To make sure I understand. Are you saying, “my style of commenting will cause some users to leave the site, and those will primarily be users that are a net negative for the site, so that’s a good thing?”
No.
I am saying that if we have a forum where the attitude and approach that I recommend, then those people will be attracted to the forum who are suited to a forum like that, and those people who are not suited to it, will mostly stay away. This is a much more effective way of building a desirable forum culture than trying to have existing members alter their behavior to “optimize for vibes”.
(Of course this works in reverse, too. The current administration of LW have built the currently active forum culture not by getting people to change their behavior, but by driving away people who find their current approach to be bad, and attracting people who find their current approach to be good.)
Assuming that is the argument, I don’t agree that this is an important factor in your favor. Insofar as the unusual property about your commenting style is vibes, it does a worse job at the selection than a nice comment with identical content would do.
This is a moot point given that the assumption doesn’t hold, but I just want to note that there is no such thing as “a nice comment with identical content” (as some purportedly “not-nice” comment). If you say something differently, then you’ve said something different. Presentation cannot be separated from content.
Response to what I thought the gist was: I agree that exploitation is a big problem. I disagree that this is enough of a reason not to optimize for vibes. I think in practice it’s less of a problem than Vladimir makes it sound, for the particular interventions I suggest (like optimizing vibes for your commenting style and considering it as a factor for moderating decisions) because (a) some people are quite good at seeing whether someone is sincere and are hard to trick, and I think this ability is crucial to be a good mod, and (b) I don’t think it sets particularly bad incentives for self-modification because you don’t actually a get a lot of power from having your feelings hurt, under the culture I’m advocating for.
Yeah, you’ve definitely missed the point.
As you say, this is rather a large rabbit hole, but I’ll just note a couple of things:
some people are quite good at seeing whether someone is sincere and are hard to trick
This is a total, fundamental misunderstanding of the claim. The people who are experiencing the negative emotions in the sorts of cases that Vladimir_M is talking about are sincere! They sincerely, genuinely, un-feignedly feel bad!
It’s just that if the incentives and the status dynamics were different, those people would feel differently.
There is usually nothing conscious about it, and no “tricking” involved.
I don’t think it sets particularly bad incentives for self-modification because you don’t actually a get a lot of power from having your feelings hurt, under the culture I’m advocating for
You get all the power from that, under the culture you’re advocating for. The purported facts about who gets their feelings hurt by what is the motivating principle of the culture you’re advocating for! By your own description, this is a culture of “optimizing for vibes”!
But, even if it were a bigger problem—even a much bigger problem—I would still not consider it a fatal rebuttal. I view this sort of like saying that having a karma system is bad because it can be exploited. In fact it is exploited all the time, but it’s still a net positive. You don’t just give up on modeling one of the most important factors of how brains work because your system of doing so will be exploited. You optimize anyway and then try to intelligently deal with exploitation as best as you can.
See above. Total misunderstanding of the causation. Your model simply gets things backwards.
Again, this has all been discussed ad nauseam, and all of the points you cite have been quite thoroughly rebutted, over and over and over.
The people in the comment threads you linked didn’t seem to be convinced, so I think a more accurate summary is, “I’ve discussed this several times before, and I think I’m right.”
Sure they weren’t convinced. What, did you expect replies along the lines of “yeah you’re totally right, after reading what you just wrote there, I hereby totally reverse my view on the matter”? As I’ve written before, that would be a bad idea! It is proper that no such replies were forthcoming, even conditional on my arguments having been completely correct.
But my interlocutors in those discussions also didn’t provide anything remotely resembling coherent or credible counter-arguments, weighty contrary evidence, etc.
(In any case, why rely on others? Suppose they had been convinced—so what? I claim that the points you cite have been thoroughly rebutted. If I am wrong about that, and a hundred people agree with me, then I am still wrong. I didn’t link those comment threads because I thought that everyone agreed with me, I linked them because I consider my arguments there to have been correct. If you disagree, fine and well; but that’s whose opinion matters here, not some other people’s.)
You can probably guess this, but I’m not convinced by your arguments, and I think the first two bullet points are completely false, and the second is mostly false. (I agree with the last one, but changing vibes doesn’t make comments that much longer; my initial comment here was long for specific reasons that don’t generalize.) I used to have a commenting style much closer to yours, and now I don’t, so I know you can in fact dramatically change vibes without changing content or length all that much. It’s difficult to convince me that X isn’t possible when I’ve done X.
