and all that, but it also positions you to be unusually exposed to the limitations of this framing. Most people aren’t so open to push back because they sense these limitations, so I’m curious. Do you experience it as genuinely effortless regardless of the type of criticism you receive? Or do you feel like you are doing something that requires actively holding yourself to high standards because the standards are important?
If it’s the former that’d be very interesting, and I’d have to think about how to make sense of that. If the latter, I’m pointing at the thing that makes it not effortless. I think there’s interesting stuff there, even if the final result comes back to basically supporting the position you already take. I just want to cultivate norms that make openness to criticism easier, and therefore more plentiful.
Do you experience it as genuinely effortless regardless of the type of criticism you receive?
No, it is not effortless! For example, I was late to respond to your top-level comment because I was too shy to check the comments for 36 hours after posting.
Or do you feel like you are doing something that requires actively holding yourself to high standards because the standards are important?
Yes, and in particular the relevant standard isn’t about not having emotions; it’s about not making my emotions other people’s problem. When I’m not feeling up to receiving criticism, I often do things like avoid checking the comments section for 36 hours until I eventually force myself to look. (It always feels better after I look, but looking never gets any easier.)
But that’s my problem, not a lever to control what other people are allowed to say to me or about me. Emotions are information. If people say things to me or about me that make me feel bad, then maybe I should feel bad.
Answering this publicly would explode into a shitstorm of drama in the best case, and have more silent failure modes in the more likely cases, so I’m gonna decline to do that :)
If you want to get my perspective of who is actually erring in this way, I’m happy to answer it in PM but I’ll still want to caveat it a bit to make sure its framed correctly, since I anticipate some potential difficulties.
Here, I just want to highlight the abstraction because then people can see who fits the pattern in their perspective rather than accepting or arguing for some collective idea of who ought to be treated as if they do.
No, it is not effortless! For example, I was late to respond to your top-level comment because I was too shy to check the comments for 36 hours after posting.
Haha, okay. That’s what I was expecting. The effort shows, FWIW.
Yes, and in particular the relevant standard isn’t about not having emotions; it’s about not making my emotions other people’s problem.
Yep. And that’s a norm I wish we had here. It’s clearly correct IMO, and also clearly not enforced. I will strong upvote anything that makes this case until its beating a dead horse into a paste from which no zombie horses can arise.
But that’s my problem, not a lever to control what other people are allowed to say to me or about me. Emotions are information. If people say things to me or about me that make me feel bad, then maybe I should feel bad.
I’m mostly with you here.
Where I get off is like… well, if you experience my comments as hard to face, then that becomes my problem too. Because I want to have this discussion with you, and so if you experience engagement as too emotionally challenging then I’m not going to get the engagement that I want. So if you’re having bad feels when reading my comments, I would definitely appreciate you letting me know so I can figure out what I should be doing differently. It’s not “controlling” my behavior in the problematic sense, but it is helping me close the loop so that the emotional information conveyed stays accurate.
And this isn’t just a private exchange between the two of us. Less Wrong as a whole is able to read and might get something out of this exchange, so if you bow out for reasons that ultimately don’t track to “He had nothing to say, and nothing to hear”, then Less Wrong as a whole loses out.
That means if I were to start my comments off with “Zach, you idiot, you’re wrong here because...”, that would probably be less pleasant for you, you’d probably engage less, and we’d all get less out of the interaction. And that’s bad, so we want norms that result in discouragement of that kind of comment. Even if I omitted the explicit insult and were to just talk to you the way one talks to idiots, it would just be “tone” but it would still be bad, for the same reasons.
Which is tricky, because the proper response to “Zach, you idiot” is “No, hypothetical-Jimmy, you are being an idiot for thinking that kind of attitude is appropriate towards Zach here. It’s appropriate towards you here”. So you can’t tone police by saying “uncomfortable tones are disallowed”, just inaccurate tones, and wtf is an “inaccurate tone”? I mean, there’s an answer, but not in the communities common knowledge, you know? The whole thing gets messy and the answer does keep coming back to your “free marketplace” ideal, but it highlights a few hidden points that really need to be a lot more free than they are for the market to work.
If people say things to me or about me that make me feel bad, then maybe I should feel bad.
Yeah, I mean, maybe. Or maybe not though, right? You don’t take yourself to be above having wrong feelings, do you? :p
The bad feels are yours and therefore your problem, yet. But who are they about?
