You know, I wondered that, and debated for a bit whether to add it. I still think I chose correctly though (with a caveat; see the end).
I was grappling with two factors here:
PDV had drawn their boundaries in a way that was about how others speak about themselves and express preferences. While I generally want to respect people’s wishes all else being equal, I don’t want to encourage boundary-drawing that prevents people from being able to express where they’re coming from. Succombing to this creates a social discourse incentive that’s waaaaay too easy to Goodhart. So, basically, I’m standing by communal norms that allow people to express what’s going on for them, and I oppose communal norms that allow people to suppress what others have to say about themselves. (This translates into problem ownership: I welcome PDV’s preferences (to the extent I can understand them — which was part of what I was asking about!) but I don’t take responsibility for managing their feelings for them.)
I could see two obvious pathways for this discussion to go down. One was where PDV keeps making statements that strike me as claims about objective or universally agreed upon moral facts, and this turns into a demon thread. The other was one where we make a sincere effort to understand what PDV is talking about. The latter seemed much, much better, and more like the kind of community I would like to encourage here.
I should also note that PDV expressed serious disdain for the “Here are my feelings” version of Circling-style interactions. The NVC move I tried was more “Okay, I imagine X is going on for you. Can you tell me more? I’d prefer style Y for reason Z.” If that’s considered “violating”… then this is bullying via boundaries. Again, I will try to be respectful of others’ wishes where I can, but I will not take responsibility for managing others’ feelings for them.
(Also, I find something seriously weird about “Hey, I’m calling BS on you” being considered totally okay but “Hey, I don’t understand you and I’d like to, can we try?” being considered violating. Are we sure that’s a culture we want?)
Caveat: I could have given the meta context I have here. I debated doing that too, but decided against it because I was worried about that increasing the chances of a demon thread.
I notice-1 that this carries an implicit claim that claims about reality, rather than one’s own feelings and experiences, are not valid. I don’t think Val actually thinks this, but it’s a super scary thing, both because its implications are awful and a lot of people (not Val!) seem to actually believe this or argue for this. That one should say “I observe that I have a belief that the sky is blue.”
Thus, I have a very hostile emotional reaction to responding to “X is bad” with “I think that what’s going on is that Y is going on inside your brain making you have the emotional reaction that X is bad, can you say more about this but only talk in this fashion?” especially to someone explicitly rejecting this frame, and in fact in this conversation in order to argue against the frame.
What? Look, if you and I are having a conversation about animals and I bring up bats and you go “bats are evil and anyone who approves of them is evil” (which is an actual word PDV actually used in this conversation), I think it’s a reasonable response for me to go “uh, bro, are you okay? It sounds like you’ve got a thing about bats,” and we don’t have to go into it if you don’t want to but refusing to acknowledge the thing that just happened seems weird to me, even if I only care about epistemics, because if I’m right then everything you say about bats needs to be filtered to take into account that, I dunno, bats killed your family or whatever (and this consideration is orthogonal to respecting your boundaries around bats, whatever they are).
(Also, probably goes without saying, but just in case: I don’t think Val is making anything like this claim, and I think “but only talk in this fashion” is a strawman. I do still think there was something not ideal about Val using an NVC-ish frame here but I’m also sympathetic to his defense.)
Look, if you and I are having a conversation about animals and I bring up bats and you go “bats are evil and anyone who approves of them is evil” (which is an actual word PDV actually used in this conversation), I think it’s a reasonable response for me to go “uh, bro, are you okay? It sounds like you’ve got a thing about bats,”
I strenuously disagree. This would be an extremely annoying sort of response, and I would think less of anyone who responded like this.
People can have strong opinions without those opinions coming from, like, emotional trauma or whatever. Insinuating some irrational, emotional motivation for a belief, in lieu of discussing the belief itself or asking how someone came to have it, etc., is simply rude.
(It’s different if you explicitly say “you’re wrong, and also, you only believe that because of [insert bad reason here]”. But that’s not what you’re doing, in your bat-hypothetical!)
I can’t emphasize enough how important the thing you’re mentioning here is, and I believe it points to the crux of the issue more directly than most other things that have been said so far.
