Hot take: this is not a parody; this is the actual message of the other post, just not trying to be cautious/reserved/gentle/pragmatically persuasive. My heart sings.
Since my disagreement with your post is about the general practice of turning advice into norms, not as much about the advice itself, I think this post is superior on object level, ignoring the style gloss.
Another point in favor of this post is that nuance is poison, it introduces costs all around that are often not worth the benefits of nuance, which could be obtained in other ways, such as with modular abstractions. So it’s like technical debt, a temporary solution in search for an opportunity for refactoring, not something to celebrate for its own sake.
Nuance is lines of code, it’s complexity of implementing communication. It is cost that comes with value of clarifying ideas, but it’s still a cost, both for the writer and for all the readers. It’s feasible to achieve unnecessary levels of clarity with additional nuance.
Clarity can be improved in other ways. It’s possible to simplify the intended message itself, by choosing to communicate something different, letting go of most aspects of the underlying issue for purposes of communication, making use of more central meanings of relevant concepts. This goes in hand with creating/popularizing unfamiliar concepts that can then be used as building blocks for communicated ideas. Modular code with short functions, each meaningful on its own, built on good libraries. And refactoring of that nuanced spaghetti code that works very well in most cases.
Yeah, a lot of the time nuance feels either like CYA loophole-closing or overexplaining.
Not to complain about a good post, but just as one example from Duncan’s original, he has a sentence that goes:
In normal social contexts, where few people are attending to or attempting to express precise truth, it’s relatively costless to do things like:
Use hyperbole for emphasis
Say a false thing, because approximately everyone will be able to intuit the nearby true thing that you’re intending to convey
Over-generalize; ignore edge cases and rounding errors (e.g. “Everybody has eyes.”)′
Which I think you could reword as:
Normally, it’s fine to exaggerate and be imprecise, because you can count on your audience to know what you mean. You can say “everybody has eyes” without your buddy retorting “WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WITH ANOPHTHALMIA???”
It’s interesting to write this comment because I can feel the same impulse in myself to cover my ass:
I want to change “reword” to “almost losslessly reword”
Give a defense of why there might be some big advantage to the original language, somehow
Explain blow by blow why I think the changes I made are fine
But mostly that’s just trying to anticipate and defeat downcomment complaints without looking like I hadn’t thought of them. And that’s something the writer does to protect themselves, not to aid the reader.
Yeah, a lot of the time nuance feels either like CYA loophole-closing or overexplaining.
I agree that defensive writing exists, is usually worse than non-defensive writing, and that you can frame some of the defenses as nuance (although I don’t think that’s the only place nuance comes from). But I feel like this comment frames defensive writing as a flaw of the author, and I don’t think that’s fair. LessWrong can be an absolutely miserable place to post, defensive writing happens because authors have a justified fear of being ~attacked. I think if you want posters to write less defensively the intervention point should be calming down the comments and otherwise providing psychological safety.
You could argue that defensive writing by and large doesn’t work. I used to think this, and I still think it does a bad job at preventing bad top level comments. But it makes it more likely another commenter gets your point and corrects the bad commenter without your involvement, which is very valuable.
But I feel like this comment frames defensive writing as a flaw of the author, and I don’t think that’s fair.
I agree that is a potential takeaway from my comment. I also agree that it’s not fair to overly criticize authors when that reaction toward defensiveness may be because they’re correctly anticipating a harsh PONDS response from their readership. I do have empathy for the problem.
When I read the blog posts I really enjoy, it seems to me those authors manage to write in ways that come across as non-defensive, with exaggerations and humor and “you know what I mean” implications. They rely on me to fill in some of the blanks, and that’s part of the fun of their posts and part of what keeps my attention.
When I write defensively, I feel like way too much of my mental energy is going into combatting phanom future commenters and not enough to the object-level of the post. And when that gets overwhelming I just delete it or leave it in drafts. I have a large graveyard of dead posts.
I used to have a lot more fun writing, enjoying the vividness of language, and while I thank LessWrong for improving many aspects of my thinking, it has also stripped away almost all my verve for language. I think that’s coming from the defensiveness-nuance complex I’m describing, and since the internet is what it is, I guess I’d like to start by changing myself. But my own self-advice may not be right for others.
I used to have a lot more fun writing, enjoying the vividness of language, and while I thank LessWrong for improving many aspects of my thinking, it has also stripped away almost all my verve for language. I think that’s coming from the defensiveness-nuance complex I’m describing, and since the internet is what it is, I guess I’d like to start by changing myself. But my own self-advice may not be right for others.
