This post literally strongly misrepresents my position in three important ways¹. And these points were purposefully made central in my answers to the author, who kindly asked for my clarifications but then didn’t include them in her summary and interpretation. This can be checked by contrasting her summary of my position with the actual text linked to, in which I clarified how my position wasn’t the simplistic one here presented.
Are you telling me I shouldn’t flag that my position has been importantly misrepresented?
On LessWrong?
And furthermore on a post that will be seen by way more people than my original text?
¹ I mean the three latter in my above comment, since the first (the hyperbolic presentation) is worrisome but not central.
You say that he quoted bits are misrepresentations, but I checked your writing and they seem like accurate summaries. You should flag that your position has been misrepresented iff that is true. But you haven’t been misrepresented, and I don’t think that you think you’ve been misrepresented.
I think you are muddying the waters on purpose, and making spurious demands on Elizabeth’s time, because you think clarity about what’s going on will make people more likely to eat meat. I believe this because you’ve written things like:
One thing that might be happening here, is that we’re speaking at different simulacra levels
Source comment. I’m not sure how how familiar you are with local usage of the the simulacrum levels phrase/framework, but in my understanding of the term, all but one of the simulacrum levels are flavors of lying. You go on to say:
Now, I understand the benefits of adopting the general adoption of the policy “state transparently the true facts you know, and that other people seem not to know”. Unfortunately, my impression is this community is not yet in a position in which implementing this policy will be viable or generally beneficial for many topics.
The front-page moderation guidelines on LessWrong say “aim to explain, not persuade”. This is already the norm. The norms of LessWrong can be debated, but not in a subthread on someone else’s post on a different topic.
Yes, your quotes show that I believe (and have stated explicitly) that publishing posts like this one is net-negative. That was the topic of our whole conversation. That doesn’t imply that I’m commenting to increase the costs of these publications. I tried to convince Elizabeth that this was net-negative, and she completely ignored those qualms, and that’s epistemically respectable. I am commenting mainly to avoid my name from being associated with some positions that I literally do not hold.
I believe that her summaries are a strong misrepresentation of my views, and explained why in the above comment through object-level references comparing my text to her summaries. If you don’t provide object-level reasons why the things I pointed out in my above comment are wrong, then I can do nothing with this information. (To be clear, I do think the screenshots are fairly central parts of my clarifications, but her summaries misrepresent and directly contradict other parts of them which I had also presented as central and important.)
I do observe that providing these arguments is a time cost for you, or fixing the misrepresentations is a time cost for Elizabeth, etc. So the argument “you are just increasing the costs” will always be available for you to make. And to that the only thing I can say is… I’m not trying to get the post taken down, I’m not talking about any other parts of the post, just the ones that summarize my position.
I believe that her summaries are a strong misrepresentation of my views, and explained why in the above comment through object-level references comparing my text to her summaries.
I’m looking at those quote-response pairs, and just not seeing the mismatch you claim there to be. Consider this one:
The charitable explanation here is that my post focuses on naive veganism, and Soto thinks that’s a made-up problem.
Of course, my position is not as hyperbolic as this.
This only asserts that there’s a mismatch; it provides no actual evidence of one. Next up:
his desired policy of suppressing public discussion of nutrition issues with plant-exclusive diets will prevent us from getting the information to know if problems are widespread
In my original answers I address why this is not the case (private communication serves this purpose more naturally).
Pretty straightforwardly, if the pilot study results had only been sent through private communications, then they wouldn’t have public discussion (ie, public discussion would be suppressed). I myself wouldn’t know about the results. The probability of a larger follow-up study would be greatly reduced. I personally would have less information about how widespread problems are.
This only asserts that there’s a mismatch; it provides no actual evidence of one
I didn’t provide quotes from my text when the mismatch was obvious enough from any read/skim of the text. In this case, for example, even the screenshots of my text included in the post demonstrate that I do think naive transitions to veganism exist. So of course this is more a point about framing, and indeed notice that I already mentioned in another comment that this one example might not constitute a strong misrepresentation, as the other two do (after all, it’s just an hyperbole), although it still gives me worries about biased tone-setting in a vaguer way.
Pretty straightforwardly, if the pilot study results had only been sent through private communications, then they wouldn’t have public discussion (ie, public discussion would be suppressed).
In the text I clearly address why
My proposal is not suppressing public discussion of plant-based nutrition, but constructing some more holistic approach whose shape isn’t solely focused on plant-based diets, or whose tone and framing aren’t like this one (more in my text).
I don’t think it’s true private communications “prevent us from getting the information” in important ways (even if taking into account the social dynamics dimension of things will always, of course, be a further hindrance). And also, I don’t think public communications give us some of the most important information.
I hope it is now clear why I think Elizabeth’s quoted sentence is a misrepresentation, since neither I push for suppressing public discussions of plant-based nutrition (only a certain non-holistic approach to this, more concretely, Elizabeth’s approach), nor I ignored the possible worry that this prevents us from obtaining useful information (on the contrary, I addressed this). Of course we can object-level argue about whether these (my positions) are true (that’s what I was trying to do with Elizabeth, although as stated she didn’t respond to these two further points), but what’s clear is that they are the ones represented in my text.
More generally, I think this is a kind of “community-health combating of symptoms” with many externalities for the epistemic and moral capabilities of our community (and ignoring them by ignoring the social dynamics at play in our community and society seems like wishful thinking, we are not immune to propaganda), and I think different actions will lead to a healthier and more robust community without the same externalities (all of this detailed in my text).
In any event, I will stop engaging now. I just wanted my name not to be associated with those positions in a post that will be read by so many people, but it’s not looking like Elizabeth will fix that, and having my intentions challenged constantly so that I need to explain my each and every mental move is too draining.
I didn’t provide quotes from my text when the mismatch was obvious enough from any read/skim of the text.