Well, having traded high-level overviews, nothing remains for us at this point but to examine specific examples. If you have such, I’m interested to see them. (That’s as far as the first bullet point goes, i.e. “it’s not possible to ‘articulate identical points in a different style’”.)
As to the second bullet point (“if it were possible and if I did it, it would have exactly the same effect”), I am quite certain about this because I’ve experienced it many times.
Here’s the thing: when someone (who has some stake in the situation) tells you that “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”, that is, with almost no exceptions ever, a deliberate attempt to get you to not say that thing at all, in any way. It is a deliberate attempt to impose costs on your ability to say that thing—and if you change the “how”, then they will simply find another thing to criticize in “how”, all the while denying that the problem is with the “what”.
(See this recent discussion for a perfect example. I say critical things directly—I get moderated for it. I don’t say such things directly, I get told that I’m being “passive-aggressive”, that what I wrote is “the same thing even though you successfully avoided saying the literal words”, that it’s “obvious” that I meant the same thing, we have a moderator outright admitting that he reads negative connotations into my comments, etc., etc. We even see a moderator claiming, absurdly, that it would be better if I were to outright call people stupid and evil! How’s that for “vibes optimization”, eh? And what’s the likelihood that “you are stupid and evil” would actually not draw moderator action?)
I’ve seen this play out many, many, many times, and not only with myself as the target. As I’ve mentioned, I do now have some experience running my own discussion forum, with many users, various moderators, various moderation approaches, etc. I have seen this happening to other people, quite often.
When someone whose interests are opposed to yours tells you that “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”, the appropriate assumption to make is that they’re lying. The only real question is whether they’re also lying to themselves, or only to you. (Both variants happen often enough that one should not have strong priors either way.)
(When you say “I have no idea why your proposed alternative version of my comment would be ‘less social-attack-y’” then I believe you, but so what? (I can see immediately why the alternative version is less social-attack-y.) If the argument were “what you’re advocating for is unfair toward people who aren’t as good at understanding vibes”, then I’d take this very seriously, but I won’t reply to that until you’re actually making that argument.)
I’m afraid that you are responding to a strawman of my point.
You quote the first sentence of the linked comment, but of course it was only the first sentence; in the rest of that comment, I go on to say that I do not, in fact, think that the proposed alternative version of my comment would be “less social-attack-y”, and furthermore that I think that neither version of my comment is, or would be, “social-attack-y” at all; but that nevertheless, either version would be equally perceived as being a social attack, by those who expect to benefit from so perceiving it. As I said then:
Were someone else to write exactly the words I wrote in my original comment, they would not be perceived as a social attack; whereas if I write those words—or the words you suggest, or any other words whatsoever, so long as they contained the same semantic content at their core[1]—they will be perceived as a social attack. After all, I can say something different, but I cannot mean something different.
The fact is, either you think that asking what an author means by a word, or asking for examples of some phenomenon, is a social attack, or you don’t. If I ask a question along such lines, no reassurances, no disclaimers, will serve to signal anything but “I am complying with the necessary formalities in order to ask what I wish to ask”. If you think my question is a social attack without the disclaimers, then their addition will change nothing. It is the question, after all, that constitutes the social attack, if anything does—not the form, in other words, but the content.
So this is not a matter of me “not understanding vibes”. It is a matter of you being mistaken about the role that “vibes” play in situations like this.
Note that the person that I’m talking to, in that comment thread—the one who gave the proposed alternate formulation of my comment—then writes, in response (and in partial agreement with) my above-quoted comment:
I do feel like it’s the case that your speech style is more likely to be perceived as a social attack coming from you than from someone else.
I wish it weren’t so. It’s certainly possible for “the identity and history of the speaker” to be a meaningful input into the question “was this a social attack”. But I think the direction is wrong, in this case. I think you’re the single user on LW who’s earned the most epistemic “benefit of the doubt”. That is, if literally any other user were to write in the style you write, I think it would be epistemically correct to give more probability to it being a social attack than it is for you.
And yet here we are. I don’t claim to fully understand it.
(This is also what it looks like when a person perceives status dynamics without recognizing this fact.)
No.
I am saying that if we have a forum where the attitude and approach that I recommend, then those people will be attracted to the forum who are suited to a forum like that, and those people who are not suited to it, will mostly stay away. This is a much more effective way of building a desirable forum culture than trying to have existing members alter their behavior to “optimize for vibes”.
(Of course this works in reverse, too. The current administration of LW have built the currently active forum culture not by getting people to change their behavior, but by driving away people who find their current approach to be bad, and attracting people who find their current approach to be good.)
