I hope you’ll all forgive the pedantry, but it seems clearly laying out the argument might be the best way to avoid a flame war that isn’t making anyone look good, or encouraging rationality particularly. If this post is downvoted, I’d suggest we leave the topic.
NB: I don’t know enough of the history to judge who is more/less right/wrong between Alicorn and SilasBarta, and even if I could, probably wouldn’t say. I solely intend to attempt to clarify what SilasBarta meant.
Summary of what I take to be SilasBarta’s argument:
SilasBarta replying to Alicorn causes Alicorn psychological damage because Alicorn dislikes SilasBarta.
If Alicorn did not dislike SilasBarta, Alicorn would not incur psychological damage when SilasBarta replied to her.
There are advantages to Alicorn of being able to freely discuss with SilasBarta.
If Alicorn did not dislike SilasBarta, these advantages would outweigh the costs (e.g. time taken reading his replies).
Alicorn doesn’t get any benefit from disliking SilasBarta.
Hence it would be beneficial for Alicorn to cease disliking SilasBarta.
Alicorn is (as reasonable an approximation as a human fairly expect to be) rational.
Hence if something would be beneficial for Alicorn to do, she would do it.
Hence if Alicorn could stop disliking SilasBarta, she would do so/would have done so.
Alicorn has not ceased disliking SilasBarta, and does not appear to be doing so.
11) Hence Alicorn does not have a general method for stopping disliking people.
Possible counter-arguments:
Alicorn’s method relies on focusing on positive aspects; SilasBarta has no/too few positive aspects for this to work.
SilasBarta’s comments have no interest to Alicorn.
Alicorn has better things to be doing with her time than building a good relationship with SilasBarta.
Alicorn thinks there are lower-hanging fruit than SilasBarta.
To start liking SilasBarta would signal that her threats weren’t credible.
Alicorn’s method has to be used before a deep dislike has set in.
SilasBarta is undermining her attempts by posting comments about her, which she finds upsetting. In this situation, containment (e.g. asking him not to reply to her) is better than cure (creating a positive relationship).
Alicorn rarely gets to see SilasBarta at what she would consider ‘his best’ – she is most aware of his posts about her, which she doesn’t enjoy.
Alicorn thinks SilasBarta is very rational, and thus attributes his acts to him, rather than his environment.
Downvoted for needlessly snarky tone, especially when you already have a history of causing negative emotional reactions in Alicorn and from the tone it seems like you’re trying to cause more. A neutral “why haven’t you applied this advice to me?” would have been a reasonable query.
A neutral “why haven’t you applied this advice to me?” would have been a reasonable query.
No, it wouldn’t have been, but let’s try that just so you’re convinced.
ETA:
you already have a history of causing negative emotional reactions in Alicorn and from the tone it seems like you’re trying to cause more.
When someone, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t practicing remotely close to what she preaches (and I’ve held silent on the first several times she preached this), and claims special insight on it, my obligation to point this out overrides most other obligations. That, and nothing else, motivates my comment.
ETA2: And before you suggest another brilliant idea like, “At least you should have kept this to PM”: no, Alicorn’s made pretty clear that’s not an option either.
EDIT: I’ve reconsidered this, and what I wrote here is unfair to SilasBarta. What really happened here, I think, is that Alicorn’s actions inadvertantly set up a feedback loop, which no one understood well enough to shut down before it blew up here. In this post, I chided Silas for not recognizing and disarming that feedback loop—but the truth is, there were plenty of people, including both Alicorn and myself, who could’ve repaired the situation with a little more awareness, and this comment really didn’t help.
And to clarify—what started this whole thing was Alicorn asking Silas not to respond to any of her comments, which was a strange and hostile thing to ask. In this comment, I interpreted that request by rounding it to the nearest non-strange request, which more than I thought. Unfortunately, when asked to clarify, Alicorn clarified it as literally “don’t reply to comments”, rather than “don’t try to initiate conversations”, as she should have.
Original comment below:
Ok, this has gotten painful to watch, and since no one has explained it properly, I feel I ought to overcome the bystander effect and step in. SilasBarta, you have dramatically misunderstood what is happening here. You are flagrantly violating a social norm that you do not seem to understand. Alicorn has acted in a way that is fully determined by your behavior towards her, and anyone else would do the same in her place.
When you speak someone’s name and know that they can hear you, you are, in effect, attempting to summon them. It effectively forces them to listen; if in public, they may need to step in to defend their reputation, and if in private they know they’re specifically being addressed. Attempts to initiate conversation are a social primitive; neurotypicals track a statistical overview of the nature, frequency, and response given to conversations with each person, and expect each other to do the same.
If you attempt to initiate conversation with someone, they give you a negative response, and you knew or should have known that they would give you a negative response, then you are pestering them. By “negative response”, I mean visible irritation, anger, or an attempt to push you out of their sphere of attention without using a pretext. If you repeatedly pester someone who has specifically asked you not to, and you don’t have a sufficiently suitable and important pretext, then you are harrassing them. Pestering someone is frowned upon. Harrassing someone is frowned upon, and can also be illegal if it either carries an implied threat or is sufficiently flagrant. Also, our culture assigns additional penalty points for this if you are male and the person you’re harrassing is female.
So here is the story, as I understand it. After an interaction that did not go well, Alicorn asked you not to reply to her comments. This means “don’t pester me” (or more succinctly, “go away”). This is one of a small number of standard messages which all neurotypicals expect each other to be able to recognize reliably and to pick out of subtext. You continued to participate in conversations Alicorn was involved in, by responding to other commenters, but every time you did so you spoke Alicorn’s name, even when you had no pretext for doing so. You interpreted her request in a literal-minded but incorrect way; you failed to generalize from “don’t respond to my comments” to “don’t try to pull me into a conversation with you by any means”.
I’m curious now about this community’s perceptions of a person A’s requests for a person B not to reply to A’s comments. (Note: I’m using letters A and B because this isn’t about the particular situation or the individuals in question, and I don’t want the individuals’ identities to distract from the issue here.)
I posted a comment stating that it wasn’t reasonable to ask someone not to reply, which got downvoted. I’m assuming this got downvoted because people disagree.
One person replied stating that A’s original request was not to avoid replying to any of A’s comments, but to stop making comments that specifically single A out. However, this was not B’s interpretation of the request. B seems to think, possibly incorrectly, that A asked B not to reply to any of A’s comments on LW.
For people who think this is a reasonable request, here’s a hypothetical: suppose C and D are enrolled in a philosophy class together. C and D have an unpleasant interaction, and C requests that D not raise her hand in class and participate in class discussion after C has made a comment. Do people agree that this would be an unreasonable request, unlike, say, “please don’t call or email me”? If so, why is a request to not reply to someone’s LW comments substantially different?
suppose C and D are enrolled in a philosophy class together. C and D have an unpleasant interaction, and C requests that D not raise her hand in class and participate in class discussion after C has made a comment. Do people agree that this would be an unreasonable request
It depends on whether D’s intention in responding to a comment of C is to contribute to the class discussion or to needle C.
In a classroom setting, the right to ask people to leave or to not participate is reserved exlusively for the professor; a student could not ask another student to shut up without the teacher’s express consent. On a blog, however, no such authority exists, so anyone can make such requests—but only in response to breaking certain social norms without a good excuse.
Well, blogs do have administrators, who hold a similar authority. I believe Eliezer has banned several people from LW for making only poor quality or trollish posts, for instance.
anyone can make such requests—but only in response to breaking certain social norms without a good excuse.
Well, yes, anyone can make such requests, just like I can request that LW commentors refrain from using the word “the” because I find it incredibly offensive. The point is that it isn’t a reasonable request. If someone’s violated enough of the community norms to be banned, that’s a matter for the administrator, but that’s different than an individual requesting “please don’t reply to my comments in a public discussion forum” as if it were comparable to “please don’t email or call me.”
After an interaction that did not go well, Alicorn asked you not to reply to her comments. This means “don’t pester me” (or more succinctly, “go away”). This is one of a small number of standard messages which all neurotypicals expect each other to be able to recognize reliably and to pick out of subtext.
Ok, that’s ridiculous. Comments on LW are part of a large group discussion. A person can tell someone else to stop bugging them or emailing them or calling them, but it is not reasonable to ask someone to not make public comments on LW. No one has the right to do that, any more than I have the right to say “stop using the Internet; it bugs me.”
A person can tell someone else to stop bugging them or emailing them or calling them, but it is not reasonable to ask someone to not make public comments on LW.
True, but that’s not the request that was made. She asked him to stop making comments which specifically single her out.
Sorry, jimrandomh, but you are flatly wrong here, and this misunderstanding underpins your entire criticism. Alicorn has asked that I not post any comments as a reply to hers, even if they don’t single her out, and even if they involve asking others not to mod her down because of the context of her comment! See here, and here.
Now, please revise your diplomatic comments in light of this new information.
