Duncan deleted my comment on their interesting post, Obligated to Respond, which is their prerogative. Reposting here instead.
if a hundred people happen to glance at this exchange then ten or twenty or thirty of them will definitely, predictably care—will draw any of a number of close-to-hand conclusions, imbue the non-response with meaning
Plausible, but I am not confident in this conclusion as stated or in its implications given the rest of the post. I can easily imagine other people who are confident in the opposite conclusions. Let’s inventory the layers of assumptions behind this post’s central claim that ignoring an internet comment has very high negative stakes.
First, it depends on the idea that there’s a default way that nonresponse is interpreted that you can’t really control. But part of the effect of reputation/status is to influence how others perceive your actions, including your choice to respond or not respond. Perhaps it’s possible to cultivate an image as a person who maintains their equilibrium and only engages with comments they find interesting.
Setting that side, people still have to read the comment, update on what it says, and also update on the fact that you haven’t yet responded to it in order for the comment to have influence. “If a hundred people glance at this exchange” is a big if, and “10-30% of those who glance will care” is a huge assumption.
Not only do people have to notice you didn’t respond, they have to interpret it as a mark against you, rather than as a positive sign (you didn’t get sucked in to arguing with a dumb comment) or neutral (maybe you had other things to do, hadn’t seen it yet, didn’t feel like responding, etc). Just because people “care” doesn’t mean they think ignoring the comment reflects poorly on you.
Not only does the comment have to directly negatively impact your reputation, the impact has to outweigh any positive side effects. What if someone else does the arguing for you, or the fact people are commenting at all gets you more positive attention, or you get a positive reputation as a person who’s tolerant of criticism?
From your linked Facebook post:
The vast majority of people—well over half—seem truly crazy and dangerous to me. Like being-trapped-on-a-bus-with-a-gorilla kind of crazy and dangerous—it’s probably going to be fine, especially if I stay very quiet and don’t make any sudden moves, but my continued existence is basically at the whim of this insensible incomprehensible alien entity that cannot actually be predicted or reasoned with and is capable of dismembering me.
I would posit that if you mean this literally, this is a symptom of an extremely unusual and highly dysfunctional anxiety disorder that you may want to seek treatment for if you aren’t already. I think that the advice in your posts needs to be interpreted in the context of being from a person who feels this way. You may want to reflect on how the untested assumptions you’re making about how the world works, especially the social world, may be a product of your extreme anxiety.
FWIW, I thought this was a good comment, until it kind of went off the rails in the last paragraph? I feel like you are leaning into a pretty weird interpretation of that paragraph, and doing some amount of unhelpful psychologizing.
Thinking a bit more about it, I do kind of want to go like “wtf?” at the last paragraph. Like, it really seems very unnecessarily adversarial and almost paranoid, and IMO quite out-of-distribution from your usual comments in terms of quality. Like, I think I might have given you a mod-warning myself if you left it on Duncan’s post (I feel like the repost here is already in the context of a deletion, so it doesn’t super feel like it makes sense to treat it as something that can get a mod-warning, though it feels kind of confusing).
You’re entitled to your opinion as well as to exercise your mod powers as you see fit.
I would note that Duncan remains the only individual to directly engage with the object-level content of the paragraph in question, beyond to comment on whether they approve or disapprove of it or to (accurately) characterize it as psychologizing. Duncan’s clearly angry about it, and while I’m insensitive enough to have (re)posted the original, I’m not insensitive enough to try and draw them into further discussion on the matter since it appears that shutting off discussion is their preferred strategy in this situation.
Questions I think are relevant to directly engaging the object-level content include:
When is psychologizing appropriate or inappropriate in general?
What makes it appropriate or inappropriate in this case?
Setting aside questions of appropriateness, which can include concerns about hurt feelings and community health, is the connection I was drawing between the Obligated to Respond post and the “800 pound gorilla” comment relevant, accurate, or illuminating?
These are some of the questions I’m interested in discussing with respect to this topic.
