I like some of what Geoffrey does, but I do think at various points he has violated enough norms of reasonable discourse (especially on Twitter) that I wouldn’t consider him in “good standing”.
I agree the standards are quite different! Nevertheless, I do currently think you are being overly aggressive even by the standards I would have for the broader rationality community for what appropriate norms are for Twitter.
I mean, my comment was written before at least I had heard any news of that, so I don’t really see its relevance to the conversation.
Also, I really don’t see the relevance of bringing in Charlie Kirk into this conversation at all. Like, if you want we can have a real conversation about whether marginally more aggressive comments on social media were partially response for it or not (seems plausible to me but I haven’t thought much about it), but I am not even sure what you mean by “this is not the day for that”, and it certainly isn’t related to really anything else in this comment section.
You accused me of being ‘overly aggressive’. I was pointing out that tweets aren’t acts of aggression. Shooting people in the neck is.
As far as I can remember, I’ve never called for violence, on any topic, in any of the 80,000 posts I’ve shared on Twitter/X, to my 150,000 followers. So, I think your claim that my posts are ‘overly aggressive’ is poorly calibrated in relation to what actual aggression looks like.
That’s the relevance of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. A reminder that in this LessWrong bubble of ever-so-cautious, ever-so-rational, ever-so-epistemically-pure discourse, people can get very disconnected from the reality of high-stakes political debate and ideologically-driven terrorism.
Of course words can be “aggressive”. Yes, they are a different form of aggression from literal physical violence, but we still have norms for words. Some tweets are obviously “acts of aggression”.
(Unless you mean to import some technical meaning with those words, in which case I am happy to clarify that I am not meaning to import any technical meaning behind “aggression” and just mean the obvious everyday usage of the word)
Regarding “calling for violence”: I can’t find any specific example scrolling through your past tweets, so it’s plausible I am wrong about this! I do think I remember some, but as you say yourself, you have >80,000 tweets and I don’t know of an efficient way to search through all of them. I apologize if it turns out to be wrong, I did not mean to imply a high level of confidence in that specific adjective. There are some tweets that I feel like someone could argue are calls for violence, though I don’t think any of the ones I’ve found with 5 minutes of searching obviously cross that line.
habryka—regarding what ‘aggression’ is, I’m coming to this from the perspective of having taught courses on animal behavior and human evolution for 35 years.
When biological scientists speak of ‘aggression’, we are referring to actual physical violence, e.g. hitting, biting, dismembering, killing, eating, within or between species. We are not referring to vocalizations, or animal signals, or their modern digital equivalents.
When modern partisan humans refer to ‘aggression’ metaphorically, this collapses the distinction between speech and violence. Which is, of course, what censors want, in order to portray speech that they don’t like as if it’s aggravated assault. This has become a standard chant on the Left: ‘speech = violence’.
I strongly disagree with that framing, because it is almost always an excuse for censorship, deplatforming, and ostracizing of political rivals.
I think to maintain the epistemic norms of the Rationality community, we must be very careful not to equate ‘verbal signals we don’t like’ with ‘acts of aggression’.
When biological scientists speak of ‘aggression’, we are referring to actual physical violence, e.g. hitting, biting, dismembering, killing, eating, within or between species. We are not referring to vocalizations, or animal signals, or their modern digital equivalents.
No, the usual term both in common usage and that biological scientists use for that kind of stuff is “violence”. Aggression very much includes speech. I would be surprised if you were to find biologists consistently avoiding the word aggression when e.g. referring to intimidation behavior between animals in lieu of actual physical contact.
Indeed, just the first Google result for “animal aggression behavior” looks like this:
This also aligns with the common usage of those words.
That said, I am very happy to use a different word for the context of this comment thread if you want. We don’t have to agree on the meanings of all words to have a conversation here.
It’s not a norm of discourse that one cannot state that a position is absurd. And it is a virtue of discourse to show up and argue for one’s stances, as Habryka does throughout that thread!
It’s not a norm of discourse that one cannot state that a position is absurd.
Speaking as someone who makes very little effort to avoid honey consumption, my opinion of Habryka would have dropped much less if he’d said something like: “Sorry, this position is just intuitively absurd to me, and I’m happy to reject it on that basis.” So I don’t think the issue has to do with absurdity per se.
