One thing I don’t like about this proposal is—and you’re hearing me right—it doesn’t positively enough incentivise criticism.
In particular, there needs to be a place where when the idea is put to the test (to peer review), if someone writes a knock-down critique, that person is celebrated and their accomplishments are to be incorporated into their reputation in the community.
We want to have a place that both strongly incentivises good ideas, and strongly incentivises checking them—not disanalogous to how in Inadequate Equilibria the Visitor says on his planet the ‘replicators’ are given major prestige.
Because I want criticisms that look like this, not like this.
The first link is Zvi’s thoughtful and well-written critique of a point made in Eliezer’s “No Fire Alarm for AGI” post. This is good criticism that puts lots of effort into being clear to the reader, and is very well written. That’s why we curated it and it got loads of karma.
The comments of yours that I don’t like arethings I would not want to find on almost any site successfully pursuing intellectual progress. They’re not nice comments to receive, but they’re also not very good criticism. Again, this isn’t all of your comments, but it often feels to me like you’re not engaging with the post very well (can’t pass the author’s ITT), or if your criticisms are true they’re attacking side notes (like a step that wasn’t rigorous, even though it was an unimportant step that wouldn’t be hard to make rigorous). If you look the places of great intellectual progress in groups, you don’t see that they reduced the effort barrier to criticism to the minimum, they increased the incentive for important criticism, that knocked down the core of an idea.
If your criticisms were written in a way that didn’t feel like it was rude / putting a burden on the author that you’re not willing to share, then that would be fine. If they were important (e.g. you were knocking down core ideas in the sequences, big mistakes everyone was making, or even just the central point of the post) then I would accept more blunt/rudeness. But when it’s neither, then it’s not good enough.
If your criticisms were written in a way that didn’t feel like it was rude / putting a burden on the author that you’re not willing to share, then that would be fine. If they were important (e.g. you were knocking down core ideas in the sequences, big mistakes everyone was making, or even just the central point of the post) then I would accept more blunt/rudeness. But when it’s neither, then it’s not good enough.
As I’ve commented, the point in that comment went to the heart of my objection not only to this post, but to a great many posts that are similar to this one along a critically important axis. I continue to be dismayed by the casualness with which this concern has been dismissed, given that it seems to me to be of the greatest importance to the epistemic health of Less Wrong.
For what it’s worth, I bet the intention was as follows: Ben had mentioned that he was going to ration his time in this thread for fear of rabbit-holes, he thought you might prefer to have some idea how much more Said-Ben discussion was possible, and so (the amount of time he’d spent not being immediately visible) he added that note. So, exactly the result of insulting intent.
If Said is insulted by your clarity about how much time you’re investing in interpretive labor, then I think this is evidence that Said’s sense of offense is not value-aligned with good discourse. If someone put a note like that on a response to a comment by me, I’d feel like they were making an effort to be metacooperative. 30 minutes is a long time for a single comment!
Sorry, I still don’t think I get it. (I could guess, but I probably wouldn’t get it right.) In the footnote of the comment you link, Pace said he was allocating 2 hours to the thread, and in a later comment, he said he’d spent 30 minutes so far. A little unconventional, but seems OK to me? (Everyone faces the problem of how to budget their limited time and attention; being transparent about how you’re doing it shouldn’t make it worse.)
Alright. I will approach the question obliquely, if you please…
First, consider this old comment by Benquo, which likewise addresses the question of whether the “30 mins” line was insulting:
If Said is insulted by your clarity about how much time you’re investing in interpretive labor, then I think this is evidence that Said’s sense of offense is not value-aligned with good discourse. If someone put a note like that on a response to a comment by me, I’d feel like they were making an effort to be metacooperative. 30 minutes is a long time for a single comment!