Setting aside questions of appropriateness, which can include concerns about hurt feelings and community health, is the connection I was drawing between the Obligated to Respond post and the “800 pound gorilla” comment relevant, accurate, or illuminating?
No. The “if —> then” of the comment is valid, in that if your characterization were at all reasonable, then yes, that would in fact be relevant contextual information for the reader, just as it’s important for, I dunno, readers of various books on polyamory to know that the authors have failed marriages and abuse accusations.
But the “if” doesn’t hold, making the leap to the “then” moot. And although the paragraph starts with a gesture in the direction of split-and-commit (“I would posit that if you mean this literally”) it does not proceed to act as if both possibilities are live; it clearly focuses on the one possibility that it presupposes is true.
I deleted it for such poor reading comprehension and adversarially selective quotation of the Facebook post in question—
(which is over 2200 words long and has tons of relevant context that softens the impression of the above text, which also didn’t contain the added bolding that pushes it in an even more straw direction)
—that it was inescapably either malice or negligence sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from malice. I would’ve greatly preferred that DirectedEvolution take the hint rather than reposting elsewhere, but since that hint was not taken I am now banning DirectedEvolution from being able to do any similarly shitty psychologizing on my future posts (and lodging this brief defense of myself, which I would have preferred not to have to write in the first place, and was with the original deletion trying to avoid needing to write).
From that same Facebook post:
I’m just going to blurt words and blame the lack of artistry and sophistication on insomniac COVID delirium
...
And yeah, it’s actually fine 99.9% of the time, the thing I’m saying here isn’t, like, “it’s impossible to coordinate or cooperate with humans.” I drive on roads. I shop at grocery stores. I engage in chitchat with Uber drivers and people at the airport.
And from discussion beneath it:
re: felt sense of strong fear, it’s not that I’m actually, like, nervous-system activated at all times? I do not walk around feeling viscerally anxious, for the most part. I think I *do* shift into high-alert faster and on smaller bits of evidence than most people.
DirectedEvolution’s overt attempt to categorize me as mentally ill, and my models suspect based purely on that categorization, is unjustified and not particularly welcome, LessWrong’s enthusiasm for upvoting shitty behavior notwithstanding.
(I also found a bunch of the reasoning in the four bullet points to be pretty poor, but that just made me unenthusiastic about trying to bridge gaps; it was the last paragraph that earned intended-to-be-silent deletion.)
Duncan’s post is actually quite insightful. The core point is an integration of the guess-vs-ask culture dichotomy such that we have a more accurate model of what is going on (one that involves tracking the social context and implications of your actions on the environment and the other people, and the other people’s actions, and so on).
I also believe that your attempts at posting good-faith critiques in the comments of most LW posts are costlier to you and the community you care about, than they are beneficial. You are swimming upstream and that is unsustainable. Your efforts are best spent elsewhere.
your attempts at posting good-faith critiques in the comments of most LW posts are costlier to [...] the community you care about, than they are beneficial.
Opportunity costs. There’s a lot more useful things one can do, such as actually work on projects that reduce existential risk, or run one’s own blog, or build a following on social media such as X to influence the zeitgeist.
I consider the banning of Said as a canary in the coal mine. I do not think it is worth the effort for people to call out non-alignment posts they consider confused, badly written, or just downright dumb.
(Alignment posts are an exception, mainly because I see people like John Wentworth and Steven Byrnes write really good counter-argument comments, and there’s little to no drama or pushback by the post authors when it comes to such highly technical posts.)
I also believe that your attempts at posting good-faith critiques in the comments of most LW posts are costlier to you and the community you care about, than they are beneficial. You are swimming upstream and that is unsustainable. Your efforts are best spent elsewhere.
My understanding is that it’s not so much very high negative stakes (usually, at least), it’s more a continuous tax. You have to always be playing PR games and be aware that there is a subset of readers that will treat your lack of involvement as surrender and implicitly granting a point. Their numbers will depend on the place and topic, of course, as e.g. I’d expect a lot more of this on twitter than on a random knitting forum. There’s also the additional problem that they tend to be quite vocal.