(The funniest part is how Alicorn keeps appealing to her own non-neurotypicality, despite my being the only one accused of missing something due to non-NT. Go fig.)
The most accurate phrasing of the intended meaning of Alicorn’s request is the one I wrote in my first post: “do not try to pull me into a conversation with you by any means”. A direct reply does that; it singles out the author of the parent, to a degree that depends on how easily someone else could step in and take their place in the conversation. Non-reply comments also do that if they name her; she didn’t explicitly say that wasn’t allowed, but “leave me the fuck alone” should’ve covered it.
The most accurate phrasing of the intended meaning of Alicorn’s request is the one I wrote in my first post: “do not try to pull me into a conversation with you by any means”.
Except that I stated what I took the request to mean, and she agreed with that. And “do no try to pull me into a conversation …” just ain’t part of it. Take, for example, this comment and this one. Off limits? Well, Alicorn certainly reserves the right to make such comments on my top-level posts. And it doesn’t obligate her to respond directly.
So you still appear very confused about the topic you’re opining on so strongly and confidently.
A direct reply does that;
Not even close: see here, another major example of Alicorn saying what is and is not okay. The comment I made, though nested under her comment, does not in any way draw her into a conversation, because it is a remark about someone else. It is not addressed to her, but to the group in general, regarding a different poster. Still off limits, for some reason.
Is it starting to dawn on you how you’ve misinterpreted Alicorn’s past demands, and why you should maybe withdraw your misconception -rounded, “noble” criticism of me from earlier?
Not even close: see here, another major example of Alicorn saying what is and is not okay. The comment I made, though nested under her comment, does not in any way draw her into a conversation, because it is a remark about someone else. It is not addressed to her, but to the group in general, regarding a different poster. Still off limits, for some reason.
I see two problems with your selected case.
First, you appeared to violate the stated version of the rule. You need a better reason just to create that appearance than wanting to make a jocular remark.
Second, jocular remarks are drawing people into conversations—they’re probably the number-one way to draw someone into a conversation. People joke around with people that they like, and Alicorn does not like you.
I had no idea the concept of “jocular” even applied at the time (and remember, the aspie defense can only be used by Alicorn, not me!) I still don’t see how such a remark somehow draws Alicorn to post further (maybe in real life, in-person situations that might be true?).
Does anyone really see why that general, light-hearted jab at Mitchell somehow gives Alicorn a social obligation to continue?
As for violating the stated rule, my (quite reasonable) understanding at the time (though not anymore) was that the mere nesting of the comment doesn’t matter; what matters is who it’s directed at. And from context, it’s clear it’s a general, big-picture remark bout Mitchell’s theory’s inadequacy. (And a bit of a rude one, but not to Alicorn.)
So it’s far from obvious I was doing anything wrong at the time—but apparently, even defending Alicorn for saying “leave me the fuck alone” is blatant disregard for her—go fig!
Your defense of Alicorn is at +1. Your original remark is at −6. This is because the former comment was appropriate, and the latter not.
Edit 5/27: I have been reminded that the primary reason given for downvoting the original comment was that it was rude, not that it was a reply to Alicorn—I had forgotten this, and left a misleading impression as a consequence.
I hope you know this already, but your social coprocessor is crap, dude. You really need to put in some hard work developing a better set of heuristics, because you’ve been making a lot of blunders, and it’s turning people off.
Your defense of Alicorn is at +1. Your original remark is at −6. This is because the former comment was appropriate, and the latter not.
The defense of Alicorn was at 0 earlier today, and long ago it went negative very quickly. It has nothing to do with appropriateness and everything to do with Alicorn wanting to impose unreasonable rules on me out of some misguided spite.
I hope you know this already, but your social coprocessor is crap, dude.
Thanks—I’m glad that won’t work as a self-fulfilling prophesy or anything, and it’s not the kind of thing you could have said privately—very thoughtful of you.
You really need to put in some hard work developing a better set of heuristics, because you’ve been making a lot of blunders, and it’s turning people off.
Well, I’m glad to know that on a site like LW, I will be given more patience because of the understanding of non-neurotypicality, so long as you use Alicorn rather than SilasBarta as your handle.
Thanks—I’m glad that won’t work as a self-fulfilling prophesy or anything, and it’s not the kind of thing you could have said privately—very thoughtful of you.
SilasBarta, let me tell you something. I am bad with names. Very, very bad with names. So bad that I know a guy who made bet that I wouldn’t know the name of his friend, who I had been hanging out with for years—and won the bet. If someone tells me in public, “Robin, you are terrible with names”, I have no grounds whatsoever to take that as an insult. It would be like being insulted that people thought I was a man. I have a beard, no breasts, and worse recall for names than the average parakeet, and all these things are painfully obvious in a short period of time.
SIlasBarta, you get caught up in more flamewars than almost anyone on Less Wrong. Drop the conspiracy theorists and you’re a lock. That’s a warning sign, man, just as much as the crazy differential between people knowing my name and my knowing theirs—it’s a clue that you’re in the wrong tail of the distribution. If you want to say that Alicorn is on the same side of the peak, I won’t argue with you, but that’s Alicorn’s problem, not yours. You need to figure out what you’re doing that can explain why the population gets peeved at you more often than it does at other people, because the difference is too large to explain by chance.
I think jimrandomh may be mistaken in selecting “neurotypical” as the relevant criterion—the correlated criterion of “well-socialized” may be nearer the mark.
Good point; that terminology would do a better job of hiding the dissonance in scolding me for my autistic errors, even as Alicorn alone gets the sympathy for being non-NT. Make sure to tell Jim!
Because society is not particularly well optimized, the implication of goodness in the modifier “well” is deceptive—a well-socialized person is quite likely to be tribalistic and repressed, for example.
Sounds like your definition of “well-socialized” is closer to “well-adjusted” than RobinZ’s.
As I understand them, skill in navigating social situations, epistemic rationality and psychological well-being are all separate features. They do seem to correlate, but the causal influences are not obvious.
ETA: Depends a lot on the standard you use, too. RobinZ is probably correct if you look at the upper quartile but less so for the 99th percentile.
As an aside, I would say that jimrandomh’s point relies upon describing a substantial population—more like the set of those above the upper quartile than those above the 99th percentile.
I think the point was that Silas is and he should have responded appropriately. Personally I think NT issue is irrelevant here unless the person receiving the message is not NT, in which case not getting it is a somewhat valid excuse.
Since you advertised it, which “bucket” are you in? My son is on the spectrum, somewhat high functioning, so potential development branches are of personal interest.
I have an Asperger’s diagnosis. People who know me in person and know the details of autism symptoms find it entirely credible. People who wouldn’t know an autie from any other neuroatypicality are surprised when I tell them (I’m high functioning and have decent social heuristics, and in the minds of the completely uninformed, autism = retardation plus rocking and hand flapping).
My hand is horizontal; I think Jim’s assumption is that you are.
If you are credibly not, and feel you did not get Alicorn’s signal due to this you should say so—I think it will create an good case to smoke some peace pipes. Personally, I like you both and wish to see this settled.
Whoa, when was evidence a pre-requisite for you to post strongly about something? Since two minutes ago?
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you put full credence in Alicorn’s self-serving, unverifiable claim to having been diagnosed with Asberger’s, despite her infamous, “Why not just meet women on the internet?” line … am I right?
And yet the very basis for your criticism of me was that I’m making a non-NT-characteristic mistake in interpreting a social situation? Did your arguments come before or after your conclusion?
unverifiable claim to having been diagnosed with Asperger’s
I, Lucas Sloan, do solemnly swear that Alicorn is not neurotypical, and very probably has Asperger’s. I further attest that the information this comment is based on is the result of having physically interacted with her.
Are you also solemnly swearing to ignorance of Alicorn’s long-time inarticulable ease with which she makes long-term friendships, a strong non-Asperger’s indicator?
Except that she’d done it naturally all her life without any rigorous systematization—which is why she finds her methods so inarticulable (“why not just meet girls/friends on the internet?”). Someone who’s systematized it has gone through all the steps (the “nuts and bolts”) explicitly and has no trouble telling others how to do it—yet Alicorn has spectacularly, laughably failed at that.
(Good for her if she can make friends—but she can’t seem to pass that skill on.)
So the evidence suggests that this friendship ability did not originate from Asperger’s-type systematization, rendering it unable to substantiate claims of Aspberger’s.
Yes, to criticize the advice’s actual vacuousness.
[Alicorn:] Cultivate social spontaneity. This one is hard to define, so I’ll give an example. I was waiting for a bus and a woman I’d never met before in an awesome homemade knitted cloak tottering along on crutches said she loved my jacket.
[Crono:] WARNING. If you’re male and you attempt to talk to a woman on public transportation, you may very well end up making her extremely uncomfortable. This xkcd comic triggered a major backlash.
[me:]The way you avoid negative outcomes or ill will in such situations is to only approach people who will appreciate being approached by you.