Your ideas about reasonable discourse can be different from mine, and Ben West’s, and Hacker News’. That’s OK. I was just sharing my opinion.
It’s been a while since I read that discussion. I remember my estimation of Habryka dropped dramatically when I read it. Maybe I can try to reconstruct why in more detail if you want. But contrasting what Habryka wrote with the HN commenting guidelines seems like a reasonable starting point.
And it is a virtue of discourse to show up and argue for one’s stances, as Habryka does throughout that thread!
You’ll notice that Habryka doesn’t provide any concrete example of Geoffrey violating a norm of reasonable discourse in this thread. I did provide a concrete example.
Is it possible that invokation of such “norms” can be a mere figleaf for drawing ingroup/outgroup boundaries in the traditional tribalistic way?
Is it too much to ask that Dear Leadership is held to the same standards, and treated the same way, as everyone else is?
It’s fine for you to have takes about my commenting style on those threads. I do continue to think that post was really quite bad (where, to be clear, most of my objection is to the author somehow taking the result at face value, while feeling no need to caveat or justify yourself, and linking to the Rethink Priorities report as an authoritative source. I don’t have the same objection to e.g. this old post by Luke which raised this as a hypothesis but doesn’t make the same errors).
But even if you think I am really mistaken here, I don’t think there is almost any standard that would make sense to defend on LessWrong that Geoffrey doesn’t routinely violate.
Some quick examples:
Cenk, you’re just upset that in fifty years, nobody will remember an antisemitic hack like you, but there will still be an Israel, standing proud.
Behind your pretty-boy mask , you’re a sociopathic ghoul. Glad that Americans are learning the truth about the deep, dark, bitter pit where your soul should be.
Keir is no different from Ephialtes—the resentful, deformed Spartan who betrayed his homeland to help the Persians invade, hoping they would reward him with the honor and validation his own people would never give him.
This goes on and on and on and on. He has hundreds of tweets like this, with insults, calls for violence, extreme aggression, sneering dismissal, the whole rickamarole.
Again, I appreciate a bunch of his work, but I really don’t think that even by your lights we treat discourse anything close to the same.
He has hundreds of tweets like this, with insults, calls for violence, extreme aggression, sneering dismissal, the whole rickamarole.
I think some of these are shown in what you link, but ‘calls for violence’ I have not seen. I just searched for it a little, and mostly found him speaking against that.
Everybody’s demanding that everybody else disavow the use of violence.
If you’re a libertarian like me, you already believe in the ‘Non-Aggression Principle’: you never initiate the use of force against anyone.
Might be nice if other political groups adopted the NAP....
If you have to resort violence, intimidation, and censorship, you don’t _really_ have any confidence that your ideas are epistemically or ethically compelling.
I also found him to be consistently annoyed about people blurring the line between aggressive speech and physical violence. Here’s one example.
PS one reason I think it’s important to maintain a crisp distinction between persuasion and coercion is that free speech rights are being eroded by creating a grey area between them, e.g. rhetoric that ‘speech is violence’ or ‘words cause trauma’ rhetoric.
This feels to me like it’s doing a bunch of blurring between aggressive speech and physical violence.
(It’s also IMO a particularly weird stance to have, because he is clearly calling AI labs an existential threat to democracy, as they are an existential threat to all human things, which by the same logic would be an incitement to violence, though I think they aren’t, but like maybe by Geoffrey’s own logic they are?)
Just to clarify here, I have no issue with you thinking the post is bad. That seems besides the point to me. My issue is with you doing much of what you accuse Miller of doing.
Insults: “This post seems completely insane to me, as do people who unquestionable retweet it.”
Aggression: “I cannot believe I have to argue for this… [cursing]...”
Sneering: “Has anyone who liked this actually read this post? How on earth is this convincing to anyone?”
Note also that the discussion around the Bentham post was previously calm and friendly. You walked in and dramatically worsened the discourse quality. By contrast, Geoffrey engages on hot-button political topics where discussion is already very heated.
As a quick and relatively objective measure, with a quick search, out of all 80K Geoffrey Miller tweets, I was only able to find one non-quoted f-bomb (“Fuck the Singularity.”).