I have about a 2:1 ratio of unsubmitted to submitted comments. The most common source of deletion is no longer really caring about what I have to say, the second is fending off possible misinterpretations. So I definitely understand just giving up. This seems like it’d make me pretty down on anticipated critique, but I think a good 5-10% of those comments would be net negative so it’s not like it’s all downside.
I remember that I used to write with vigor—I’d really enjoy flushing out what it is I thought and letting the words pour from my fingers. At some point, I think it was in high school, I got a writing assignment back from the teacher and the sum total of the comments were (paraphrased) ‘Very clear voice, no one could have written this but you! B-.’ I’ve never gotten good marks on writing assignments, but that one in particular has stuck with me. While it’s hilarious, it’s amusing to me in the sort of way that also makes me disinterested in writing. I really do feel like I’ve lost a big part of that spark. Very little of it has to do with that one particular comment, but more a general erosion of expected charity. If I anticipate that my words will be taken badly, then the space of ideas I can explore are either limited to the mundane or it requires a gargantuan effort to construct the well fortified arguments necessary to repel the hypothetical critic.
At the risk of giving you advice that I myself regularly fail to follow: perhaps ignore the critics?
I know it doesn’t wash away the cumulative effects of any curmudgeons, but I do appreciate what you wrote here.
‘Very clear voice, no one could have written this but you! B-.’
An open-faced shit sandwich. That’s some standup comedy gold :D
perhaps ignore the critics?
At least filter them! You’re trying to draw a signal from yourself and the world, then condition and analyze it. Good critics help you troubleshoot the circuit, or test the limits of the device you’ve built.
A successful critic understands who the author was trying to help, and bases their criticism on helping the author achieve that goal.
I like the framework of “true, helpful, and kind.” Usually, I’ve seen it as “strive for at least two.” Another way to look at it is “be at least OK at all three.”
I used to have a lot more fun writing, enjoying the vividness of language, and while I thank LessWrong for improving many aspects of my thinking, it has also stripped away almost all my verve for language. I think that’s coming from the defensiveness-nuance complex I’m describing, and since the internet is what it is, I guess I’d like to start by changing myself. But my own self-advice may not be right for others.
That’s also a good example of my concern with turning advice like this into norms. There are obvious malign interpretations of what the advice is saying, and I don’t trust norms to keep their interpretations reasonable, to pay sufficient attention to the nuance. Under such malign interpretations, this can be advice to write defensively, and in the form of norms the defensive writing would be mandatory. Also, you’d need to explain yourself if you don’t do it. It’s no longer merely a risk that you are attacked if you didn’t preemptively disclaim everything possible and impossible, but a norm.
I go into this a good bit in Sapir-Whorf for Rationalists; basically, if you find the distinction tedious, it’s strong evidence that you’re either blind to the meaningfulness in the first place, or you just don’t care.
The “everybody knows what we’re really trying to say” mentality is demonstrably false; misunderstandings of precisely this form are legion; there are children and autists and people-from-other-cultures and people straddling the border between technical and non-technical uses and on and on and on; motte-and-bailey is essentially everywhere; using words like “everyone” sloppily makes it harder to convey “literally actually everyone” and it’s not like it’s hard to just say “most people” or whatever.
When people are like “c’mon, relax, this was in fact already clear” what they are primarily saying is “I and my ingroup got it and everyone else can go hang,” and usually “everyone else” encompasses a lot of people.
Flagging I also disagree with this (also seems to obviously be failing rule #10).
I’m a bit confused about this, because, like, I’m sure you know that time is short, there are lots of (true) things to talk about, going infinitely deep on precisely specifying any given thing is clearly unworkable even if you pick the specific sub-hill of “be LessWrong” to die on rather than the broader hill of “maximize truthseeking.”. I assume you pick some point on the curve where you’re like “okay, practically, that was enough precision”, which is just higher than mine.
When I imagine bringing this up my Duncan-sim says “yes I know that and can pass your ITT and integrated it”, but, I don’t really know why you’re making the tradeoffs you do.
There’s a hell of a lot of stuff I want to learn, and it honestly seems anti-helpful to me, on truthseeking terms, to spend the amount you do on nuance, when there is so much other stuff I need to think about, learn, discuss and reason about.
it honestly seems anti-helpful to me, on truthseeking terms, to spend the amount you do on nuance, when there is so much other stuff I need to think about, learn, discuss and reason about.
