I’m happy to agree on the crux that if one accepts “the only people who care what LessWrongers have to say are other LessWrongers” (which I currently don’t), then that would weaken the case for mutual knowledge — I would say by about half. The other half of my claim is that building mutual knowledge benefits other LessWrongers.
I have argued both that your argument for why “The goal of LessWrong [...] is to lead the world on having correct opinions about important topics” is false, why even if it was true this would not therefore imply people outside LessWrong care about the views of LessWrong, and why your particular strategy to build “mutual knowledge” is misguided & harmful to LessWrongers. So far I have seen zero real engagement on these points from you.
Especially on the “building mutual knowledge benefits other LessWrongers.” (implicitly, mutual knowledge via your post here) point, you have just consistently restated your belief ‘mutual knowledge is good’ as if it were an argument. That is not how arguments work, nor is my argument even “mutual knowledge is bad”.
I see this comment as continued minimal engagement. You don’t have to change your mind! It would be fine to say “I don’t know how to respond to your arguments, they are good, but not convincing for reasons I don’t know why”, but instead you post this conversation on X (previously Twitter)[1] as if its obvious why I’m wrong, calling it “crab bucketing”.
I just feel like your engagement here has been disingenuous, even if polite when talking here on LessWrong.
Note: I don’t follow you on X (previously Twitter), nor do I use X (previously Twitter), but I did notice a change in voting patterns, so I figured someone (probably you) shared the conversation.
What’s the issue with my Twitter post? It just says I see your comment as representative of many LWers, and the same thing I said in my previous reply, that aggregating people’s belief-states into mutual knowledge is actually part of “thinking” rather than “fighting”.
I find the criticism for my quality of engagement in this thread distasteful, as I’ve provided substantive object-level engagement with each of your comments so far. I could equally criticize you for bringing up multiple sub-points per post that leave me no way to respond in a time-efficient way without being called “minimal”, but I won’t, because I don’t see either of our behaviors so far as breaking out of the boundaries of productive LessWrong discourse. My claim about this community’s “crab-bucketing” was a separate tweet not intended as a reply to you.
I have argued both that your argument for why “The goal of LessWrong [...] is to lead the world on having correct opinions about important topics” is false
Ok, I’ll pick this sub-argument to expand on. You correctly point out that what I wrote does not text-match the “What LessWrong is about” section. My argument would be that this cited quote:
[Aspiring] rationalists should win [at life, their goals, etc]. You know a rationalist because they’re sitting atop a pile of utility. – Rationality is systematized winning
As well as Eliezer’s post about “Something to protect”—imply that a community that practices rationality ought to somehow optimize the causal connection between their practice of rationality and the impact that it has.
This obviously leaves room for people to have disagreeing interpretations of what LessWrong ought to do, as you and I currently do.
I think my responses have all had at most two distinct arguments, so I’m not sure in what sense I’m “bringing up multiple sub-points per post that leave [you] no way to respond in a time-efficient way without being called ’minimal’”. In the case that I am, that is also what the ‘not worth getting into’ emoji is for.
(other than this one, which has three)
This obviously leaves room for people to have disagreeing interpretations of what LessWrong ought to do, as you and I currently do.
Room for disagreement does not imply any disagreement is valid.
What’s the issue with my Twitter post? It just says I see your comment as representative of many LWers, and the same thing I said in my previous reply, that aggregating people’s belief-states into mutual knowledge is actually part of “thinking” rather than “fighting”.
It says
LW crab-buckets anyone from elevating an already majority-held object-level belief into mutual knowledge.
But this is not what I’m doing, nor what I’ve argued for anywhere, and as I’ve said before,
nor is my argument even “mutual knowledge is bad”.
For example, I really like the LessWrong surveys! I take those every year!
I just think your post is harmful and uninformative.
> nor is my argument even “mutual knowledge is bad”.
For example, I really like the LessWrong surveys! I take those every year!
What’s the minimally modified version of posting this “Statement of Support for IABIED” you’d feel good about? Presumably the upper bound for your desired level of modification would be if we included a yearly survey question about whether people agree with the quoted central claim from the book?
I would feel better if your post was more of the following form: “I am curious about the actual level of agreement with IABI, here is a list of directly quoted claims made in the book (which I put in the comments below). React with agree/disagree about each claim. If your answer is instead “mu”, then you can argue about it or something idk. Please also feel free to comment claims the book makes which you are interested in getting a survey of LessWrong opinions on yourself”.
I think I would actually strong-upvote this post if it existed, provided the moderation seemed appropriate, and the seeded claims concrete and not phrased leadingly.
Edit: Bonus points for encouraging people to use the probability reacts rather than agree/disagree reacts.
Thanks. The reactions to such a post would constitute a stronger common knowledge signal of community agreement with the book (to the degree that such agreement is in fact present in the community).
I wonder if it would be better to make the agree-voting anonymous (like LW post voting) or with people’s names attached to their votes (like react-voting).
