PDV, I like you and often agree with you and am on your side about the circling thing, so I hope you will take this in the sense it is meant, but I agree with gworley. In particular, I think you often tend to escalate arguments you’re part of, sometimes to the point of transforming them into demon threads even though they didn’t have to be. That’s a good trait to have sometimes: it’s what lets you point out that the emperor has no clothes. But I get the feeling that you’re not deploying it particularly tactically, and you’d probably do better at advancing your goals if you also deescalated sometimes.
If I can be direct since you often are, at least for myself I appreciate that you disagree, but I really dislike the way you do it. In particular you are often unnecessarily confrontational in ways that end up insulting other people on the site or assume bad faith on the part of your interlocutors.
For example you already did this in the comments on this post when you replied to Oli to say he was wrong about his own motivation. I think it’s fair to point out that someone may be mistaken about their own motivations, but you do it in a way that shuts down rather than invites discussion. Whatever your intended effect, it ends up reading like your motivation is to score points, in your own words, “in a way trivially predictable by monkey dynamics”, and makes comments on LW feel like a slightly more hostile place.
I’m in favor of you being able to participate because your comments have at times proved helpful, and calling out that which you disagree with is important for the health of the site, but only if you can do so in a way that leads to productive discussion rather than threatening it.
When you remove someone who says the truth but does so in an inconvenient way, you shift the Overton window of required politeness over toward the “maximally non-confrontational” side of the spectrum. Then, next time, you say the same sort of thing that you’re now saying to PDV, to the next-most-confrontational person. You keep going until no one can say that the emperor has no clothes, except in such oblique terms that a dogwhistle is a bomb siren by comparison.
You might as well say that when you don’t criticize people for saying the truth in an unproductive way, then you shift the Overton window of required politeness over toward the “maximally confrontational” side. Next time, you give a pass to someone who sprinkles their comments with irrelevant insults. You keep going until you’re 4Chan.
Given that spaces other than 4Chan that have disagreements exist, I think it’s possible to put a fence on the slippery slope.
You might indeed say exactly that, which is why it’s important to differentiate between (a) criticizing people, (b) downvoting people, and (c) banning people. (Not that ‘mere’ criticism is problem-free—not at all! But very different dynamics result from these approaches.)
Or, to put it another way: given that spaces other than 4chan that have disagreements exist, we can conclude that people do, indeed, criticize people for saying the truth in an unproductive way.
In short: one person’s modus tollens is another’s modus ponens.
Edit: Or, to put it another way: of course it’s possible to put a fence on the slippery slope. And the way you build that fence is by doing exactly the thing that you’re implying we don’t need to do! (That being “don’t ban commenters who say the truth but in an incovenient way”, in one direction; and “do criticize people for being unnecessarily uncivil”, in the other direction.)
Too little politeness is clearly unfortunate. Too much politeness is… possibly somewhat annoying? (Certainly not a huge problem.)
Too much truth is an oxymoron (there can never be too much truth; the optimal amount of truth is also the maximum possible amount of truth). Too little truth is catastrophic.
Therefore, to ban truthful people for being insufficiently civil is to court catastrophe; meanwhile, to fail to ban insufficiently civil people who are truthful is… somewhat unfortunate, at best.
Truth, in short, is the object. Civility is an additional desideratum (however important of one it may be). Losing the former makes the latter irrelevant.
This model assumes that truth and politeness are in a simple tradeoff relationship, and if that were true I would absolutely agree that truth is more important. But I don’t think the territory is that simple.
Our goal is not just to maximize the truth on the website at this current moment, but to optimize the process of discovering and sharing truth. One effect of a comment is to directly share some truth, and so removing comments or banning people does, in the short term, reduce the amount of truth produced. However, another effect of a comment is to incentivize or disincentivize other posters, by creating a welcoming or hostile environment. Since those posters may also produce comments that contain truth, a comment can in this way indirectly encourage or discourage the later production of truth.
The downstream effects of the incentivization/disincentivization of comments containing truth will, I think, often swamp the short-term effect of the specific truth shared in the specific comment. (This has some similarities to the long-termist view in altruism.)
This analysis explains why 4chan is not at the forefront of scientific discovery.
Calling out obvious groupthink and bullshit. Which is depressingly common with increasing regularity.