It was not obvious to me, although that’s largely because after reading what you’ve written I had difficulty understanding what your position was at all precisely. It also definitely wasn’t obvious to jimrandomh, who wrote that Elizabeth’s summary of your position is accurate. It might be obvious to you, but as written this is a factual statement about the world that is demonstrably false.
My proposal is not suppressing public discussion of plant-based nutrition, but constructing some more holistic approach whose shape isn’t solely focused on plant-based diets, or whose tone and framing aren’t like this one (more in my text).
I’m confused. You say that you don’t want to suppress public discussion of plant-based nutrition, but also that you do want to suppress Elizabeth’s work. I don’t know how we could get something that matches Elizabeth’s level of rigor, accomplishes your goal of a holistic approach, and doesn’t require at least 3 times the work from the author to investigate all other comparable diets to ensure that veganism isn’t singled out. Simplicity is a virtue in this community!
I don’t think it’s true private communications “prevent us from getting the information” in important ways (even if taking into account the social dynamics dimension of things will always, of course, be a further hindrance). And also, I don’t think public communications give us some of the most important information.
This sounds, to me, like you are arguing against public discussions. Then in the next sentence you say you’re not suppressing public discussions. Those are in fact very slightly different things since arguing that something isn’t the best mode of communication is distinct from promoting suppression of that thing, but this seems like a really small deal. You might ask Elizabeth something like “hey, could you change ‘promotes the suppression of x’ with ‘argues strongly that x shouldn’t happen’? It would match my beliefs more precisely.” This seems nitpicky to me, but if it’s important to you it seems like the sort of thing Elizabeth Elizabeth might go for. It also wouldn’t involve asking her to either delete a bunch of her work or make another guess at what you actually mean.
In any event, I will stop engaging now.
Completely reasonable, don’t feel compelled to respond.
these points were purposefully made central in my answers to the author, who kindly asked for my clarifications but then didn’t include them in her summary and interpretation
The quotes I screenshotted are from the clarifications, not your initial statement.
Yes, I was referring to your written summaries of my position, which are mostly consistent with the shown screenshots, but not with other parts of my answers. That’s why I kindly demand these pieces of text attached to my name to be changed to stop misrepresenting my position (I can provide written alternate versions if that helps), or at least removed while this is pending.
As long as Elizabeth doesn’t claim that you literally wrote yourself what she wrote in the summaries (she doesn’t), and it’s clear that it’s her interpretation (it is), she’s entirely in the right to include them, and under no obligation to change or remove them to suite you. If you think it misrepresents you, you can leave a comment (as you did). “demanding” that it is removed or changed is going too far (likely in order to incur extra costs on this type of criticism, imo).
It’s true the boundary between interpretation and strong misrepresentation is fuzzy. In my parent comment I’m providing object-level arguments for why this is a case of strong misrepresentation. This is aggravated by the fact that this post will be seen by a hundred times more people than my actual text, by the fact that Elizabeth herself reached out for these clarifications (which I’ve spent time to compose), and by the fact that I offered to quickly review the write-up more than a week ago.
I’m not trying to incur any extra costs, Elizabeth is free to post her opinions even if I believe doing so is net-negative. I’m literally just commenting so that my name is not associated with opinions which are literally not held by me (this being completely explicited in my linked text, but of course this being too long for almost anyone to actually check first-hand).
If you didn’t include the request/demand for “a removal of those parts of the post until this has cleared up” I (and I think others as well) would have been much more receptive and less likely to see it as an attempt to incur extra costs.
As mentioned, my main objective in writing these comments is not have associated with a position I don’t hold. Many people will see that part of the post, but not go into the comments, and even more will go into the comments but won’t see my short explanation of how my position has been misrepresented, since it has been heavily down-voted (although I yet have to hear any object-level argument for why the misrepresentation actually hasn’t happened or my conduct is epistemically undesirable). So why wouldn’t I demand for the most public part of all this to not strongly misrepresent my position?
I get it this incurs some extra effort on Elizabeth (as does any change or discussion), but I’m trying to minimize that by offering myself to write the alternate summary, or even just remove that part of the text (which should take minimal effort). She’s literally said things I didn’t claim (especially the third example), and a demand to fix that doesn’t seem so far-fetched to me that the first guess is I’m just trying to mud the waters.
Maybe we’re still fresh from the Nonlinear exchange and are especially wary of tactical incurring of costs, but of course I don’t even need to point out how radically different this situation is.
I think it would be reasonable to ask that she links to your comment in the post, so people know you disagree with her interpretations. But if she thinks her interpretations are right she should keep them.
As I’ve object-level argued above, I believe these summaries fall into the category of misrepresentation, not just interpretation. And I don’t believe an author should maintain such misrepresentations in their text in light of evidence about them.
In any event, certainly a link to my comment is better than nothing. At this point I’m just looking for any gesture in the direction of avoiding my name from being associated with positions I do not hold.
On general principle, I think embedding links to people who think they’ve been mischaracterized in a post is fair and good. And if you had crisp pointers to where I mischaracterized you, I would absolutely link to it.
But what you have is a long comment thread asserting that I mischaracterized you and that the mischaracterizations are obvious, and multiplepeople telling you they’re not, plus (as of this writing)14 disagreement karma on 15 votes. Linking people to this isn’t informative, it’s a tax, and I view it as a continuation of the pattern of making vegan nutrition costly to talk about.
But of course it’s a terrible norm to trust authors to decide if someone’s challenge to their work is good enough. My ideal solution is something like a bet- I include your disclaimer, we run a poll and people say reading your clarifications was uninformative it costs you something meaningful. And if the votes say I was inaccurate, I’ll at a minimum remove your section and put up a big disclaimer, and rethink the post as whole, since it rests on my ability to fairly summarize people.
Right now I don’t know of a way to do this that isn’t too vulnerable to carpet bagging. I also don’t know what stakes would be meaningful from you. But conceptually I think this is the right thing to do.