Now, for one thing, this is wrong for basic “confusing a conflict for a mistake” sorts of reasons—but that’s uninteresting. More to the point, it’s wrong because it implies that someone spending 30 minutes writing a comment is somehow a positive thing. But (as I’ve written about, on many occasions) in fact, effort invested in something (and in writing especially) is completely worthless. Indeed it’s worse than worthless—it’s a negative! Effort is a cost, not a benefit. Maybe you’re “buying” something useful with your effort and maybe you aren’t, but whatever you end up with, it would’ve been better if you had acquired it “more cheaply”. A comment that you spent 30 minutes on is strictly worse than that same comment if you’d been able to write it in 15 seconds.
That is—it’s worse for you. For your readers, it’s neither better nor worse (except instrumentally and probabilistically, insofar as the longer you spend writing any given comment, or doing any given thing, the less likely it is that you’ll be able to produce more and other value, since you’ll have less time left to do so; so in that sense, it’s worse for your readers too—but otherwise, they have no reason to care).
We can see that it makes no sense at all to treat “having spent some time writing a comment” as a gift to one’s interlocutor. There’s no benefit which accrues to anyone from you having spent some amount of time writing a comment. So reporting “time spent writing a comment” can’t be thought of as calling attention to such a benefit.
Well, we’ve seen that time spent writing is actually a cost, so a report like this is in fact reporting a cost. (Right away we can consult our intuitions, and ask: suppose that someone gives you a gift, and as they hand it to you, they pointedly mention how much it cost them. What would you think of a person who did this? … but that is only an intuition pump, not an argument.)
Alright, so what exactly is wrong with reporting a cost like this?
A principle that I consider to be of critical importance is that we ought not allow people to reduce or eliminate their responsibility by outsourcing it. Crucially, this includes the outsourcing of responsibility to one’s other selves.
If the one says “I was just following orders, so blame those who gave the orders”—this is no excuse, right? You were following orders—but you chose to follow orders! (“I had no real choice” is a valid excuse, of course—but a completely different excuse.) If the one says “I had those moral views because I trusted such-and-such spiritual authorities, so blame them and not me”—this too is no excuse; you chose to trust those people! Likewise with “I can’t do that, because our policy forbids it”—yet who else but you decided to have that policy? And so on… this is all standard stuff. But I say that precisely the same principle applies when the one says “I can’t do that, because I have precommitted to not doing that”. We should reject this excuse just as forcefully as we do the others, and say: “who else but you decided that?” Precommitments, self-imposed rules, and the like, should never mitigate one’s responsibility for one’s actions.
Now suppose that we regularly exchange gifts (birthday and holiday presents, etc.), but one day I announce that I’m precommitting to spending $500 more on buying you gifts, and nothing more thereafter. Some months later, I hand you a birthday present and say “this one cost me $100, which exhausts that $500 limit I’d mentioned, so you’ll get nothing more from me ever again, sorry”. According to the principle outlined above, this is equivalent to me simply saying, one day, “I’ve decided to never buy you any gifts ever again”.
Obviously, this is not exactly something that you’d expect to hear in the course of a relationship that is going well.
The “I plan to spend only X more time on this discussion”, and the “I have spent Y time on this comment” follow-ups, are saying: “I am doing you a favor by engaging in this discussion with you (in contrast to the usual situation, where we are both freely choosing to participate in a discussion, for various reasons of our own); and to emphasize how gracious I am being, how appreciative you should be, and how much it’s costing me to do you this favor, I will remind you of those costs with each comment”. Then, when the self-imposed limit is reached, the one saying these things now gets to avoid the normal expectations about replying to relevant questions, the normal conclusions that readers might reach when they observe lack of response to relevant comments, etc., by pointing to said limit—“sorry, I wish I could reply, but I just can’t; the limit, you know”.
(“Hey, does Alice not like you anymore or something? She didn’t get you anything for your birthday this year…” “Oh, that’s just because she precommitted to not getting me any more gifts ever again after reaching a certain defined limit of money spent on gifts for me.” “But… that’s worse. You get how that’s worse, right?”)
In short, the message is “I’m doing you a favor here, and I have a fixed budget of favors for you; and this favor is very valuable—see that you don’t forget what it’s costing me!”. This is a stance that one takes toward one’s social inferiors, never toward equals.