See the linked Sapir-Whorf bit, especially Nate’s tweetstorm; I am not, in fact, “spending” effort on nuance; most of the time the nuance is genuinely effortless because I’m just straightforwardly describing the world I see and saying things that feel true.
If it feels particularly effortful, or like one is injecting nuance, then I think this usually means that one’s underlying thoughts and models aren’t nuanced (at that level).
Over and over, the actual guidelines post tries to make clear “a big important piece of this puzzle is just being open to requests that the conversation get more nuanced or more precise, as opposed to expecting to hit convergence with your partner on the first go (or tying yourself into knots trying to do so).”
If it feels particularly effortful, or like one is injecting nuance, then I think this usually means that one’s underlying thoughts and models aren’t nuanced (at that level).
Having nuanced thoughts and models is not a free action either though, so I don’t think this necessarily speaks against the marginal effectiveness point. And speaking in a nuanced way will not be effortless for your listeners if their own models don’t already possess that nuance.
See my more direct reply above; this was a very gentle experiment in trying to meet the conversational norms it seemed to me DirectedEvolution was explicitly advocating for. I feel like the results of the experiment underscore my point/are in support of my core position.
Here’s how I’d line up our two opening lines to demonstrate why:
Me: Yeah, a lot of the time nuance feels either like CYA loophole-closing or overexplaining.
You: It feels like CYA if you don’t care about truth.
Frankly, I think my standards are just fine. Every time you make a statement, you’re betting on whether or not you put enough nuance in it for the other person to understand you. In a friendly discussion, you can expect your debate partner to ask for clarification when they misunderstand you.
This discussion feels unfriendly to me. Specifically, it means that I anticipate that not only will you object to things I say that you disagree with, which is fine, but that you will continue your track record of accompanying those objections with personal attacks against me. While I’m perfectly fine with having a thorough discussion of our points of disagreement, I am absolutely unwilling to have such a discussion with an internet stranger if that discussion will have an unfriendly tone. If you care to reword your comment in a non-unfriendly manner, I will be happy to continue our conversation. Otherwise, this will be my last comment in this comment thread, though I will read a reply if you choose to make one.
In other words, you would’ve preferred I said something more nuanced, such as “It sometimes is the case that things feel like CYA because the person doesn’t care about truth (though often there are other reasons; this isn’t an accusation).”
Which is my M.O. most of the time, but you were advocating against nuance so I tried being a little less nuanced than usual and BAM—super strong objection.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(You might perhaps use the experience you just had, reading my comment above, to boot up some degree of empathy for those requesting the nuance that you think is extraneous.)
...I don’t think the issue here is nuance. My attempt at a non-nuanced non-unfriendly version would be more like “It feels like CYA because those nuances are obvious to you, but they aren’t actually obvious to some other people.” or maybe “It feels like CYA because you are not the target audience.”
As someone who is perhaps overly optimistic about people’s intentions in general, I don’t really like it when people make assumptions about character/values (e.g. don’t care about truth) or read intent into other people’s actions (e.g. you’re trying to CYA, or you’re not really trying to understand me). People seem to assume negative intent with unjustifiable levels of confidence when there can be better alternative explanations (see below), and this can be very damaging to relationships and counterproductive for discussions. I think it might be helpful if we move away from inferring unknowable things and focus more on explaining our own experiences instead? (e.g. I liked the part where DirectedEvolution shared about their experience rewriting the section, and also Duncan’s explanation that writing nuance feels genuinely effortless).
Example of an alternative interpretation:
...basically, if you find the distinction tedious, it’s strong evidence that you’re either blind to the meaningfulness in the first place, or you just don’t care.
There is a third possibility I can think of: something may be meaningful and important but omitted because it is not relevant to our current task. For example, when we teach children science, we don’t teach them quantum mechanics simply because it is distracting when learning the basics, and not because quantum mechanics is irrelevant or unimportant in general. I personally would prefer it if teachers made this more explicit (i.e. say that they are teaching a simplified model and we would get to learn more details next time) but I get the impression that this is already obvious to other people so I’d imagine it comes across as superfluous to them.
