In my experience, this is a euphemism for “ensuring that high-status people retain their high status, and that (high-status) conflict-averse people don’t have to deal with real disagreements” approximately 99% of the time.
That’s because this principle is so obvious that it typically goes without saying. Speaking such phrases aloud can indeed serve as a form of rhetoric to defend status hierarchies. Yet when one person is deploying non-constructive criticism, high-status people have the most clout to push back. If their high status genuinely depends on bona fide healthy working relationships and productive conversations, then they’ll be extra motivated to deliver this pushback.
In summary:
The fact that these phrases can also serve as rhetoric to defend status hierarchies is not a particularly strong argument against the ideas they express.
Status hierarchies often depend on productive conversations and healthy working relationships, so it’s no surprise that defending one is entangled with defending the other.
First, the thing about “one person is [saying/writing whatever things that are somehow problematic]” is that if the things in question are just obviously bad, then they can be downvoted and ignored and then that’s the end of it. If it’s some criticism that has a known and obvious answer, reply with a link to that answer and then ignore. If the criticism is due to the critic having failed to read some part of the post, point that out and then ignore. And so on.
The only reason why you would perceive any need to “push back” is if the criticism were not obviously bad. But if it’s not obviously bad, well, then it deserves an answer. Even if it actually is bad! (And why are you so sure that it’s bad, in this case? But let’s set that aside…)
And in this sort of case, well, by all means “push back”—with a reply. (And once again, please note that it won’t do at all to say “ah but what if the critic persistently makes the same bad criticism”, etc.—in that case, hyperlinks are your friend. Answer it once, then link back to the answer. This is one of the many, many benefits of public discussions: you can write a thing once, and refer back to it thenceforth.)
Second, as I’ve noted before, the idea that only “constructive” criticism is good is false. Sometimes destructive criticism is good. (“Whatever can be destroyed by the truth, should be.”) The proper standard is is not whether criticism is “constructive”; it’s whether the criticism is correct and relevant.
(In the Soviet Union, it was a standard ploy to reply to certain sorts of arguments or views by saying that they are, for instance, “not in accordance with dialectical materialism”, or “not Marxist-Leninist”, or “that’s Trotskyism!”, etc. This was a considered knockdown argument (and in practical terms it was, because arguing against it means “straight to gulag”)—but of course if you say something and your interlocutor says “that’s Trotskyism!”, this does not actually address the question of whether it’s… true. “Constructive” is one of these sorts of words, which functions as a way to sidestep the question of truth. “That criticism is not constructive!”—yeah, I’m sure it’s also Trotskyism, but let’s get back to the point, shall we?)
Third, on the question of “healthy working relationships” and so on. Sure, it’s usually good, all else being equal, to have a healthy working relationship with someone. But if you make “healthy working relationship” an optimization target, then it gets Goodharted immediately—the measures taken to “reinforce healthy working relationships” immediately become decoupled from the reasons why it’s good (all else being equal! which it’s often not!) to have healthy working relationships. (And of course this is generally deliberate. This sort of line is used, quite knowingly, by high-status people, as a euphemism for “threats to my status are unacceptable”.)
Responding to criticism of any kind is costly in time and emotional energy. Criticism may feel unpleasant to the recipient, or turn out to be incorrect or unimportant, and that’s OK to a certain extent. We need to tolerate a certain amount of net-negative criticism so that people feel like they can afford to make occasional mistakes when attempting to deliver constructive criticism. When an individual delivers a large amount of net-negative criticism (i.e. a mix of incorrect, unpelasant, and time consuming) over an extended period of time, then that eventually becomes a problem.
Constraints on discussion are typically implicit guardrails that most people respect that makes participating in the conversation, project, or community sustainable for most of its members. Those guardrails are sometimes self-imposed (i.e. individuals weighing the consequences of saying vs. not saying X) and sometimes externally enforced (i.e. criticizing the critic, or criticizing the community for having the wrong approach to tolerating criticism).
My argument is that it would be a very bad idea to optimize for the fewest possible guardrails against people’s ability to criticize, and that this seems to be what you’re advocating for in the space of online discourse, at least on LessWrong (“it’s so important to have discussion in the comments to a post be as unconstrained as possible”). A policy of zero guardrails allows conversations to be routinely derailed by Gish gallops, and I claim this not only can happen, but that it’s common knowledge that this happens consistently. There are a number of strategies communities can use to impose guardrails that mitigate this problem, all of which do have substantial costs that those communities appear largely willing to bear because of the much higher cost of allowing Gish gallops to destroy spaces for meaningful discourse.