FWIW I just spent a lot of time reading all of the comments (in the original thread and this one) and my position is that Martín Soto’s criticism of his representation is valid, and that he has been obviously mischaracterized.
I think Martín Soto explained it pretty well in his comments here, but I can try to explain it myself. (Can’t guarantee I will do it well, I originally commented because the stated opinions of commenters voicing an opposing view seemed to be used as evidence)
The post directly represents Soto as thinking that nieve veganism is a made up problem, despite him not saying that, or giving any indication that he thought the problem was fabricated (he literally states that he doesn’t doubt the anecdotes of the commenter speaking about the college group). He just shared that in his experience, knowledge about vegan supplimenting needs was extremely widespread and the norm.
The post also represents Soto as desiring a “policy of suppressing public discussion of nutrition issues with plant-exclusive diets”
That’s not what he said, and it’s not an accurate interpretation.
He innitally commented thanking them for the post in question, providing some criticism and questions. Elizabeth later asked about whether he thinks vegan nutrition issues should be discussed, and for his thoughts on the right way to discuss vegan nutrition issues.
He seems to agree they should be discussed, but he offers a lot of thoughts about how the framing of those discussions is important, along with some other considerations.
He says that in his opinion the consequences of pushing the line she was pushing in the way she was pushing it were probably net negative, but that’s very different from advocating a policy of suppressing public discussion about a topic.
Saying something along the lines of: “this speech about this topic framed in this way probably does more harm than good in my opinion”
Is very different than saying something like: “there should be a policy of suppressing speech about this topic”
Advocating generalized norms around suppressing speech about a broad topic, is not the same as stating an opinion that certain speech falling under that topic and framed a certain way might do more harm than good.
Tristan wrote a beautiful comment about prioritizing creating a culture of reverence for life/against suffering, and how that wasn’t very amenable to compromise.
My guess is that if you took someone with Tristan’s beliefs and put more challenging discussion circumstances- less writing skill, less clarity, more emotional activation, trying to operate in an incompatible frame rather than a direct question on their own values- you might get something that looked a lot like the way you describe Martin’s comments. And what looked like blatant contradictions to me are a result of carving reality at different joints.
I don’t want to ask you to speak for Martin in particular, but does that model of friction in communication on this issue in general feel plausible to you?
When trying to model your disagreement with Martin and his position, I think the best sort of analogy I can think of is that of tobacco companies employing ‘fear, uncertainty, and doubt’ tactics in order to prevent people from seriously considering quitting smoking.
Smokers experience cognitive dissonance when they have strong desires to smoke, coupled with knowledge that smoking is likely not in their best interest. They can supress this cognitive dissonance by changing their behaviour and quitting smoking, or by finding something that introduces sufficient doubt about whether that behavior is in their self interest, the latter being much easier. They only need a marginal amount of uncertainty and doubt in order to suppress the dissonance, because their reasoning is heavily motivated, and that’s all tobacco companies needed to offer.
I think Martin is essentially trying to make a case that your post(s) about veganism are functionally providing sufficient marginal ‘uncertainty and doubt’ for non-vegans to suppress any inclination that they ought to reconsider their behaviour. Even if that isn’t at all the intention of the post(s), or a reasonable takeaway (for meat eaters).
I think this explains much or most of the confusing friction which came up around your posts involving veganism. Vegans have certain intuitions regarding the kinds of things that non-vegans will use to maintain the sufficient ‘uncertainty and doubt’ required to suppress the mental toll of their cognitive dissonance. So even though it was hard to find explicit disagreement, it also felt clear to a lot of people that the framing, rhetorical approach, and data selection entailed in the post(s) would mostly have the effect of readers permitting themselves license to forgo reckoning with the case for veganism.
So I think it’s relevant whether one affords animals a higher magnitude of moral consideration, or internalized an attitude which places animals in the in-group, However I don’t think that accounts for everything here.
Some public endeavors in truth seeking can satisfy the motivated anti-truth seeking of people encountering it. I interpret the top comment of this post as evidence of that.
I’m not sure if I conveyed everything I meant to here, but I think I should make sure the main point here makes sense before expanding.
This seems like an inside view of the feelings that lead to using arguments as soldiers. The motivation is sympathetic and the reasoning is solid enough to weather low-effort attacks, but at the end of the day it is treating arguments as means to ends rather than attempts to discover ground level truth. And Effective Altruism and LessWrong have defined themselves as places where we operate on the object level and evaluate each argument on its own merit, not as a pawn in a war.
The systems can tolerate a certain amount of failure (which is good, because it’s going to happen). But the more people treat arguments as soldiers, the weaker the norm and aspiration to collaboratively truthseek, even when it’s inconvenient, becomes. Do it too much, and the norm will go away entirely.
You might argue that it’s good to destroy high-decoupling norms, because they’re innately bad or because animal welfare is so important it is worth ruining any institution that gets in its way. But AFAICT, the truthseeking norms of EA and LW have been extremely hospitable environments for animal welfare advocates[1], specifically because of the high decoupling. High decoupling is what let people consider the argument that factory farming was a moral atrocity even though it was very inconvenient for them.
So when vegan advocates operate using arguments as soldiers they are not only destroying truthseeking infrastructure that was valuable to many causes. They are destroying infrastructure that has already done a great deal of good for their cause in particular. They are using arguments as soldiers to destroy their own buildings.
relative to baseline. Evidence off the top of my head:
* EAs go vegan, vegetarian, and reducitarian at much higher than baseline rates. This is less true of rationalists, but I believe is still above baseline. I know many people who loathe most vegan advocacy and nonetheless reduce meat, or in rare cases go all the way to vegan, because they could decouple the suffering arguments from the people making them. * EA money has transformed farmed animal welfare and AFAIK is the ~only source of funding for things like insect suffering (couldn’t immediately find numbers, source is “a friend in EA animal welfare told me so”) * AFAIK, veganism’s biggest antagonist on LW and EAF over the last year has been me. And I’ve expressed that antagonism by… let me check my notes… getting dozens of vegans nutrition tested and on (AFAIK) vegan supplements. That project would have gone bigger if I’d been able to find a vegan collaborator, but I couldn’t find one (and I did actively look, although exhausted my options pretty quickly). My main posts in this sequence go out of their way to express deep respect for vegans’ moral convictions and recognize animal suffering as morally relevant.