We can often weakman postmodernism as making basically the same claim, but this doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people are running an algorithm in their head with the textual description “there is no outside reality, only things that happen in my mind.” This algorithm seems to produce different behaviors in people than if they were running the algorithm “outside reality exists and is important.” I think the first algorithm tends to produce behaviors that are a lot more dangerous than the latter, even though it’s always possible to make philosophical arguments that make one algorithm seem much more likely to be “true” than the other. It’s crucial to realize that not everyone is running the perfectly steelmanned version of such algorithms to do with updating our beliefs based on observations of the processes of how we update on our beliefs, and such things are very tricky to get right.
Even though it’s valid to make observations of the form “I observe that I am running a process that produces the belief X in me”, it is definitely very risky to create a social norm that says such statements are superior to statements like “X is true” because such norms create the tendency to assign less validity to statements like “X is true”. In other words, such a norm can itself become a process that produces the belief “X is not true” when we don’t necessarily want to move our beliefs on X just because we begin to understand how the processes work. It’s very easy to go from “X is true” to “I observe I believe X is true” to “I observe there are social and emotional influences on my beliefs” to “There are social and emotional influences on my belief in X” to finally “X is not true” and I can’t help but feel a mistake is being made somewhere in that process.
I consider you to be bullying me. NVC and most related practice are morally-disguised bullying, a framework in which anyone who does not conform to the norm (and never mind the personal cost) is constantly socially attacked.
I trust both your intentions to be good here. But I’m going to step in and express some of my own preferences for this comment section.
@PDV I would like it if you took a break from commenting on my post for some reasonable time period, like, 24-48 hours.
@Valentine I prefer that you stop trying to have this conversation with PDV.
I obviously cannot do anything here but express my preferences, and I do not expect you guys to comply. I am just a person and stuff. But here I am, expressing them.
I did not see this comment until this moment (the comment display when there are more than 100 of them is really screwy). I will break off for the next day.
@Valentine I prefer that you stop trying to have this conversation with PDV.
Preference received. I appreciate you expressing it.
I’m happy to fulfill it, as long as I see that the cultural vision that I’m standing for is well-represented in the discussion. (Which isn’t a request or a threat. Just a description of the parameters that shape where I’m okay stepping back from this.)
I don’t know what cultural vision you’re wanting to be represented. I am hoping it doesn’t rely on the particular conversation with PDV, but if it does, I’d like to understand that. Feel free to elaborate. (To clarify I’m only requesting you to stop trying to talk to PDV, not commenting here in general.)
That’s very hard to answer here without implicitly continuing the conversation with PDV. Something something game theory something something. Happy to answer you in more detail privately.
I appreciate Unreal setting boundaries on their post. (Whether done via formal moderation policies or simple expressions of preference, this seems like a good thing for people to feel empowered to do)
I quite disagree—this is just the sort of thing that I am worried will become more common (and more enforceable) with the upcoming moderation changes.
I think my disgreement may come from fundamentally different notions of what posting to the front page of LW is—in my view, it’s starting a public conversation. That conversation might well move in a direction you don’t want, but that’s the way it is—and I don’t think the conversation starter should have any special rights, explicit or implicit, to control that conversation.
I want to be very clear that I don’t think Unreal is being all that rude or unreasonable with their request—and that’s in fact precisely why I’m worried! If the request were obviously cruel or foolish that would be one thing, but something like this might well become accepted—and I think if requests like this are accepted there may well be a chilling effect on the overall discourse here, and it will occur in a way that is quite hard to see in the moment.
FYI, I’m writing out a lengthier post about this sort of issue. The short answer is that not giving creators control over their spaces creates different chilling effects.
NVC and most related practice are morally-disguised bullying, a framework in which anyone who does not conform to the norm (and never mind the personal cost) is constantly socially attacked.
**Can you be more specific?
I can guess that there is going to be a problem here.
If you want to answer “no” then you take social penalty. In NVC the “no” would look like “An explanation of why I can’t answer”. Either that or you say yes, and give specifics. You will probably perceive that you are being cornered.
Feeling cornered here would be a symptom of not knowing how to say no. Here are some versions of saying no.
“I don’t know how to say no without taking social damage”.
“It’s not my job to tell you the specifics”.