In certain situations, like Soviet Russia, brutal enforcement of excessive guardrails against true and important criticism can become a much bigger problem than the sort of Gish gallops that degrade online discourse and that we are discussing here. But I regard that as so different from the problem that we’re discussing here that it’s a red herring and I’m not interested in further discussing comparisons between guardrails in online discourse and anti-speech enforcement in totalitarian regimes.
Responding to criticism of any kind is costly in time and emotional energy. Criticism may feel unpleasant to the recipient, or turn out to be incorrect or unimportant, and that’s OK to a certain extent. We need to tolerate a certain amount of net-negative criticism so that people feel like they can afford to make occasional mistakes when attempting to deliver constructive criticism. When an individual delivers a large amount of net-negative criticism (i.e. a mix of incorrect, unpelasant, and time consuming) over an extended period of time, then that eventually becomes a problem.
I wholly reject this entire framework.
We ought not even consider the question of whether criticism is “unpleasant”. That it’s unpleasant to receive criticism is just an obvious, banal fact about human psychology. We take it as a baseline assumption, but it’s completely misguided to endorse that reaction. It is a bias to be overcome. Otherwise… well, we’ve been over this.
If criticism is incorrect, then say why it’s incorrect. That’s the whole point of having a discussion. You speak as if everyone always knows in advance what is correct and what is not! If that were true, what the heck would be the point of… any of this? This whole website, the whole rationalist project?
(As for the notion that only “constructive” criticism is good—well, I’ve already addressed that.)
A policy of zero guardrails allows conversations to be routinely derailed by Gish gallops, and I claim this not only can happen, but that it’s common knowledge that this happens consistently. There are a number of strategies communities can use to impose guardrails that mitigate this problem, all of which do have substantial costs that those communities appear largely willing to bear because of the much higher cost of allowing Gish gallops to destroy spaces for meaningful discourse.
For one thing, I do not advocate, and have never advocated, a policy of having zero guardrails. There ought not to be personal insults, like “you’re an idiot and an asshole” (which is to say, such things should always receive moderator attention, with a view toward heavily discouraging them; I can conceive of exceptions where such comments may be allowed, but they ought to be exceedingly rare). There ought not to be vulgarity. There ought not to be doxxing. There ought not to be spam. The posting of dumb memes and similar low-value content should be discouraged. AI-written text should be heavily policed. Probably I could think of several other obvious sorts of “guardrails” if I gave it more thought, and doubtless you could also. So please refrain from claiming that I endorse a “zero guardrails” policy; I don’t.
As for Gish gallops (and similar things)—I agree that such things are bad! But you know what is a very easy way of dealing with them?
Posting a reply that says “that’s a Gish gallop”.
And then downvoting the comment, and moving on with your life.
(And, as described earlier, if your judgment on that question is mistaken, then other commenters can reply to say “actually, no, that comment makes good points, you’re wrong about it being a Gish gallop, and here’s why”.)
(Indeed, this seems like an excellent role for the moderators to take on: when someone posts bad content like Gish gallops, comment to point this out; when someone unfairly labels a good comment as a Gish gallop, comment to point that out, too.)
In certain situations, like Soviet Russia, brutal enforcement of excessive guardrails against true and important criticism can become a much bigger problem than the sort of Gish gallops that degrade online discourse and that we are discussing here. But I regard that as so different from the problem that we’re discussing here that it’s a red herring and I’m not interested in further discussing comparisons between guardrails in online discourse and anti-speech enforcement in totalitarian regimes.
You’re quite thoroughly mistaken about this. The problem is not the brutality of the enforcement (do you think that the problem went away when the punishment stopped being “straight to gulag” and became more like “you can kiss goodbye to any career advancement or professional accolades”?); the problem is the ideological approach itself—the “it’s Trotskyism!” reply. If that sort of thing is even allowed to stand without receiving the withering scorn that it deserves, and even more so if it is enforced as the officially sanctioned and presumed-to-be-correct reply, then it’s utterly corrosive to any kind of intellectual work or truth-seeking.
That you see this as a “red herring” is a huge mistake on your part. This kind of problem arises in many forms, and it is fatal to the sort of project that Less Wrong is ostensibly engaged in.
“For one thing, I do not advocate, and have never advocated, a policy of having zero guardrails.”
I’m glad to hear you are comfortable with at least some guardrails. But you did specifically say “it’s so important to have discussion in the comments to a post be as unconstrained as possible.”
“As constrained as possible” means “no guardrails.” If you meant something different, you should have said what you meant, or at least acknowledged that you made a mistake.
“As [un]constrained as possible” means “no guardrails.”
(Brackets correcting what I presume is a typo.)
