So we usually don’t tone police on LessWrong, but this is such an extreme case that I’m going to break that norm.
Your tone is needlessly rude, and the emphasis here is on “needless”. Your rudeness doesn’t achieve anything useful.
I think the mistake (at least this is the one I used to make) is to think that being aggressive is bad if you’re wrong, but good if you’re right. That is not true. Being rude (at least in this context) is bad if you’re wrong and bad if you’re right. This isn’t some kind of washy feel-good message, it’s a factual claim about how the world works. Assuming you are 100% correct about every factual item, you will convince fewer people due to your tone.
The reason why rudeness is bad is that you’re increasing the social cost for the other person to admit they’re wrong. If you’re polite, they have to admit they’re wrong; if you’re rude, they have to admit they’re wrong and stupid; admitting wrongness and stupidity is harder than admitting wrongness, hence it’s less likely to happen. (Scott Alexander talks about this here.) Hence fewer people will believe your factual points. To the extent that your post would have increased the usage of Ice Ships, your tone will decrease the usage of Ice Ships.
This is even partially justified! Your being needlessly rude shows that you have not figured out truths about persuasion, which, because there is such a thing as general problem solving ability, is evidence about your ability to figure out other things, such as the usability of Ice Ships.
What’s beautiful about your comment is how clear-cut all this is. It’s like something you could have put into a text book about how not to argue. In your case, your comment can be made way better by only taking out parts of it—like, literally, you don’t need to add a single word. To demonstrate this, I’ve copied it into paint.net and struck through all the passages that you could have omitted without hurting the substance of your arguments. Here’s the result:
Some of these are obvious, others less so. There’s real art to not being needlessly offensive because some words like the “unfathomably” just sneak in. But this word is terrible there; it adds nothing and antagonizes the person you’re replying to. You really have to train looking over your writing and cutting them out. Or at least I really needed to train this, maybe other people do it naturally.
Don’t get me wrong, the comment you’re replying to isn’t great either; I’d maybe give it a 4⁄10 on the “avoid needless aggression” metric. But your comment is a 0. And if you want to convince anyone ever, that is a massive problem.
I’m surprised that rudeness is the issue, when fallacies are not; it displays your priorities. If I follow your line of thinking, then I should present myself in whatever way would best manipulate my audience for my own desires. It sounds really icky, and I don’t want to follow your norms. Other cultures have been more interested in the fallacies than the rude words, and they did a better job of keeping solid epistemology. When you walk-past fallacies without comment, you are accomplice to them, says Tom Moore. I agree, and I’ll point-out a fallacy the same way Voltaire approved: defending your right to say it, without a tone-police to silence you.
:: If LessWrong members walk-past fallacies and errors, unmentioned
:: And LessWrong members enfore tone-police to coerce greater agreement and satisfaction
:: Then—enforcing tone-police is evidenced to NOT bring LessWrong closer to the truth, by the fact that fallacies and errors go unmentioned.
So, you do not become less wrong by enforcing tone; you are not describing an epistemological method for truth. You are asking me to follow a recent, regional culture of extra-polite, as a strategy, by saying “we all ignore whoever isn’t polite, so it’s in your best interests to obey and sugar-coat.” That’s a threat of dismissing the speaker regardless of their arguments, which is an ad hominem attack (attacking the speaker, instead of the argument). To insist that I follow your standard of politeness, or else I am ignored, is a hostage scenario. I wasn’t running around shouting obscenities; and I won’t cow to sugar-coat my words, just to coerce more listeners. The listeners who are swayed by sugar-coating, instead of being swayed by the arguments themselves, are a dubious audience.
No it doesn’t. I know nothing about the factual question (and I don’t intend to change this because I don’t care). So I have opinion about the subject matter that could interfere one way or another.
When you walk-past fallacies without comment, you are accomplice to them, says Tom Moore. I agree, and I’ll point-out a fallacy the same way Voltaire approved: defending your right to say it, without a tone-police to silence you.
This is a nonsequitor; nothing I said entails changing your factual comments.
If I follow your line of thinking, then I should present myself in whatever way would best manipulate my audience for my own desires. It sounds really icky, and I don’t want to follow your norms.
That’s very noble. It’s also a legitimately interesting dilemma, sort of. Specifically for rationalists, trying to be actively persuasive is considered taboo. Scott Alexander even says this in the post I linked; he draws a distinction between [being manipulative] and [not actively squashing any chance to convince the other person]. Sort of optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there.
