I’ve been reflecting on this since it was posted. Coming back to it from time to time.
I just wanted to make a note saying: received. I believe I see your point, and I’ve been taking it in.
(I also disagree with some of the narrativemancy you employ here about me. It’s difficult for me to publicly agree with anything in your comment here because of a similar mechanism that you’re objecting to in the OP. I wish I didn’t need to add this note. I’d rather just say “I’m hearing something meaningful in what you’re saying and have been taking it in.” That’s the part that matters. But I can do so only if I also register that I very much disagree with your model of what I was trying to do, and in some cases I strongly disagree with your analysis of what I was in fact doing. Thankfully I can still learn from your message anyway. I just wanted to say — more to LW than to you, really — that I’ve heard your objection and have been taking the truth I can find in it seriously.)
Stumbled upon this. Duncan overlooked the fact that there are good reasons to use a very forceful framing when you’re doing an intervention to help an addict. He got offended by the generalizations because of his tendency to take all such generalizations personally. This distortion causes him to do things like claiming you made “not even a token acknowledgement of the possibility that perhaps some of it is not this particular game”, which is flatly, unambiguously false, because your entire last section of the post was practically filled with such token acknowledgements.
Why does Duncan do this? Because he has an elaborately constructed self-narrative that he is in love with, and when people disagree with his self-narrative, he feels profoundly invalidated and underestimated, and has a distinct habit of phrasing this as “you don’t exist, Duncan”. Actually it’s just a very particular form of vulnerable narcissism, and many aspects of his self-narrative are unambiguously untrue if you just look.
In short, you’re good, and he’s not actually making a point that’s worth taking in. If anything your intervention is not forceful enough. There are many people in this comment section behaving like abject drug addicts and completely failing to realize it.
Though I do feel I ought to add that Buddhism is itself another addiction of this sort, much like Christianity is. Where Christianity rejects worldliness, Buddhism rejects samsara. Both of these are actually rejections of embodiment, even if they do sometimes use embodiment instrumentally. If you’re interested in Eastern philosophical traditions, I strongly recommend Chinese chan over Japanese zen. And when it does come to zen, rinzai zen is a better choice than soto zen.
Edit: upon reflection I agree that the comment was too combative. I still qualitatively endorse most of the claims made, though I think the harshness is misleading. For example, I think the “vulnerable narcissism” thing is technically true, but misleading because it is mitigated by a sufficient level of principled virtue that its connotations are simply too harsh for the description to properly apply. In short, it’s a characterisation that is more technically accurate than emotively accurate.
and [Duncan is] not actually making a point that’s worth taking in.
I disagree. I learned something about what he’s been trying to say to me for years from his reply here.
One of my ongoing frustrations in my life has been, I’ve been very right about some things that really matter a lot, but because I was irritated or triggered or added elements that people could tell were off the mark, they dismissed the part that was actually important.
I think Duncan made a move like that here. He said something unskillfully that nonetheless had truth in it. In his unskillfulness he also added some framing effects that I frankly resent and made it quite hard for me to be seen as taking in. And yet, there’s still something to it. I suspect that at least some of the many people who upvoted his review were responding to that truth.
I can’t really control whether other people respectfully listen to the message underneath my difficulty in expressing it. But I can at least try to offer that listening to others. And benefit from the underlying truth they’re trying to express. And maybe even express it differently so that more people can hear it!
I like the world where that attitude is much more common. I can’t make it more common, but I can at least try to live by it myself, and possibly that’ll inspire something similar by example.
For clarification, I don’t think Duncan is actually playing the game your post was describing, but I think virtually all the other commenters who objected to your post were. I think this justifies the forceful framing of the overall intervention, all the more so because Duncan is averse to generalizations anyway and thus unlikely to be swayed by them when it comes to his own self-concept.
