Separate response because this doesn’t matter for the moderation question (my argument here applies to personal style only) and also because I suspect this will be a much more unpopular take than the other one, so people may disagree-vote in a more targeted way.
All this to say that I’m averse to overtly optimizing the vibes to be more persuasive, because I don’t want to persuade people by means of the vibes. That doesn’t count!
The question of, should you optimize personal writing for persuasion-via-vibes is one I’ve thought about a lot, and I think the correct answer is “yes”. Here’s four reasons for why.
One, you can adhere to very high epistemic standard while doing this. You can still only argue for something if you believe it to be true and know why you believe it, and always give the actual reasons for why you believe it. (The State Science Institute article from your post responding to Eliezer’s meta-honesty notably fails this standard.) I’m phrasing this in a careful/weird way because I guess you are in some sense including ‘components’ into your writing that will be persuasive for reasons-that-are-not-the-reasons-why-you-believe-the-thing-you’re-arguing-for, so you’re not only giving those reasons, but you can still always include those reasons. I mean the truth is that when I write, I don’t spend much time explicitly checking whether I obey any specific rules, I just think I have a good intuitive sense of how epistemically pure I’m being. When I said in my comment 4 days ago that optimizing vibes doesn’t require you to lie “at all”, this feeling was the thing upstream of that phrasing. Like, I can write a post such that I have a good feeling about both the post’s vibes and its epistemic purity.
In practice, I just suspect that the result won’t look anything you’d actually take issue with. E.g., my timelines post was like this.. (And fwiw no one has ever accused me of being manipulative in a high-effort post, iirc.)
Two, I don’t think there is a bright line between persuasive vibes and not having anti-persuasive vibes. Say you start off having a writing style that’s actively off-putting and hence anti-persuasive. I think you’re “allowed” to clean that up? But then when do you have to stop?
Three, it’s not practically feasible no not optimize vibes. It is feasible to not deliberately optimize vibes, but if you care about your writing, you’re going to improve it, and that will make the vibes better. Scott Alexander is obviously persuasive in part because he’s a good writer. (I think that’s obvious, anyway.) I think your writing specifically actually has a very distinct vibe, and I think that significantly affects your persuasiveness, and you could certainly do a lot worse as far as the net effect goes, so… yeah, I think it is in fact true to say that you have optimized your vibes to be more persuasive, just not intentionally.
And four, well, if there’s a correlation between having good ideas and having self-imposed norms on how to communicate, which I think there is, then refusing to optimize vibes is shooting yourself/your own team/the propagation of good ideas in the foot. You could easily come up with a toy model where where there are two teams, one optimizes vibes and one doesn’t, and the one who does gradually wins out.
I think right now the situation is basically that ~no one has a good model of how vibes work so people just develop their own vibes and some of them happen to be good for persuasion and some don’t. I’d probably estimate the net effect of this much higher than most people; as I indicated in my comment 4 days ago, I think the idea that most people on LW are not influenced by vibes is just not true at all. (Though it is higher outside LW, which, I mean, that also matters.) Which is kind of a shitty situation.
Like I said, I think this doesn’t have a bearing on the moderation question, but I do think it’s actually a really important point that many people will have to grapple with at some point. Ironically I think the idea of optimizing vibes for persuasion has very ugly vibes (like a yuck factor to it), which I definitely get.
Separate response because this doesn’t matter for the moderation question (my argument here applies to personal style only) and also because I suspect this will be a much more unpopular take than the other one, so people may disagree-vote in a more targeted way.
The question of, should you optimize personal writing for persuasion-via-vibes is one I’ve thought about a lot, and I think the correct answer is “yes”. Here’s four reasons for why.
One, you can adhere to very high epistemic standard while doing this. You can still only argue for something if you believe it to be true and know why you believe it, and always give the actual reasons for why you believe it. (The State Science Institute article from your post responding to Eliezer’s meta-honesty notably fails this standard.) I’m phrasing this in a careful/weird way because I guess you are in some sense including ‘components’ into your writing that will be persuasive for reasons-that-are-not-the-reasons-why-you-believe-the-thing-you’re-arguing-for, so you’re not only giving those reasons, but you can still always include those reasons. I mean the truth is that when I write, I don’t spend much time explicitly checking whether I obey any specific rules, I just think I have a good intuitive sense of how epistemically pure I’m being. When I said in my comment 4 days ago that optimizing vibes doesn’t require you to lie “at all”, this feeling was the thing upstream of that phrasing. Like, I can write a post such that I have a good feeling about both the post’s vibes and its epistemic purity.
In practice, I just suspect that the result won’t look anything you’d actually take issue with. E.g., my timelines post was like this.. (And fwiw no one has ever accused me of being manipulative in a high-effort post, iirc.)
Two, I don’t think there is a bright line between persuasive vibes and not having anti-persuasive vibes. Say you start off having a writing style that’s actively off-putting and hence anti-persuasive. I think you’re “allowed” to clean that up? But then when do you have to stop?
Three, it’s not practically feasible no not optimize vibes. It is feasible to not deliberately optimize vibes, but if you care about your writing, you’re going to improve it, and that will make the vibes better. Scott Alexander is obviously persuasive in part because he’s a good writer. (I think that’s obvious, anyway.) I think your writing specifically actually has a very distinct vibe, and I think that significantly affects your persuasiveness, and you could certainly do a lot worse as far as the net effect goes, so… yeah, I think it is in fact true to say that you have optimized your vibes to be more persuasive, just not intentionally.
And four, well, if there’s a correlation between having good ideas and having self-imposed norms on how to communicate, which I think there is, then refusing to optimize vibes is shooting yourself/your own team/the propagation of good ideas in the foot. You could easily come up with a toy model where where there are two teams, one optimizes vibes and one doesn’t, and the one who does gradually wins out.
I think right now the situation is basically that ~no one has a good model of how vibes work so people just develop their own vibes and some of them happen to be good for persuasion and some don’t. I’d probably estimate the net effect of this much higher than most people; as I indicated in my comment 4 days ago, I think the idea that most people on LW are not influenced by vibes is just not true at all. (Though it is higher outside LW, which, I mean, that also matters.) Which is kind of a shitty situation.
Like I said, I think this doesn’t have a bearing on the moderation question, but I do think it’s actually a really important point that many people will have to grapple with at some point. Ironically I think the idea of optimizing vibes for persuasion has very ugly vibes (like a yuck factor to it), which I definitely get.