This is a moot point given that the assumption doesn’t hold, but I just want to note that there is no such thing as “a nice comment with identical content” (as some purportedly “not-nice” comment). If you say something differently, then you’ve said something different. Presentation cannot be separated from content.
Yeah, you’ve definitely missed the point.
As you say, this is rather a large rabbit hole, but I’ll just note a couple of things:
This is a total, fundamental misunderstanding of the claim. The people who are experiencing the negative emotions in the sorts of cases that Vladimir_M is talking about are sincere! They sincerely, genuinely, un-feignedly feel bad!
It’s just that if the incentives and the status dynamics were different, those people would feel differently.
There is usually nothing conscious about it, and no “tricking” involved.
You get all the power from that, under the culture you’re advocating for. The purported facts about who gets their feelings hurt by what is the motivating principle of the culture you’re advocating for! By your own description, this is a culture of “optimizing for vibes”!
See above. Total misunderstanding of the causation. Your model simply gets things backwards.
Sure they weren’t convinced. What, did you expect replies along the lines of “yeah you’re totally right, after reading what you just wrote there, I hereby totally reverse my view on the matter”? As I’ve written before, that would be a bad idea! It is proper that no such replies were forthcoming, even conditional on my arguments having been completely correct.
But my interlocutors in those discussions also didn’t provide anything remotely resembling coherent or credible counter-arguments, weighty contrary evidence, etc.
(In any case, why rely on others? Suppose they had been convinced—so what? I claim that the points you cite have been thoroughly rebutted. If I am wrong about that, and a hundred people agree with me, then I am still wrong. I didn’t link those comment threads because I thought that everyone agreed with me, I linked them because I consider my arguments there to have been correct. If you disagree, fine and well; but that’s whose opinion matters here, not some other people’s.)
Well, having traded high-level overviews, nothing remains for us at this point but to examine specific examples. If you have such, I’m interested to see them. (That’s as far as the first bullet point goes, i.e. “it’s not possible to ‘articulate identical points in a different style’”.)
As to the second bullet point (“if it were possible and if I did it, it would have exactly the same effect”), I am quite certain about this because I’ve experienced it many times.
Here’s the thing: when someone (who has some stake in the situation) tells you that “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”, that is, with almost no exceptions ever, a deliberate attempt to get you to not say that thing at all, in any way. It is a deliberate attempt to impose costs on your ability to say that thing—and if you change the “how”, then they will simply find another thing to criticize in “how”, all the while denying that the problem is with the “what”.
(See this recent discussion for a perfect example. I say critical things directly—I get moderated for it. I don’t say such things directly, I get told that I’m being “passive-aggressive”, that what I wrote is “the same thing even though you successfully avoided saying the literal words”, that it’s “obvious” that I meant the same thing, we have a moderator outright admitting that he reads negative connotations into my comments, etc., etc. We even see a moderator claiming, absurdly, that it would be better if I were to outright call people stupid and evil! How’s that for “vibes optimization”, eh? And what’s the likelihood that “you are stupid and evil” would actually not draw moderator action?)
I’ve seen this play out many, many, many times, and not only with myself as the target. As I’ve mentioned, I do now have some experience running my own discussion forum, with many users, various moderators, various moderation approaches, etc. I have seen this happening to other people, quite often.
When someone whose interests are opposed to yours tells you that “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”, the appropriate assumption to make is that they’re lying. The only real question is whether they’re also lying to themselves, or only to you. (Both variants happen often enough that one should not have strong priors either way.)
I’m afraid that you are responding to a strawman of my point.
You quote the first sentence of the linked comment, but of course it was only the first sentence; in the rest of that comment, I go on to say that I do not, in fact, think that the proposed alternative version of my comment would be “less social-attack-y”, and furthermore that I think that neither version of my comment is, or would be, “social-attack-y” at all; but that nevertheless, either version would be equally perceived as being a social attack, by those who expect to benefit from so perceiving it. As I said then:
So this is not a matter of me “not understanding vibes”. It is a matter of you being mistaken about the role that “vibes” play in situations like this.
Note that the person that I’m talking to, in that comment thread—the one who gave the proposed alternate formulation of my comment—then writes, in response (and in partial agreement with) my above-quoted comment:
(This is also what it looks like when a person perceives status dynamics without recognizing this fact.)
Read everything you wrote; I think it’s very unlikely that continuing this would be fruitful, so I won’t.