You can ignore all of this and just be weird, but that has it’s own costs, which aren’t always visible. Cultivating an appropriate image only works if you have a reputation and/or are so obviously strange that you won’t be judged by the usual standards—if you seem “normal”, you get judged by “normal” standards, which depending on whatever someone thinks is normal, can include “if you don’t push back, you’ve lost the interaction”.
edit:
I also think Duncan is doing a different version of this
my continued existence is basically at the whim of this insensible incomprehensible alien entity that cannot actually be predicted or reasoned with and is capable of dismembering me.
Sounds like a good description of democracy, where a mob of people with average IQ about 100 decides your future.
Duncan deleted my comment on their interesting post, Obligated to Respond, which is their prerogative. Reposting here instead.
Plausible, but I am not confident in this conclusion as stated or in its implications given the rest of the post. I can easily imagine other people who are confident in the opposite conclusions. Let’s inventory the layers of assumptions behind this post’s central claim that ignoring an internet comment has very high negative stakes.
First, it depends on the idea that there’s a default way that nonresponse is interpreted that you can’t really control. But part of the effect of reputation/status is to influence how others perceive your actions, including your choice to respond or not respond. Perhaps it’s possible to cultivate an image as a person who maintains their equilibrium and only engages with comments they find interesting.
Setting that side, people still have to read the comment, update on what it says, and also update on the fact that you haven’t yet responded to it in order for the comment to have influence. “If a hundred people glance at this exchange” is a big if, and “10-30% of those who glance will care” is a huge assumption.
Not only do people have to notice you didn’t respond, they have to interpret it as a mark against you, rather than as a positive sign (you didn’t get sucked in to arguing with a dumb comment) or neutral (maybe you had other things to do, hadn’t seen it yet, didn’t feel like responding, etc). Just because people “care” doesn’t mean they think ignoring the comment reflects poorly on you.
Not only does the comment have to directly negatively impact your reputation, the impact has to outweigh any positive side effects. What if someone else does the arguing for you, or the fact people are commenting at all gets you more positive attention, or you get a positive reputation as a person who’s tolerant of criticism?
From your linked Facebook post:
I would posit that if you mean this literally, this is a symptom of an extremely unusual and highly dysfunctional anxiety disorder that you may want to seek treatment for if you aren’t already. I think that the advice in your posts needs to be interpreted in the context of being from a person who feels this way. You may want to reflect on how the untested assumptions you’re making about how the world works, especially the social world, may be a product of your extreme anxiety.
FWIW, I thought this was a good comment, until it kind of went off the rails in the last paragraph? I feel like you are leaning into a pretty weird interpretation of that paragraph, and doing some amount of unhelpful psychologizing.
Thinking a bit more about it, I do kind of want to go like “wtf?” at the last paragraph. Like, it really seems very unnecessarily adversarial and almost paranoid, and IMO quite out-of-distribution from your usual comments in terms of quality. Like, I think I might have given you a mod-warning myself if you left it on Duncan’s post (I feel like the repost here is already in the context of a deletion, so it doesn’t super feel like it makes sense to treat it as something that can get a mod-warning, though it feels kind of confusing).
You’re entitled to your opinion as well as to exercise your mod powers as you see fit.
I would note that Duncan remains the only individual to directly engage with the object-level content of the paragraph in question, beyond to comment on whether they approve or disapprove of it or to (accurately) characterize it as psychologizing. Duncan’s clearly angry about it, and while I’m insensitive enough to have (re)posted the original, I’m not insensitive enough to try and draw them into further discussion on the matter since it appears that shutting off discussion is their preferred strategy in this situation.
Questions I think are relevant to directly engaging the object-level content include:
When is psychologizing appropriate or inappropriate in general?
What makes it appropriate or inappropriate in this case?
Setting aside questions of appropriateness, which can include concerns about hurt feelings and community health, is the connection I was drawing between the Obligated to Respond post and the “800 pound gorilla” comment relevant, accurate, or illuminating?
