I’m somewhat confused by what people mean by “strategic” in these discussions. It seems to me like there are aspects of communication that I would call “stategic” but are uncontroversial. I would suggest the “grown not crafted” idea from IABIED. I think this is a extremely succinct and effective way to communicate the underlying technical idea, but of course expressing the idea in more technical language would also be truthful (arguably even more so). The difference isn’t that the “grown not crafted” way of communicating the idea is more truthful, but (I would infer) that it is predicted ot be more helpful in allowing others to understand the idea, even if they aren’t already famiiar with relevant technical knowledge. In other words, it is a more strategic way of communicating the idea.
I don’t think that example is particularly controversial, but I think these discussions are meant to also apply to statements that are highly contentious and subject to adversarial dynamics. When we consider statements that are more in those domains, I think we enter a kind of “messy middle” where the truthfulness of a statement is much more contested and it isn’t necessarily as easy to seperate the core content from the communication strategy.
Let’s take the “DEFUND THE POLICE” example from the post. I definitely believe that some people engage in the “window-stretching” as you describe. But I could also imagine proponents of the slogan saying something like this:
“I genuinely believe that current policing practices are so unjust that the police deserve to be defunded. It would be better for policing to be reformed to correct these injustices while still carrying out legitimate policing functions. But saying I want to “defund the police” is genuinely true under the current system. If I only advocated for more centrist reforms that would actually be misleading about what I believe and trying to fit my beliefs into the overton window, not the other way around. Its extremely important to use slogans like “DEFUND THE POLICE” when you actually believe in them because the powerful simply ignore centrist calls for reform. They need to know how strongly we actually feel about this. Calling for measures such as defunding is the only way to have our voices heard”.
I think such a view lives in this messy middle. People who agree are likely to see it as genuine while critics will be tempted to claim inappropriate use of stategy. The issue of whether the person who holds this view is being “truthful” essentially collapses back into the underlying object-level issues. Those who agree on the object-level will also agree of the meta question of whether what the person is doing is acceptable, and the reverse for someone who disagrees.
As I allude to here I think the best approach is to simply argue over the object-level question, and leave aiside the dicussions about whether someone is being stategic, how truth-seeking they are, if they are “gaslighting” etc.
I’m somewhat confused by what people mean by “strategic” in these discussions.
Apologies, I tried to make this clear: I am referring to “high-dimensional discourse chess” that requires asserting or assuming “we can model how public acceptability shifts and cleverly intervene to steer those shifts.” That’s not about communicating an idea, it’s about the goal of convincing people of something in order to have them react in order to change the pubic acceptability of another thing.
Let’s take the “DEFUND THE POLICE” example from the post.
Of course, not everyone who said “Defund the police” was playing games—some were true extremists, including leftist anarchists. But far more were being duped by those trying to play those games, advocating for what they thought was good based on social proof, almost always without a coherent replacement in their mind. That is, they generally weren’t advocating anarchy, they were advocating replacing police with something else undefined. It seems you are saying something similar; you dislike the current system, and say it should be replaced instead of reformed, but don’t have a clear argument for the details.
I think the best approach is to… leave aiside the dicussions about whether someone is being stategic, how truth-seeking they are, if they are “gaslighting” etc.
I agree—and if anything, think it’s exactly in line with the post’s conclusion? Specifically, in the post, I don’t argue that readers should dismiss anyone else’s views for playing discourse games, I argue that they should not attempt them.
The only reason I feel comfortable using the Defund the Police example is because the leaders of the movement were explicit in their intent to widen the window. For example, “Progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the use of language like “defund” an “excellent choice” for those who have been trying for years to “prompt a national conversation” about police. “‘Refund’ or ‘reallocate’ didn’t do that,” she tweeted. The shocking language of the slogans can help shift the Overton Window, making what might otherwise be politically controversial interventions more palatable. ”
And I wasn’t guessing about EA either; I have been in the room, repeatedly, when senior people in EA talked about shifting the Overton window on AI risk. So yes, don’t accuse others of doing this, but that doesn’t mean you can’t call them out when they say they are doing it!
Apologies, I tried to make this clear: I am referring to “high-dimensional discourse chess” that requires asserting or assuming “we can model how public acceptability shifts and cleverly intervene to steer those shifts.” That’s not about communicating an idea, it’s about the goal of convincing people of something in order to have them react in order to change the pubic acceptability of another thing.