As a matter of simple intellectual honesty, it would be nice if you could acknowledge that you engage in insults and aggressive behavior on Twitter. You might be doing it less than Geoffrey does. You might express it in a different way. But it’s just a question of degree, as far as I can tell. I really don’t think you have much moral high ground here.
You also have far fewer tweets than Geoffrey does (factor of ~16 difference). So it’s not just that you’ve dropped more f-bombs than him; your density of f-bombs appears to be far higher.
I… again am happy to accept critique of my posting, but I think you are really weirdly off-base here. Feel free to ask some neutral third-party to do an evaluation of our commenting or tweeting styles and how they compare to local norms of discourse.
In-particular, who cares about using words like “fuck”? What does this have to do with anything? Saying “fuck them” is much less aggressive or bad than saying “Behind your pretty-boy mask, you’re a sociopathic ghoul. Glad that Americans are learning the truth about the deep, dark, bitter pit where your soul should be.”!
I have certainly said the former to friends or acquaintances many times and received it many times. If you ever hear me or anyone else say the latter (or anything like it) earnestly to you, I think something is seriously going wrong.
Saying ‘fuck them’ when people are shifting to taking actions that threaten society is expressing something that should be expressed, in my view.
I see Oliver replied that in response to two Epoch researchers leaving to found an AI start-up focussed on improving capabilities. I interpret it as ‘this is bad, dismiss those people’. It’s not polite though maybe for others who don’t usually swear, it comes across much stronger?
To me, if someone posts an intense-feeling negatively worded text in response to what other people are doing, it usually signals that there is something they care about that they perceive to be threatened. I’ve found it productive to try relate with that first, before responding. Jumping to enforcing general rules stipulated somewhere in the community, and then implying that the person not following those rules is not harmonious with or does not belong to the community, can get counterproductive.
(Note I’m not tracking much of what Oliver and Geoffrey have said here and on twitter. Just wanted to respond to this part.)
To me, if someone posts an intense-feeling negatively worded text in response to what other people are doing, it usually signals that there is something they care about that they perceive to be threatened. I’ve found it productive to try relate with that first, before responding. Jumping to enforcing general rules stipulated somewhere in the community, and then implying that the person not following those rules is not harmonious with or does not belong to the community, can get counterproductive.
I’m a bit concerned about a situation where “insiders” always get this sort of contextual benefit-of-the-doubt, and “outsiders” don’t.
Agreed on tracking that hypothesis. It makes sense that people are more open to consider what’s said by an insider they look up to or know. In a few discussions I saw, this seemed a likely explanation.
Also, insiders tend to say more stuff that is already agreed on and understandable by others in the community.
Here there seems to be another factor:
Whether the person is expressing negative views that appear to support v.s. to be dissonant with core premises. With ‘core premises’, I mean beliefs about the world that much thinking shared in the community is based on, or tacitly relies on to be true.
In my experience (yours might be different), when making an argument that reaches a conclusion that contradicts a core premise in the community, I had to be painstakingly careful to be polite, route around understandable misinterpretations, and already address common objections. To be able to get to a conversation where the argument was explored somewhat openly.
It’s hard to have productive conversations that way. The person arguing against the ‘core premise’ bears by far the most cost trying to write out responses in a way that might be insightful for others (instead of dismissed too quickly). The time and strain this takes is mostly hidden to others.
Keep in mind that US conservatives are liable to be reading this thread, trying to determine whether they want to ally with a group such as yourselves. Conservatives have much more leverage to dictate alliance terms than you do. Note the alliance with the AI art people was apparently already wrecked. Something you might ask yourselves: If you can’t make nice with a guy like me, who shares more of your ideals than either artists or US conservatives do, how do you expect to make nice with US conservatives?
Reiterating what I said above that “conservatives” should be taboo’d here. It appears to me that this faction is flashy but do not have enough political capital or leverage to decide Republican policy relative to the tech right and neocons, and could only serve as tie-breaker in issues where Ds and (other) Rs disagree (e.g. antitrust policy). On the flip side, it’s worthwhile talking about how to interact with anti-techs whether they are left-coded (deep greens), right-coded (national conservatives), or whatever the anti-AI artists are.