But also, Duncan Sabien’s psychology simply isn’t as rare as he seems to believe. I actually like him in a personal sense and find him interesting as an exemplar of a particular worldview that Duncan distills to an unusual purity. But the worldview is not particularly uncommon, and Duncan stands out only be the extent to which he takes it. Roughly speaking, the worldview comes from a merger of technocratic liberalism (think Keynesianism and Chicago school, both originating ultimately from Fabian socialism), itself tinged heavily by social justice (which traces partly to ecumenism via the social gospel movement and partly to the New Left) and a sort of hybrid of libertarianism and mainstream Republicanism that forms the “right wing” in Silicon Valley and to an extent California more broadly, and definitely forms the “right wing” in LessWrong and SSC circles. The mainstream Republicanism is basically the exoteric counterpart to neoconservatism, which is founded by the Trotskyites James Burnham and Irving Kristol, and the libertarianism comes from Rothbard’s alliance with the old right, who of course drew heavily upon Ayn Rand’s synthesis of Misesianism with a Marxian sociology that begat right-wing syndicalism, agorism, etc. — so basically most of it just comes from Karl Marx when you trace the lineages back.
But the point I’m getting at is not that most of the ideologyspace of LessWrong and SSC and their peripheries trace largely to Karl Marx, the point is that it’s a highly specific form of Marxism, ie. there are identifiable ideological and cultural currents that have shaped Duncan Sabien’s way of thinking, which you can plainly by see by how he still today straddles the line between the social justice tinged liberal wing of LessWrong/SSC culture and the neocon-paleolibertarian wing of LessWrong/SSC culture. Add to this a certain level of neurodivergence, but also a frankly wholesome libidinous love of movement, and you basically wind up with Duncan Sabien. Like, it’s a highly specific combination, but it’s also basically a hegemonic politics, so if we loosen up the category to include not just Duncan Sabien but also people who are broadly like him, then we wind up with hundreds of thousands of highly educated, well-connected people who possess a lot of cultural capital.
My main gripe with Duncan — keeping in mind that I actually like the guy — is that he does not know himself. He has undoubtedly reflected on his own intellectual background, in the sense of thinking about when and how he changed his mind about important things, etc., but he has not done the work of studying his own intellectual lineage in depth. If he did, he’d see that his habitual “you don’t exist, Duncan” framing is missing the mark entirely.
I’ve been reflecting on this since it was posted. Coming back to it from time to time.
I just wanted to make a note saying: received. I believe I see your point, and I’ve been taking it in.
(I also disagree with some of the narrativemancy you employ here about me. It’s difficult for me to publicly agree with anything in your comment here because of a similar mechanism that you’re objecting to in the OP. I wish I didn’t need to add this note. I’d rather just say “I’m hearing something meaningful in what you’re saying and have been taking it in.” That’s the part that matters. But I can do so only if I also register that I very much disagree with your model of what I was trying to do, and in some cases I strongly disagree with your analysis of what I was in fact doing. Thankfully I can still learn from your message anyway. I just wanted to say — more to LW than to you, really — that I’ve heard your objection and have been taking the truth I can find in it seriously.)
Stumbled upon this. Duncan overlooked the fact that there are good reasons to use a very forceful framing when you’re doing an intervention to help an addict. He got offended by the generalizations because of his tendency to take all such generalizations personally. This distortion causes him to do things like claiming you made “not even atokenacknowledgement of the possibility that perhaps some of it is not this particular game”, which is flatly, unambiguously false, because your entire last section of the post was practically filled with such token acknowledgements.Why does Duncan do this? Because he has an elaborately constructed self-narrative that he is in love with, and when people disagree with his self-narrative, he feels profoundly invalidated and underestimated, and has a distinct habit of phrasing this as “you don’t exist, Duncan”. Actually it’s just a very particular form of vulnerable narcissism, and many aspects of his self-narrative are unambiguously untrue if you just look.In short, you’re good, and he’s not actually making a point that’s worth taking in. If anything your intervention is not forceful enough. There are many people in this comment section behaving like abject drug addicts and completely failing to realize it.Though I do feel I ought to add that Buddhism is itself another addiction of this sort, much like Christianity is. Where Christianity rejects worldliness, Buddhism rejects samsara. Both of these are actually rejections of embodiment, even if they do sometimes use embodiment instrumentally. If you’re interested in Eastern philosophical traditions, I strongly recommend Chinese chan over Japanese zen. And when it does come to zen, rinzai zen is a better choice than soto zen.Edit: upon reflection I agree that the comment was too combative. I still qualitatively endorse most of the claims made, though I think the harshness is misleading. For example, I think the “vulnerable narcissism” thing is technically true, but misleading because it is mitigated by a sufficient level of principled virtue that its connotations are simply too harsh for the description to properly apply. In short, it’s a characterisation that is more technically accurate than emotively accurate.