Thanks, I see it now. I think the insult has more to do with the relationship-terminating aspect (the part where Alice sets a lifetime birthday budget, or the moderator says he’s changing his stance towards allegedly low-interpretive-effort comments going forward) than the mere tracking of time costs. When my busy friend says she can only talk on the phone for twenty minutes (and that affects what I want to talk about with our limited time), it doesn’t feel insulting because the budget is just for that call, not our entire relationship.
Effort is a cost, not a benefit.
I’m not convinced Ben was making that mistake (which I expect him to also be attuned to noticing, because he wrote about it two years earlier): I read it as, given unusual but not praiseworthy-in-itself effort expenditure, it makes sense to flag it.
When my busy friend says she can only talk on the phone for twenty minutes (and that affects what I want to talk about with our limited time), it doesn’t feel insulting because the budget is just for that call, not our entire relationship.
Yes, but that is because phone conversations are a synchronous communication medium. That means both that it’s subject to scheduling constraints (being able to talk now is a requirement over and above being able to talk for some amount of time) and that the time invested in generating some output is equal to the size of the output. Neither is the case for writing discussion forum comments.
Now consider instead the scenario where your friend says that she’s only going to spend an hour baking you a birthday cake (for your upcoming birthday specifically, not necessarily for all birthdays to come). Insulting, right? For one thing, she’s not obligated to bake you a cake to start with; it’s cool if she does (and you baked a cake for her last birthday—not that she owes you a cake in response; but baking cakes for each other is a thing that the two of you do), but if not, well, it’s not the end of the world. But why decide to bake the cake but then impose this limit? And of effort spent, too! Not, “I’m going to bake you a small cake, but not a big one”, but “I’m going to spend an hour on your cake”.[1] Weird!
Well… weird if you still think that the two of you are friends, anyway. But actually it turns out that she considers you to be somehow beneath her. This is her way of informing you of this.
This is not a hypothetical example, either. I regularly bake desserts for my friends (for birthdays, for various holidays, just for ordinary get-togethers—such things happen infrequently enough that they’re worth investing a bit of effort in). And sometimes it so happens that I haven’t had the time or energy (due to unavoidable life circumstances) to invest in an elaborate cake; so I’ll make something simpler, and say “hey, sorry, I wasn’t able to do my usual fancy thing, but I’ve made you this”.
First thoughts:
One thing I don’t like about this proposal is—and you’re hearing me right—it doesn’t positively enough incentivise criticism.
In particular, there needs to be a place where when the idea is put to the test (to peer review), if someone writes a knock-down critique, that person is celebrated and their accomplishments are to be incorporated into their reputation in the community.
We want to have a place that both strongly incentivises good ideas, and strongly incentivises checking them—not disanalogous to how in Inadequate Equilibria the Visitor says on his planet the ‘replicators’ are given major prestige.
Because I want criticisms that look like this, not like this.
The first link is Zvi’s thoughtful and well-written critique of a point made in Eliezer’s “No Fire Alarm for AGI” post. This is good criticism that puts lots of effort into being clear to the reader, and is very well written. That’s why we curated it and it got loads of karma.
The comments of yours that I don’t like are things I would not want to find on almost any site successfully pursuing intellectual progress. They’re not nice comments to receive, but they’re also not very good criticism. Again, this isn’t all of your comments, but it often feels to me like you’re not engaging with the post very well (can’t pass the author’s ITT), or if your criticisms are true they’re attacking side notes (like a step that wasn’t rigorous, even though it was an unimportant step that wouldn’t be hard to make rigorous). If you look the places of great intellectual progress in groups, you don’t see that they reduced the effort barrier to criticism to the minimum, they increased the incentive for important criticism, that knocked down the core of an idea.
If your criticisms were written in a way that didn’t feel like it was rude / putting a burden on the author that you’re not willing to share, then that would be fine. If they were important (e.g. you were knocking down core ideas in the sequences, big mistakes everyone was making, or even just the central point of the post) then I would accept more blunt/rudeness. But when it’s neither, then it’s not good enough.
(I’m at 30 mins.)