Sorry, this position is just intuitively absurd to me, and I’m happy to reject it on that basis
To be clear, this is not my position! I am not an intuitionist or anything close to it. This position also seems absurd to me after thinking hard about moral philosophy, and as someone who is pretty sympathetic to general positions that morality can be quite counterintuitive and weird. Please do not summarize my position as arguing primarily from intuition!
Geoffrey Miller is already a member of this community in good standing.
Thanks. I’d better stay out of this until I know who that is :)
I like some of what Geoffrey does, but I do think at various points he has violated enough norms of reasonable discourse (especially on Twitter) that I wouldn’t consider him in “good standing”.
X (formerly known as Twitter) isn’t for ‘reasonable discourse’ according to the very specific and high epistemic standards of LessWrong.
X is for influence, persuasion, and impact. Which is exactly what AI safety advocates need, if we’re to have any influence, persuasion, or impact.
I’m comfortable using different styles, modes of discourse, and forms of outreach on X versus podcasts versus LessWrong versus my academic writing.
I agree the standards are quite different! Nevertheless, I do currently think you are being overly aggressive even by the standards I would have for the broader rationality community for what appropriate norms are for Twitter.
‘Overly aggressive’ is what the shooter who just assassinated conservative Charlie Kirk was being.
Posting hot takes on X is not being ‘aggressive’.
This is not a day when I will tolerate any conflation of posting strong words on social media with committing actual aggressive violence.
This is not the day for that.
I mean, my comment was written before at least I had heard any news of that, so I don’t really see its relevance to the conversation.
Also, I really don’t see the relevance of bringing in Charlie Kirk into this conversation at all. Like, if you want we can have a real conversation about whether marginally more aggressive comments on social media were partially response for it or not (seems plausible to me but I haven’t thought much about it), but I am not even sure what you mean by “this is not the day for that”, and it certainly isn’t related to really anything else in this comment section.
You accused me of being ‘overly aggressive’. I was pointing out that tweets aren’t acts of aggression. Shooting people in the neck is.
As far as I can remember, I’ve never called for violence, on any topic, in any of the 80,000 posts I’ve shared on Twitter/X, to my 150,000 followers. So, I think your claim that my posts are ‘overly aggressive’ is poorly calibrated in relation to what actual aggression looks like.
That’s the relevance of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. A reminder that in this LessWrong bubble of ever-so-cautious, ever-so-rational, ever-so-epistemically-pure discourse, people can get very disconnected from the reality of high-stakes political debate and ideologically-driven terrorism.
Of course words can be “aggressive”. Yes, they are a different form of aggression from literal physical violence, but we still have norms for words. Some tweets are obviously “acts of aggression”.
(Unless you mean to import some technical meaning with those words, in which case I am happy to clarify that I am not meaning to import any technical meaning behind “aggression” and just mean the obvious everyday usage of the word)
Regarding “calling for violence”: I can’t find any specific example scrolling through your past tweets, so it’s plausible I am wrong about this! I do think I remember some, but as you say yourself, you have >80,000 tweets and I don’t know of an efficient way to search through all of them. I apologize if it turns out to be wrong, I did not mean to imply a high level of confidence in that specific adjective. There are some tweets that I feel like someone could argue are calls for violence, though I don’t think any of the ones I’ve found with 5 minutes of searching obviously cross that line.
habryka—regarding what ‘aggression’ is, I’m coming to this from the perspective of having taught courses on animal behavior and human evolution for 35 years.
When biological scientists speak of ‘aggression’, we are referring to actual physical violence, e.g. hitting, biting, dismembering, killing, eating, within or between species. We are not referring to vocalizations, or animal signals, or their modern digital equivalents.
When modern partisan humans refer to ‘aggression’ metaphorically, this collapses the distinction between speech and violence. Which is, of course, what censors want, in order to portray speech that they don’t like as if it’s aggravated assault. This has become a standard chant on the Left: ‘speech = violence’.
I strongly disagree with that framing, because it is almost always an excuse for censorship, deplatforming, and ostracizing of political rivals.
I think to maintain the epistemic norms of the Rationality community, we must be very careful not to equate ‘verbal signals we don’t like’ with ‘acts of aggression’.
No, the usual term both in common usage and that biological scientists use for that kind of stuff is “violence”. Aggression very much includes speech. I would be surprised if you were to find biologists consistently avoiding the word aggression when e.g. referring to intimidation behavior between animals in lieu of actual physical contact.