I disagree. My issue with your comment is not that it lacks nuance. It’s that it read as a personal attack against me, an ad hominem. Below, I write an edited version of your original comment that has little-no more nuance than the original—perhaps less—but also was not an ad hominem. I strikeout the parts that felt like ad hominems to me, and replaced them with wording that I think roughly captures the (as you say, un-nuanced) meaning of your sentences without coming across as an attack. Of course, I won’t do as good a job of reflecting your intended meaning as you would, which is why I hope that in the future, you’ll remove the ad hominems from your writing on your own.
It feels like CYA if you don’t care about truth.
I disagree, nuance is damned important for truth-seekers.
I go into this a good bit in Sapir-Whorf for Rationalistsbasically, if you find the distinction tedious, it’s strong evidence that you’re either blind to the meaningfulness in the first place, or you just don’t care.to explain why I think we ought to be strict and explicit about the precise distinctions we’re drawing.
The “everybody knows what we’re really trying to say” mentality is demonstrably false; misunderstandings of precisely this form are legion; there are children and autists and people-from-other-cultures and people straddling the border between technical and non-technical uses and on and on and on; motte-and-bailey is essentially everywhere; using words like “everyone” sloppily makes it harder to convey “literally actually everyone” and it’s not like it’s hard to just say “most people” or whatever.
When people are like “c’mon, relax, this was in fact already clear” what they are primarily saying is “I and my ingroup got it and everyone else can go hang,” and usually “everyone else” encompasses a lot of people.
If you had made a comment roughly along these lines, we could have had a productive debate, using the amount of nuance that seemed appropriate to us both.
I’ll offer up the edit “It feels like CYA when you don’t care about [the particular delineations of] truth [involved].” (Sort of an “everyone faster than you on the highway is reckless, everyone slower is holding up traffic” claim; truth you don’t care about but feel obligated to account for.)
Look. Inasmuch as you can claim that my CYA line was a direct attack on your character (it wasn’t intended as such and I think you’re stretching to make it so, especially since the comment went on to elaborate), you had already launched a similarly direct attack on mine, taking the discourse that I was arguing is crucial and important and calling it, variously, CYA loophole-closing, over-explaining, and in-service-of-self-protection rather than aiding the reader.
And this is sort of generally the point: you think I was the first one to break norms, whereas I was genuinely just trying to mirror you back to yourself. Your comment had a lot of implications about why people want nuance that were uncharitable and not universal; the discussion felt unfriendly to me from the moment of your comment being dismissive.
(You were also explicitly agreeing with someone who, a comment earlier, had said that nuance is poison.)
You would like, I think, for me to care about how you felt unfriendlied-toward. Do you care about how I did?
(I note that I was slightly more cavalier than I would ordinarily be, because we’re under a post titled “Fucking goddamn basics;” I think this is not an unreasonable call to have made. I think that calling the previous comment an ad hominem attack is a bit of a motte-and-bailey; it is certainly nowhere near a median-bad instance of the class, even if we label it a member.)
you had already launched a similarly direct attack on mine, taking the discourse that I was arguing is crucial and important and calling it, variously, CYA loophole-closing, over-explaining, and in-service-of-self-protection rather than aiding the reader.
I agree that this is a natural way you could, and I see did, respond to my original comment. I apologize for that.
My intention was different. I’ll explain what it was in the hopes that it will decrease the tension.
I don’t think the bit I quoted from your original post was all that unusually (by my lights “overly”) nuanced by LW standards, and I tried to gesture in that direction by prefacing with “not to complain about a good post.” But obviously that did not correct for the unfriendly tone that I managed to project anyway.
The only reason I picked it out was because the topic of the commend thread was comparing the style of this post with the style of yours. When I said that the writing had a CYA feel, I meant that empathetically, strange as that may sound. I perceive that LW writers write anxious, and I experience this myself.
That may be me typical-minding, but I have also heard other writers talk about feeling defensive about the comments they’ll get, so I don’t think it’s just me. Amping up the nuance for the purpose of avoiding attacks in the comments leads to too much of the wrong kind of nuance, even if a lot of nuance is a good thing. When I call this “covering your ass,” I meant “because you’re legit afraid that you really need to do so because the internet can be really damned mean,” not “stop being a pansy and drop the nuance.” Obviously this is a case where more nuance, among other things, would have been helpful!
Having a sample of your writing quoted, criticized, and labeled with terms like “overexplaining” and “CYA” just doesn’t feel good. I should have known better. I can also see why, despite it having been meant as a reference to the writing style only, it came across as a criticism of you as a person, and why your own response to me felt like “mirroring” rather than like “escalating.”