Maybe there’s a poster who’s actively hostile to animal welfare that I didn’t notice, but if I didn’t hear about them they can’t possibly have done that much.
First off, thanks for including that edit (which is certainly better than nothing), although that still doesn’t neglect that (given the public status of the post) your summaries will be the only thing almost everyone sees (as much as you link to these comments or my original text), and that in this thread I have certainly just been trying to get my positions not misrepresented (so I find it completely false that I’m purposefully imposing an unnecessary tax, even if it’s true that engaging with this misrepresentation debate takes some effort, like any epistemic endeavor).
Here’s the two main reasons why I wouldn’t find your proposal above fair:
I expect most people who will see this post / read your summaries of my position to have already seen it (although someone correct me if I’m wrong about viewership dynamics in LessWrong). As a consequence, I’d gain much less from such a disclaimer / rethinking of the post being incorporated now (although of course it would be positive for me / something I could point people towards). Of course, this is not solely a consequence of your actions, but also of my delayed response times (as I had already anticipated in our clarifications thread).
A second order effect is that most people who have seen the post up until now will have been “skimmers” (because it was just in frontpage, just released, etc.), while probably more of the people who read the post in the future will be more thorough readers (because they “went digging for it”, etc.). As I’ve tried to make explicit in the past, my worry is more about the social dynamics consequences of having such a post (with such a framing) receive a lot of public attention, than with any scientific inquiry into nutrition, or any emphasis on public health. Thus, I perceive most of the disvalue coming from the skimmers’ reactions to such a public signal. More on this below.
My worry is exactly that such a post (with such a framing) will not be correctly processed by too many readers (and more concretely, the “skimmers”, or the median upvoter/downvoter), in the sense that they will take away (mostly emotionally / gutturally) the wrong update (especially action-wise) from the actual information in the post (and previous posts). Yes: I am claiming that I cannot assume perfect epistemics from LessWrong readers. More concretely, I am claiming that there is a predictable bias in one of two emotional / ethical directions, which exists mainly due to the broader ethical / cultural context we experience (from which LessWrong is not insulated). Even if we want LessWrong to become a transparent hub of information sharing (in which indeed epistemic virtue is correctly assumed of the other), I claim that the best way to get there is not through completely implementing this transparent information sharing immediately in the hopes that individuals / groups will respond correctly. This would amount to ignoring a part of reality that steers our behavior too much to be neglected: social dynamics and culturally inherited biases. I claim the best way to get there is by implementing this transparency wherever it’s clearly granted, but necessarily being strategic in situations when some unwanted dynamics and biases are at play. The alternative, being completely transparent (“hands off the simulacrum levels”), amounts to leaving a lot of instrumental free energy on the table for these already existing dynamics and biases to hoard (as they have always done). It amounts to having a dualistic (as opposed to embedded) picture of reality, in which epistemics cannot be affected by the contingent or instrumental. And furthermore, I claim this topic (public health related to animal ethics) is unfortunately one of the tricky situations in which such strategicness (as opposed to naive transparency) is the best approach (even if it requires some more efforts on our part). Of course, you can disagree with these claims, but I hope it’s clear why I don’t find a public jury is to be trusted on this matter.
You might respond “huh, but we’re not talking about deciding things about animal ethics here. We’re talking about deciding rationally whether some comments were or weren’t useful. We certainly should be able to at least trust the crowd on that?” I don’t think that’s the case for this topic, given how strong the “vegans bad” / “vegans annoying” immune reaction is for most people generally (that is, the background bias present in our culture / the internet).
As an example, in this thread there are some people (like you and Jim) who have engaged with my responses / position fairly deeply, and for now disagreed. I don’t expect the bulk of the upvotes / downvotes in this thread (or if we were to carry out such a public vote) to come from this camp, but more from “skimmers” and first reactions (that wouldn’t enter the nuance of my position, which is, granted, slightly complex). Indeed (and of course based on my anecdotal experience on the internet and different circles, including EA circles), I expect way too many anonymous readers/voters to, upon seeing something like human health and animal ethics weighed off in this way, would just jump on the bandwagon of punishing the veganism meme for the hell of it. And let me also note that, while further engagement and explicit reasoning should help with recognizing those nuances (although you have reached a different conclusion), I don’t expect this to eliminate some strong emotional reactions to this topic, that drive our rational points (“we are not immune to propaganda”). And again, given the cultural background, I expect these to go more in one direction than the other.
So, what shall we do? The only thing that seems viable close to your proposal would be having the voters be “a selected crowd”, but I don’t know how to select it (if we had half and half this could look too much like a culture war, although probably that’d be even better than the random crowd due to explicitly engaging deeply with the text). Although maybe we could agree on 2-3 people. To be honest, that’s sounding like a lot of work, and as I mentioned I don’t think there’s that much more in this debate for me. But I truly think I have been strongly misrepresented, so if we did find 2-3 people who seemed impartial and epistemically virtuous I’d deem it positive to have them look at my newest, overly explicit explanation and express opinions.
So, since your main worry was that I hadn’t made my explanation of misrepresentation explicit enough (and indeed, I agree that I hadn’t yet written it out in completely explicit detail, simply because I knew that would require a lot of time), I have in this new comment provided the most explicit version I can muster myself to compose. I have made it explicit (and as a consequence long) enough that I don’t think I have many more thoughts to add, and it is a faithful representation of my opinions about how I’ve been misrepresented. I think having that out there, for you (and Jim, etc.) to be able to completely read my thoughts and re-consider whether I was misrepresented, and for any passer-by who wants to stop by to see, is the best I can do for now. In fact, I would recommend (granted you don’t change your mind more strongly due to reading that) that your edit linked to this new, completely explicit version, instead of my original comment written in 10 minutes.