If they’re saying “Oh no Zach, your post was bad!” then sure, I guess you gotta figure out whether that’s true or whatever. If they’re saying “This meany jerk man isn’t being fair to me! Their criticisms are dishonest!” then like… maybe you’re right?
Maybe you aren’t, of course. Maybe your post is just bad and you’re avoiding the humility to notice, so we have to account for that possibility too, but it’s also possible that you’re just right.
To the extent that you’re right, there’s room to hold people accountable for being dishonest and unfair. Your strategy of “Take full responsibility, respond on the object level, let the truth shine through” is a great start because your arguments for it all hold up.
But there’s an implicit “I shouldn’t address it head on” that I don’t think actually holds—or at least, doesn’t hold in a community with healthy norms.
The community with healthy norms isn’t gonna say “Oh no, conflict is uncomfortable so we’re going to stick to the object level and pretend that it doesn’t exist and doesn’t need to be dealt with”. The community with healthy norms is going to say “I notice that you feel unfairly treated because the other side isn’t doing their duty to engage honestly. Let’s find out whether this is true”—and then you either get an additional dose of bad feels to sit with when it turns out “Nah, your post was just bad, the criticism was valid, and you were just doing arrogance” or you get off scot free, your perspective is vindicated, and the person doing dishonesty has to sit with the bad feels of “You were bad, don’t do this again”. Ideally both sides trust the resulting judgement to be fair and either happily submit to the process to correct the one that’s wrong even if it’s them, or they know that they aren’t gonna like the outcome and leave the community alone.
I know there are plenty of people who interpret the unpleasant comments on their posts as problems with the commenters, and I know they’re not entirely wrong, but do you share this feeling at times? Not “In the end, do you decide that they were bad” but is part of the emotional difficulty that it feels like commenters aren’t living up to the standards you hold for yourself, which would be really nice to see them held to—either by themselves or by the community?
I don’t have a good idea of how it feels to you, but I have a good idea of how I would feel in your shoes.
if you experience my comments as hard to face, then that becomes my problem too. Because I want to have this discussion with you
Yes, that makes sense. I often do some of this, too.
Sometimes there’s a recursive problem that I haven’t figured out how to deal with, when someone is demanding narcissistic ego supply as a precondition for talking, and I don’t see any way to comply while still making progress in the conversation, because the specific thing I want to talk about is how it’s bad to demand narcissistic ego supply as a precondition for talking.
But there’s an implicit “I shouldn’t address it head on”
My strategy has mostly been to address it an a meta-discourse post like this one, or inmymemoirsequence. The reason to stick to the object-level in the moment is because I anticipate that addressing it head-on would just immediately deadlock. There’s nowhere to recover from “You’re being unfair”, “No, you’re being unfair”.
Sometimes there’s a recursive problem that I haven’t figured out how to deal with, when someone is demanding narcissistic ego supply as a precondition for talking, and I don’t see any way to comply while still making progress in the conversation, because the specific thing I want to talk about is how it’s bad to demand narcissistic ego supply as a precondition for talking.
Haha, yeah. It’s a tricky one for sure. And really tedious. And believe me, I feel ya on this. “Demanding narcissistic ego supply” makes it sound really pathological, which it is, but it’s also something that’s essentially ubiquitous. Especially when you get to the truths that matter most. Figuring out how to deal with this from the inside and out is something I think is of utmost importance for rational thinking both on the individual and communal level.
I spent a while talking to a woman with pretty serious BPD as an exercise in figuring out how to talk to people who are difficult in this way. It was difficult, and required being very meticulous with my wording, but eventually I did figure it out. Also, eventually the effort paid off in clearing some room for less sensitive interactions. By the time I felt I had learned what I needed to learn and we drifted apart, I was able to laugh at her for stuff that would make most people freak out, and she’d laugh with me because she realized she had been a bit silly.
This isn’t to say “you should do this” because again, tedious and all that, but it’s nice knowing that there is a way to go about it for when it’s worth the effort.
My strategy has mostly been to address it an a meta-discourse post like this one, or in my memoir sequence. The reason to stick to the object-level in the moment is because I anticipate that addressing it head-on would just immediately deadlock. There’s nowhere to recover from “You’re being unfair”, “No, you’re being unfair”.
Yeah, I agree that posts like these are valuable. And also that addressing it head on is… problematic, at the moment. I think there are times when it can be worthwhile, but the battles have to be both picked and fought very carefully.
I agree that’s the hope. And in a well functioning community of peers that can work. Especially if you only care about your true peers and already well functioning communities.