No need to apologize, the point of having discussions is th hash these things out, right? And any error or misunderstand may also me mine rather than yours.
The thing that I find confusing is I feel like I get the vibe that is meant, but I don’t understand what the brightline or criteria are for when something is acceptable vs violates some norm. “High-dimensional discourse chess” to me kind of leans into this rather than clarifying the issue. I get that sense that people mean to address discursive strategies that in some way misleading, bad faith, “not truth-seeking”, or similar “vibes”. But in my view, whether these aspects apply to a person’s statements or a group’s rhetoric are likely to be contested, and the disagreement about those meta-questions are likely to have a high degree of overlap with the underlying object-level disagreement. I am worried that this causes a dynamic where people who disagree on the undelying issue often get into meta-debates about who is doing bad discource stuff, and that this is often unproductive.
It seems you are saying something similar; you dislike the current system, and say it should be replaced instead of reformed, but don’t have a clear argument for the details.
I strongly disagree with proponents of the “defund the police” slogan. Literally nothing I said has anything to do with my views on policing. I brought it up purely to address it in the context of your OP, as an example of the phenomenon under discussion. My personal interest in this has nothing to do with the defund the police example itself, and I think this goes to my concern about how meta-discussions often tend to meander to unproductive topics.
That said, I’m curious what you think that supporters of the slogan would feel about your argument. My suspicion is that they wouldn’t think that the issue is as clean cut as you describe. I will avoid trying to describe what arguments they might make since I don’t want violate my own advice and get into the weeds on a topic that I view as a sideshow, but hopefully you can see my point here. When people have strong disagreements, accusations of meta-level bad behavior that seems obvious to a person on one side of the underlying issue may not seem as obvious to someone on the other side.
And I wasn’t guessing about EA either; I have been in the room, repeatedly, when senior people in EA talked about shifting the Overton window on AI risk. So yes, don’t accuse others of doing this, but that doesn’t mean you can’t call them out when they say they are doing it!
Part of my interest in these discussions is that I have zero interactions with anyone in the EA/Rationalist spheres other than reading stuff online and in more recent years doing my own posting. I don’t have any inside knowledge, but I find statements like this very interesting and informative because I would like to understand what is going on to the extent I can. I find this difficult however, because I often find myself in the situation where when the statements being evaluated are public, I feel like people sometimes are overreading them. My read of many public statements that attract allegations of inappropriate discourse game playing is that they often appear to be downstream of disagreements on the object-level issues.
So yes, don’t accuse others of doing this, but that doesn’t mean you can’t call them out when they say they are doing it!
I’m not really sure how to take your statement as not being an accusation of EAs doing the thing you are criticizing. Are you saying that pronenent EAs would read what you have said here and publicly say “yes, we are doing this”? If not, I don’t think it really makes sense to say you are just calling out what they say they are doing. I understand you have non-public information here and of course you would use all the information you have access to to inform your own views. The thing that is difficult for me, as someone working off of only public info, is how to come to my own understanding of what is going on. If these people aren’t openly saying what they are doing, I can’t rely on “but they are saying it!” as something that shows that the behavior in question is over the line.
Edit: I appear to be rate-limited, so I will add my clarifications here (hopefully that isn’t breaking any rules, appologies if so), and then comment once the limit is up (this and all below was added after the subsequent comment).
I don’t think there is a bright line, there’s just a point being made about a gradient where discourse chess is on one side, and talking about object level facts in on the other. And I pointed out that on the chess side, people suck at getting what they want.
Perhaps I misunderstood you then. My perspective is something like this:
Speed of a car on a highway is a gradient, but if you are caught speeding, for practical purposes we might break down that gradient into buckets. If you are going 61 mph in a 60 zone, I have zero problem. If you are going 200 mph in a 60 zone, I have zero problem with you doing time in prison. Somewhere in there is a “messy middle” where people might reasonably disagree, but the disagreement is within acceptable parameters. Maybe I try to stay with 10 mpg of the speed limit but for you its 15. We disagree, but its a prison vs no-prison magnitude of disagreement. Even if think you should stay below 70 I don’t think 71 deserves jail time.