As I’ve commented, the point in that comment went to the heart of my objection not only to this post, but to a great many posts that are similar to this one along a critically important axis. I continue to be dismayed by the casualness with which this concern has been dismissed, given that it seems to me to be of the greatest importance to the epistemic health of Less Wrong.
Honestly, this is just insulting. I don’t know if you intended it that way, but this does an excellent job of discouraging me from engaging.
For what it’s worth, I bet the intention was as follows: Ben had mentioned that he was going to ration his time in this thread for fear of rabbit-holes, he thought you might prefer to have some idea how much more Said-Ben discussion was possible, and so (the amount of time he’d spent not being immediately visible) he added that note. So, exactly the result of insulting intent.
I didn’t intend it that way. I will not write them further and will keep them privately.
If Said is insulted by your clarity about how much time you’re investing in interpretive labor, then I think this is evidence that Said’s sense of offense is not value-aligned with good discourse. If someone put a note like that on a response to a comment by me, I’d feel like they were making an effort to be metacooperative. 30 minutes is a long time for a single comment!
I don’t get it. What’s insulting about someone disclosing how much time they spent writing something?
See the end of this comment. (If you are still confused about my stance on this after reading that bit, then I will explain in greater detail.)
Sorry, I still don’t think I get it. (I could guess, but I probably wouldn’t get it right.) In the footnote of the comment you link, Pace said he was allocating 2 hours to the thread, and in a later comment, he said he’d spent 30 minutes so far. A little unconventional, but seems OK to me? (Everyone faces the problem of how to budget their limited time and attention; being transparent about how you’re doing it shouldn’t make it worse.)
Alright. I will approach the question obliquely, if you please…
First, consider this old comment by Benquo, which likewise addresses the question of whether the “30 mins” line was insulting:
Now, for one thing, this is wrong for basic “confusing a conflict for a mistake” sorts of reasons—but that’s uninteresting. More to the point, it’s wrong because it implies that someone spending 30 minutes writing a comment is somehow a positive thing. But (as I’ve written about, on many occasions) in fact, effort invested in something (and in writing especially) is completely worthless. Indeed it’s worse than worthless—it’s a negative! Effort is a cost, not a benefit. Maybe you’re “buying” something useful with your effort and maybe you aren’t, but whatever you end up with, it would’ve been better if you had acquired it “more cheaply”. A comment that you spent 30 minutes on is strictly worse than that same comment if you’d been able to write it in 15 seconds.
That is—it’s worse for you. For your readers, it’s neither better nor worse (except instrumentally and probabilistically, insofar as the longer you spend writing any given comment, or doing any given thing, the less likely it is that you’ll be able to produce more and other value, since you’ll have less time left to do so; so in that sense, it’s worse for your readers too—but otherwise, they have no reason to care).
We can see that it makes no sense at all to treat “having spent some time writing a comment” as a gift to one’s interlocutor. There’s no benefit which accrues to anyone from you having spent some amount of time writing a comment. So reporting “time spent writing a comment” can’t be thought of as calling attention to such a benefit.
Well, we’ve seen that time spent writing is actually a cost, so a report like this is in fact reporting a cost. (Right away we can consult our intuitions, and ask: suppose that someone gives you a gift, and as they hand it to you, they pointedly mention how much it cost them. What would you think of a person who did this? … but that is only an intuition pump, not an argument.)
Alright, so what exactly is wrong with reporting a cost like this?
A principle that I consider to be of critical importance is that we ought not allow people to reduce or eliminate their responsibility by outsourcing it. Crucially, this includes the outsourcing of responsibility to one’s other selves.
If the one says “I was just following orders, so blame those who gave the orders”—this is no excuse, right? You were following orders—but you chose to follow orders! (“I had no real choice” is a valid excuse, of course—but a completely different excuse.) If the one says “I had those moral views because I trusted such-and-such spiritual authorities, so blame them and not me”—this too is no excuse; you chose to trust those people! Likewise with “I can’t do that, because our policy forbids it”—yet who else but you decided to have that policy? And so on… this is all standard stuff. But I say that precisely the same principle applies when the one says “I can’t do that, because I have precommitted to not doing that”. We should reject this excuse just as forcefully as we do the others, and say: “who else but you decided that?” Precommitments, self-imposed rules, and the like, should never mitigate one’s responsibility for one’s actions.