I’m sure this is going too far for you, but I also personally wish LW could go even further toward turning a sufficient amount of mutual support expressed in that form (if it turns out to exist) into a frontpage that actually looks like what most humans expect a supportive front page around a big event to look like (moreso than having a banner mentioning it and discussion mentioning it).
I’m happy to agree on the crux that if one accepts “the only people who care what LessWrongers have to say are other LessWrongers” (which I currently don’t), then that would weaken the case for mutual knowledge — I would say by about half. The other half of my claim is that building mutual knowledge benefits other LessWrongers.
I have argued both that your argument for why “The goal of LessWrong [...] is to lead the world on having correct opinions about important topics” is false, why even if it was true this would not therefore imply people outside LessWrong care about the views of LessWrong, and why your particular strategy to build “mutual knowledge” is misguided & harmful to LessWrongers. So far I have seen zero real engagement on these points from you.
Especially on the “building mutual knowledge benefits other LessWrongers.” (implicitly, mutual knowledge via your post here) point, you have just consistently restated your belief ‘mutual knowledge is good’ as if it were an argument. That is not how arguments work, nor is my argument even “mutual knowledge is bad”.
I see this comment as continued minimal engagement. You don’t have to change your mind! It would be fine to say “I don’t know how to respond to your arguments, they are good, but not convincing for reasons I don’t know why”, but instead you post this conversation on X (previously Twitter)[1] as if its obvious why I’m wrong, calling it “crab bucketing”.
I just feel like your engagement here has been disingenuous, even if polite when talking here on LessWrong.
Note: I don’t follow you on X (previously Twitter), nor do I use X (previously Twitter), but I did notice a change in voting patterns, so I figured someone (probably you) shared the conversation.
What’s the issue with my Twitter post? It just says I see your comment as representative of many LWers, and the same thing I said in my previous reply, that aggregating people’s belief-states into mutual knowledge is actually part of “thinking” rather than “fighting”.
I find the criticism for my quality of engagement in this thread distasteful, as I’ve provided substantive object-level engagement with each of your comments so far. I could equally criticize you for bringing up multiple sub-points per post that leave me no way to respond in a time-efficient way without being called “minimal”, but I won’t, because I don’t see either of our behaviors so far as breaking out of the boundaries of productive LessWrong discourse. My claim about this community’s “crab-bucketing” was a separate tweet not intended as a reply to you.
Ok, I’ll pick this sub-argument to expand on. You correctly point out that what I wrote does not text-match the “What LessWrong is about” section. My argument would be that this cited quote:
As well as Eliezer’s post about “Something to protect”—imply that a community that practices rationality ought to somehow optimize the causal connection between their practice of rationality and the impact that it has.
This obviously leaves room for people to have disagreeing interpretations of what LessWrong ought to do, as you and I currently do.
I think my responses have all had at most two distinct arguments, so I’m not sure in what sense I’m “bringing up multiple sub-points per post that leave [you] no way to respond in a time-efficient way without being called ’minimal’”. In the case that I am, that is also what the ‘not worth getting into’ emoji is for.
(other than this one, which has three)
Room for disagreement does not imply any disagreement is valid.
It says
But this is not what I’m doing, nor what I’ve argued for anywhere, and as I’ve said before,
For example, I really like the LessWrong surveys! I take those every year!
I just think your post is harmful and uninformative.
What’s the minimally modified version of posting this “Statement of Support for IABIED” you’d feel good about? Presumably the upper bound for your desired level of modification would be if we included a yearly survey question about whether people agree with the quoted central claim from the book?
I would feel better if your post was more of the following form: “I am curious about the actual level of agreement with IABI, here is a list of directly quoted claims made in the book (which I put in the comments below). React with agree/disagree about each claim. If your answer is instead “mu”, then you can argue about it or something idk. Please also feel free to comment claims the book makes which you are interested in getting a survey of LessWrong opinions on yourself”.
I think I would actually strong-upvote this post if it existed, provided the moderation seemed appropriate, and the seeded claims concrete and not phrased leadingly.
Edit: Bonus points for encouraging people to use the probability reacts rather than agree/disagree reacts.
Thanks. The reactions to such a post would constitute a stronger common knowledge signal of community agreement with the book (to the degree that such agreement is in fact present in the community).
I wonder if it would be better to make the agree-voting anonymous (like LW post voting) or with people’s names attached to their votes (like react-voting).
I’m sure this is going too far for you, but I also personally wish LW could go even further toward turning a sufficient amount of mutual support expressed in that form (if it turns out to exist) into a frontpage that actually looks like what most humans expect a supportive front page around a big event to look like (moreso than having a banner mentioning it and discussion mentioning it).
Again, the separate tweet about LW crab-bucketing in my Twitter thread wasn’t meant as a response to to you in this LW thread.
I agree that “room for disagreement does not imply any disagreement is valid”, and am not seeing anything left to respond to on that point.