The impression I got from your post, which may be mistaken, is that you think people who behave in a way that is too strategic are doing something that is bad or wrong. It seemed to me like you thought that “crossing a line” in this regard is or should be a norm-violation. I’m of the view that while in any given case what a person does along these lines might not be ideal, it shouldn’t be considered a norm violation. I think it is often very messy to distinquish strategic/gameplaying/intended-overton-shifting speech from “just saying what you think”. You could write something that to you feels like you are just putting your best understanding of the truth out there, but which someone else feels like is being too strategic. I think when people speech, they should avoid the “norm-violating” versions of strategic speech but shouldn’t focus too much on whether or not their speech is strategic or not.
So I agree that imputing this type of behavior, as an accusation, is worrying, but that’s different than pointing out when the behavior was in fact intentional.
For clarity, when I say it seems like you’re making an accusation, I’m not saying this accusation is wrong. If a person says “I saw so-and-so commit this crime” that is accusing that person of a crime. Its not bad to correctly accuse people of things! My issues is I feel like its often unclear what the accusation is, or (like I in this case I think?) if there even is an accusation. To me it seemed like you were saying that some EAs did an intentially bad thing, and it was bad of them to do it, I’m trying to understand if that is correct or not basically (and if you are saying they did something bad, what that thing is).
The thing that I find confusing is I feel like I get the vibe that is meant, but I don’t understand what the brightline or criteria are for when something is acceptable vs violates some norm.
I don’t think there is a bright line, there’s just a point being made about a gradient where discourse chess is on one side, and talking about object level facts in on the other. And I pointed out that on the chess side, people suck at getting what they want.
Similarly for the other points, I don’t really care about exact lines, I’m not being prescriptive.
I’m not really sure how to take your statement as not being an accusation of EAs doing the thing you are criticizing.
You should read the last paragraph of my response. I don’t need to ask what prominent EAs would think, since I know what they did, in fact, say. And you may not have been around, but if you look at older posts on the EA forum, this wasn’t exactly a secret, it was a declared intention. And looking back, Rob was complaining about this 5 years ago. And here’s complaining about related issues 7 years ago. So I agree that imputing this type of behavior, as an accusation, is worrying, but that’s different than pointing out when the behavior was in fact intentional.
I an not sure that critics of defunding the police claimed an inappropriate use of strategy. One of themimplied that defunding the police is a luxury belief, i.e. a phrase which is both used as a status symbol and ensures that attempts to implement it differentially hurt the poor people, not the rich ones who tried to spread the meme.
I am stating, not implying, that the galaxy brain plan for stretching the Overton window backfired on them. But I’m not criticizing the position, I’m criticizing the efficacy of the strategy. Whether it was a luxury belief seems like a mostly separate point, though correlated in that such clever strategies do seem to be more likely to be pursued by the educated and wealthy.
I only addressed the defund the police issue because it is used as an example in the OP, I’m not trying to describe critics of the slogan in general. “Inappropriate use of strategy”, is my way of describing the view set forth in the OP, because I think it relates to people “speaking strategically” vs “just saying what they think”.
I’m somewhat confused by what people mean by “strategic” in these discussions. It seems to me like there are aspects of communication that I would call “stategic” but are uncontroversial. I would suggest the “grown not crafted” idea from IABIED. I think this is a extremely succinct and effective way to communicate the underlying technical idea, but of course expressing the idea in more technical language would also be truthful (arguably even more so). The difference isn’t that the “grown not crafted” way of communicating the idea is more truthful, but (I would infer) that it is predicted ot be more helpful in allowing others to understand the idea, even if they aren’t already famiiar with relevant technical knowledge. In other words, it is a more strategic way of communicating the idea.
I don’t think that example is particularly controversial, but I think these discussions are meant to also apply to statements that are highly contentious and subject to adversarial dynamics. When we consider statements that are more in those domains, I think we enter a kind of “messy middle” where the truthfulness of a statement is much more contested and it isn’t necessarily as easy to seperate the core content from the communication strategy.
Let’s take the “DEFUND THE POLICE” example from the post. I definitely believe that some people engage in the “window-stretching” as you describe. But I could also imagine proponents of the slogan saying something like this:
“I genuinely believe that current policing practices are so unjust that the police deserve to be defunded. It would be better for policing to be reformed to correct these injustices while still carrying out legitimate policing functions. But saying I want to “defund the police” is genuinely true under the current system. If I only advocated for more centrist reforms that would actually be misleading about what I believe and trying to fit my beliefs into the overton window, not the other way around. Its extremely important to use slogans like “DEFUND THE POLICE” when you actually believe in them because the powerful simply ignore centrist calls for reform. They need to know how strongly we actually feel about this. Calling for measures such as defunding is the only way to have our voices heard”.