I will also note (since you seemed to care about the public opinions of people about the misrepresentation issue) that 3 people (not counting Slapstick here) (only one vegan) have privately reached out to me to say they agree that I have been strongly misrepresented. Maybe there’s a dynamic here in which some people agree more with my points but stay more silent due to being in the periphery of the community (maybe because of perceived wrong-epistemics in exchanges like this one, or having different standards for information-sharing / what constitutes misrepresentation, etc.).
This post literally strongly misrepresents my position in three important ways¹. And these points were purposefully made central in my answers to the author, who kindly asked for my clarifications but then didn’t include them in her summary and interpretation. This can be checked by contrasting her summary of my position with the actual text linked to, in which I clarified how my position wasn’t the simplistic one here presented.
Are you telling me I shouldn’t flag that my position has been importantly misrepresented? On LessWrong? And furthermore on a post that will be seen by way more people than my original text?
¹ I mean the three latter in my above comment, since the first (the hyperbolic presentation) is worrisome but not central.
You say that he quoted bits are misrepresentations, but I checked your writing and they seem like accurate summaries. You should flag that your position has been misrepresented iff that is true. But you haven’t been misrepresented, and I don’t think that you think you’ve been misrepresented.
I think you are muddying the waters on purpose, and making spurious demands on Elizabeth’s time, because you think clarity about what’s going on will make people more likely to eat meat. I believe this because you’ve written things like:
Source comment. I’m not sure how how familiar you are with local usage of the the simulacrum levels phrase/framework, but in my understanding of the term, all but one of the simulacrum levels are flavors of lying. You go on to say:
The front-page moderation guidelines on LessWrong say “aim to explain, not persuade”. This is already the norm. The norms of LessWrong can be debated, but not in a subthread on someone else’s post on a different topic.
Yes, your quotes show that I believe (and have stated explicitly) that publishing posts like this one is net-negative. That was the topic of our whole conversation. That doesn’t imply that I’m commenting to increase the costs of these publications. I tried to convince Elizabeth that this was net-negative, and she completely ignored those qualms, and that’s epistemically respectable. I am commenting mainly to avoid my name from being associated with some positions that I literally do not hold.
I believe that her summaries are a strong misrepresentation of my views, and explained why in the above comment through object-level references comparing my text to her summaries. If you don’t provide object-level reasons why the things I pointed out in my above comment are wrong, then I can do nothing with this information. (To be clear, I do think the screenshots are fairly central parts of my clarifications, but her summaries misrepresent and directly contradict other parts of them which I had also presented as central and important.)
I do observe that providing these arguments is a time cost for you, or fixing the misrepresentations is a time cost for Elizabeth, etc. So the argument “you are just increasing the costs” will always be available for you to make. And to that the only thing I can say is… I’m not trying to get the post taken down, I’m not talking about any other parts of the post, just the ones that summarize my position.
I’m looking at those quote-response pairs, and just not seeing the mismatch you claim there to be. Consider this one:
This only asserts that there’s a mismatch; it provides no actual evidence of one. Next up:
Pretty straightforwardly, if the pilot study results had only been sent through private communications, then they wouldn’t have public discussion (ie, public discussion would be suppressed). I myself wouldn’t know about the results. The probability of a larger follow-up study would be greatly reduced. I personally would have less information about how widespread problems are.
I didn’t provide quotes from my text when the mismatch was obvious enough from any read/skim of the text. In this case, for example, even the screenshots of my text included in the post demonstrate that I do think naive transitions to veganism exist. So of course this is more a point about framing, and indeed notice that I already mentioned in another comment that this one example might not constitute a strong misrepresentation, as the other two do (after all, it’s just an hyperbole), although it still gives me worries about biased tone-setting in a vaguer way.
In the text I clearly address why
My proposal is not suppressing public discussion of plant-based nutrition, but constructing some more holistic approach whose shape isn’t solely focused on plant-based diets, or whose tone and framing aren’t like this one (more in my text).
I don’t think it’s true private communications “prevent us from getting the information” in important ways (even if taking into account the social dynamics dimension of things will always, of course, be a further hindrance). And also, I don’t think public communications give us some of the most important information.
I hope it is now clear why I think Elizabeth’s quoted sentence is a misrepresentation, since neither I push for suppressing public discussions of plant-based nutrition (only a certain non-holistic approach to this, more concretely, Elizabeth’s approach), nor I ignored the possible worry that this prevents us from obtaining useful information (on the contrary, I addressed this). Of course we can object-level argue about whether these (my positions) are true (that’s what I was trying to do with Elizabeth, although as stated she didn’t respond to these two further points), but what’s clear is that they are the ones represented in my text.
More generally, I think this is a kind of “community-health combating of symptoms” with many externalities for the epistemic and moral capabilities of our community (and ignoring them by ignoring the social dynamics at play in our community and society seems like wishful thinking, we are not immune to propaganda), and I think different actions will lead to a healthier and more robust community without the same externalities (all of this detailed in my text).
In any event, I will stop engaging now. I just wanted my name not to be associated with those positions in a post that will be read by so many people, but it’s not looking like Elizabeth will fix that, and having my intentions challenged constantly so that I need to explain my each and every mental move is too draining.
It was not obvious to me, although that’s largely because after reading what you’ve written I had difficulty understanding what your position was
at allprecisely. It also definitely wasn’t obvious to jimrandomh, who wrote that Elizabeth’s summary of your position is accurate. It might be obvious to you, but as written this is a factual statement about the world that is demonstrably false.I’m confused. You say that you don’t want to suppress public discussion of plant-based nutrition, but also that you do want to suppress Elizabeth’s work. I don’t know how we could get something that matches Elizabeth’s level of rigor, accomplishes your goal of a holistic approach, and doesn’t require at least 3 times the work from the author to investigate all other comparable diets to ensure that veganism isn’t singled out. Simplicity is a virtue in this community!