Now suppose that we regularly exchange gifts (birthday and holiday presents, etc.), but one day I announce that I’m precommitting to spending $500 more on buying you gifts, and nothing more thereafter. Some months later, I hand you a birthday present and say “this one cost me $100, which exhausts that $500 limit I’d mentioned, so you’ll get nothing more from me ever again, sorry”. According to the principle outlined above, this is equivalent to me simply saying, one day, “I’ve decided to never buy you any gifts ever again”.
Obviously, this is not exactly something that you’d expect to hear in the course of a relationship that is going well.
The “I plan to spend only X more time on this discussion”, and the “I have spent Y time on this comment” follow-ups, are saying: “I am doing you a favor by engaging in this discussion with you (in contrast to the usual situation, where we are both freely choosing to participate in a discussion, for various reasons of our own); and to emphasize how gracious I am being, how appreciative you should be, and how much it’s costing me to do you this favor, I will remind you of those costs with each comment”. Then, when the self-imposed limit is reached, the one saying these things now gets to avoid the normal expectations about replying to relevant questions, the normal conclusions that readers might reach when they observe lack of response to relevant comments, etc., by pointing to said limit—“sorry, I wish I could reply, but I just can’t; the limit, you know”.
(“Hey, does Alice not like you anymore or something? She didn’t get you anything for your birthday this year…” “Oh, that’s just because she precommitted to not getting me any more gifts ever again after reaching a certain defined limit of money spent on gifts for me.” “But… that’s worse. You get how that’s worse, right?”)
In short, the message is “I’m doing you a favor here, and I have a fixed budget of favors for you; and this favor is very valuable—see that you don’t forget what it’s costing me!”. This is a stance that one takes toward one’s social inferiors, never toward equals.
Thanks, I see it now. I think the insult has more to do with the relationship-terminating aspect (the part where Alice sets a lifetime birthday budget, or the moderator says he’s changing his stance towards allegedly low-interpretive-effort comments going forward) than the mere tracking of time costs. When my busy friend says she can only talk on the phone for twenty minutes (and that affects what I want to talk about with our limited time), it doesn’t feel insulting because the budget is just for that call, not our entire relationship.
I’m not convinced Ben was making that mistake (which I expect him to also be attuned to noticing, because he wrote about it two years earlier): I read it as, given unusual but not praiseworthy-in-itself effort expenditure, it makes sense to flag it.
Yes, but that is because phone conversations are a synchronous communication medium. That means both that it’s subject to scheduling constraints (being able to talk now is a requirement over and above being able to talk for some amount of time) and that the time invested in generating some output is equal to the size of the output. Neither is the case for writing discussion forum comments.
Now consider instead the scenario where your friend says that she’s only going to spend an hour baking you a birthday cake (for your upcoming birthday specifically, not necessarily for all birthdays to come). Insulting, right? For one thing, she’s not obligated to bake you a cake to start with; it’s cool if she does (and you baked a cake for her last birthday—not that she owes you a cake in response; but baking cakes for each other is a thing that the two of you do), but if not, well, it’s not the end of the world. But why decide to bake the cake but then impose this limit? And of effort spent, too! Not, “I’m going to bake you a small cake, but not a big one”, but “I’m going to spend an hour on your cake”.[1] Weird!
Well… weird if you still think that the two of you are friends, anyway. But actually it turns out that she considers you to be somehow beneath her. This is her way of informing you of this.
This is not a hypothetical example, either. I regularly bake desserts for my friends (for birthdays, for various holidays, just for ordinary get-togethers—such things happen infrequently enough that they’re worth investing a bit of effort in). And sometimes it so happens that I haven’t had the time or energy (due to unavoidable life circumstances) to invest in an elaborate cake; so I’ll make something simpler, and say “hey, sorry, I wasn’t able to do my usual fancy thing, but I’ve made you this”.