“I don’t have time to tell you, and other comments are more important”
“no.”
The trouble with most of them is they are epistemically poor. If you expect to change something, the phrase “I don’t like this but I won’t explain why” isn’t very helpful.
You know, I wondered that, and debated for a bit whether to add it. I still think I chose correctly though (with a caveat; see the end).
I was grappling with two factors here:
PDV had drawn their boundaries in a way that was about how others speak about themselves and express preferences. While I generally want to respect people’s wishes all else being equal, I don’t want to encourage boundary-drawing that prevents people from being able to express where they’re coming from. Succombing to this creates a social discourse incentive that’s waaaaay too easy to Goodhart. So, basically, I’m standing by communal norms that allow people to express what’s going on for them, and I oppose communal norms that allow people to suppress what others have to say about themselves. (This translates into problem ownership: I welcome PDV’s preferences (to the extent I can understand them — which was part of what I was asking about!) but I don’t take responsibility for managing their feelings for them.)
I could see two obvious pathways for this discussion to go down. One was where PDV keeps making statements that strike me as claims about objective or universally agreed upon moral facts, and this turns into a demon thread. The other was one where we make a sincere effort to understand what PDV is talking about. The latter seemed much, much better, and more like the kind of community I would like to encourage here.
I should also note that PDV expressed serious disdain for the “Here are my feelings” version of Circling-style interactions. The NVC move I tried was more “Okay, I imagine X is going on for you. Can you tell me more? I’d prefer style Y for reason Z.” If that’s considered “violating”… then this is bullying via boundaries. Again, I will try to be respectful of others’ wishes where I can, but I will not take responsibility for managing others’ feelings for them.
(Also, I find something seriously weird about “Hey, I’m calling BS on you” being considered totally okay but “Hey, I don’t understand you and I’d like to, can we try?” being considered violating. Are we sure that’s a culture we want?)
Caveat: I could have given the meta context I have here. I debated doing that too, but decided against it because I was worried about that increasing the chances of a demon thread.
I notice-1 that this carries an implicit claim that claims about reality, rather than one’s own feelings and experiences, are not valid. I don’t think Val actually thinks this, but it’s a super scary thing, both because its implications are awful and a lot of people (not Val!) seem to actually believe this or argue for this. That one should say “I observe that I have a belief that the sky is blue.”
Thus, I have a very hostile emotional reaction to responding to “X is bad” with “I think that what’s going on is that Y is going on inside your brain making you have the emotional reaction that X is bad, can you say more about this but only talk in this fashion?” especially to someone explicitly rejecting this frame, and in fact in this conversation in order to argue against the frame.
What? Look, if you and I are having a conversation about animals and I bring up bats and you go “bats are evil and anyone who approves of them is evil” (which is an actual word PDV actually used in this conversation), I think it’s a reasonable response for me to go “uh, bro, are you okay? It sounds like you’ve got a thing about bats,” and we don’t have to go into it if you don’t want to but refusing to acknowledge the thing that just happened seems weird to me, even if I only care about epistemics, because if I’m right then everything you say about bats needs to be filtered to take into account that, I dunno, bats killed your family or whatever (and this consideration is orthogonal to respecting your boundaries around bats, whatever they are).
(Also, probably goes without saying, but just in case: I don’t think Val is making anything like this claim, and I think “but only talk in this fashion” is a strawman. I do still think there was something not ideal about Val using an NVC-ish frame here but I’m also sympathetic to his defense.)
I strenuously disagree. This would be an extremely annoying sort of response, and I would think less of anyone who responded like this.
People can have strong opinions without those opinions coming from, like, emotional trauma or whatever. Insinuating some irrational, emotional motivation for a belief, in lieu of discussing the belief itself or asking how someone came to have it, etc., is simply rude.
(It’s different if you explicitly say “you’re wrong, and also, you only believe that because of [insert bad reason here]”. But that’s not what you’re doing, in your bat-hypothetical!)
I can’t emphasize enough how important the thing you’re mentioning here is, and I believe it points to the crux of the issue more directly than most other things that have been said so far.