I don’t really have a reason to try to convince you either way though, so … (shrugs).
“optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there.”
That’s a strategy, not an epistemology. That is the priority which you did, in fact, display. You focus on tone, which shows you value that issue more. I’m not sure how you side-stepped that, by turning what I said into a claim of “nothing I said entails changing your factual comments.” I was actually pointing-out that you were trying to coerce a bargain: “We’ll ignore you unless you follow our edits, such as calling crew-costs ‘tiny’ when they are only 5% of expenses.” That’s not a “dilemma”—it’s just unethical. And, you keep pointing to Scott Alexander as an appeal to authority? Or, do you think I’m just unaware of the reasons for extra-polite wording?
I was actually pointing-out that you were trying to coerce a bargain: We’ll ignore you unless you follow our edits
… What do you think this site is? There is no “we” or “our”. Not a single person on this site will particularly care about what I think on this. And it goes against my honor to downvote you out of spite, which means I have zero leverage over you.
I was giving you advice because I saw you doing something that I know is self-desctructive. But you’ve exhausted my good will with this comment so I’m no longer going to do this conversation.
I don’t appreciate unsolitced advice on how you’d prefer I communicate; as I mentioned, your norms of politeness are a recent, regional change, where you consider it “self-destructive” that I referred to the 5% spending on ship’s crew as “tiny”. That’s bizarre.
You then conveniently ignore the core of my point, again: you hoped to coerce the bargain, by saying I should be ignored if I don’t meet your standards of communications, regardless of the merits of my arguments. You specifically said “Hence fewer people will believe your factual points.” Yet, if there is some person Bob, who ignores the factual points, then I know I don’t need to convince him; he is fooled by appearances, and fails to appreciate the facts. Bob won’t be able to provide any valuable insight or substantive critique of the concept itself. I notice you won’t be able to provide any valuable insight into the factual points and concept, either. I hope to avoid such people, so I am glad that you take your unsolicited advice away! :)
“A British person would see hedging around a difficult issue as politeness and civility, whereas a Dutch person might see the same thing as actually dishonest.”—BBC’s recent explainer clip “Why the Dutch Always Say What They Mean”
What Rafael referred to as “self-destructive” is considered appropriate in other cultures, and has absolutely nothing to do with epistemology. It belongs on LessRude, not LessWrong.
A great explainer on this concept of “unsolicited advice on a tangent I don’t value, which is then a reason to throw-up-hands in disgust” is Theramintrees’ video on the Martyr, “When Saviors Go Bad”
The concept Theramintrees discusses which is relevant is this:
The Savior-Complex rushes-in, offering help which that recipient did NOT ask for (in this case, I did not ask for “advice on the tone and presentation”—Rafael decided on his own that my tone “needs saving!”). Then, when the recipient is not gracious and fawning for the Savior’s help, that Savior declares their target ‘the problem’ and the Savior rushes-off in anger, to target another person with their unsolicited and irrelevant ‘help’.
[[Personal Examples of The Strategy of Politeness being Counter-Productive to Valuable Critique of a Concept: When I would dress-up, and say only polite things, going to the Innovation Oakland meet-ups to hob-nob with the Mayor and all the local techies, I quickly learned something—dress down. When you dress-up, every money-hunting idiot flocks to you, and believes any crazy idea you make-up on the spot, because they are gullible and uninformed. They will never provide you with valuable insight into your work. They suck-up your time and attention, and you end-up NOT talking to the scruffy engineer who would tell you why, specifically, your design sucks. You need to hear that engineer’s critique—and the only way to get it is by dressing down . Now, you scare-away all the folks who can only read a book by its cover! ONLY the scruffy engineer will talk to you, because she doesn’t care about appearances—she wants to hear your details, and tear you apart. :)
Similarly, if there are two people in an audience, Alice and Bob, and Alice will focus on the reasoning and evidence, while Bob focuses on tone. In 25 years of experience, I have never heard valuable critique of the concept from any of the Bobs—tell me if you’ve heard one! They complain about tone and presentation, without insights into the design; I have to meet their standards, or I should be ignored, regardless of the merits of my arguments. Alice is actually the only person I WANT to talk to. So, when you claim that “Being extra polite will win Bob to your side...” well, I don’t want Bob on my side; those guys clutter things up and get in the way, without providing valuable insight into the problem itself. I ONLY want to appeal to Alice, who as stated originally is not focused on tone.]]