When you made your first response to me, I had not seen myself as being critical toward you as a person, even though I do see why you perceived it that way now. When I read your first reply to me, it seemed to me like a big escalation. I now understand better where you were coming from and how you felt when you responded that way.
Personally, I am ready to let the personal side of things drop if you are, but we can also continue the discussion. I think your response above was helpful and constructive.
I also apologize for the (strong) (reasonable for you to object to or feel defensive about) implication that I thought you specifically don’t care about truth generally. There is definitely no call for someone in my position to make a judgment like that. Sorry for the clumsy wording.
A while ago I had a sense that writing should be nuanced, dramatic, and true. I no longer think in these exact terms. Now I just say that you should try to be as leading (the opposite of misleading) as possible; leadingness captures basically everything I wanted from that trinity.
That seems apt in the way I expect you to intend/interpret these points (a concern separate from the one about norms), but I don’t agree with them in such sense. That illustrates my expectation for how norms get out of hand: the way other people start interpreting (and enforcing) them is often different from the intended sense, especially if the intended sense is importantly nuanced. Norms round off their mission statement to the nearest available idea, which is often not that great.
Hot take: this is not a parody; this is the actual message of the other post, just not trying to be cautious/reserved/gentle/pragmatically persuasive. My heart sings.
Since my disagreement with your post is about the general practice of turning advice into norms, not as much about the advice itself, I think this post is superior on object level, ignoring the style gloss.
Another point in favor of this post is that nuance is poison, it introduces costs all around that are often not worth the benefits of nuance, which could be obtained in other ways, such as with modular abstractions. So it’s like technical debt, a temporary solution in search for an opportunity for refactoring, not something to celebrate for its own sake.
“Nuance is poison”? Come on
I’m not sure what you mean by modular abstractions but I expect to agree that it’s the way to go
Nuance is lines of code, it’s complexity of implementing communication. It is cost that comes with value of clarifying ideas, but it’s still a cost, both for the writer and for all the readers. It’s feasible to achieve unnecessary levels of clarity with additional nuance.
Clarity can be improved in other ways. It’s possible to simplify the intended message itself, by choosing to communicate something different, letting go of most aspects of the underlying issue for purposes of communication, making use of more central meanings of relevant concepts. This goes in hand with creating/popularizing unfamiliar concepts that can then be used as building blocks for communicated ideas. Modular code with short functions, each meaningful on its own, built on good libraries. And refactoring of that nuanced spaghetti code that works very well in most cases.
Yeah, a lot of the time nuance feels either like CYA loophole-closing or overexplaining.
Not to complain about a good post, but just as one example from Duncan’s original, he has a sentence that goes:
Which I think you could reword as:
It’s interesting to write this comment because I can feel the same impulse in myself to cover my ass:
I want to change “reword” to “almost losslessly reword”
Give a defense of why there might be some big advantage to the original language, somehow
Explain blow by blow why I think the changes I made are fine
But mostly that’s just trying to anticipate and defeat downcomment complaints without looking like I hadn’t thought of them. And that’s something the writer does to protect themselves, not to aid the reader.
I agree that defensive writing exists, is usually worse than non-defensive writing, and that you can frame some of the defenses as nuance (although I don’t think that’s the only place nuance comes from). But I feel like this comment frames defensive writing as a flaw of the author, and I don’t think that’s fair. LessWrong can be an absolutely miserable place to post, defensive writing happens because authors have a justified fear of being ~attacked. I think if you want posters to write less defensively the intervention point should be calming down the comments and otherwise providing psychological safety.
You could argue that defensive writing by and large doesn’t work. I used to think this, and I still think it does a bad job at preventing bad top level comments. But it makes it more likely another commenter gets your point and corrects the bad commenter without your involvement, which is very valuable.
I agree that is a potential takeaway from my comment. I also agree that it’s not fair to overly criticize authors when that reaction toward defensiveness may be because they’re correctly anticipating a harsh PONDS response from their readership. I do have empathy for the problem.
When I read the blog posts I really enjoy, it seems to me those authors manage to write in ways that come across as non-defensive, with exaggerations and humor and “you know what I mean” implications. They rely on me to fill in some of the blanks, and that’s part of the fun of their posts and part of what keeps my attention.
When I write defensively, I feel like way too much of my mental energy is going into combatting phanom future commenters and not enough to the object-level of the post. And when that gets overwhelming I just delete it or leave it in drafts. I have a large graveyard of dead posts.