We can often weakman postmodernism as making basically the same claim, but this doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people are running an algorithm in their head with the textual description “there is no outside reality, only things that happen in my mind.” This algorithm seems to produce different behaviors in people than if they were running the algorithm “outside reality exists and is important.” I think the first algorithm tends to produce behaviors that are a lot more dangerous than the latter, even though it’s always possible to make philosophical arguments that make one algorithm seem much more likely to be “true” than the other. It’s crucial to realize that not everyone is running the perfectly steelmanned version of such algorithms to do with updating our beliefs based on observations of the processes of how we update on our beliefs, and such things are very tricky to get right.
Even though it’s valid to make observations of the form “I observe that I am running a process that produces the belief X in me”, it is definitely very risky to create a social norm that says such statements are superior to statements like “X is true” because such norms create the tendency to assign less validity to statements like “X is true”. In other words, such a norm can itself become a process that produces the belief “X is not true” when we don’t necessarily want to move our beliefs on X just because we begin to understand how the processes work. It’s very easy to go from “X is true” to “I observe I believe X is true” to “I observe there are social and emotional influences on my beliefs” to “There are social and emotional influences on my belief in X” to finally “X is not true” and I can’t help but feel a mistake is being made somewhere in that process.
I consider you to be bullying me. NVC and most related practice are morally-disguised bullying, a framework in which anyone who does not conform to the norm (and never mind the personal cost) is constantly socially attacked.
I trust both your intentions to be good here. But I’m going to step in and express some of my own preferences for this comment section.
@PDV I would like it if you took a break from commenting on my post for some reasonable time period, like, 24-48 hours.
@Valentine I prefer that you stop trying to have this conversation with PDV.
I obviously cannot do anything here but express my preferences, and I do not expect you guys to comply. I am just a person and stuff. But here I am, expressing them.
I did not see this comment until this moment (the comment display when there are more than 100 of them is really screwy). I will break off for the next day.
Preference received. I appreciate you expressing it.
I’m happy to fulfill it, as long as I see that the cultural vision that I’m standing for is well-represented in the discussion. (Which isn’t a request or a threat. Just a description of the parameters that shape where I’m okay stepping back from this.)
I don’t know what cultural vision you’re wanting to be represented. I am hoping it doesn’t rely on the particular conversation with PDV, but if it does, I’d like to understand that. Feel free to elaborate. (To clarify I’m only requesting you to stop trying to talk to PDV, not commenting here in general.)
That’s very hard to answer here without implicitly continuing the conversation with PDV. Something something game theory something something. Happy to answer you in more detail privately.
I appreciate Unreal setting boundaries on their post. (Whether done via formal moderation policies or simple expressions of preference, this seems like a good thing for people to feel empowered to do)
I quite disagree—this is just the sort of thing that I am worried will become more common (and more enforceable) with the upcoming moderation changes.
I think my disgreement may come from fundamentally different notions of what posting to the front page of LW is—in my view, it’s starting a public conversation. That conversation might well move in a direction you don’t want, but that’s the way it is—and I don’t think the conversation starter should have any special rights, explicit or implicit, to control that conversation.
I want to be very clear that I don’t think Unreal is being all that rude or unreasonable with their request—and that’s in fact precisely why I’m worried! If the request were obviously cruel or foolish that would be one thing, but something like this might well become accepted—and I think if requests like this are accepted there may well be a chilling effect on the overall discourse here, and it will occur in a way that is quite hard to see in the moment.
FYI, I’m writing out a lengthier post about this sort of issue. The short answer is that not giving creators control over their spaces creates different chilling effects.
I’m pretty sure that the standard Eliezer requires to post here is hostile to good epistemics.
**Can you be more specific?
I can guess that there is going to be a problem here.
If you want to answer “no” then you take social penalty. In NVC the “no” would look like “An explanation of why I can’t answer”. Either that or you say yes, and give specifics. You will probably perceive that you are being cornered.
Feeling cornered here would be a symptom of not knowing how to say no. Here are some versions of saying no.
“I don’t know how to say no without taking social damage”.
“It’s not my job to tell you the specifics”.
“I don’t have time to tell you, and other comments are more important”
“no.”
The trouble with most of them is they are epistemically poor. If you expect to change something, the phrase “I don’t like this but I won’t explain why” isn’t very helpful.
I think I’ve explained this in other subthreads.