These are some of the questions I’m interested in discussing with respect to this topic.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPv4sYrKnPzeJASuk/basics-of-rationalist-discourse-1#10__Hold_yourself_to_the_absolute_highest_standard_when_directly_modeling_or_assessing_others__internal_states__values__and_thought_processes_
No. The “if —> then” of the comment is valid, in that if your characterization were at all reasonable, then yes, that would in fact be relevant contextual information for the reader, just as it’s important for, I dunno, readers of various books on polyamory to know that the authors have failed marriages and abuse accusations.
But the “if” doesn’t hold, making the leap to the “then” moot. And although the paragraph starts with a gesture in the direction of split-and-commit (“I would posit that if you mean this literally”) it does not proceed to act as if both possibilities are live; it clearly focuses on the one possibility that it presupposes is true.
I deleted it for such poor reading comprehension and adversarially selective quotation of the Facebook post in question—
(which is over 2200 words long and has tons of relevant context that softens the impression of the above text, which also didn’t contain the added bolding that pushes it in an even more straw direction)
—that it was inescapably either malice or negligence sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from malice. I would’ve greatly preferred that DirectedEvolution take the hint rather than reposting elsewhere, but since that hint was not taken I am now banning DirectedEvolution from being able to do any similarly shitty psychologizing on my future posts (and lodging this brief defense of myself, which I would have preferred not to have to write in the first place, and was with the original deletion trying to avoid needing to write).
From that same Facebook post:
And from discussion beneath it:
DirectedEvolution’s overt attempt to categorize me as mentally ill, and my models suspect based purely on that categorization, is unjustified and not particularly welcome, LessWrong’s enthusiasm for upvoting shitty behavior notwithstanding.
(I also found a bunch of the reasoning in the four bullet points to be pretty poor, but that just made me unenthusiastic about trying to bridge gaps; it was the last paragraph that earned intended-to-be-silent deletion.)
Thanks a lot for reposting this.
Duncan’s post is actually quite insightful. The core point is an integration of the guess-vs-ask culture dichotomy such that we have a more accurate model of what is going on (one that involves tracking the social context and implications of your actions on the environment and the other people, and the other people’s actions, and so on).
I also believe that your attempts at posting good-faith critiques in the comments of most LW posts are costlier to you and the community you care about, than they are beneficial. You are swimming upstream and that is unsustainable. Your efforts are best spent elsewhere.
Why? What are the costs to the community?
Opportunity costs. There’s a lot more useful things one can do, such as actually work on projects that reduce existential risk, or run one’s own blog, or build a following on social media such as X to influence the zeitgeist.
Followup question: you thought criticism was useful in April 2023. What changed your mind?
I consider the banning of Said as a canary in the coal mine. I do not think it is worth the effort for people to call out non-alignment posts they consider confused, badly written, or just downright dumb.
(Alignment posts are an exception, mainly because I see people like John Wentworth and Steven Byrnes write really good counter-argument comments, and there’s little to no drama or pushback by the post authors when it comes to such highly technical posts.)
I swim upstream for the exercise ;)
My understanding is that it’s not so much very high negative stakes (usually, at least), it’s more a continuous tax. You have to always be playing PR games and be aware that there is a subset of readers that will treat your lack of involvement as surrender and implicitly granting a point. Their numbers will depend on the place and topic, of course, as e.g. I’d expect a lot more of this on twitter than on a random knitting forum. There’s also the additional problem that they tend to be quite vocal.
You can ignore all of this and just be weird, but that has it’s own costs, which aren’t always visible. Cultivating an appropriate image only works if you have a reputation and/or are so obviously strange that you won’t be judged by the usual standards—if you seem “normal”, you get judged by “normal” standards, which depending on whatever someone thinks is normal, can include “if you don’t push back, you’ve lost the interaction”.
edit:
I also think Duncan is doing a different version of this
Sounds like a good description of democracy, where a mob of people with average IQ about 100 decides your future.