This sounds, to me, like you are arguing against public discussions. Then in the next sentence you say you’re not suppressing public discussions. Those are in fact very slightly different things since arguing that something isn’t the best mode of communication is distinct from promoting suppression of that thing, but this seems like a really small deal. You might ask Elizabeth something like “hey, could you change ‘promotes the suppression of x’ with ‘argues strongly that x shouldn’t happen’? It would match my beliefs more precisely.” This seems nitpicky to me, but if it’s important to you it seems like the sort of thing Elizabeth Elizabeth might go for. It also wouldn’t involve asking her to either delete a bunch of her work or make another guess at what you actually mean.
Completely reasonable, don’t feel compelled to respond.
The quotes I screenshotted are from the clarifications, not your initial statement.
Yes, I was referring to your written summaries of my position, which are mostly consistent with the shown screenshots, but not with other parts of my answers. That’s why I kindly demand these pieces of text attached to my name to be changed to stop misrepresenting my position (I can provide written alternate versions if that helps), or at least removed while this is pending.
As long as Elizabeth doesn’t claim that you literally wrote yourself what she wrote in the summaries (she doesn’t), and it’s clear that it’s her interpretation (it is), she’s entirely in the right to include them, and under no obligation to change or remove them to suite you. If you think it misrepresents you, you can leave a comment (as you did). “demanding” that it is removed or changed is going too far (likely in order to incur extra costs on this type of criticism, imo).
It’s true the boundary between interpretation and strong misrepresentation is fuzzy. In my parent comment I’m providing object-level arguments for why this is a case of strong misrepresentation. This is aggravated by the fact that this post will be seen by a hundred times more people than my actual text, by the fact that Elizabeth herself reached out for these clarifications (which I’ve spent time to compose), and by the fact that I offered to quickly review the write-up more than a week ago.
I’m not trying to incur any extra costs, Elizabeth is free to post her opinions even if I believe doing so is net-negative. I’m literally just commenting so that my name is not associated with opinions which are literally not held by me (this being completely explicited in my linked text, but of course this being too long for almost anyone to actually check first-hand).
If you didn’t include the request/demand for “a removal of those parts of the post until this has cleared up” I (and I think others as well) would have been much more receptive and less likely to see it as an attempt to incur extra costs.
As mentioned, my main objective in writing these comments is not have associated with a position I don’t hold. Many people will see that part of the post, but not go into the comments, and even more will go into the comments but won’t see my short explanation of how my position has been misrepresented, since it has been heavily down-voted (although I yet have to hear any object-level argument for why the misrepresentation actually hasn’t happened or my conduct is epistemically undesirable). So why wouldn’t I demand for the most public part of all this to not strongly misrepresent my position?
I get it this incurs some extra effort on Elizabeth (as does any change or discussion), but I’m trying to minimize that by offering myself to write the alternate summary, or even just remove that part of the text (which should take minimal effort). She’s literally said things I didn’t claim (especially the third example), and a demand to fix that doesn’t seem so far-fetched to me that the first guess is I’m just trying to mud the waters.
Maybe we’re still fresh from the Nonlinear exchange and are especially wary of tactical incurring of costs, but of course I don’t even need to point out how radically different this situation is.
I think it would be reasonable to ask that she links to your comment in the post, so people know you disagree with her interpretations. But if she thinks her interpretations are right she should keep them.
As I’ve object-level argued above, I believe these summaries fall into the category of misrepresentation, not just interpretation. And I don’t believe an author should maintain such misrepresentations in their text in light of evidence about them.
In any event, certainly a link to my comment is better than nothing. At this point I’m just looking for any gesture in the direction of avoiding my name from being associated with positions I do not hold.
On general principle, I think embedding links to people who think they’ve been mischaracterized in a post is fair and good. And if you had crisp pointers to where I mischaracterized you, I would absolutely link to it.
But what you have is a long comment thread asserting that I mischaracterized you and that the mischaracterizations are obvious, and multiple people telling you they’re not, plus (as of this writing)14 disagreement karma on 15 votes. Linking people to this isn’t informative, it’s a tax, and I view it as a continuation of the pattern of making vegan nutrition costly to talk about.
But of course it’s a terrible norm to trust authors to decide if someone’s challenge to their work is good enough. My ideal solution is something like a bet- I include your disclaimer, we run a poll and people say reading your clarifications was uninformative it costs you something meaningful. And if the votes say I was inaccurate, I’ll at a minimum remove your section and put up a big disclaimer, and rethink the post as whole, since it rests on my ability to fairly summarize people.
Right now I don’t know of a way to do this that isn’t too vulnerable to carpet bagging. I also don’t know what stakes would be meaningful from you. But conceptually I think this is the right thing to do.
FWIW I just spent a lot of time reading all of the comments (in the original thread and this one) and my position is that Martín Soto’s criticism of his representation is valid, and that he has been obviously mischaracterized.
Can you say how?
(I don’t think you’re obligated to or anything, seems good for you to just note your experience, but hearing more details would be helpful)
I think Martín Soto explained it pretty well in his comments here, but I can try to explain it myself. (Can’t guarantee I will do it well, I originally commented because the stated opinions of commenters voicing an opposing view seemed to be used as evidence)
The post directly represents Soto as thinking that nieve veganism is a made up problem, despite him not saying that, or giving any indication that he thought the problem was fabricated (he literally states that he doesn’t doubt the anecdotes of the commenter speaking about the college group). He just shared that in his experience, knowledge about vegan supplimenting needs was extremely widespread and the norm.
The post also represents Soto as desiring a “policy of suppressing public discussion of nutrition issues with plant-exclusive diets”
That’s not what he said, and it’s not an accurate interpretation.