Thank you.
I disagree. I learned something about what he’s been trying to say to me for years from his reply here.
One of my ongoing frustrations in my life has been, I’ve been very right about some things that really matter a lot, but because I was irritated or triggered or added elements that people could tell were off the mark, they dismissed the part that was actually important.
I think Duncan made a move like that here. He said something unskillfully that nonetheless had truth in it. In his unskillfulness he also added some framing effects that I frankly resent and made it quite hard for me to be seen as taking in. And yet, there’s still something to it. I suspect that at least some of the many people who upvoted his review were responding to that truth.
I can’t really control whether other people respectfully listen to the message underneath my difficulty in expressing it. But I can at least try to offer that listening to others. And benefit from the underlying truth they’re trying to express. And maybe even express it differently so that more people can hear it!
I like the world where that attitude is much more common. I can’t make it more common, but I can at least try to live by it myself, and possibly that’ll inspire something similar by example.
For clarification, I don’t think Duncan is actually playing the game your post was describing, but I think virtually all the other commenters who objected to your post were. I think this justifies the forceful framing of the overall intervention, all the more so because Duncan is averse to generalizations anyway and thus unlikely to be swayed by them when it comes to his own self-concept.
But also, Duncan Sabien’s psychology simply isn’t as rare as he seems to believe. I actually like him in a personal sense and find him interesting as an exemplar of a particular worldview that Duncan distills to an unusual purity. But the worldview is not particularly uncommon, and Duncan stands out only be the extent to which he takes it. Roughly speaking, the worldview comes from a merger of technocratic liberalism (think Keynesianism and Chicago school, both originating ultimately from Fabian socialism), itself tinged heavily by social justice (which traces partly to ecumenism via the social gospel movement and partly to the New Left) and a sort of hybrid of libertarianism and mainstream Republicanism that forms the “right wing” in Silicon Valley and to an extent California more broadly, and definitely forms the “right wing” in LessWrong and SSC circles. The mainstream Republicanism is basically the exoteric counterpart to neoconservatism, which is founded by the Trotskyites James Burnham and Irving Kristol, and the libertarianism comes from Rothbard’s alliance with the old right, who of course drew heavily upon Ayn Rand’s synthesis of Misesianism with a Marxian sociology that begat right-wing syndicalism, agorism, etc. — so basically most of it just comes from Karl Marx when you trace the lineages back.
But the point I’m getting at is not that most of the ideologyspace of LessWrong and SSC and their peripheries trace largely to Karl Marx, the point is that it’s a highly specific form of Marxism, ie. there are identifiable ideological and cultural currents that have shaped Duncan Sabien’s way of thinking, which you can plainly by see by how he still today straddles the line between the social justice tinged liberal wing of LessWrong/SSC culture and the neocon-paleolibertarian wing of LessWrong/SSC culture. Add to this a certain level of neurodivergence, but also a frankly wholesome libidinous love of movement, and you basically wind up with Duncan Sabien. Like, it’s a highly specific combination, but it’s also basically a hegemonic politics, so if we loosen up the category to include not just Duncan Sabien but also people who are broadly like him, then we wind up with hundreds of thousands of highly educated, well-connected people who possess a lot of cultural capital.
My main gripe with Duncan — keeping in mind that I actually like the guy — is that he does not know himself. He has undoubtedly reflected on his own intellectual background, in the sense of thinking about when and how he changed his mind about important things, etc., but he has not done the work of studying his own intellectual lineage in depth. If he did, he’d see that his habitual “you don’t exist, Duncan” framing is missing the mark entirely.