I think such a view lives in this messy middle. People who agree are likely to see it as genuine while critics will be tempted to claim inappropriate use of stategy. The issue of whether the person who holds this view is being “truthful” essentially collapses back into the underlying object-level issues. Those who agree on the object-level will also agree of the meta question of whether what the person is doing is acceptable, and the reverse for someone who disagrees.
As I allude to here I think the best approach is to simply argue over the object-level question, and leave aiside the dicussions about whether someone is being stategic, how truth-seeking they are, if they are “gaslighting” etc.
Apologies, I tried to make this clear: I am referring to “high-dimensional discourse chess” that requires asserting or assuming “we can model how public acceptability shifts and cleverly intervene to steer those shifts.” That’s not about communicating an idea, it’s about the goal of convincing people of something in order to have them react in order to change the pubic acceptability of another thing.
Of course, not everyone who said “Defund the police” was playing games—some were true extremists, including leftist anarchists. But far more were being duped by those trying to play those games, advocating for what they thought was good based on social proof, almost always without a coherent replacement in their mind. That is, they generally weren’t advocating anarchy, they were advocating replacing police with something else undefined. It seems you are saying something similar; you dislike the current system, and say it should be replaced instead of reformed, but don’t have a clear argument for the details.
I agree—and if anything, think it’s exactly in line with the post’s conclusion? Specifically, in the post, I don’t argue that readers should dismiss anyone else’s views for playing discourse games, I argue that they should not attempt them.
The only reason I feel comfortable using the Defund the Police example is because the leaders of the movement were explicit in their intent to widen the window. For example, “Progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the use of language like “defund” an “excellent choice” for those who have been trying for years to “prompt a national conversation” about police. “‘Refund’ or ‘reallocate’ didn’t do that,” she tweeted. The shocking language of the slogans can help shift the Overton Window, making what might otherwise be politically controversial interventions more palatable. ”
And I wasn’t guessing about EA either; I have been in the room, repeatedly, when senior people in EA talked about shifting the Overton window on AI risk. So yes, don’t accuse others of doing this, but that doesn’t mean you can’t call them out when they say they are doing it!
No need to apologize, the point of having discussions is th hash these things out, right? And any error or misunderstand may also me mine rather than yours.
The thing that I find confusing is I feel like I get the vibe that is meant, but I don’t understand what the brightline or criteria are for when something is acceptable vs violates some norm. “High-dimensional discourse chess” to me kind of leans into this rather than clarifying the issue. I get that sense that people mean to address discursive strategies that in some way misleading, bad faith, “not truth-seeking”, or similar “vibes”. But in my view, whether these aspects apply to a person’s statements or a group’s rhetoric are likely to be contested, and the disagreement about those meta-questions are likely to have a high degree of overlap with the underlying object-level disagreement. I am worried that this causes a dynamic where people who disagree on the undelying issue often get into meta-debates about who is doing bad discource stuff, and that this is often unproductive.
I strongly disagree with proponents of the “defund the police” slogan. Literally nothing I said has anything to do with my views on policing. I brought it up purely to address it in the context of your OP, as an example of the phenomenon under discussion. My personal interest in this has nothing to do with the defund the police example itself, and I think this goes to my concern about how meta-discussions often tend to meander to unproductive topics.
That said, I’m curious what you think that supporters of the slogan would feel about your argument. My suspicion is that they wouldn’t think that the issue is as clean cut as you describe. I will avoid trying to describe what arguments they might make since I don’t want violate my own advice and get into the weeds on a topic that I view as a sideshow, but hopefully you can see my point here. When people have strong disagreements, accusations of meta-level bad behavior that seems obvious to a person on one side of the underlying issue may not seem as obvious to someone on the other side.
Part of my interest in these discussions is that I have zero interactions with anyone in the EA/Rationalist spheres other than reading stuff online and in more recent years doing my own posting. I don’t have any inside knowledge, but I find statements like this very interesting and informative because I would like to understand what is going on to the extent I can. I find this difficult however, because I often find myself in the situation where when the statements being evaluated are public, I feel like people sometimes are overreading them. My read of many public statements that attract allegations of inappropriate discourse game playing is that they often appear to be downstream of disagreements on the object-level issues.