And how do you determine that? Um, implementation issue. Yeah.
The advice requires you to know things that, as an AS type, you wouldn’t know to begin with. Her advice is just another form of “do what the other person believes is okay for you to do, and do it right and stuff”—this shows serious lack of systematization.
And what kind of advice is it anyway, to say, “Um, okay, first assume the other person has started the conversation...”
I’ve read everything that Alicorn wrote in that thread four times now, and don’t see anywhere where she said to assume that the other person has started the conversation. She didn’t give explicit advice on how to start a conversation, but note that the original comment is marked “some tidbits”, not “everything you need to know about having a conversation”.
She does give a useful, if rough, heuristic for determining when one shouldn’t try to start a conversation with a stranger:
If you do not have practice using social spontaneity to good effect it is ideal to try it in situations where the other party may both physically and socially escape, just as a general rule.
Further, auties can learn heuristics that mitigate some of our social skills deficits, and Alicorn’s advice is generally within the realm of such heuristics; she doesn’t suggest reading the other person’s body language, for example, but gives advice that is likely to work without the knowledge that body language gives. Also, as a strong extrovert, Alicorn is more likely than most auties to have developed those heuristics to the point where they can be built on to create more advanced heuristics that go well beyond what is stereotypically expected of an autie.
I’ve read everything that Alicorn wrote in that thread four times now, and don’t see anywhere where she said to assume that the other person has started the conversation.
What about the thing I just quoted:
[Alicorn:] Cultivate social spontaneity. This one is hard to define, so I’ll give an example. I was waiting for a bus and a woman I’d never met before in an awesome homemade knitted cloak tottering along on crutches said she loved my jacket.
Next:
She does give a useful, if rough, heuristic for determining when one shouldn’t try to start a conversation with a stranger:
If you do not have practice using social spontaneity to good effect it is ideal to try it in situations where the other party may both physically and socially escape, just as a general rule.
Except that’s not useful, because socially-adept people violate that in spades.
As I discussed here, I don’t think being autistic and being extroverted are mutually exclusive, although they may co-occur in many individuals. Alicorn was actually one of the people I had in mind as someone whom I’ve met who has AS and is also extroverted.
Yes, I’m quite aware of that. And be that as it may, the experience of an extroverted autistic is going to be significantly different from that of a normal autistic, questioning the usefulness of the former’s insight into the latter.
I agree with you on this point. To the extent that Alicorn has presented her socialization/luminosity advice as being applicable to all people (or all autistic people), she has certainly overstated her case. Indeed, I would guess the reason her comment about meeting people on the Internet was downvoted was that it appeared to promise universally applicable advice, and as HughRistik ably pointed out, it did not fulfill that promise.
But my guess, based on Alicorn’s posts, would be that at this point, even Alicorn would agree that her advice may not work for all people. She backed off somewhat on the universal applicability of her Internet-socializing advice in response to HughRistik’s comment (“It is possible I was overgeneralizing”). And I think her more recent posts have mostly recognized that her advice may not be helpful to all people. For example, in the introduction to the luminosity sequence, she wrote:
I’m optimistic that at least some of [these techniques] will be useful to at least some people. However, I may be a walking, talking “results not typical”. My prior attempts at improving luminosity in others consist of me asking individually-designed questions in real time, and that’s gone fairly well; it remains to be seen if I can distill the basic idea into a format that’s generally accessible.
Yes, she backed down in response to my comment, which I noticed and greatly appreciated. But she never made any personal admission of fault or retraction to Silas, so I understand why he held a grudge. After all, she did tell him:
If they [women Silas knows] have not invited you to any social functions where you could meet any of their friends, I doubt they like you very much. If you’d like to add a less polite data point, I’d neither date you nor introduce you to my single friends based on what little I know of you.
At this point in the conversation, I really don’t see what Silas had done to deserve such as assessment, other than proclaim frustration at his dating situation, and point out that her advice wasn’t helpful to him.
If Alicorn had given Silas some kind of personal apology or retraction, admitting that it was premature to try to give him advice without understanding his situation, and imputing negative characteristics to him because of his difficulty accepting that advice, then perhaps the whole communication breakdown might not have happened.
While Silas has handled the interpersonal aspects of their interaction badly, so has Alicorn. I understand why he was frustrated, and felt motivated to point out seeming contradictions between the way she treated him and his arguments, and some of the other posting she did on LessWrong (I also noticed a contradiction between her excellent post on problems vs tasks, and her “let them eat cake” style dating advice to Silas). Along the way, Silas dug himself into a deeper and deeper hole with sarcasm and abrasiveness (despite the urging of me and many others to cool down) and convinced Alicorn and a bunch of other people that he is a jerk, even though he also seems to have made good faith efforts to have discussions with Alicorn on other subjects.
As a result, judgments of Silas by Alicorn or others based on his recent behavior risk falling prey to the fundamental attribution error that Alicorn correctly warns against in the original post. He does have (in my mind) a valid, unresolved beef with a certain lack of charity and hasty negative conclusions that Alicorn displayed to his arguments and character in the past. I strongly, strongly disagree with how he has been expressing it, but he does have a valid beef that people need to realize before piling on him (it’s a testament to the failure of his communication skills that he has slowly managed to alienate a large segment of the community even when he started out being in the right.)
Indeed with this single post you are a much better advocate for Silas than he has been with his many posts. I had not previously seen that post from Alicorn, and I suspect I am not the only one. I agree that Silas, while he has made some good points here and there, has mostly just dug himself a deeper and deeper hole. Whereas Alicorn’s radio silence, particularly in comparison with the frequency of Silas’s posting, has been the wiser move, whether or not it was calculated to be so.
Except that’s not useful, because socially-adept people violate that in spades.
Yes, they can afford to violate it because they can pick up on the relevant subtle cues. Any attempt at systematization in this sort is going to require having a more restrained set of options than that used by socially-adept people. That’s because the rules for how humans interact are really complicated. So even if you did have a decent descriptor for how they all worked, keeping track of all those rules would be really difficult.
Yes, they can afford to violate it because they can pick up on the relevant subtle cues. Any attempt at systematization in this sort is going to require having a more restrained set of options than that used by socially-adept people.
And adhering to this rule will so constrain you and mark you as unusual, that it’s no different from just doing aspie SOP (what you’d do anyway).
If I could afford to only talk to people in these circumstances, I wouldn’t be asking for social advice.
And adhering to this rule will so constrain you and mark you as unusual, that it’s no different from just doing aspie SOP (what you’d do anyway).
It’s different in that it’s a kind of unusual behavior that helps one learn skills that can then be used to make one appear less abnormal.
Isomorphically, someone who was just learning to drive would not immediately try to drive on a busy highway; they would start by practicing in an empty parking lot, even though that’s not a normal venue for driving. Once they were confident in their ability to get the results that they wanted from their car, then they’d try driving on roads.
I concur with Lady Airedale, but from what I understand Alicorn is mostly extroverted in one-on-one settings and less so in large groups. I’m not sure how common this is for extroverts generally.
So then she is like most autistics, but still hasn’t actually systematized the problem in a way that she can articulate the solution to other real autistics.
I’m planning an article/series on how to explain, and I can definitely see more and more people every day who need it.
I’m not familiar with this “infamous” remark and I’m not sure what you’re suggesting it proves or even implies. I recently read the book Born on a Blue Day, which was written by Daniel Tammet, a man with Asperger’s. He writes at one point:
There is something exciting and reassuring for individuals on the autistic spectrum about communicating with other people over the Internet. For one thing, talking in chat rooms or by email does not require you to know how to initiate a conversation or when to smile or the numerous intricacies of body language, as in other social situations. The use of “emoticons” . . . also makes it easier to know how the other person is feeling because he or she tells you in a simple, visual method.
Tammet met his partner on the Internet. His reasoning makes sense to me. Is there something ridiculous that I am missing about the suggestion that people, especially those with autism spectrum diagnoses, meet other people on the Internet, as opposed to real life?
Of course. Just check out HughRistik’s detailed explanation of how such a suggestion, like “let them eat cake” completely misunderstands the state of an AS male.
Yes, in some time and place it was possible for these internet chats to easily translate into dating for aspies, but apparently, everyone on the site seemed to disagree with Alicorn’s assessment.
But taking it as a given that Alicorn’s comment completely misunderstood the state of an AS male, how does it show that she also completely misunderstands the state of an AS female, and how does the comment therefore provide support for your suggestion that Alicorn’s AS is in doubt because she made that comment?
Because if she had AS, she would be approaching sociality from (more of a) blank slate, and would have to get explicit, conscious knowledge of the rules of sociality she learned, which could then be explained to other AS blank slates, male or female. But her advice is spoken from the perspective of someone who never had to systematize, but only had tacit understanding of sociality—and hence sounds vague to those who really need the advice.