Indeed, just the first Google result for “animal aggression behavior” looks like this:
This also aligns with the common usage of those words.
That said, I am very happy to use a different word for the context of this comment thread if you want. We don’t have to agree on the meanings of all words to have a conversation here.
I’ve seen Eliezer violate what I’d consider norms of reasonable discourse on Twitter. You too.
It’s not a norm of discourse that one cannot state that a position is absurd. And it is a virtue of discourse to show up and argue for one’s stances, as Habryka does throughout that thread!
Speaking as someone who makes very little effort to avoid honey consumption, my opinion of Habryka would have dropped much less if he’d said something like: “Sorry, this position is just intuitively absurd to me, and I’m happy to reject it on that basis.” So I don’t think the issue has to do with absurdity per se.
I said I thought he violated “what I’d consider reasonable norms of discourse”. You can see Ben West thought something similar.
I’d estimate that Habryka violated roughly 7 or 8 of the Hacker News commenting guidelines in that discussion.
Your ideas about reasonable discourse can be different from mine, and Ben West’s, and Hacker News’. That’s OK. I was just sharing my opinion.
It’s been a while since I read that discussion. I remember my estimation of Habryka dropped dramatically when I read it. Maybe I can try to reconstruct why in more detail if you want. But contrasting what Habryka wrote with the HN commenting guidelines seems like a reasonable starting point.
You’ll notice that Habryka doesn’t provide any concrete example of Geoffrey violating a norm of reasonable discourse in this thread. I did provide a concrete example.
Is it possible that invokation of such “norms” can be a mere figleaf for drawing ingroup/outgroup boundaries in the traditional tribalistic way?
Is it too much to ask that Dear Leadership is held to the same standards, and treated the same way, as everyone else is?
It’s fine for you to have takes about my commenting style on those threads. I do continue to think that post was really quite bad (where, to be clear, most of my objection is to the author somehow taking the result at face value, while feeling no need to caveat or justify yourself, and linking to the Rethink Priorities report as an authoritative source. I don’t have the same objection to e.g. this old post by Luke which raised this as a hypothesis but doesn’t make the same errors).
But even if you think I am really mistaken here, I don’t think there is almost any standard that would make sense to defend on LessWrong that Geoffrey doesn’t routinely violate.
Some quick examples:
This goes on and on and on and on. He has hundreds of tweets like this, with insults, calls for violence, extreme aggression, sneering dismissal, the whole rickamarole.
Again, I appreciate a bunch of his work, but I really don’t think that even by your lights we treat discourse anything close to the same.
I think some of these are shown in what you link, but ‘calls for violence’ I have not seen. I just searched for it a little, and mostly found him speaking against that.
I also found him to be consistently annoyed about people blurring the line between aggressive speech and physical violence. Here’s one example.
Hmm, I don’t super buy this. In 2024 he made a bunch of tweets of this shape:
This feels to me like it’s doing a bunch of blurring between aggressive speech and physical violence.
(It’s also IMO a particularly weird stance to have, because he is clearly calling AI labs an existential threat to democracy, as they are an existential threat to all human things, which by the same logic would be an incitement to violence, though I think they aren’t, but like maybe by Geoffrey’s own logic they are?)
Just to clarify here, I have no issue with you thinking the post is bad. That seems besides the point to me. My issue is with you doing much of what you accuse Miller of doing.
Insults: “This post seems completely insane to me, as do people who unquestionable retweet it.”
Aggression: “I cannot believe I have to argue for this… [cursing]...”
Sneering: “Has anyone who liked this actually read this post? How on earth is this convincing to anyone?”
Note also that the discussion around the Bentham post was previously calm and friendly. You walked in and dramatically worsened the discourse quality. By contrast, Geoffrey engages on hot-button political topics where discussion is already very heated.
As a quick and relatively objective measure, with a quick search, out of all 80K Geoffrey Miller tweets, I was only able to find one non-quoted f-bomb (“Fuck the Singularity.”).
Your tweets appear to have a somewhat larger number of them, and they’re often directed at individuals rather than abstract concepts. “Fuck them”, “fuck you”, “fuck [those people]”.