So we usually don’t tone police on LessWrong, but this is such an extreme case that I’m going to break that norm.
Your tone is needlessly rude, and the emphasis here is on “needless”. Your rudeness doesn’t achieve anything useful.
I think the mistake (at least this is the one I used to make) is to think that being aggressive is bad if you’re wrong, but good if you’re right. That is not true. Being rude (at least in this context) is bad if you’re wrong and bad if you’re right. This isn’t some kind of washy feel-good message, it’s a factual claim about how the world works. Assuming you are 100% correct about every factual item, you will convince fewer people due to your tone.
The reason why rudeness is bad is that you’re increasing the social cost for the other person to admit they’re wrong. If you’re polite, they have to admit they’re wrong; if you’re rude, they have to admit they’re wrong and stupid; admitting wrongness and stupidity is harder than admitting wrongness, hence it’s less likely to happen. (Scott Alexander talks about this here.) Hence fewer people will believe your factual points. To the extent that your post would have increased the usage of Ice Ships, your tone will decrease the usage of Ice Ships.
This is even partially justified! Your being needlessly rude shows that you have not figured out truths about persuasion, which, because there is such a thing as general problem solving ability, is evidence about your ability to figure out other things, such as the usability of Ice Ships.
What’s beautiful about your comment is how clear-cut all this is. It’s like something you could have put into a text book about how not to argue. In your case, your comment can be made way better by only taking out parts of it—like, literally, you don’t need to add a single word. To demonstrate this, I’ve copied it into paint.net and struck through all the passages that you could have omitted without hurting the substance of your arguments. Here’s the result:
Some of these are obvious, others less so. There’s real art to not being needlessly offensive because some words like the “unfathomably” just sneak in. But this word is terrible there; it adds nothing and antagonizes the person you’re replying to. You really have to train looking over your writing and cutting them out. Or at least I really needed to train this, maybe other people do it naturally.
Don’t get me wrong, the comment you’re replying to isn’t great either; I’d maybe give it a 4⁄10 on the “avoid needless aggression” metric. But your comment is a 0. And if you want to convince anyone ever, that is a massive problem.
I’m surprised that rudeness is the issue, when fallacies are not; it displays your priorities. If I follow your line of thinking, then I should present myself in whatever way would best manipulate my audience for my own desires. It sounds really icky, and I don’t want to follow your norms. Other cultures have been more interested in the fallacies than the rude words, and they did a better job of keeping solid epistemology. When you walk-past fallacies without comment, you are accomplice to them, says Tom Moore. I agree, and I’ll point-out a fallacy the same way Voltaire approved: defending your right to say it, without a tone-police to silence you.
Key Concept Note: Strategy vs. Epistemology
:: If LessWrong members walk-past fallacies and errors, unmentioned
:: And LessWrong members enfore tone-police to coerce greater agreement and satisfaction
:: Then—enforcing tone-police is evidenced to NOT bring LessWrong closer to the truth, by the fact that fallacies and errors go unmentioned.
So, you do not become less wrong by enforcing tone; you are not describing an epistemological method for truth. You are asking me to follow a recent, regional culture of extra-polite, as a strategy, by saying “we all ignore whoever isn’t polite, so it’s in your best interests to obey and sugar-coat.” That’s a threat of dismissing the speaker regardless of their arguments, which is an ad hominem attack (attacking the speaker, instead of the argument). To insist that I follow your standard of politeness, or else I am ignored, is a hostage scenario. I wasn’t running around shouting obscenities; and I won’t cow to sugar-coat my words, just to coerce more listeners. The listeners who are swayed by sugar-coating, instead of being swayed by the arguments themselves, are a dubious audience.
No it doesn’t. I know nothing about the factual question (and I don’t intend to change this because I don’t care). So I have opinion about the subject matter that could interfere one way or another.
This is a nonsequitor; nothing I said entails changing your factual comments.
That’s very noble. It’s also a legitimately interesting dilemma, sort of. Specifically for rationalists, trying to be actively persuasive is considered taboo. Scott Alexander even says this in the post I linked; he draws a distinction between [being manipulative] and [not actively squashing any chance to convince the other person]. Sort of optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there.
