I think I see another drawback of these kinds of techniques: when someone criticizes your thing, your first thought is “let’s analyze why the person said that”, rather than “wait, is my thing bad?” It’s worrying that the thing you’re defending happens to teach that kind of mental move.
Aren’t those kind of the same thing, though? In that before you can ask yourself whether your thing is bad, you need to understand the criticism in question, and that requires verifying that your interpretation of the criticism is correct before you proceed.
It’s true that these sometimes come apart: e.g. maybe I have an irrational fear of AI, but that irrational motive can still drive me to formulate correct arguments for AI risk. But in that case there exists a clean separation between the motive and the object-level argument. Whereas in this case, Bunthut seemed to be articulating reasons behind their emotional discomfort.
If you are trying to check that you correctly understood what someone is saying about their emotional discomfort, then that doesn’t seem like a case where you can isolate an object-level argument that would be separate from “why the person said that”. They are trying to express discomfort about something, and the specific reason why the thing is making them uncomfortable is the object-level issue.
your first thought is “let’s analyze why the person said that”, rather than “wait, is my thing bad?”
It definitely makes sense to be worried about Bulverism, where my attention becomes solely about how it lands for the other person (and figuring out what mistake of theirs prevents it from landing the way I want).
I think you often want to figure out all of 1) what the causal history of their statement is, 2) whether your thing was bad according to you, 3) whether your sense of goodness/badness is bad according to you, in contact with their statement and its causal history. What order you do those in will depend on what the situation is.
Like, suppose I write a post and someone comments with a claim that I made a typo. Presumably my attention jumps to the second point, of “oh, did I type incorrectly?”, and only later (if ever) do I ask the questions of “why do they care about this?” and “am I caring the right amount about spelling errors?”
If instead I make a claim and someone says “that claim misses my experience,” presumably my attention should jump to the first point, of what their experience was so that I can then determine whether or not I was missing their experience when I said it, or expressed myself poorly, or was misheard, or whatever.
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I note that I am personally only minimally worried about specific Circlers that I know falling into Bulverism, and I feel like if I knew the theory / practice of it more I would be able to point to the policies and principles they’re using that mean that error is unlikely for them. Like, for me personally, one of the protective forces is something like “selfish growth,” where there’s a drive to interpret information in a way that leads to me getting better at what I want to get better at, and so it would be surprising to see me ‘write off’ criticism after analyzing it, because the thing I want is the growth, not the defense-from-attack.
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I think there are definitely developmental stages that people can pass through that make them more annoying when they advance a step. Like, I can imagine someone who mostly cares about defending themselves from attacks, and basically doesn’t have a theory of mind, and you introduce them to the idea that they can figure out why other people say things, and so then they go around projecting at everyone else. I think so long as they’re still accepting input / doing empiricism / able to self-reflect, this will be a temporary phase as their initial random model gradient-descents through feedback to something that more accurately reflects reality. If they aren’t, well, knowing about biases can hurt people, and they might project why other people dislike their projections in a way that’s self-reinforcing and get stuck in a trap.
I think I see another drawback of these kinds of techniques: when someone criticizes your thing, your first thought is “let’s analyze why the person said that”, rather than “wait, is my thing bad?” It’s worrying that the thing you’re defending happens to teach that kind of mental move.
Aren’t those kind of the same thing, though? In that before you can ask yourself whether your thing is bad, you need to understand the criticism in question, and that requires verifying that your interpretation of the criticism is correct before you proceed.
It’s true that these sometimes come apart: e.g. maybe I have an irrational fear of AI, but that irrational motive can still drive me to formulate correct arguments for AI risk. But in that case there exists a clean separation between the motive and the object-level argument. Whereas in this case, Bunthut seemed to be articulating reasons behind their emotional discomfort.
If you are trying to check that you correctly understood what someone is saying about their emotional discomfort, then that doesn’t seem like a case where you can isolate an object-level argument that would be separate from “why the person said that”. They are trying to express discomfort about something, and the specific reason why the thing is making them uncomfortable is the object-level issue.
It definitely makes sense to be worried about Bulverism, where my attention becomes solely about how it lands for the other person (and figuring out what mistake of theirs prevents it from landing the way I want).
I think you often want to figure out all of 1) what the causal history of their statement is, 2) whether your thing was bad according to you, 3) whether your sense of goodness/badness is bad according to you, in contact with their statement and its causal history. What order you do those in will depend on what the situation is.
Like, suppose I write a post and someone comments with a claim that I made a typo. Presumably my attention jumps to the second point, of “oh, did I type incorrectly?”, and only later (if ever) do I ask the questions of “why do they care about this?” and “am I caring the right amount about spelling errors?”
If instead I make a claim and someone says “that claim misses my experience,” presumably my attention should jump to the first point, of what their experience was so that I can then determine whether or not I was missing their experience when I said it, or expressed myself poorly, or was misheard, or whatever.
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I note that I am personally only minimally worried about specific Circlers that I know falling into Bulverism, and I feel like if I knew the theory / practice of it more I would be able to point to the policies and principles they’re using that mean that error is unlikely for them. Like, for me personally, one of the protective forces is something like “selfish growth,” where there’s a drive to interpret information in a way that leads to me getting better at what I want to get better at, and so it would be surprising to see me ‘write off’ criticism after analyzing it, because the thing I want is the growth, not the defense-from-attack.
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I think there are definitely developmental stages that people can pass through that make them more annoying when they advance a step. Like, I can imagine someone who mostly cares about defending themselves from attacks, and basically doesn’t have a theory of mind, and you introduce them to the idea that they can figure out why other people say things, and so then they go around projecting at everyone else. I think so long as they’re still accepting input / doing empiricism / able to self-reflect, this will be a temporary phase as their initial random model gradient-descents through feedback to something that more accurately reflects reality. If they aren’t, well, knowing about biases can hurt people, and they might project why other people dislike their projections in a way that’s self-reinforcing and get stuck in a trap.