As a matter of simple intellectual honesty, it would be nice if you could acknowledge that you engage in insults and aggressive behavior on Twitter. You might be doing it less than Geoffrey does. You might express it in a different way. But it’s just a question of degree, as far as I can tell. I really don’t think you have much moral high ground here.
You also have far fewer tweets than Geoffrey does (factor of ~16 difference). So it’s not just that you’ve dropped more f-bombs than him; your density of f-bombs appears to be far higher.
I… again am happy to accept critique of my posting, but I think you are really weirdly off-base here. Feel free to ask some neutral third-party to do an evaluation of our commenting or tweeting styles and how they compare to local norms of discourse.
In-particular, who cares about using words like “fuck”? What does this have to do with anything? Saying “fuck them” is much less aggressive or bad than saying “Behind your pretty-boy mask, you’re a sociopathic ghoul. Glad that Americans are learning the truth about the deep, dark, bitter pit where your soul should be.”!
I have certainly said the former to friends or acquaintances many times and received it many times. If you ever hear me or anyone else say the latter (or anything like it) earnestly to you, I think something is seriously going wrong.
Saying ‘fuck them’ when people are shifting to taking actions that threaten society is expressing something that should be expressed, in my view.
I see Oliver replied that in response to two Epoch researchers leaving to found an AI start-up focussed on improving capabilities. I interpret it as ‘this is bad, dismiss those people’. It’s not polite though maybe for others who don’t usually swear, it comes across much stronger?
To me, if someone posts an intense-feeling negatively worded text in response to what other people are doing, it usually signals that there is something they care about that they perceive to be threatened. I’ve found it productive to try relate with that first, before responding. Jumping to enforcing general rules stipulated somewhere in the community, and then implying that the person not following those rules is not harmonious with or does not belong to the community, can get counterproductive.
(Note I’m not tracking much of what Oliver and Geoffrey have said here and on twitter. Just wanted to respond to this part.)
I’m a bit concerned about a situation where “insiders” always get this sort of contextual benefit-of-the-doubt, and “outsiders” don’t.
That’s a healthy hypothesis to track.
Agreed on tracking that hypothesis. It makes sense that people are more open to consider what’s said by an insider they look up to or know. In a few discussions I saw, this seemed a likely explanation.
Also, insiders tend to say more stuff that is already agreed on and understandable by others in the community.
Here there seems to be another factor:
Whether the person is expressing negative views that appear to support v.s. to be dissonant with core premises. With ‘core premises’, I mean beliefs about the world that much thinking shared in the community is based on, or tacitly relies on to be true.
In my experience (yours might be different), when making an argument that reaches a conclusion that contradicts a core premise in the community, I had to be painstakingly careful to be polite, route around understandable misinterpretations, and already address common objections. To be able to get to a conversation where the argument was explored somewhat openly.
It’s hard to have productive conversations that way. The person arguing against the ‘core premise’ bears by far the most cost trying to write out responses in a way that might be insightful for others (instead of dismissed too quickly). The time and strain this takes is mostly hidden to others.
Keep in mind that US conservatives are liable to be reading this thread, trying to determine whether they want to ally with a group such as yourselves. Conservatives have much more leverage to dictate alliance terms than you do. Note the alliance with the AI art people was apparently already wrecked. Something you might ask yourselves: If you can’t make nice with a guy like me, who shares more of your ideals than either artists or US conservatives do, how do you expect to make nice with US conservatives?
Reiterating what I said above that “conservatives” should be taboo’d here. It appears to me that this faction is flashy but do not have enough political capital or leverage to decide Republican policy relative to the tech right and neocons, and could only serve as tie-breaker in issues where Ds and (other) Rs disagree (e.g. antitrust policy). On the flip side, it’s worthwhile talking about how to interact with anti-techs whether they are left-coded (deep greens), right-coded (national conservatives), or whatever the anti-AI artists are.
To be clear, this is not my position! I am not an intuitionist or anything close to it. This position also seems absurd to me after thinking hard about moral philosophy, and as someone who is pretty sympathetic to general positions that morality can be quite counterintuitive and weird. Please do not summarize my position as arguing primarily from intuition!
I think that didn’t tag/notify him but @geoffreymiller does, in case he wants to participate in the discussion.
Thanks for the tag. I’ve just started to read the comments here, and wrote an initial reply.