PDV, I like you and often agree with you and am on your side about the circling thing, so I hope you will take this in the sense it is meant, but I agree with gworley. In particular, I think you often tend to escalate arguments you’re part of, sometimes to the point of transforming them into demon threads even though they didn’t have to be. That’s a good trait to have sometimes: it’s what lets you point out that the emperor has no clothes. But I get the feeling that you’re not deploying it particularly tactically, and you’d probably do better at advancing your goals if you also deescalated sometimes.
If I can be direct since you often are, at least for myself I appreciate that you disagree, but I really dislike the way you do it. In particular you are often unnecessarily confrontational in ways that end up insulting other people on the site or assume bad faith on the part of your interlocutors.
For example you already did this in the comments on this post when you replied to Oli to say he was wrong about his own motivation. I think it’s fair to point out that someone may be mistaken about their own motivations, but you do it in a way that shuts down rather than invites discussion. Whatever your intended effect, it ends up reading like your motivation is to score points, in your own words, “in a way trivially predictable by monkey dynamics”, and makes comments on LW feel like a slightly more hostile place.
I’m in favor of you being able to participate because your comments have at times proved helpful, and calling out that which you disagree with is important for the health of the site, but only if you can do so in a way that leads to productive discussion rather than threatening it.
When you remove someone who says the truth but does so in an inconvenient way, you shift the Overton window of required politeness over toward the “maximally non-confrontational” side of the spectrum. Then, next time, you say the same sort of thing that you’re now saying to PDV, to the next-most-confrontational person. You keep going until no one can say that the emperor has no clothes, except in such oblique terms that a dogwhistle is a bomb siren by comparison.
Is this really what you want?
You might as well say that when you don’t criticize people for saying the truth in an unproductive way, then you shift the Overton window of required politeness over toward the “maximally confrontational” side. Next time, you give a pass to someone who sprinkles their comments with irrelevant insults. You keep going until you’re 4Chan.
Given that spaces other than 4Chan that have disagreements exist, I think it’s possible to put a fence on the slippery slope.
You might indeed say exactly that, which is why it’s important to differentiate between (a) criticizing people, (b) downvoting people, and (c) banning people. (Not that ‘mere’ criticism is problem-free—not at all! But very different dynamics result from these approaches.)
Or, to put it another way: given that spaces other than 4chan that have disagreements exist, we can conclude that people do, indeed, criticize people for saying the truth in an unproductive way.
In short: one person’s modus tollens is another’s modus ponens.
Edit: Or, to put it another way: of course it’s possible to put a fence on the slippery slope. And the way you build that fence is by doing exactly the thing that you’re implying we don’t need to do! (That being “don’t ban commenters who say the truth but in an incovenient way”, in one direction; and “do criticize people for being unnecessarily uncivil”, in the other direction.)
I fail to see why we cannot both speak to what we think is true and do so in a civil way.
We can, of course. We should. But consider:
Too little politeness is clearly unfortunate. Too much politeness is… possibly somewhat annoying? (Certainly not a huge problem.)
Too much truth is an oxymoron (there can never be too much truth; the optimal amount of truth is also the maximum possible amount of truth). Too little truth is catastrophic.
Therefore, to ban truthful people for being insufficiently civil is to court catastrophe; meanwhile, to fail to ban insufficiently civil people who are truthful is… somewhat unfortunate, at best.
Truth, in short, is the object. Civility is an additional desideratum (however important of one it may be). Losing the former makes the latter irrelevant.
This model assumes that truth and politeness are in a simple tradeoff relationship, and if that were true I would absolutely agree that truth is more important. But I don’t think the territory is that simple.
Our goal is not just to maximize the truth on the website at this current moment, but to optimize the process of discovering and sharing truth. One effect of a comment is to directly share some truth, and so removing comments or banning people does, in the short term, reduce the amount of truth produced. However, another effect of a comment is to incentivize or disincentivize other posters, by creating a welcoming or hostile environment. Since those posters may also produce comments that contain truth, a comment can in this way indirectly encourage or discourage the later production of truth.
The downstream effects of the incentivization/disincentivization of comments containing truth will, I think, often swamp the short-term effect of the specific truth shared in the specific comment. (This has some similarities to the long-termist view in altruism.)
This analysis explains why 4chan is not at the forefront of scientific discovery.