In practice, how well do you see it working? Does LW live up to this standard as well as you might hope, or do you notice bits here and there where the market for ideas is distorted by other considerations?
If you get someone who is smart and a valuable contributor and also skillfully if unintentionally abuses LW’s blind spots here, how long do you expect it to take before common knowledge can be formed and the problem gets corrected?
Hah.
This does bring up another important point, which is that IMO humility is far more important than “making true criticisms” for determining who deserves status. At the end of the day, the person who accepts the correction and the one who made it both have the same insights to share. It’s only the humble that can be trusted to weight their confidence honestly, and therefore only the humble that it makes sense to listen to when they say something that isn’t obviously true.
The distortions I’m most concerned about are the ones discussed in the post. That’s why I wrote the post. (All Goofusia’s parts are abstracted from real-life conversations I’ve had within the past five weeks.)
I’m sure there are other distortions that I’m not seeing. That’s why a culture of vigorous, unfettered discussion is important, so other people can point out the things I can’t see myself.
I’m roughly equally worried about both. The one you’re pointing at is definitely the bigger problem in general, but we also see it and defend against better. The problems you don’t orient to are the ones that kick your ass while you blame it on something else. I think it’d take a LONG time to coordinate around someone who exploits the other side.
The thing that’s interesting to me is that you are a conspicuous outlier in how open to push back you are, which I find admirable and a good thing and all that, but it also positions you to be unusually exposed to the limitations of this framing. Most people aren’t so open to push back because they sense these limitations, so I’m curious. Do you experience it as genuinely effortless regardless of the type of criticism you receive? Or do you feel like you are doing something that requires actively holding yourself to high standards because the standards are important?
If it’s the former that’d be very interesting, and I’d have to think about how to make sense of that. If the latter, I’m pointing at the thing that makes it not effortless. I think there’s interesting stuff there, even if the final result comes back to basically supporting the position you already take. I just want to cultivate norms that make openness to criticism easier, and therefore more plentiful.
Examples? Who is exploiting the other side?
No, it is not effortless! For example, I was late to respond to your top-level comment because I was too shy to check the comments for 36 hours after posting.
Yes, and in particular the relevant standard isn’t about not having emotions; it’s about not making my emotions other people’s problem. When I’m not feeling up to receiving criticism, I often do things like avoid checking the comments section for 36 hours until I eventually force myself to look. (It always feels better after I look, but looking never gets any easier.)
But that’s my problem, not a lever to control what other people are allowed to say to me or about me. Emotions are information. If people say things to me or about me that make me feel bad, then maybe I should feel bad.
Answering this publicly would explode into a shitstorm of drama in the best case, and have more silent failure modes in the more likely cases, so I’m gonna decline to do that :)
If you want to get my perspective of who is actually erring in this way, I’m happy to answer it in PM but I’ll still want to caveat it a bit to make sure its framed correctly, since I anticipate some potential difficulties.
Here, I just want to highlight the abstraction because then people can see who fits the pattern in their perspective rather than accepting or arguing for some collective idea of who ought to be treated as if they do.
Haha, okay. That’s what I was expecting. The effort shows, FWIW.
Yep. And that’s a norm I wish we had here. It’s clearly correct IMO, and also clearly not enforced. I will strong upvote anything that makes this case until its beating a dead horse into a paste from which no zombie horses can arise.
I’m mostly with you here.
Where I get off is like… well, if you experience my comments as hard to face, then that becomes my problem too. Because I want to have this discussion with you, and so if you experience engagement as too emotionally challenging then I’m not going to get the engagement that I want. So if you’re having bad feels when reading my comments, I would definitely appreciate you letting me know so I can figure out what I should be doing differently. It’s not “controlling” my behavior in the problematic sense, but it is helping me close the loop so that the emotional information conveyed stays accurate.
And this isn’t just a private exchange between the two of us. Less Wrong as a whole is able to read and might get something out of this exchange, so if you bow out for reasons that ultimately don’t track to “He had nothing to say, and nothing to hear”, then Less Wrong as a whole loses out.
That means if I were to start my comments off with “Zach, you idiot, you’re wrong here because...”, that would probably be less pleasant for you, you’d probably engage less, and we’d all get less out of the interaction. And that’s bad, so we want norms that result in discouragement of that kind of comment. Even if I omitted the explicit insult and were to just talk to you the way one talks to idiots, it would just be “tone” but it would still be bad, for the same reasons.