I used to have a lot more fun writing, enjoying the vividness of language, and while I thank LessWrong for improving many aspects of my thinking, it has also stripped away almost all my verve for language. I think that’s coming from the defensiveness-nuance complex I’m describing, and since the internet is what it is, I guess I’d like to start by changing myself. But my own self-advice may not be right for others.
I have about a 2:1 ratio of unsubmitted to submitted comments. The most common source of deletion is no longer really caring about what I have to say, the second is fending off possible misinterpretations. So I definitely understand just giving up. This seems like it’d make me pretty down on anticipated critique, but I think a good 5-10% of those comments would be net negative so it’s not like it’s all downside.
I remember that I used to write with vigor—I’d really enjoy flushing out what it is I thought and letting the words pour from my fingers. At some point, I think it was in high school, I got a writing assignment back from the teacher and the sum total of the comments were (paraphrased) ‘Very clear voice, no one could have written this but you! B-.’ I’ve never gotten good marks on writing assignments, but that one in particular has stuck with me. While it’s hilarious, it’s amusing to me in the sort of way that also makes me disinterested in writing. I really do feel like I’ve lost a big part of that spark. Very little of it has to do with that one particular comment, but more a general erosion of expected charity. If I anticipate that my words will be taken badly, then the space of ideas I can explore are either limited to the mundane or it requires a gargantuan effort to construct the well fortified arguments necessary to repel the hypothetical critic.
At the risk of giving you advice that I myself regularly fail to follow: perhaps ignore the critics?
I know it doesn’t wash away the cumulative effects of any curmudgeons, but I do appreciate what you wrote here.
An open-faced shit sandwich. That’s some standup comedy gold :D
At least filter them! You’re trying to draw a signal from yourself and the world, then condition and analyze it. Good critics help you troubleshoot the circuit, or test the limits of the device you’ve built.
A successful critic understands who the author was trying to help, and bases their criticism on helping the author achieve that goal.
I like the framework of “true, helpful, and kind.” Usually, I’ve seen it as “strive for at least two.” Another way to look at it is “be at least OK at all three.”
This is so sad.
That’s also a good example of my concern with turning advice like this into norms. There are obvious malign interpretations of what the advice is saying, and I don’t trust norms to keep their interpretations reasonable, to pay sufficient attention to the nuance. Under such malign interpretations, this can be advice to write defensively, and in the form of norms the defensive writing would be mandatory. Also, you’d need to explain yourself if you don’t do it. It’s no longer merely a risk that you are attacked if you didn’t preemptively disclaim everything possible and impossible, but a norm.
It feels like CYA if you don’t care about truth.
I go into this a good bit in Sapir-Whorf for Rationalists; basically, if you find the distinction tedious, it’s strong evidence that you’re either blind to the meaningfulness in the first place, or you just don’t care.
The “everybody knows what we’re really trying to say” mentality is demonstrably false; misunderstandings of precisely this form are legion; there are children and autists and people-from-other-cultures and people straddling the border between technical and non-technical uses and on and on and on; motte-and-bailey is essentially everywhere; using words like “everyone” sloppily makes it harder to convey “literally actually everyone” and it’s not like it’s hard to just say “most people” or whatever.
When people are like “c’mon, relax, this was in fact already clear” what they are primarily saying is “I and my ingroup got it and everyone else can go hang,” and usually “everyone else” encompasses a lot of people.
Flagging I also disagree with this (also seems to obviously be failing rule #10).
I’m a bit confused about this, because, like, I’m sure you know that time is short, there are lots of (true) things to talk about, going infinitely deep on precisely specifying any given thing is clearly unworkable even if you pick the specific sub-hill of “be LessWrong” to die on rather than the broader hill of “maximize truthseeking.”. I assume you pick some point on the curve where you’re like “okay, practically, that was enough precision”, which is just higher than mine.
When I imagine bringing this up my Duncan-sim says “yes I know that and can pass your ITT and integrated it”, but, I don’t really know why you’re making the tradeoffs you do.
There’s a hell of a lot of stuff I want to learn, and it honestly seems anti-helpful to me, on truthseeking terms, to spend the amount you do on nuance, when there is so much other stuff I need to think about, learn, discuss and reason about.
