Saying “ah, but when you talk to me in person I find it unpleasant, and so did these five other people” is, as Nate correctly characterized, barely topical. “Underdeployed Strategy X has powerful upsides; here’s evidence of those upsides in a concrete case” is not meaningfully undercut by “your particular version of a thing that might not even be intended as a central example of Strategy X has sometimes had negative side effects.”
It is indeed more related than a randomly selected post would be. The relevant part is not because of the subject matter (as you solely talk about during this comment thread), but because of the nature of the evidence it uses to make its case.
The vast majority[1] of the original post, along with subsequent comments, uses Nate Soares’s personal experience meeting with congressional staffers, elected officials, cold-emailing famous and notorious people to get endorsements for his book, etc, as evidence of how his strategy works out in practice/can succeed for his purposes.
If the post was along the lines of “I, Nate Soares, talked to this expert on PR and this is what he recommended for how AI Safety should handle public communication” or “I, Nate Soares, analyzed these papers and came to this conclusion” or “I, Nate Soares, believe for technical alignment reasons that [X is true]”, then talking about his supposed personal abrasiveness or how he turned off other people would be off-topic and arguably ad hominem.
But if the post is mostly Nate Soares describing his own conversations where he employed this strategy, suppressing descriptions of other conversations of his where he employed these strategies but his interlocutors were turned off/thought he was manipulative/thought he was so abrasive they got scared of him/etc. is entirely inappropriate. He himself has opened the door to this topic by bringing it up in the first place! Allowing the same body of evidence to be used, but only when arguing for one side, is incompatible with principles of truth-seeking.
I (measurably, objectively) cut back my Facebook fights by (literally) 95%, and kept it up for multiple years. Do you think people rewarded me, reputationally, with a 95% improvement in their models of me? No, because people aren’t good at stuff like that.
I suspect there are a ton of new people who would have gotten in fights with you in a counterfactual universe where you hadn’t made that change, but who haven’t done so in this one. The change isn’t from “they think of Duncan negatively” to “they think of Duncan positively,” but more so from “they think of Duncan negatively” to “they think of Duncan neutrally” or even “they don’t think of Duncan at all.”
As for the ones who have already engaged in fights with you and continued to dislike you[1]… well, why would they change their opinions of you? You had an established reputation at that point; part of the role reputation plays in human social interactions is to ensure social punishment for perceived transgressions of norms, regardless of when the purported transgressor starts signaling he is changing his behavior. For all people may wax poetically about accepting change and giving people second chances, in practice that doesn’t really happen, in a way I think is quite justifiable from their POV.
The concerns about Nate’s conversational style, and the impacts of the way he comports himself, aren’t nonsense. Some people in fact manage to never bruise another person, conversationally, the way Nate has bruised more than one person.
Fallacious black and white thinking, here.[2] Some people manage to never bruise anyone like Nate did, but a heck of a lot more people manage to bruise far fewer people than Nate. If you’ve never hurt anyone, you’re probably too conservative in your speech. If you’ve hurt and turned off too many people, you’re almost certainly insufficiently conservative in your speech.
objectively overblown
Not sure what the word “objectively” is meant to accomplish here, more than just signaling “I really really think this is true” and trying to wrap it in a veneer of impartiality to pack a bigger rhetorical punch. Discussions about human social interactions and the proper use of norms are very rarely resolvable in entirely objective ways, and moreover in this case, for reasons given throughout the years on this site, I think your conclusion (about them being “overblown”) is more likely than not wrong, at least as I understand proper norms of interpersonal interaction in such environments.
I think you’ll find that Nate is 90th-percentile or above willing-and-able to accept critical feedback.
Might or might not be true.[3] But as I see it, since reality doesn’t grade on a curve, even 90th-percentile-for-humans in terms of accepting criticism is grossly insufficient for actually accepting criticism that you believe distracts from your main points or flows from perspectives you don’t inherently care about.
“You’re trying to argue for X, but your claim is factually false for reason Y” is something a 90th-percentile receiver of feedback can grapple with seriously and incorporate into their thinking process easily, if they fundamentally care about truth-seeking as an end goal in addition to X.
“You’re trying to argue for X, but you should stop for reason Z, which I know you don’t inherently care about but trust me that if we run down a list of all your flaws, you’ll see past the motivated cognition and confirmation bias and realize this is distracting from X” is significantly more difficult for such a person to seriously engage with.[4]
Or, more likely, overblown rhetoric distracting from the critical point of discussion (edit: I first mistakenly wrote this as fallacy of gray, which is the complete opposite of what I meant)
And “seriously” does not mean “performatively”; it’s a substantive descriptor, not a procedural one. There is no ritual of public discourse one can perform, where one uses fancy LW jargon and the vocabulary of “updating” in the face of evidence and an even-keeled tone of voice, that can substitute for the act of actually updating according to impartial rules of evidence and reasoning.
A couple of ways this comment feels like it’s talking past Duncan:
As for the ones who have already engaged in fights with you and continued to dislike you[1]… well, why would they change their opinions of you? You had an established reputation at that point; part of the role reputation plays in human social interactions is to ensure social punishment for perceived transgressions of norms, regardless of when the purported transgressor starts signaling he is changing his behavior. For all people may wax poetically about accepting change and giving people second chances, in practice that doesn’t really happen, in a way I think is quite justifiable from their POV.