Here is an easy test to see the incorrectness of that reading of my comment: if, on a literal reading, it seems like I really meant “no guardrails” in the sense that you claim to have taken me to mean, then this would mean that I’d be opposed to the moderators deleting obvious (e.g., Russian penis enlargement pill) spam. Does this seem remotely plausible to you?
And before you protest further, let me remind you that we’ve already had this conversation. The link is to a comment thread where I say, in direct response to you specifically, that I dislike and do not endorse vulgarity and name-calling.
Additionally, in this comment (posted in the comment section of the same post as the one linked above), I say:
Going all the way to “zero” [catering to people’s feelings] is not even what I am proposing, nor would propose (for example, I am entirely in favor of forbidding personal insults, vulgarity, etc., even if some hypothetical ideal reasoner would be entirely unfazed even by such things).
In this comment (in that same comment section), I say:
Like, “avoid vulgarity” and “don’t use direct personal attacks” can be made into rules. There generally isn’t any reason to break them, except perhaps in the most extreme, rare cases.
You’re positing a person who is posting things that aren’t, like… vulgarity, or personal insults, or anything bad or crazy like that (because if he were doing that, then the mods would presumably ban him outright—or should, anyway!). And he’s not doing anything else that is rightly ban-worthy (like, say, persistently lying about his interlocutors’ claims, or something along those lines).
I have consistently and unambiguously expressed opposition to such behaviors, and support for rules forbidding such behaviors, including (I emphasize again) in direct response to you, personally.
Perhaps you forgot about those past statements. If so, let this be a reminder. I hope that there will be no further confusion on your part about what my position on this matter is.
Can you say more about what makes criticism “constructive” vs. “non-constructive”? If the idea is that constructive criticism proposes solutions (here’s how the thing could be better) rather than just pointing out problems (here’s why the thing is bad), then requiring criticism to be constructive seems bad, because if critics have to propose a solution at the same time that they point out a problem, that prevents pointing out problems that don’t have an immediately apparent solution (but for which a solution might be found in time with further discussion).
I don’t have a comprehensive definition of constructive criticism—I know it when I see it. Presenting solutions is not necessary for constructive criticism.
To take a stab at defining it, constructive criticism is about optimizing the alignment between proposed methods and true goals given the resources available. Non-constructive criticism may be actively worsening the alignment, but it could also just be inefficient. The risk of inefficiency is the issue I’ve been pointing out above.
I don’t have a comprehensive definition of constructive criticism—I know it when I see it.
Without claiming that this is necessarily un-virtuous, I hope that you can see how this sort of thing is evidence for the claim that “constructive criticism” is not primarily a good criterion for truth-seeking, but rather is primarily a weapon for suppression of criticism.
To take a stab at defining it, constructive criticism is about optimizing the alignment between proposed methods and true goals given the resources available.
I confess that I have no idea what exactly you could mean by this. I think that it would be most helpful if you could supplement this intensional definition with an extensional one.
To lay cards on the table, what are you trying to accomplish with this back and forth with me? I’m trying to find common ground and make some important distinctions, but it seems to me like you’re trying to vent or cut off the discussion. Is that what you’re trying to do?
By no means. I am saying true and relevant things, in response to things you are saying which seem to me to be seriously mistaken. The purpose of this is to enable all of us to become less wrong about these very important issues.
That’s because this principle is so obvious that it typically goes without saying. Speaking such phrases aloud can indeed serve as a form of rhetoric to defend status hierarchies. Yet when one person is deploying non-constructive criticism, high-status people have the most clout to push back. If their high status genuinely depends on bona fide healthy working relationships and productive conversations, then they’ll be extra motivated to deliver this pushback.
In summary:
The fact that these phrases can also serve as rhetoric to defend status hierarchies is not a particularly strong argument against the ideas they express.
Status hierarchies often depend on productive conversations and healthy working relationships, so it’s no surprise that defending one is entangled with defending the other.
Separately from my other comment:
First, the thing about “one person is [saying/writing whatever things that are somehow problematic]” is that if the things in question are just obviously bad, then they can be downvoted and ignored and then that’s the end of it. If it’s some criticism that has a known and obvious answer, reply with a link to that answer and then ignore. If the criticism is due to the critic having failed to read some part of the post, point that out and then ignore. And so on.
The only reason why you would perceive any need to “push back” is if the criticism were not obviously bad. But if it’s not obviously bad, well, then it deserves an answer. Even if it actually is bad! (And why are you so sure that it’s bad, in this case? But let’s set that aside…)
And in this sort of case, well, by all means “push back”—with a reply. (And once again, please note that it won’t do at all to say “ah but what if the critic persistently makes the same bad criticism”, etc.—in that case, hyperlinks are your friend. Answer it once, then link back to the answer. This is one of the many, many benefits of public discussions: you can write a thing once, and refer back to it thenceforth.)