Separately:
See the linked Sapir-Whorf bit, especially Nate’s tweetstorm; I am not, in fact, “spending” effort on nuance; most of the time the nuance is genuinely effortless because I’m just straightforwardly describing the world I see and saying things that feel true.
If it feels particularly effortful, or like one is injecting nuance, then I think this usually means that one’s underlying thoughts and models aren’t nuanced (at that level).
Over and over, the actual guidelines post tries to make clear “a big important piece of this puzzle is just being open to requests that the conversation get more nuanced or more precise, as opposed to expecting to hit convergence with your partner on the first go (or tying yourself into knots trying to do so).”
Having nuanced thoughts and models is not a free action either though, so I don’t think this necessarily speaks against the marginal effectiveness point. And speaking in a nuanced way will not be effortless for your listeners if their own models don’t already possess that nuance.
See my more direct reply above; this was a very gentle experiment in trying to meet the conversational norms it seemed to me DirectedEvolution was explicitly advocating for. I feel like the results of the experiment underscore my point/are in support of my core position.
You’re accusing me of not caring about truth.
Here’s how I’d line up our two opening lines to demonstrate why:
Frankly, I think my standards are just fine. Every time you make a statement, you’re betting on whether or not you put enough nuance in it for the other person to understand you. In a friendly discussion, you can expect your debate partner to ask for clarification when they misunderstand you.
This discussion feels unfriendly to me. Specifically, it means that I anticipate that not only will you object to things I say that you disagree with, which is fine, but that you will continue your track record of accompanying those objections with personal attacks against me. While I’m perfectly fine with having a thorough discussion of our points of disagreement, I am absolutely unwilling to have such a discussion with an internet stranger if that discussion will have an unfriendly tone. If you care to reword your comment in a non-unfriendly manner, I will be happy to continue our conversation. Otherwise, this will be my last comment in this comment thread, though I will read a reply if you choose to make one.
In other words, you would’ve preferred I said something more nuanced, such as “It sometimes is the case that things feel like CYA because the person doesn’t care about truth (though often there are other reasons; this isn’t an accusation).”
Which is my M.O. most of the time, but you were advocating against nuance so I tried being a little less nuanced than usual and BAM—super strong objection.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(You might perhaps use the experience you just had, reading my comment above, to boot up some degree of empathy for those requesting the nuance that you think is extraneous.)
...I don’t think the issue here is nuance. My attempt at a non-nuanced non-unfriendly version would be more like “It feels like CYA because those nuances are obvious to you, but they aren’t actually obvious to some other people.” or maybe “It feels like CYA because you are not the target audience.”
As someone who is perhaps overly optimistic about people’s intentions in general, I don’t really like it when people make assumptions about character/values (e.g. don’t care about truth) or read intent into other people’s actions (e.g. you’re trying to CYA, or you’re not really trying to understand me). People seem to assume negative intent with unjustifiable levels of confidence when there can be better alternative explanations (see below), and this can be very damaging to relationships and counterproductive for discussions. I think it might be helpful if we move away from inferring unknowable things and focus more on explaining our own experiences instead? (e.g. I liked the part where DirectedEvolution shared about their experience rewriting the section, and also Duncan’s explanation that writing nuance feels genuinely effortless).
Example of an alternative interpretation:
There is a third possibility I can think of: something may be meaningful and important but omitted because it is not relevant to our current task. For example, when we teach children science, we don’t teach them quantum mechanics simply because it is distracting when learning the basics, and not because quantum mechanics is irrelevant or unimportant in general. I personally would prefer it if teachers made this more explicit (i.e. say that they are teaching a simplified model and we would get to learn more details next time) but I get the impression that this is already obvious to other people so I’d imagine it comes across as superfluous to them.
This is good comment but I’m already sort of at my limit; going to try to focus just on DirectedEvolution.
Noted, and I appreciate the response.
I disagree. My issue with your comment is not that it lacks nuance. It’s that it read as a personal attack against me, an ad hominem. Below, I write an edited version of your original comment that has little-no more nuance than the original—perhaps less—but also was not an ad hominem. I strikeout the parts that felt like ad hominems to me, and replaced them with wording that I think roughly captures the (as you say, un-nuanced) meaning of your sentences without coming across as an attack. Of course, I won’t do as good a job of reflecting your intended meaning as you would, which is why I hope that in the future, you’ll remove the ad hominems from your writing on your own.
If you had made a comment roughly along these lines, we could have had a productive debate, using the amount of nuance that seemed appropriate to us both.