Which is tricky, because the proper response to “Zach, you idiot” is “No, hypothetical-Jimmy, you are being an idiot for thinking that kind of attitude is appropriate towards Zach here. It’s appropriate towards you here”. So you can’t tone police by saying “uncomfortable tones are disallowed”, just inaccurate tones, and wtf is an “inaccurate tone”? I mean, there’s an answer, but not in the communities common knowledge, you know? The whole thing gets messy and the answer does keep coming back to your “free marketplace” ideal, but it highlights a few hidden points that really need to be a lot more free than they are for the market to work.
Yeah, I mean, maybe. Or maybe not though, right? You don’t take yourself to be above having wrong feelings, do you? :p
The bad feels are yours and therefore your problem, yet. But who are they about?
If they’re saying “Oh no Zach, your post was bad!” then sure, I guess you gotta figure out whether that’s true or whatever. If they’re saying “This meany jerk man isn’t being fair to me! Their criticisms are dishonest!” then like… maybe you’re right?
Maybe you aren’t, of course. Maybe your post is just bad and you’re avoiding the humility to notice, so we have to account for that possibility too, but it’s also possible that you’re just right.
To the extent that you’re right, there’s room to hold people accountable for being dishonest and unfair. Your strategy of “Take full responsibility, respond on the object level, let the truth shine through” is a great start because your arguments for it all hold up.
But there’s an implicit “I shouldn’t address it head on” that I don’t think actually holds—or at least, doesn’t hold in a community with healthy norms.
The community with healthy norms isn’t gonna say “Oh no, conflict is uncomfortable so we’re going to stick to the object level and pretend that it doesn’t exist and doesn’t need to be dealt with”. The community with healthy norms is going to say “I notice that you feel unfairly treated because the other side isn’t doing their duty to engage honestly. Let’s find out whether this is true”—and then you either get an additional dose of bad feels to sit with when it turns out “Nah, your post was just bad, the criticism was valid, and you were just doing arrogance” or you get off scot free, your perspective is vindicated, and the person doing dishonesty has to sit with the bad feels of “You were bad, don’t do this again”. Ideally both sides trust the resulting judgement to be fair and either happily submit to the process to correct the one that’s wrong even if it’s them, or they know that they aren’t gonna like the outcome and leave the community alone.
I know there are plenty of people who interpret the unpleasant comments on their posts as problems with the commenters, and I know they’re not entirely wrong, but do you share this feeling at times? Not “In the end, do you decide that they were bad” but is part of the emotional difficulty that it feels like commenters aren’t living up to the standards you hold for yourself, which would be really nice to see them held to—either by themselves or by the community?
I don’t have a good idea of how it feels to you, but I have a good idea of how I would feel in your shoes.
(PM’d.)
Yes, that makes sense. I often do some of this, too.
Sometimes there’s a recursive problem that I haven’t figured out how to deal with, when someone is demanding narcissistic ego supply as a precondition for talking, and I don’t see any way to comply while still making progress in the conversation, because the specific thing I want to talk about is how it’s bad to demand narcissistic ego supply as a precondition for talking.
My strategy has mostly been to address it an a meta-discourse post like this one, or in my memoir sequence. The reason to stick to the object-level in the moment is because I anticipate that addressing it head-on would just immediately deadlock. There’s nowhere to recover from “You’re being unfair”, “No, you’re being unfair”.
Haha, yeah. It’s a tricky one for sure. And really tedious. And believe me, I feel ya on this. “Demanding narcissistic ego supply” makes it sound really pathological, which it is, but it’s also something that’s essentially ubiquitous. Especially when you get to the truths that matter most. Figuring out how to deal with this from the inside and out is something I think is of utmost importance for rational thinking both on the individual and communal level.
I spent a while talking to a woman with pretty serious BPD as an exercise in figuring out how to talk to people who are difficult in this way. It was difficult, and required being very meticulous with my wording, but eventually I did figure it out. Also, eventually the effort paid off in clearing some room for less sensitive interactions. By the time I felt I had learned what I needed to learn and we drifted apart, I was able to laugh at her for stuff that would make most people freak out, and she’d laugh with me because she realized she had been a bit silly.
This isn’t to say “you should do this” because again, tedious and all that, but it’s nice knowing that there is a way to go about it for when it’s worth the effort.
Yeah, I agree that posts like these are valuable. And also that addressing it head on is… problematic, at the moment. I think there are times when it can be worthwhile, but the battles have to be both picked and fought very carefully.