I think it will create an good case to smoke some peace pipes
Sorry, that ship has already sailed. Alicorn’s not interested until first I follow a divaesque list of demands, including “justifying the [probably fake] psychological stress” of having to deal with me, the same stress that somehow manages to disappear when higher-status members do the exact same things she doesn’t like.
Alicorn has acted in a way that is fully determined by your behavior towards her, and anyone else would do the same in her place.
No, everyone else who’s voiced an opinion on this has said that they would never ask someone what Alicorn has asked of me: that I never post a reply to her comments, even if it’s not directed at her.
When you speak someone’s name and know that they can hear you, you are, in effect, attempting to summon them. … If you attempt to initiate conversation with someone, they give you a negative response, and you knew or should have known that they would give you a negative response, then you are pestering them.
I think that’s a large part of why I didn’t do any of that in the original comment, just in the version that Kaj asked me to post instead! Who should I listen to here, you or Kaj? Which is the real neurotypical standard that I violated?
So here is the story, as I understand it. After an interaction that did not go well, Alicorn asked you not to reply to her comments. This means “don’t pester me” (or more succinctly, “go away”).
No, as I said in my other reply to you, this isn’t Alicorn’s request at all. It’s:
-Don’t post any comments nested under Alicorn’s, irrespective of content or who the comment is directed at. -Don’t PM Alicorn, even and especially if it’s something she would want to know but prefer not be said publicly. (?) -But posting comments in reply to top-level posts is okay, because Alicorn wants to do so on my top-level posts.
You continued to participate in conversations Alicorn was involved in, by responding to other commenters, but every time you did so you spoke Alicorn’s name, even when you had no pretext for doing so.
Which comments are you talking about? Be specific. I don’t recall violating what Alicorn’s request actually was until this conversation, and even then, it wasn’t until I substituted my comment for what Kaj asked me to say, and I warned of this at the time!
You interpreted her request in a literal-minded but incorrect way; you failed to generalize from “don’t respond to my comments” to “don’t try to pull me into a conversation with you by any means”.
That’s certainly the narrative you want to put on it, sure, but if you actually look at the history of what exactly she asked for (including the very specific clarificaitons), your interpretation is mistaken.
And while I’m believably non-NT, I think I can safely guess there wasn’t a lot of nobility in your intent to reply to this comment—not when anything I could have done would have given you a pretense to build yourself up by pointing out the “obvious” error on my part.
I think that’s a large part of why I didn’t do any of that in the original comment, just in the version that Kaj asked me to post instead! Who should I listen to here, you or Kaj? Which is the real neurotypical standard that I violated?
For the record: I wasn’t fully aware of the history and magnitude of this conflict, and I didn’t realize Alicorn had specifically asked for you to not reply to her at all.
Regardless, as I remember, both versions of the comment were (are) addressed to Alicorn. It was just more implicit in the first one (“I know someone this advice hasn’t been applied to” or something along those lines, I think), but it was still pointing out that Alicorn hadn’t applied the technique to you. Therefore it was referencing her, just as strongly as if you’d mentioned her.
psst! I’m still waiting for you to revise this comment in light of the demonstrable misconceptions you grounded it on.
Though if retracting some of your bold, noble statements would cost you a little status here and there, I just want to let you know, I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to step down from your position on the bandwagon. That’s just a decision you have to make between you and your god (or Omega, as the case may be).
She’s not necessarily failing to practice what she preaches.… after all, she never said that it’s a good idea to like everyone, only that it’s possible to like someone intentionally, and that this can be instrumentally useful in some circumstances. It’s entirely possible, however, that she simply has no desire to like you—on purpose or otherwise.
Thanks, but keep in mind I can’t even reply to this comment, where she tries to explain herself, as she will consider it an atrocity (much like terrorism is an atrocity), simply because she categorically demands that I not post a reply to any of her comments.
Considering that we talk about things other than “the history of Alicorn and Silas” on LW, and that I occasionally have good reason to reply to her comments, this gets to be very inconvenient, very quickly.
I hope it’s starting to become obvious why refusal to apply her own advice seems rather inconsistent and unbecoming of someone who would offer such advice.
Once again, how is it that she’s failing to apply her own advice? Several people now have offered a retort to this claim—either rebut it, or stop making the claim.
No, she clearly gains from being able to post impersonal replies nested under my comments—just as she gains from making posts replying to my top-level posts, even though I could revoke this privilege, and she would be obligated, by symmetry, to honor it.
So, even if she really, truly doesn’t care about having to avoid my comments, and even she doesn’t get “peripheral psychological” damage from seeing the existence of my comments (which, truth be told, she probably doesn’t), then this state only exists because of diplomacy on my part—not from following the advice in this article.
Re-read my comment above and note what it does and does not allege; and if “Alicorn deems violation of her demands to be an atrocity” is a reasonable characterization of where she stands.
The narrowest way that I can read your comment is as follows:
“There is badness level x such that Alicorn calls any act with badness level at least x an ‘atrocity’. Alicorn thinks that responding to her would have badness level at least x and that terrorism also meets or surpasses this level.”
Is that, and no more, all that you meant to imply? You intended no implication that Alicorn considers responding to her and terrorism to be anything remotely close to morally equivalent? Do you believe that terrorism is a representative example of the kinds of acts that Alicorn believes are worse than x? If not, why did you choose that example?
And did she actually use the word “atrocity” to describe your responding to her?
1) When paraphrasing others’ views, it’s not necessary that they have used the exact words before that you use in the paraphrase. That’s what makes it a paraphrase.
The question that matters is: are her actions consistent with classifying my (unapproved) replies to her as an atrocity? I say yes. For one thing, she brooks no excuse whatsoever for violating her demands, even when it goes against her interests. One time:
-She says it’s okay to post replies to her top level comments, but not by PM. -I realize that one such “okay” comment would cause her to lose face, so I say it by PM. -She accepts that it would cause her to lose face, but that PMing her was just as bad, but would have been okay if I said it publicly.
2) I invoke terrorism to emphasize her over-the-top responses to minor offenses (as she ignores them in others). (And also to remove the sting from the word, but that’s a different story.)
1) When paraphrasing others’ views, it’s not necessary that they have used the exact words before that you use in the paraphrase. That’s what makes it a paraphrase.
Then it sounds like “atrocity” is a prime candidate for tabooing. You made a step towards unpacking “atrocity” by saying that “she brooks no excuse whatsoever for violating her demands”.
But your evidence does not show that she brooks no excuse. It shows only that saving her face is an insufficient excuse. Saving her face sounds like a pretty small payoff for getting a PM, at least on a scale that includes terrorism. Therefore, the fact that saving face is an insufficient excuse is weak evidence for the claim that all excuses are insufficient. (Suppose you knew that there was a carbon monoxide leak in her room, and you could only tell her by PM. Do you really think that she would be upset with you if you did?)
2) I invoke terrorism to emphasize her over-the-top responses to minor offenses (as she ignores them in others). (And also to remove the sting from the word, but that’s a different story.)
But, I gather, you did not mean to imply that her moral evaluation of these “minor offenses” is actually equivalent to her moral evaluation to terrorism. Is that right?
Then it sounds like “atrocity” is a prime candidate for tabooing.
Already done, as you mention, so you don’t need to belabor the issue of tabooing.
You made a step towards unpacking “atrocity” by saying that “she brooks no excuse whatsoever for violating her demands”. But your evidence does not show that she brooks no excuse.
Okay, now re-interpret everything I’ve said or will say under standard conventions, in which one does not expect statements to be perfectly exceptionless.
It shows only that saving her face is an insufficient excuse. Saving her face sounds like a pretty small payoff for getting a PM, at least in a scale that includes terrorism.
No, it shows intransitive values, which suggests simplistic, trigger-happy moral evaluations.
But, I gather, you did not mean to imply that her moral evaluation of these “minor offenses” is actually equivalent to her moral evaluation to terrorism. Is that right?
Of course? The point was the hyperbole she uses in describing my affect on her, emphasized by reference to terrorism.
Okay, now re-interpret everything I’ve said or will say under standard conventions, in which one does not expect statements to be perfectly exceptionless.
Why do you think that I took you to mean that your statement was “perfectly exceptionless”? If it is only because I used the phrase “no excuse”, then you are failing to extend to me the consideration that you are requesting.
No, it shows intransitive values, which suggests simplistic, trigger-happy moral evaluations.
This is not relevant, because I am not challenging your contention that she ought to like you. I am challenging the following contentions:
(1) It is appropriate to say “I can’t even reply to this comment . . . as she will consider it an atrocity (much like terrorism is an atrocity)”.
(2) Her decision not to like you shows that she is unqualified to give the advice in the OP.
The point was the hyperbole she uses in describing my affect on her, emphasized by reference to terrorism.
You know that her description of psychological stress is hyperbole? That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you could establish reliably over the internet. Not without some smoking gun like her saying, “You know, Silas, I really like interacting with you.”
Why do you think that I took you to mean that your statement was “perfectly exceptionless”?