(This is approximately the same point as made earlier by @sunwillrise.)
Second, as I’ve noted before, the idea that only “constructive” criticism is good is false. Sometimes destructive criticism is good. (“Whatever can be destroyed by the truth, should be.”) The proper standard is is not whether criticism is “constructive”; it’s whether the criticism is correct and relevant.
(In the Soviet Union, it was a standard ploy to reply to certain sorts of arguments or views by saying that they are, for instance, “not in accordance with dialectical materialism”, or “not Marxist-Leninist”, or “that’s Trotskyism!”, etc. This was a considered knockdown argument (and in practical terms it was, because arguing against it means “straight to gulag”)—but of course if you say something and your interlocutor says “that’s Trotskyism!”, this does not actually address the question of whether it’s… true. “Constructive” is one of these sorts of words, which functions as a way to sidestep the question of truth. “That criticism is not constructive!”—yeah, I’m sure it’s also Trotskyism, but let’s get back to the point, shall we?)
Third, on the question of “healthy working relationships” and so on. Sure, it’s usually good, all else being equal, to have a healthy working relationship with someone. But if you make “healthy working relationship” an optimization target, then it gets Goodharted immediately—the measures taken to “reinforce healthy working relationships” immediately become decoupled from the reasons why it’s good (all else being equal! which it’s often not!) to have healthy working relationships. (And of course this is generally deliberate. This sort of line is used, quite knowingly, by high-status people, as a euphemism for “threats to my status are unacceptable”.)
Responding to criticism of any kind is costly in time and emotional energy. Criticism may feel unpleasant to the recipient, or turn out to be incorrect or unimportant, and that’s OK to a certain extent. We need to tolerate a certain amount of net-negative criticism so that people feel like they can afford to make occasional mistakes when attempting to deliver constructive criticism. When an individual delivers a large amount of net-negative criticism (i.e. a mix of incorrect, unpelasant, and time consuming) over an extended period of time, then that eventually becomes a problem.
Constraints on discussion are typically implicit guardrails that most people respect that makes participating in the conversation, project, or community sustainable for most of its members. Those guardrails are sometimes self-imposed (i.e. individuals weighing the consequences of saying vs. not saying X) and sometimes externally enforced (i.e. criticizing the critic, or criticizing the community for having the wrong approach to tolerating criticism).
My argument is that it would be a very bad idea to optimize for the fewest possible guardrails against people’s ability to criticize, and that this seems to be what you’re advocating for in the space of online discourse, at least on LessWrong (“it’s so important to have discussion in the comments to a post be as unconstrained as possible”). A policy of zero guardrails allows conversations to be routinely derailed by Gish gallops, and I claim this not only can happen, but that it’s common knowledge that this happens consistently. There are a number of strategies communities can use to impose guardrails that mitigate this problem, all of which do have substantial costs that those communities appear largely willing to bear because of the much higher cost of allowing Gish gallops to destroy spaces for meaningful discourse.
In certain situations, like Soviet Russia, brutal enforcement of excessive guardrails against true and important criticism can become a much bigger problem than the sort of Gish gallops that degrade online discourse and that we are discussing here. But I regard that as so different from the problem that we’re discussing here that it’s a red herring and I’m not interested in further discussing comparisons between guardrails in online discourse and anti-speech enforcement in totalitarian regimes.
I wholly reject this entire framework.
We ought not even consider the question of whether criticism is “unpleasant”. That it’s unpleasant to receive criticism is just an obvious, banal fact about human psychology. We take it as a baseline assumption, but it’s completely misguided to endorse that reaction. It is a bias to be overcome. Otherwise… well, we’ve been over this.
If criticism is incorrect, then say why it’s incorrect. That’s the whole point of having a discussion. You speak as if everyone always knows in advance what is correct and what is not! If that were true, what the heck would be the point of… any of this? This whole website, the whole rationalist project?
(As for the notion that only “constructive” criticism is good—well, I’ve already addressed that.)
For one thing, I do not advocate, and have never advocated, a policy of having zero guardrails. There ought not to be personal insults, like “you’re an idiot and an asshole” (which is to say, such things should always receive moderator attention, with a view toward heavily discouraging them; I can conceive of exceptions where such comments may be allowed, but they ought to be exceedingly rare). There ought not to be vulgarity. There ought not to be doxxing. There ought not to be spam. The posting of dumb memes and similar low-value content should be discouraged. AI-written text should be heavily policed. Probably I could think of several other obvious sorts of “guardrails” if I gave it more thought, and doubtless you could also. So please refrain from claiming that I endorse a “zero guardrails” policy; I don’t.