He innitally commented thanking them for the post in question, providing some criticism and questions. Elizabeth later asked about whether he thinks vegan nutrition issues should be discussed, and for his thoughts on the right way to discuss vegan nutrition issues.
He seems to agree they should be discussed, but he offers a lot of thoughts about how the framing of those discussions is important, along with some other considerations.
He says that in his opinion the consequences of pushing the line she was pushing in the way she was pushing it were probably net negative, but that’s very different from advocating a policy of suppressing public discussion about a topic.
Saying something along the lines of: “this speech about this topic framed in this way probably does more harm than good in my opinion”
Is very different than saying something like: “there should be a policy of suppressing speech about this topic”
Advocating generalized norms around suppressing speech about a broad topic, is not the same as stating an opinion that certain speech falling under that topic and framed a certain way might do more harm than good.
I’d like to ask your opinion on something.
Tristan wrote a beautiful comment about prioritizing creating a culture of reverence for life/against suffering, and how that wasn’t very amenable to compromise.
My guess is that if you took someone with Tristan’s beliefs and put more challenging discussion circumstances- less writing skill, less clarity, more emotional activation, trying to operate in an incompatible frame rather than a direct question on their own values- you might get something that looked a lot like the way you describe Martin’s comments. And what looked like blatant contradictions to me are a result of carving reality at different joints.
I don’t want to ask you to speak for Martin in particular, but does that model of friction in communication on this issue in general feel plausible to you?
When trying to model your disagreement with Martin and his position, I think the best sort of analogy I can think of is that of tobacco companies employing ‘fear, uncertainty, and doubt’ tactics in order to prevent people from seriously considering quitting smoking.
Smokers experience cognitive dissonance when they have strong desires to smoke, coupled with knowledge that smoking is likely not in their best interest. They can supress this cognitive dissonance by changing their behaviour and quitting smoking, or by finding something that introduces sufficient doubt about whether that behavior is in their self interest, the latter being much easier. They only need a marginal amount of uncertainty and doubt in order to suppress the dissonance, because their reasoning is heavily motivated, and that’s all tobacco companies needed to offer.
I think Martin is essentially trying to make a case that your post(s) about veganism are functionally providing sufficient marginal ‘uncertainty and doubt’ for non-vegans to suppress any inclination that they ought to reconsider their behaviour. Even if that isn’t at all the intention of the post(s), or a reasonable takeaway (for meat eaters).
I think this explains much or most of the confusing friction which came up around your posts involving veganism. Vegans have certain intuitions regarding the kinds of things that non-vegans will use to maintain the sufficient ‘uncertainty and doubt’ required to suppress the mental toll of their cognitive dissonance. So even though it was hard to find explicit disagreement, it also felt clear to a lot of people that the framing, rhetorical approach, and data selection entailed in the post(s) would mostly have the effect of readers permitting themselves license to forgo reckoning with the case for veganism.
So I think it’s relevant whether one affords animals a higher magnitude of moral consideration, or internalized an attitude which places animals in the in-group, However I don’t think that accounts for everything here.
Some public endeavors in truth seeking can satisfy the motivated anti-truth seeking of people encountering it. I interpret the top comment of this post as evidence of that.
I’m not sure if I conveyed everything I meant to here, but I think I should make sure the main point here makes sense before expanding.
This seems like an inside view of the feelings that lead to using arguments as soldiers. The motivation is sympathetic and the reasoning is solid enough to weather low-effort attacks, but at the end of the day it is treating arguments as means to ends rather than attempts to discover ground level truth. And Effective Altruism and LessWrong have defined themselves as places where we operate on the object level and evaluate each argument on its own merit, not as a pawn in a war.
The systems can tolerate a certain amount of failure (which is good, because it’s going to happen). But the more people treat arguments as soldiers, the weaker the norm and aspiration to collaboratively truthseek, even when it’s inconvenient, becomes. Do it too much, and the norm will go away entirely.
You might argue that it’s good to destroy high-decoupling norms, because they’re innately bad or because animal welfare is so important it is worth ruining any institution that gets in its way. But AFAICT, the truthseeking norms of EA and LW have been extremely hospitable environments for animal welfare advocates[1], specifically because of the high decoupling. High decoupling is what let people consider the argument that factory farming was a moral atrocity even though it was very inconvenient for them.
So when vegan advocates operate using arguments as soldiers they are not only destroying truthseeking infrastructure that was valuable to many causes. They are destroying infrastructure that has already done a great deal of good for their cause in particular. They are using arguments as soldiers to destroy their own buildings.
relative to baseline. Evidence off the top of my head:
* EAs go vegan, vegetarian, and reducitarian at much higher than baseline rates. This is less true of rationalists, but I believe is still above baseline. I know many people who loathe most vegan advocacy and nonetheless reduce meat, or in rare cases go all the way to vegan, because they could decouple the suffering arguments from the people making them.
* EA money has transformed farmed animal welfare and AFAIK is the ~only source of funding for things like insect suffering (couldn’t immediately find numbers, source is “a friend in EA animal welfare told me so”)
* AFAIK, veganism’s biggest antagonist on LW and EAF over the last year has been me. And I’ve expressed that antagonism by… let me check my notes… getting dozens of vegans nutrition tested and on (AFAIK) vegan supplements. That project would have gone bigger if I’d been able to find a vegan collaborator, but I couldn’t find one (and I did actively look, although exhausted my options pretty quickly). My main posts in this sequence go out of their way to express deep respect for vegans’ moral convictions and recognize animal suffering as morally relevant.
Maybe there’s a poster who’s actively hostile to animal welfare that I didn’t notice, but if I didn’t hear about them they can’t possibly have done that much.
That’s a good question. I have many thoughts about this and I’m working on a more thorough response.
My very simple answer is that I do think that’s generally plausible (or at least that you’re getting at something significant).
(See also this new comment.)