Because you base your entire reply to it on the assumption that it is substantively refuted the moment you find one atypical exception?
You know that her description of psychological stress is hyperbole? That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you could establish reliably over the internet. Not without some smoking gun like her saying, “You know, Silas, I really like interacting with you.”
Second time: I do have solid proof for this in that she very much enjoys my contributions and even makes non-specific comments attempting to draw me out, so long as she doesn’t know it’s me. I have the smoking gun, however implausible you might think that to be. (Though I assure you I did not seek out such a gun, as no amount of effort would have reliably gotten Alicorn to do this; it’s too improbable.)
I will reveal who Jocaste is[1] once enough people can agree this would be sufficiently informative evidence.
[1] “reveal who Jocaste is” = an term I just made up which should make sense if you’re familiar with the story of Oedipus.
Why do you think that I took you to mean that your statement was “perfectly exceptionless”?
Because you base your entire reply to it on the assumption that it is substantively refuted the moment you find one atypical exception?
No, that was not the assumption of my reply. The assumption of my reply was that the excuse I gave (carbon monoxide leak) would not justify committing an atrocity. Therefore, if the excuse is an exception, then PMing her would not be an atrocity.
You know that her description of psychological stress is hyperbole? That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you could establish reliably over the internet. Not without some smoking gun like her saying, “You know, Silas, I really like interacting with you.”
Second time: I do have solid proof for this in that she very much enjoys my contributions and even makes non-specific comments attempting to draw me out, so long as she doesn’t know it’s me. I have the smoking gun, however implausible you might think that to be. (Though I assure you I did not seek out such a gun, as no amount of effort would have reliably gotten Alicorn to do this; it’s too improbable.)
Suppose she said, “You know, Jocaste*, I really like your comments. I wish that you would post more often, especially in reply to my comments.”
That would not prove that her claims of psychological stress were hyperbole. The stress evidently arises from interacting with an entire picture of a person built from an entire comment history, not from any arbitrary subportion of that comment history.
For all of the reasons anyone would make a separate account here: to make an (unrelated) point, to see if my comments are modded differently if people don’t know it’s me, to pose questions I wouldn’t want to ask under my real name, etc. etc.
Again, Blueberry, I could have gotten CIA covert ops to help me trick Alicorn into making the comments I have in mind; it still wouldn’t have done any good. These are remarks you just can’t reliably lure people into saying.
Enough. If you really want to know, then add your name to and promote this petition,
“We, the undersigned, are prepared to believe Alicorn has been deliberately and unnecessarily vindictive toward Silas, as judged by her treatment of Silas when she doesn’t know it’s him; and that this behavior casts doubt on the merit of her interpersonal advice, once we learn who Silas’s alternate identity is and see Alicorn’s relevant posts regarding that person.”
which is one of the few reasons I’d couple myself to the other screenname. (And I suspect Alicorn is taking a long walk through her comment history right about now...)
That’s ridiculous and insulting. If she reacts differently to your other identity, it’s because your other identity has acted differently. And if you want a person to like you, then circulating a petition saying bad things about them, as you are doing now, is among the very worst things you could do.
Furthermore, creating an alternate identity and interacting with Alicorn under it is extremely threatening behavior; it demonstrates both an unhealthy obsession and a willingness to deceive.
Furthermore, creating an alternate identity and interacting with Alicorn under it is extremely threatening behavior; it demonstrates both an unhealthy obsession and a willingness to deceive.
I think you could really benefit from a hot cup of “get some perspective”. Despite all the flak I get for characterizing Alicorn et al’s reactions to me as calling them “atrocities” and “terrorism”, it’s comments like yours here that show that people really dive into the hyperbole when talking about what I did.
“Extremely threatening behavior”? Um, hello? I don’t know who Alicorn is, or what she looks like, and only sketchy information about where I’d find her. If you believe that anything about my behavior here, anything whatsoever, is “extremely threatening”, then start acting like it—go get the police involved, since you think such a severe threat is going on.
And after the police laugh in your face, you could take a deep breath, drop the hyperbole, and stop looking for reasons to smear me. Sound like a plan?
It’s easy to throw off a damaging, irresponsible allegation that someone else is dangerous. The hard part is to actually substantiate that chest-beating. And it’s yet harder to unring the great “evil” bell you’ve just rung over my head. An apology is in order—but I’ve learned long ago not to expect that, from anyone here, once they’ve comitted to a position publicly.
Very true. And since I was the one giving you a hard time for the “atrocity” and “terrorism” remarks, I feel bound to point out that accusing you of “extremely threatening behavior” is not only hyperbolic, but also more damaging to discourse because it amounts to accusing you of a crime. Definitely not cool.
“threatening” doesn’t necessarily imply threats of violence or criminality, it can simply refer to threats of further harassment.
But how about we remove the word “threatening” and replace it with plain ole “creepy”.
creating an alternate identity and interacting with Alicorn under it is extremely creepy behavior; it demonstrates both an unhealthy obsession and a willingness to deceive.
It would be creepy for someone to create an alternative identity and use it to interact intentionally with Alicorn in a way that they couldn’t with their original identify.
OK. I have no idea what Silas did, beyond what’s been said in this thread. I was just trying to rephrase the statement in a way that removed the connotation of criminality that was alleged to be embedded in the word “threatening”
That’s ridiculous and insulting. If she reacts differently to your other identity, it’s because your other identity has acted differently.
But when this identity acts like that identity, somehow, that’s not enough to change her reaction! Go fig.
And if you want a person to like you, then circulating a petition saying bad things about them, as you are doing now....
What a crock. Even when the comment was up (which it hasn’t been for 15+ minutes), it wasn’t doing that. But I guess deleted comments are the easiest targets for misrepresentation.
Seriously, are you capable of having all the facts before you criticize someone? Is that just not in your job description?
Furthermore, creating an alternate identity and interacting with Alicorn under it is extremely threatening behavior; it demonstrates both an unhealthy obsession and a willingness to deceive.
Except a) I didn’t seek to “interact with Alicorn”. Rather, Miss “I’m terrified of Jocaste” replied to Oedipus’s mother!
and
b) alternate screennames, in and of themselves, are acceptable behavior on LW and do not count as deception for the numerous justifiable reasons for using them.
Wait, I forgot—this is Silas we’re talking about. Screw the rules.
Ok, there’s some unfortunate timing here in that I saw and replied to the post above without knowing that it was deleted. I infer from the fact that you deleted it, that you realized the subtext was saying something you didn’t mean to say. So, I applaud your discretion and will delete my criticisms in the grandparent. I also had wrongly assumed that you had used your alternate identity to post replies to Alicorn rather than the other way around, which would have very different significance.
I do think you ought to take a lesson from Prof Quirrell on backing down gracefully, though.
On March 25 I received a PM from Morendil. Its full text follows.
Hi Alicorn,
Silas has asked me to inquire with you if you would now be “able to return to dialogue with (him)”. This comment of yours was the trigger for thinking the question was timely.
After an hour or so of dithering, I’ve decided to grant the request, on limited terms: I’ve promised to ask you a question, and that is all.
Please feel free to answer me, or not answer as you see fit. Please feel free to provide any message you’d like me to pass back to Silas, or not. I will not relay anything back unless you ask me explicitly.
My motivations are, mainly, curiosity as to what’s going on, and a desire to be a cooperator when asked for help explicitly.
I hope my decision causes no future ill feelings between us, though I accept full responsibility if it does.
I replied:
First of all, you’ve engendered no ill will for yourself; I can understand why you chose to relay the message.
However, I need more information before I can proceed. Specifically, I need to know how said dialogue would take place (format, presence of third parties, time, topic, ostensible goal of the conversation); I need to know something about Silas’s motivations for making this attempt (because he finds it annoying to coexist on LW with someone who won’t talk to him? because he looks at it as a challenge? because he finds me scintillating and admirable and regrets not being able to bask in my company? because he wants to look magnanimous and charismatic upon publicly interacting with me again?); and I need to know whether it’s going to take the form of “Silas said X and Y and acknowledges why this led to shunning but is sorry now and wants to apologize” or the form “gosh, hasn’t it been long enough, won’t Alicorn just let bygones be bygones already?” The latter form of “reconciliation” is neither useful nor, as a general heuristic, safe, and I won’t undertake it. I could likely be persuaded to receive an attempt at the other, although the answers to the other questions would have to be satisfactory. (Kindly don’t prime him with my specific examples, as they’re rather obviously connotatively tagged and they lose a lot of informative power if he doesn’t come up with them himself.)
One thing to note is that nothing in that comment is new since I stopped talking to Silas. I stopped talking to him in spite of the fact that I was reasonably sure I could make myself like him, simply because I judged the tradeoff to be not worth it. Liking somebody on purpose is time-consuming and hard. In order to reverse the decision, it has to be shown both that it was worth trying to like him at the time, and that it is additionally worth the cost of reversal now in the form of a weakened consistency effect the next time I’m invited to return to talking to someone I’ve previously written off. (Note that I may be forced to rely on this exact consistency effect if, for example, I’m ever abused by a loved one and manage to leave once and am then pressured to return. It is not trivial for me to have a self-image of someone who stays gone after leaving.)