As for Gish gallops (and similar things)—I agree that such things are bad! But you know what is a very easy way of dealing with them?
Posting a reply that says “that’s a Gish gallop”.
And then downvoting the comment, and moving on with your life.
(And, as described earlier, if your judgment on that question is mistaken, then other commenters can reply to say “actually, no, that comment makes good points, you’re wrong about it being a Gish gallop, and here’s why”.)
(Indeed, this seems like an excellent role for the moderators to take on: when someone posts bad content like Gish gallops, comment to point this out; when someone unfairly labels a good comment as a Gish gallop, comment to point that out, too.)
You’re quite thoroughly mistaken about this. The problem is not the brutality of the enforcement (do you think that the problem went away when the punishment stopped being “straight to gulag” and became more like “you can kiss goodbye to any career advancement or professional accolades”?); the problem is the ideological approach itself—the “it’s Trotskyism!” reply. If that sort of thing is even allowed to stand without receiving the withering scorn that it deserves, and even more so if it is enforced as the officially sanctioned and presumed-to-be-correct reply, then it’s utterly corrosive to any kind of intellectual work or truth-seeking.
That you see this as a “red herring” is a huge mistake on your part. This kind of problem arises in many forms, and it is fatal to the sort of project that Less Wrong is ostensibly engaged in.
“For one thing, I do not advocate, and have never advocated, a policy of having zero guardrails.”
I’m glad to hear you are comfortable with at least some guardrails. But you did specifically say “it’s so important to have discussion in the comments to a post be as unconstrained as possible.”
“As constrained as possible” means “no guardrails.” If you meant something different, you should have said what you meant, or at least acknowledged that you made a mistake.
(Brackets correcting what I presume is a typo.)
Here is an easy test to see the incorrectness of that reading of my comment: if, on a literal reading, it seems like I really meant “no guardrails” in the sense that you claim to have taken me to mean, then this would mean that I’d be opposed to the moderators deleting obvious (e.g., Russian penis enlargement pill) spam. Does this seem remotely plausible to you?
And before you protest further, let me remind you that we’ve already had this conversation. The link is to a comment thread where I say, in direct response to you specifically, that I dislike and do not endorse vulgarity and name-calling.
Additionally, in this comment (posted in the comment section of the same post as the one linked above), I say:
In this comment (in that same comment section), I say:
Finally, in this more recent comment (on the topic about “moderation tools” etc.), I say:
I have consistently and unambiguously expressed opposition to such behaviors, and support for rules forbidding such behaviors, including (I emphasize again) in direct response to you, personally.
Perhaps you forgot about those past statements. If so, let this be a reminder. I hope that there will be no further confusion on your part about what my position on this matter is.
Can you say more about what makes criticism “constructive” vs. “non-constructive”? If the idea is that constructive criticism proposes solutions (here’s how the thing could be better) rather than just pointing out problems (here’s why the thing is bad), then requiring criticism to be constructive seems bad, because if critics have to propose a solution at the same time that they point out a problem, that prevents pointing out problems that don’t have an immediately apparent solution (but for which a solution might be found in time with further discussion).
I don’t have a comprehensive definition of constructive criticism—I know it when I see it. Presenting solutions is not necessary for constructive criticism.
To take a stab at defining it, constructive criticism is about optimizing the alignment between proposed methods and true goals given the resources available. Non-constructive criticism may be actively worsening the alignment, but it could also just be inefficient. The risk of inefficiency is the issue I’ve been pointing out above.
Without claiming that this is necessarily un-virtuous, I hope that you can see how this sort of thing is evidence for the claim that “constructive criticism” is not primarily a good criterion for truth-seeking, but rather is primarily a weapon for suppression of criticism.
I confess that I have no idea what exactly you could mean by this. I think that it would be most helpful if you could supplement this intensional definition with an extensional one.
In my experience, this is also a euphemism for “threats to the status of high-status people” approximately 99% of the time.
To lay cards on the table, what are you trying to accomplish with this back and forth with me? I’m trying to find common ground and make some important distinctions, but it seems to me like you’re trying to vent or cut off the discussion. Is that what you’re trying to do?
By no means. I am saying true and relevant things, in response to things you are saying which seem to me to be seriously mistaken. The purpose of this is to enable all of us to become less wrong about these very important issues.
I don’t perceive you as having understood what I was saying, or as having addressed my central points.
Please feel free to point out what you think I got wrong, what I missed, etc.