First off, thanks for including that edit (which is certainly better than nothing), although that still doesn’t neglect that (given the public status of the post) your summaries will be the only thing almost everyone sees (as much as you link to these comments or my original text), and that in this thread I have certainly just been trying to get my positions not misrepresented (so I find it completely false that I’m purposefully imposing an unnecessary tax, even if it’s true that engaging with this misrepresentation debate takes some effort, like any epistemic endeavor).
Here’s the two main reasons why I wouldn’t find your proposal above fair:
I expect most people who will see this post / read your summaries of my position to have already seen it (although someone correct me if I’m wrong about viewership dynamics in LessWrong). As a consequence, I’d gain much less from such a disclaimer / rethinking of the post being incorporated now (although of course it would be positive for me / something I could point people towards).
Of course, this is not solely a consequence of your actions, but also of my delayed response times (as I had already anticipated in our clarifications thread).
A second order effect is that most people who have seen the post up until now will have been “skimmers” (because it was just in frontpage, just released, etc.), while probably more of the people who read the post in the future will be more thorough readers (because they “went digging for it”, etc.). As I’ve tried to make explicit in the past, my worry is more about the social dynamics consequences of having such a post (with such a framing) receive a lot of public attention, than with any scientific inquiry into nutrition, or any emphasis on public health. Thus, I perceive most of the disvalue coming from the skimmers’ reactions to such a public signal. More on this below.
My worry is exactly that such a post (with such a framing) will not be correctly processed by too many readers (and more concretely, the “skimmers”, or the median upvoter/downvoter), in the sense that they will take away (mostly emotionally / gutturally) the wrong update (especially action-wise) from the actual information in the post (and previous posts).
Yes: I am claiming that I cannot assume perfect epistemics from LessWrong readers. More concretely, I am claiming that there is a predictable bias in one of two emotional / ethical directions, which exists mainly due to the broader ethical / cultural context we experience (from which LessWrong is not insulated).
Even if we want LessWrong to become a transparent hub of information sharing (in which indeed epistemic virtue is correctly assumed of the other), I claim that the best way to get there is not through completely implementing this transparent information sharing immediately in the hopes that individuals / groups will respond correctly. This would amount to ignoring a part of reality that steers our behavior too much to be neglected: social dynamics and culturally inherited biases. I claim the best way to get there is by implementing this transparency wherever it’s clearly granted, but necessarily being strategic in situations when some unwanted dynamics and biases are at play. The alternative, being completely transparent (“hands off the simulacrum levels”), amounts to leaving a lot of instrumental free energy on the table for these already existing dynamics and biases to hoard (as they have always done). It amounts to having a dualistic (as opposed to embedded) picture of reality, in which epistemics cannot be affected by the contingent or instrumental. And furthermore, I claim this topic (public health related to animal ethics) is unfortunately one of the tricky situations in which such strategicness (as opposed to naive transparency) is the best approach (even if it requires some more efforts on our part).
Of course, you can disagree with these claims, but I hope it’s clear why I don’t find a public jury is to be trusted on this matter.
You might respond “huh, but we’re not talking about deciding things about animal ethics here. We’re talking about deciding rationally whether some comments were or weren’t useful. We certainly should be able to at least trust the crowd on that?” I don’t think that’s the case for this topic, given how strong the “vegans bad” / “vegans annoying” immune reaction is for most people generally (that is, the background bias present in our culture / the internet).
As an example, in this thread there are some people (like you and Jim) who have engaged with my responses / position fairly deeply, and for now disagreed. I don’t expect the bulk of the upvotes / downvotes in this thread (or if we were to carry out such a public vote) to come from this camp, but more from “skimmers” and first reactions (that wouldn’t enter the nuance of my position, which is, granted, slightly complex). Indeed (and of course based on my anecdotal experience on the internet and different circles, including EA circles), I expect way too many anonymous readers/voters to, upon seeing something like human health and animal ethics weighed off in this way, would just jump on the bandwagon of punishing the veganism meme for the hell of it.
And let me also note that, while further engagement and explicit reasoning should help with recognizing those nuances (although you have reached a different conclusion), I don’t expect this to eliminate some strong emotional reactions to this topic, that drive our rational points (“we are not immune to propaganda”). And again, given the cultural background, I expect these to go more in one direction than the other.
So, what shall we do? The only thing that seems viable close to your proposal would be having the voters be “a selected crowd”, but I don’t know how to select it (if we had half and half this could look too much like a culture war, although probably that’d be even better than the random crowd due to explicitly engaging deeply with the text). Although maybe we could agree on 2-3 people. To be honest, that’s sounding like a lot of work, and as I mentioned I don’t think there’s that much more in this debate for me. But I truly think I have been strongly misrepresented, so if we did find 2-3 people who seemed impartial and epistemically virtuous I’d deem it positive to have them look at my newest, overly explicit explanation and express opinions.
So, since your main worry was that I hadn’t made my explanation of misrepresentation explicit enough (and indeed, I agree that I hadn’t yet written it out in completely explicit detail, simply because I knew that would require a lot of time), I have in this new comment provided the most explicit version I can muster myself to compose. I have made it explicit (and as a consequence long) enough that I don’t think I have many more thoughts to add, and it is a faithful representation of my opinions about how I’ve been misrepresented.
I think having that out there, for you (and Jim, etc.) to be able to completely read my thoughts and re-consider whether I was misrepresented, and for any passer-by who wants to stop by to see, is the best I can do for now. In fact, I would recommend (granted you don’t change your mind more strongly due to reading that) that your edit linked to this new, completely explicit version, instead of my original comment written in 10 minutes.
I will also note (since you seemed to care about the public opinions of people about the misrepresentation issue) that 3 people (not counting Slapstick here) (only one vegan) have privately reached out to me to say they agree that I have been strongly misrepresented. Maybe there’s a dynamic here in which some people agree more with my points but stay more silent due to being in the periphery of the community (maybe because of perceived wrong-epistemics in exchanges like this one, or having different standards for information-sharing / what constitutes misrepresentation, etc.).