Morendil’s reply (including a minor edit he clarified in a separate message):
Thanks for replying. I’m now feeling nearly discharged of the obligation I’ve taken on voluntarily: it seems to me that I’ve delivered the key message I’ve been asked to get across, i.e. that Silas would like to be at least able to offer peace talks.
As I said earlier, I intend to pass nothing back that you don’t explicitly ask me to, and I prefer to err on the safe side and look for something in quotes with a request from you along the lines of “tell Silas the following”. (And again, replying is optional.)
Ideally, this would be something that I can pass back to Silas such that from that point on, the two of you can either continue with the status quo or negotiate further on mutually agreeable terms. I have no burning desire to see this go one way or the other; I do have a preference for being a go-between only so long as necessary.
I said:
You may tell Silas the following:
I am tentatively willing to engage, preliminarily through a go-between, whom it is your responsibility to find and keep interested if Morendil declines to continue providing the service. This exchange’s continuation is dependent on satisfactory explanations from you through the go-between about your motives for wanting to resume being on speaking terms with me, and a summary of why it ought to be considered worth both my time and some undesirable peripheral psychological effects.
Apart from a mis-addressing of the passing on of this message, I heard nothing more on the topic from anyone thereafter.
There was an extended series of interactions, not all of which I can remember well enough to dig up via search; the bit where I told him to leave me alone is here.
Evidently, she doesn’t think that it would be instrumentally useful to like you. Perhaps you can sympathize, since you don’t seem to think that it would be instrumentally useful to like her.
Yes, but at least I want to lift off the albatross of having to avoid replying her comments (and her mine) even when it adds to the discussion and is not specifically directed at her. The advice she’s given in this article (and past ones) show she believes herself to be an expert on this, but won’t take even this reasonable step.
Yes, but at least I want to lift off the albatross of having to avoid replying her comments (and her mine) even when it adds to the discussion.
In my opinion, you are a poor judge of when a reply to Alicorn’s comments will add to a discussion. Your judgment seems to me to be biased strongly in favor of deciding to reply to Alicorn’s comments so as to highlight what you see as their shortcomings, possibly because you wish to lower her status. Thus, what you see as a useful contribution might be seen by others as the latest in a series of unwarranted snarky put-downs.
Therefore, if your primary desire is to discuss general issues that Alicorn also contributes to, you should take great pains to make it clear that you are not attempting to interact with Alicorn, much less disparage her. Concretely, this means that you would:
(1) not address Alicorn in the second person
(2) not state or imply that Alicorn’s posts are worthless or nearly worthless
(3) not ask, directly or indirectly, what Alicorn’s opinion on a subject is
but would instead
(4) make assertions about an abstract topic, using the third person
(5) use polite phrases like “no offense,” “nothing personal,” or “in my opinion”
(6) ask for the opinion of other LW commenters in general or for the opinion of specific named LWers who you get along with.
Minor note- the phrases “nothing personal” and “no offense” can often have the exact opposite of the intended result. Tthey can come across as condescending and very often when people use them they really are trying to be offensive, although they may not realize it. (A relevant quote from me from about 10 years ago “No offense, but the only thing saving that argument from being completely stupid is that sections of it are incoherent.” (Yes, I’d like to think I don’t say things like that now)). And “in my opinion” is very rarely useful unless the point being made is that one is a subject matter expert. It also personalizes things unnecessarily in the same way that the 2nd person does, just to a lesser extent.
In my opinion, you are a poor judge of when a reply to Alicorn’s comments will add to a discussion. Your judgment seems to me to be biased strongly in favor of deciding to reply to Alicorn’s comments so as to highlight what you see as their shortcomings, possibly because you wish to lower her status.
It probably appears that way because in all the cases since ~Nov ’09 when I have a substantive reply to an Alicorn comment, I just don’t make it because of this ban. So all the remaining ones you see will be less engaging and productive. Hey—maybe we should lift that ban … oh, wait.
Therefore, if your primary desire is to discuss general issues that Alicorn also contributes to, you should take great pains to make it clear that you are not attempting to interact with Alicorn, much less disparage her.
I feel I have already demonstrated mastery of this in such comments as these. I don’t see how any reasonable person would find those offensive, even as they violate your extensive standards.
As for your (1) to (4) -- yeah, that’s an inconvenient, ridiculous set of hoops to jump through, which is why I want to get to the root of our disagreement, and eliminate the need to have to walk through a minefield to exchange ideas. Why doesn’t Alicorn want the same? You tell me.
I am not going to vote on or address the content of this post because, in my opinion, it engages in doublespeak and straw-manning. I have a blanket policy of not responding to such tactics on an Internet forum. I am extremely unlikely to make further public comments on the Alicorn-SilasBarta dispute(s).
The advice she’s given in this article (and past ones) show she believes herself to be an expert on this, but won’t take even this reasonable step.
She is not claiming to be an expert on recognizing when it would be good to like someone. Here is her claim of knowledge:
As such, it’s very handy to be able to like someone you want to like deliberately when it doesn’t happen by itself. There are three basic components to liking someone on purpose. . . .
There is really no contradiction or hypocrisy here unless you are someone whom she wants to like deliberately.
It’s not necessary that I be someone she wants to like; the advice is just as relevant for canceling out dislike. And the extensive demands she makes out of that dislike suggest she doesn’t actually use this advise in at least one clear case where the dislike is having severe consequences.
Seriously, if the mere sight of a comment of mine replying to her—no matter what it says, no matter how impersonal—causes “undesirable peripheral psychological effects”, effects that must be elaborately justified by others in order for her to consider enduring them … you fill in the blank.
Seriously, if the mere sight of a comment of mine replying to her—no matter what it says, no matter how impersonal
Look, I don’t claim to know the entire history of Silas v Alicorn… but I think you would have a much easier time making your case if the comments you made in this very thread hadn’t been so unnecessarily antagonistic.
Alright, so having been convinced I have something important to add, you decide that whatever I did to get you to that point was inappropriate. Fair enough.
But tell me, where would be the appropriate place to point out that this Alicorn is completely different from the one I’ve come to know? As far as possible from where she promotes her deep wisdom? Or near?
Rhetorical question: Is here the best place to bring up the failures of her advice?
Non-rhetorical question.If I have evidence that suggests Alicorn acts completely differently than implied by this article, what is the best way to go about it, that would have (potentially) convinced you of its merit?
Rhetorical question: Is here the best place to bring up the failures of her advice?
I’m not sure how this question is rhetorical, since it seems to have a perfectly straightforward answer: here would be a perfectly suitable place to bring up failures of her advice, if such failures actually existed.
We’ve made this point so many times now I feel silly even typing it again, but maybe one more time will do it: her advice has not failed. She wrote an article about how to go about intentionally liking someone. The fact that she’s chosen not to intentionally like you is not evidence that she is incapable of doing so in other cases, nor that the advice may not be useful to others.
Non-rhetorical question.If I have evidence that suggests Alicorn acts completely differently than implied by this article, what is the best way to go about it, that would have (potentially) convinced you of its merit?
Since she makes no claims about when or under what circumstances she makes use of the described method, the only thing I read the article to imply about her behavior is that she has had, on at least one occasion, some success in applying this method. So convincing me of the merit of the proposition that this is false would require documentary evidence of her entire life, exhaustively showing a complete absence of any instance of success with this method. Yes, that’s a tall order, but you’re the one who’s trying to prove a negative.
She wrote an article about how to go about intentionally liking someone. The fact that she’s chosen not to intentionally like you is not evidence that she is incapable of doing so in other cases, nor that the advice may not be useful to others.
Isn’t Alicorn choosing not to try to like him based on an existing negative impression of him? In other word, she has decided not to try to like him… because she doesn’t like him in the first place...? Isn’t this exactly the kind of error that her post warns against? [Edit: I retract this particular paragraph for making assumptions about Alicorn’s motives that I can’t verify.]
I wonder if the whole breakdown between the two could have been minimized if Alicorn (and Silas) had been applying the type of strategies she mentions in the post from the start. She did mention avoiding the fundamental attribution error (emphasis mine):
When the person exhibits a characteristic, habit, or tendency you have on your list (or, probably just to aggravate you, turns out to have a new one), be on your guard immediately for the fundamental attribution error. It is especially insidious when you already dislike the person, and so it’s important to compensate consciously and directly for its influence. Elevate to conscious thought an “attribution story”, in which you consider a circumstance—not a character trait—which would explain this most recent example of bad behavior.