I don’t really have a reason to try to convince you either way though, so … (shrugs).
“optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there.”
That’s a strategy, not an epistemology. That is the priority which you did, in fact, display. You focus on tone, which shows you value that issue more. I’m not sure how you side-stepped that, by turning what I said into a claim of “nothing I said entails changing your factual comments.” I was actually pointing-out that you were trying to coerce a bargain: “We’ll ignore you unless you follow our edits, such as calling crew-costs ‘tiny’ when they are only 5% of expenses.” That’s not a “dilemma”—it’s just unethical. And, you keep pointing to Scott Alexander as an appeal to authority? Or, do you think I’m just unaware of the reasons for extra-polite wording?
… What do you think this site is? There is no “we” or “our”. Not a single person on this site will particularly care about what I think on this. And it goes against my honor to downvote you out of spite, which means I have zero leverage over you.
I was giving you advice because I saw you doing something that I know is self-desctructive. But you’ve exhausted my good will with this comment so I’m no longer going to do this conversation.
I don’t appreciate unsolitced advice on how you’d prefer I communicate; as I mentioned, your norms of politeness are a recent, regional change, where you consider it “self-destructive” that I referred to the 5% spending on ship’s crew as “tiny”. That’s bizarre.
You then conveniently ignore the core of my point, again: you hoped to coerce the bargain, by saying I should be ignored if I don’t meet your standards of communications, regardless of the merits of my arguments. You specifically said “Hence fewer people will believe your factual points.” Yet, if there is some person Bob, who ignores the factual points, then I know I don’t need to convince him; he is fooled by appearances, and fails to appreciate the facts. Bob won’t be able to provide any valuable insight or substantive critique of the concept itself. I notice you won’t be able to provide any valuable insight into the factual points and concept, either. I hope to avoid such people, so I am glad that you take your unsolicited advice away! :)
“A British person would see hedging around a difficult issue as politeness and civility, whereas a Dutch person might see the same thing as actually dishonest.”—BBC’s recent explainer clip “Why the Dutch Always Say What They Mean”
What Rafael referred to as “self-destructive” is considered appropriate in other cultures, and has absolutely nothing to do with epistemology. It belongs on LessRude, not LessWrong.
A great explainer on this concept of “unsolicited advice on a tangent I don’t value, which is then a reason to throw-up-hands in disgust” is Theramintrees’ video on the Martyr, “When Saviors Go Bad”
The concept Theramintrees discusses which is relevant is this:
The Savior-Complex rushes-in, offering help which that recipient did NOT ask for (in this case, I did not ask for “advice on the tone and presentation”—Rafael decided on his own that my tone “needs saving!”). Then, when the recipient is not gracious and fawning for the Savior’s help, that Savior declares their target ‘the problem’ and the Savior rushes-off in anger, to target another person with their unsolicited and irrelevant ‘help’.
[[Personal Examples of The Strategy of Politeness being Counter-Productive to Valuable Critique of a Concept: When I would dress-up, and say only polite things, going to the Innovation Oakland meet-ups to hob-nob with the Mayor and all the local techies, I quickly learned something—dress down. When you dress-up, every money-hunting idiot flocks to you, and believes any crazy idea you make-up on the spot, because they are gullible and uninformed. They will never provide you with valuable insight into your work. They suck-up your time and attention, and you end-up NOT talking to the scruffy engineer who would tell you why, specifically, your design sucks. You need to hear that engineer’s critique—and the only way to get it is by dressing down . Now, you scare-away all the folks who can only read a book by its cover! ONLY the scruffy engineer will talk to you, because she doesn’t care about appearances—she wants to hear your details, and tear you apart. :)
Similarly, if there are two people in an audience, Alice and Bob, and Alice will focus on the reasoning and evidence, while Bob focuses on tone. In 25 years of experience, I have never heard valuable critique of the concept from any of the Bobs—tell me if you’ve heard one! They complain about tone and presentation, without insights into the design; I have to meet their standards, or I should be ignored, regardless of the merits of my arguments. Alice is actually the only person I WANT to talk to. So, when you claim that “Being extra polite will win Bob to your side...” well, I don’t want Bob on my side; those guys clutter things up and get in the way, without providing valuable insight into the problem itself. I ONLY want to appeal to Alice, who as stated originally is not focused on tone.]]