I’ll offer up the edit “It feels like CYA when you don’t care about [the particular delineations of] truth [involved].” (Sort of an “everyone faster than you on the highway is reckless, everyone slower is holding up traffic” claim; truth you don’t care about but feel obligated to account for.)
Look. Inasmuch as you can claim that my CYA line was a direct attack on your character (it wasn’t intended as such and I think you’re stretching to make it so, especially since the comment went on to elaborate), you had already launched a similarly direct attack on mine, taking the discourse that I was arguing is crucial and important and calling it, variously, CYA loophole-closing, over-explaining, and in-service-of-self-protection rather than aiding the reader.
And this is sort of generally the point: you think I was the first one to break norms, whereas I was genuinely just trying to mirror you back to yourself. Your comment had a lot of implications about why people want nuance that were uncharitable and not universal; the discussion felt unfriendly to me from the moment of your comment being dismissive.
(You were also explicitly agreeing with someone who, a comment earlier, had said that nuance is poison.)
You would like, I think, for me to care about how you felt unfriendlied-toward. Do you care about how I did?
(I note that I was slightly more cavalier than I would ordinarily be, because we’re under a post titled “Fucking goddamn basics;” I think this is not an unreasonable call to have made. I think that calling the previous comment an ad hominem attack is a bit of a motte-and-bailey; it is certainly nowhere near a median-bad instance of the class, even if we label it a member.)
I agree that this is a natural way you could, and I see did, respond to my original comment. I apologize for that.
My intention was different. I’ll explain what it was in the hopes that it will decrease the tension.
I don’t think the bit I quoted from your original post was all that unusually (by my lights “overly”) nuanced by LW standards, and I tried to gesture in that direction by prefacing with “not to complain about a good post.” But obviously that did not correct for the unfriendly tone that I managed to project anyway.
The only reason I picked it out was because the topic of the commend thread was comparing the style of this post with the style of yours. When I said that the writing had a CYA feel, I meant that empathetically, strange as that may sound. I perceive that LW writers write anxious, and I experience this myself.
That may be me typical-minding, but I have also heard other writers talk about feeling defensive about the comments they’ll get, so I don’t think it’s just me. Amping up the nuance for the purpose of avoiding attacks in the comments leads to too much of the wrong kind of nuance, even if a lot of nuance is a good thing. When I call this “covering your ass,” I meant “because you’re legit afraid that you really need to do so because the internet can be really damned mean,” not “stop being a pansy and drop the nuance.” Obviously this is a case where more nuance, among other things, would have been helpful!
Having a sample of your writing quoted, criticized, and labeled with terms like “overexplaining” and “CYA” just doesn’t feel good. I should have known better. I can also see why, despite it having been meant as a reference to the writing style only, it came across as a criticism of you as a person, and why your own response to me felt like “mirroring” rather than like “escalating.”
When you made your first response to me, I had not seen myself as being critical toward you as a person, even though I do see why you perceived it that way now. When I read your first reply to me, it seemed to me like a big escalation. I now understand better where you were coming from and how you felt when you responded that way.
Personally, I am ready to let the personal side of things drop if you are, but we can also continue the discussion. I think your response above was helpful and constructive.
I think the last note we need is:
I also apologize for the (strong) (reasonable for you to object to or feel defensive about) implication that I thought you specifically don’t care about truth generally. There is definitely no call for someone in my position to make a judgment like that. Sorry for the clumsy wording.
I think we agree.
A while ago I had a sense that writing should be nuanced, dramatic, and true. I no longer think in these exact terms. Now I just say that you should try to be as leading (the opposite of misleading) as possible; leadingness captures basically everything I wanted from that trinity.
What do you define between nuance and ambiguity is in this context?
I’m sorry? Do you want to know how I define the words ‘nuance’ and ‘ambiguity’ and then explain important differences between the two?
I would guess that you think ambiguity is bad in principle; I don’t expect that I’ll feel the same way after I reach reflective equilibrium about it.
I direct your attention to 1, 3, and 4 of the above post, all of which are pointed at stuff like your second paragraph.
That seems apt in the way I expect you to intend/interpret these points (a concern separate from the one about norms), but I don’t agree with them in such sense. That illustrates my expectation for how norms get out of hand: the way other people start interpreting (and enforcing) them is often different from the intended sense, especially if the intended sense is importantly nuanced. Norms round off their mission statement to the nearest available idea, which is often not that great.