In this case, there actually is a relevant circumstance (which I attempt to recount ): Alicorn was kind of a jerk to him in both intellectual and personal ways without any retraction or apology. He followed her around being increasingly sarcastic, and she wrote him off as a jerk, resulting in him becoming even more abrasive. [Edit: This is my perception as an observer with (a) significant agreement with Silas on substantive issues, (b) significant disagreement with Silas’ communication style, and (c) significant disagreement with Alicorn on certain issues.]
Alicorn doesn’t seem to have acknowledged the circumstance in which Silas was being abrasive and sarcastic towards her. People recently seeing their exchanges won’t know the circumstance, either. As a result, his comments may read as more hostile to them, when to me many of them read like frustration at being treated unfairly by someone and then being made into the bad guy when attempting to seek redress with them. Yes, many of his comments sound flat-out hostile to me, too (and I’ve told Silas in the past to tone it down), but these mainly started appearing after communication between the two of them had broken down, which seems a lot due to communication errors on Alicorn’s end, also.
When judging how much of a jerk someone is and deciding whether it’s worth trying to like them, it’s probably an example of the fundamental attribution error to judge them a jerk for being consistently sarcastic to you after you were a jerk to them and didn’t apologize. Alicorn’s assessment of Silas seems, to a large degree, a self-fulfilling prophecy (which also implies that there is a degree to which Silas’ sarcasm level isn’t justified by the way Alicorn treated him… though I do have sympathy for him for reasons I explain below).
Now, normally, I wouldn’t feel motivated to point a contradiction I perceived between a top-level post, and the behavior of a poster. I tend to treat people’s arguments in isolation. However, I’m not in Silas’ shoes. I know that I would feel frustrated and helpless if I was treated unfairly by a higher status member of a community, and then notice that person receiving acclaim from the community for advocating virtues that seemed absent in their treatment of me. I would start to feel a bit bullied if, when I had tried to point out the contradiction at various points and seek some updating from the high status person, members of the community sided with the high status person, rather than with me. I hope I would be able to just get over it, or communicate my frustration in a constructive way that put people on my side.
I have a decent level of social support, so I can handle someone giving me poor advice that is ignorant of my experience. I can handle people telling me something like what Alicorn told Silas (see my first link): that my female friends must not like me very much because they aren’t introducing me to more women. I could even handle someone saying: “If you’d like to add a less polite data point, I’d neither date you nor introduce you to my single friends based on what little I know of you” (Alicorn’s words to Silas, which were not justified by anything he had said at that point).
To me, I can shrug these things off; they aren’t a big deal… because I have social support. But it’s important to realize that to someone who has a below average level of social support, such presumptions are a big deal. People, including me, kept telling Silas to “get over” his issues with Alicorn, but perhaps what she said might have been disproportionately hurtful or angering to him than it would have been to any of us, and consequently harder to just “get over.” Silas still should have followed our advice, but our judgments of him based on the fact that he didn’t must take this potential background into account.
For people with lower social support, being asked to “get over it” can trigger past issues of bullying: being bullied by a more popular bully and then being told that it isn’t a big deal, and people judging you as more uncool for making a big deal about it than they judge the bully uncool for originally mistreating you. I am not saying that Alicorn was bullying Silas (though she may owe him some sort of apology or retraction), only presenting a hypothesis that her treatment of him, and our insistence that he “get over it” without any kind of apology or retraction from her, could well trigger a less-than-graceful response from someone with lower than average social support who have suffered interpersonal maltreatment in the past. If Silas belongs to such a class of people, it would explain a lot of the sarcasm and abrasiveness he has been flinging around towards people.
The ability to “just get over” people being a jerk to you and devaluing your social desirability is a privilege of people with social support. Since many of the people here might experience lower-than-average levels of social support, it’s a bad precedent on LessWrong if the norms allow someone to be a jerk to someone with a low level of social support, and then write the victim off as a jerk because they get mad and don’t respond as gracefully as someone with high social support would. It’s also a bad norm to allow poster A to be a jerk to poster B, and then accept that poster A can demand that poster B stop replying to them after poster B acts like a jerk in return.
For various reasons, Alicorn herself may not have realized that Silas felt maligned in that original discussion, or that she owed him an apology/retracion, and perhaps thought the updating she showed towards my explanation of where he was coming from was enough (again, see the first post I link to). As a result, she might have been mystified by why he was consistently being sarcastic to her, and imputed his behavior as a negative reflection of his character, such that he wasn’t worth communicating with or even trying to like. [Edit: Although these potential explanations of Alicorn’s thought processes are charitable, I acknowledge them as speculation.] This would be an example of the fundamental attribution error, even though it might have been an unknowing one.
Upvoted for being constructive and evenhanded. But I think a consensus has emerged that we should stop talking about this, or at least move it off this comment thread.
here would be a perfectly suitable place to bring up failures of her advice, if such failures actually existed.
Please reconcile your obvious advice with jimrandomh’s equally-obvious but opposite advice given here. Specifically, on the issue of whether I should have made a comment in this discussion that implicitly requests a response from Alicorn.
Moderators: please withdraw your upvotes from the parent until you can come up with a course of action that would have satisfied both kodos96 and jimrandomh’s constraints; otherwise, you’re venturing deep into politicsland.
Please reconcile your obvious advice with jimrandomh’s equally-obvious but opposite advice given here. Specifically, on the issue of whether I should have made a comment in this discussion that implicitly requests a response from Alicorn.
This is a fair point. Following jimrandomh’s advice would imply never criticizing Alicorn’s comments or posts. The letter of your “agreement” with Alicorn doesn’t require that, but jimrandomh’s advice does. I’ve upvoted this comment of yours and removed my upvote from jimrandomh’s. (I hadn’t upvoted kodos96′s.)
Merely being you and criticizing Alicorn ought not to be counted as pestering by this community. (Of course, certain kinds of criticism can count as pestering. And context, such as the poster’s identity, does count.)
Please reconcile your obvious advice with jimrandomh’s
My understanding of your agreement with Alicorn was that you were allowed to comment on each other’s top level posts, just not address each other directly. It may be that my understanding is incorrect (I don’t really care). The important part of what I said was the conditional, “if such failures actually existed.” If you’re pulling your claims of hypocrisy out of your ass, then there is no appropriate place for them.
Moderators: please withdraw your upvotes from the parent
My understanding of your agreement with Alicorn was that you were allowed to comment on each other’s top level posts, just not address each other directly. It may be that my understanding is incorrect (I don’t really care).
Well, it is indeed incorrect. The agreement’s not supposed to make sense—I found out the hard way what Alicorn is demanding.
The important part of what I said was the conditional, “if such failures actually existed.” If you’re pulling your claims of hypocrisy out of your ass, then there is no appropriate place for them.
Well, that’s subjective. If I have a good-faith suspicion of Alicorn not following this advice when in critical cases where it actually matters, surely, it obviously belongs here. Except that to jimrandomh, it obviously does. Which of these two contradictory obvious positions is right? And what inference should I draw from this kafkaesqueness?
If I have a good-faith suspicion of Alicorn not following this advice
… I don’t know how many more ways we can rephrase this till you get it: her advice is solely about how, not when or whether, to go about liking someone. So even if everything you’re saying is absolutely true, it does not refute the claims in the article.
Which of these two contradictory obvious positions is right?
Our positions aren’t contradictory. His is that you should refrain from commenting at all. Mine is that as long as you’re making personal accusations irrelevant to the OP, you should refrain from commenting. Since, in this case, you’re making personal accusations irrelevant to the OP, both our positions recommend the same course of action.
It’s not necessary that I be someone she wants to like; the advice is just as relevant for canceling out dislike.
Granted, her advice is also relevant to canceling out dislike of someone whom you’ve already decided that you don’t want to dislike. But since she evidently has not made that decision with regard to you, it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to use her advice in this case. The relationship that you two have is not in a state where her advice is relevant. If Alicorn started writing posts about when one ought to like someone, then your criticisms would be relevant.
But her advice here is just not relevant to cases where one has decided that one really ought to dislike the other person.
I have already provided more than enough reasons why, by her own actions, she reveals that she believes she loses significantly (note those psychological stresses) by not counteracting her hatred. When you start addressing those points, you’ll have a case.
As it stands, Alicorn speaks as if from a different world than the one any named witness has seen her in.
I have already provided more than enough reasons why, by her own actions, she reveals that she believes she loses significantly (note those psychological stresses) by not counteracting her hatred. When you start addressing those points, you’ll have a case.
Such a case would be for the claim that she ought not to like you. But I never made that claim, and I have no desire to make such a case. I like you and I think that she should, too.
But her wrong decision to dislike you does not imply that she is unqualified to give the advice in the OP, because the advice in the OP doesn’t concern the question of when one ought to dislike someone. The OP concerns the question of what to do after you have decided, by whatever means, that you ought not dislike someone whom you dislike.
Haven’t I shown that, by any reasonable measure—like the psychological stresses she claims (questionably) to get from merely noticing my comments—Alicorn ought to try to reverse this dislike, by her very own values?