I’m not really sure how to take your statement as not being an accusation of EAs doing the thing you are criticizing. Are you saying that pronenent EAs would read what you have said here and publicly say “yes, we are doing this”? If not, I don’t think it really makes sense to say you are just calling out what they say they are doing. I understand you have non-public information here and of course you would use all the information you have access to to inform your own views. The thing that is difficult for me, as someone working off of only public info, is how to come to my own understanding of what is going on. If these people aren’t openly saying what they are doing, I can’t rely on “but they are saying it!” as something that shows that the behavior in question is over the line.
Edit: I appear to be rate-limited, so I will add my clarifications here (hopefully that isn’t breaking any rules, appologies if so), and then comment once the limit is up (this and all below was added after the subsequent comment).
Perhaps I misunderstood you then. My perspective is something like this:
Speed of a car on a highway is a gradient, but if you are caught speeding, for practical purposes we might break down that gradient into buckets. If you are going 61 mph in a 60 zone, I have zero problem. If you are going 200 mph in a 60 zone, I have zero problem with you doing time in prison. Somewhere in there is a “messy middle” where people might reasonably disagree, but the disagreement is within acceptable parameters. Maybe I try to stay with 10 mpg of the speed limit but for you its 15. We disagree, but its a prison vs no-prison magnitude of disagreement. Even if think you should stay below 70 I don’t think 71 deserves jail time.
The impression I got from your post, which may be mistaken, is that you think people who behave in a way that is too strategic are doing something that is bad or wrong. It seemed to me like you thought that “crossing a line” in this regard is or should be a norm-violation. I’m of the view that while in any given case what a person does along these lines might not be ideal, it shouldn’t be considered a norm violation. I think it is often very messy to distinquish strategic/gameplaying/intended-overton-shifting speech from “just saying what you think”. You could write something that to you feels like you are just putting your best understanding of the truth out there, but which someone else feels like is being too strategic. I think when people speech, they should avoid the “norm-violating” versions of strategic speech but shouldn’t focus too much on whether or not their speech is strategic or not.
For clarity, when I say it seems like you’re making an accusation, I’m not saying this accusation is wrong. If a person says “I saw so-and-so commit this crime” that is accusing that person of a crime. Its not bad to correctly accuse people of things! My issues is I feel like its often unclear what the accusation is, or (like I in this case I think?) if there even is an accusation. To me it seemed like you were saying that some EAs did an intentially bad thing, and it was bad of them to do it, I’m trying to understand if that is correct or not basically (and if you are saying they did something bad, what that thing is).
I don’t think there is a bright line, there’s just a point being made about a gradient where discourse chess is on one side, and talking about object level facts in on the other. And I pointed out that on the chess side, people suck at getting what they want.
Similarly for the other points, I don’t really care about exact lines, I’m not being prescriptive.
You should read the last paragraph of my response. I don’t need to ask what prominent EAs would think, since I know what they did, in fact, say. And you may not have been around, but if you look at older posts on the EA forum, this wasn’t exactly a secret, it was a declared intention. And looking back, Rob was complaining about this 5 years ago. And here’s complaining about related issues 7 years ago. So I agree that imputing this type of behavior, as an accusation, is worrying, but that’s different than pointing out when the behavior was in fact intentional.
I an not sure that critics of defunding the police claimed an inappropriate use of strategy. One of them implied that defunding the police is a luxury belief, i.e. a phrase which is both used as a status symbol and ensures that attempts to implement it differentially hurt the poor people, not the rich ones who tried to spread the meme.
I am stating, not implying, that the galaxy brain plan for stretching the Overton window backfired on them. But I’m not criticizing the position, I’m criticizing the efficacy of the strategy. Whether it was a luxury belief seems like a mostly separate point, though correlated in that such clever strategies do seem to be more likely to be pursued by the educated and wealthy.
I only addressed the defund the police issue because it is used as an example in the OP, I’m not trying to describe critics of the slogan in general. “Inappropriate use of strategy”, is my way of describing the view set forth in the OP, because I think it relates to people “speaking strategically” vs “just saying what they think”.
I think I lost your point now, this got very meta.