Feels like Duncan said “X didn’t happen, because people aren’t good at it” and you’re saying “indeed, people aren’t good at X, what did you expect?”
Like, do you claim that “reputation fails to update in the face of actual changes in behavior (not just someone announcing their intent to change)” is a good thing?
Fallacious black and white thinking, here.
Feels like you think Duncan thinks the options are “Nate’s amount of bruising” and “no bruising”. I don’t know why you’d think Duncan thinks that.
Like, do you claim that “reputation fails to update in the face of actual changes in behavior (not just someone announcing their intent to change)” is a good thing?
I’m saying “subconsciously pre-committing to ignoring claims/purported evidence of changed behavior, because usually they’re wrong and it’s not worth the cost of litigating individual cases” is often times the correct thing to do.
Feels like you think Duncan thinks the options are “Nate’s amount of bruising” and “no bruising”. I don’t know why you’d think Duncan thinks that.
No, I don’t believe Duncan thinks this (it’s a pretty dumb thing to believe, and Duncan is smart). I believe Duncan was intentionally using rhetorically dishonest language to distract from the possibility of “reducing” bruising by talking only about “never” bruising another person.
I think I’ve already explained why this misses the point:
I suspect there are a ton of new people who would have gotten in fights with you in a counterfactual universe where you hadn’t made that change, but who haven’t done so in this one. The change isn’t from “they think of Duncan negatively” to “they think of Duncan positively,” but more so from “they think of Duncan negatively” to “they think of Duncan neutrally” or even “they don’t think of Duncan at all.”
As for the ones who have already engaged in fights with you and continued to dislike you[1]… well, why would they change their opinions of you? You had an established reputation at that point; part of the role reputation plays in human social interactions is to ensure social punishment for perceived transgressions of norms, regardless of when the purported transgressor starts signaling he is changing his behavior. For all people may wax poetically about accepting change and giving people second chances, in practice that doesn’t really happen, in a way I think is quite justifiable from their POV.
Fallacious black and white thinking, here.[2] Some people manage to never bruise anyone like Nate did, but a heck of a lot more people manage to bruise far fewer people than Nate. If you’ve never hurt anyone, you’re probably too conservative in your speech. If you’ve hurt and turned off too many people, you’re almost certainly insufficiently conservative in your speech.
Not sure what the word “objectively” is meant to accomplish here, more than just signaling “I really really think this is true” and trying to wrap it in a veneer of impartiality to pack a bigger rhetorical punch. Discussions about human social interactions and the proper use of norms are very rarely resolvable in entirely objective ways, and moreover in this case, for reasons given throughout the years on this site, I think your conclusion (about them being “overblown”) is more likely than not wrong, at least as I understand proper norms of interpersonal interaction in such environments.
Might or might not be true.[3] But as I see it, since reality doesn’t grade on a curve, even 90th-percentile-for-humans in terms of accepting criticism is grossly insufficient for actually accepting criticism that you believe distracts from your main points or flows from perspectives you don’t inherently care about.
“You’re trying to argue for X, but your claim is factually false for reason Y” is something a 90th-percentile receiver of feedback can grapple with seriously and incorporate into their thinking process easily, if they fundamentally care about truth-seeking as an end goal in addition to X.
“You’re trying to argue for X, but you should stop for reason Z, which I know you don’t inherently care about but trust me that if we run down a list of all your flaws, you’ll see past the motivated cognition and confirmation bias and realize this is distracting from X” is significantly more difficult for such a person to seriously engage with.[4]
Or who have been told by their in-group that they should dislike you because you’re too confrontational, even if they’ve never interacted with you
Or, more likely, overblown rhetoric distracting from the critical point of discussion (edit: I first mistakenly wrote this as fallacy of gray, which is the complete opposite of what I meant)
I suspect not, but it’s possible
And “seriously” does not mean “performatively”; it’s a substantive descriptor, not a procedural one. There is no ritual of public discourse one can perform, where one uses fancy LW jargon and the vocabulary of “updating” in the face of evidence and an even-keeled tone of voice, that can substitute for the act of actually updating according to impartial rules of evidence and reasoning.
A couple of ways this comment feels like it’s talking past Duncan:
Feels like Duncan said “X didn’t happen, because people aren’t good at it” and you’re saying “indeed, people aren’t good at X, what did you expect?”
Like, do you claim that “reputation fails to update in the face of actual changes in behavior (not just someone announcing their intent to change)” is a good thing?
Feels like you think Duncan thinks the options are “Nate’s amount of bruising” and “no bruising”. I don’t know why you’d think Duncan thinks that.
I’m saying “subconsciously pre-committing to ignoring claims/purported evidence of changed behavior, because usually they’re wrong and it’s not worth the cost of litigating individual cases” is often times the correct thing to do.
No, I don’t believe Duncan thinks this (it’s a pretty dumb thing to believe, and Duncan is smart). I believe Duncan was intentionally using rhetorically dishonest language to distract from the possibility of “reducing” bruising by talking only about “never” bruising another person.