Given that she does not apply the advice she gives here to this very real-world scenario, and I’m the only one so far with a name to go on record stating the impacts of these heuristics of engagement …
I too have observed a certain ironic discordance between some of Alicorn’s top level posts (including the luminosity series) and her observable behavior.
I’m actually am having a little trouble grasping your meaning with these questions. I agree that someone giving advice on (1) should have applied (1). Otherwise, they don’t have a justified claim to the knowledge in (1). But this is the case whether or not they demonstrate (2), which is why I’m confused by the wording of your question.
What I don’t get is why it is relevant if the advice-giver failed to realize that they should have applied (1) in some particular case, even if they ought to have known that they should have applied (1).
To give a gruesome example, a professional hitman might be able to give very good advice on how to kill someone you’ve decided to kill, even if his advice on when to decide to kill someone is spectacularly bad.
Similarly, your evaluation of Alicorn’s advice on how to like someone you’ve decided to like should be independent of your belief that she’s very bad at deciding when to like someone.
So that’s what your entire criticism amounts to? That maybe Alicorn just didn’t recognize this as an opportunity to use her skills, even as she goes through the terror of seeing my comments pop up all over the place?
That would kind of require you to believe that Alicorn was lying about the whole psychological stress thing, which is a spectacularly nasty thing to lie about. If you’re fine with that if it proves me wrong … I guess that’s a call you have to make.
That would kind of require you to believe that Alicorn was lying about the whole psychological stress thing. . .
I don’t follow this inference at all.
I would guess that she “didn’t recognize this as an opportunity to use her skills” because of the psychological stress.
That is, because of the psychological stress of interacting with you, she came to the mistaken conclusion that she ought not to like you, so she never tried to apply her advice. That would be my guess.
ETA: Maybe this is your reasoning (please confirm or deny): A person with the ability to choose to like anyone would choose to like everyone, especially the people that he or she really, really doesn’t like. This is because disliking someone is unpleasant, and it’s more unpleasant the more you dislike them. But liking someone is pleasant, so that is what someone with the power in the OP would choose to do. Therefore, someone who claims to have the power in the OP, but who also evidently doesn’t like someone, is probably lying or deluded.
Fourth time: the advice applies to canceling dislike, just as much as changing to like.
So, your position is now that Alicorn suffers psychological stress from seeing my name all over her favorite[1] discussion site, but feels this is just “something she has to live with” (though it has disadvantages of its own), becuase of the severe wrongness of turning off her dislike of me?
It’s okay to say “oops”.
ETA:
Maybe this is your reasoning (please confirm or deny): A person with the ability to choose to like anyone would choose to like everyone, especially the people that he or she really, really doesn’t like. …
Not even close: I listed the reasons Alicorn unnecessarily adheres to a dislike that are specific to this situation, and how the unpleasantness can be good for and the site by switching to non-dislike … already it looks nothing like the reasoning you posited.
[1] please, please don’t nitpick this one—you get the point, I hope
So, your position is now that Alicorn suffers psychological stress from seeing my name all over her favorite[1] discussion site, but feels this is just “something she has to live with” (though it has disadvantages of its own), becuase of the severe wrongness of turning off her dislike of me?
Yes, I think that that is a fair description of my position. (ETA: However, the “severe wrongness” need not be moral wrongness. Humans often want to do unpleasant things and very much don’t want to do something that would increase their pleasure. It’s not all that unusual. Usually this is for moral reasons, as conventionally understood, but not always.)
Did you read my edit to my last comment? Does it capture your reasoning (with “like” replaced with “not dislike”, if you like)?
Cute, but considering how contorted your position has turned out to be, you can forgive me for wondering if you wanted to stick with it.
Yes, I think that that is a fair description of my position. (ETA: However, the “severe wrongness” need not be moral wrongness. Humans often want to do unpleasant things and very much don’t want to do something that would increase their pleasure. It’s not all that unusual. Usually this is for moral reasons, as conventionally understood, but not always.)
And that’s what I mean: on top of the already contorted position I attributed to you, you’re adding this moral-or-maybe-something else wrongness, which has no precedent in your earlier justifications. Do you think it’s probably one of the non-moral-wrongness things? Is that just a matter of terminology?
My earlier comment has been revised to respond to your addition, but it’s just an elaboration of “wtf? no”.
Do you take enjoyment in participating in these long, often repetitive arguments? Do you not find the antagonism consistently grating or stressful? If you have been wronged, surely from experience you can see that repeatedly bringing it up is simply not going to change anything. I’m curious as to whether this apparent futility bothers you in the same way that I know it would bother me.
Do you take enjoyment in participating in these long, often repetitive arguments?
No.
Do you not find the antagonism consistently grating or stressful?
I do find the antagonism grating and/or stressful. (The same with questions posed in the negative, but I digress.)
If you have been wronged, surely from experience you can see that repeatedly bringing it up is simply not going to change anything.
It’s definitely going to change the cardinality of the set of non-anonymous people who can indepently confirm or disconfirm being on the receiving end of Alicorn’s wisdom, which is what I was mainly hoping for.
To your broader, implied query: I’m between a rock in a hard place. I’ve wanted to point out what a crock Alicorn’s supposed insight on the matter is since her luminosity series (this isn’t the first time she’s posted advice in direct contradiction of how all evidence reveals she handles situations). After about the ~8th article, I couldn’t let her go on promoting this two-faced act, so I spoke up.
No, I don’t enjoy becoming LW’s whipping boy every three months. But what can I say—no good deed goes unpunished.
(The same with questions posed in the negative, but I digress.)
This doesn’t work online, but Steve Rayhawk has cultivated the habit of consistently responding to questions in the negative with an affirmative response (‘Yes, I do not believe that’, or simply ‘Yes’) and thus I feel I do not have to sacrifice meaning for ease of conversational flow. I really wish this would become a more common disposition. Anyway, sorry for doing that.
I think you discount the possibility (I have no idea how probable it is, by the way) that Alicorn is actually a generally luminous and thoughtful person and that for some reason you seem to be an especially rare and difficult case for her. Maybe she has legitimate things to say to help people generally, even if she messed up (or you messed up for her) the dynamic between you two specifically. I know Alicorn. She can be critical, but she’s genuinely a good person. It could be that you’ve been wronged, but it could also be that this is an an atypical result for people who interact with Alicorn, as most of the evidence seems to suggest. Generalizing from one example, although it probably feels justified, might actually be the wrong thing to do here. It might be impossible for you, but I’d suggest letting it go. All of the writing time you’ve spent on comments in this thread could have been spent on a good post, which is your strong point. One should generally not spend their time optimizing for cold harshies.
I’m not generalizing from one example, and my reaction is not atypical. Looking at the moderation difference between Alicorn and HughRistik regarding her advice here, and the numerous other times she posts dating/meeting friends advice in the comments section (rather than as an article), it seems that most men here aren’t benefitting from what she has to say in their daily lives—though they may certainly find the advice intellectually stimulating.
I’m not generalizing from one example, and my reaction is not typical.
Point taken (and I think you meant atypical?). It’s funny, because I know Hugh and I know Alicorn, and I bet they’d make decent friends in person (if they haven’t met already at a Less Wrong meetup while I was on vacation or something). Anyway, your claim here seems way more reasonable than the dramatized ones above. (“I couldn’t let her go on promoting this two-faced act”.) It seems you have narrowed your argument specifically to relationship advice, in which case I’m much more tempted to agree that your point has merit. But I think her luminosity sequence got a lot of upvotes for a reason. I personally found some useful concepts in there, and looking at the comments it seems many others also discovered her ideas about luminosity to be useful. First, I don’t think shouting ‘hypocrisy’ is a good argument against the usefulness of a post; second, I don’t think that shouting ‘hypocrisy’, or attempting ad hominem attacks, is going to get you anywhere anyway. If you want to make people think Alicorn is a bad person, fine, but why the heck would you want to do that? Vengeance? It seems you take the more reasonable position that Alicorn might be being trusted as an expert where she lacks skill, but continuing to attack her in areas where skill has been demonstrated erodes Less Wrongers’ ability to believe you are acting in good faith.
Cute, but considering how contorted your position has turned out to be, you can forgive me for wondering if you wanted to stick with it.
Hmm. I thought that I laid it out very cleanly here.
And that’s what I mean: on top of the already contorted position I attributed to you, you’re adding this moral-or-maybe-something else wrongness, which has no precedent in your earlier justifications. Do you think it’s probably one of the non-moral-wrongness things? Is that just a matter of terminology?
I think that it’s probably moral wrongness, but I’m less certain, so I’m more cautious about attributing that view to her.
But, at any rate, I honestly don’t see the contortions to which you refer. Perhaps she would experience a certain increase in pleasure if she modified herself not to dislike you. If she has this power, but chooses not to use it, then you may conclude that she cares about something more than that pleasure. It’s sort of like how Ghandi wouldn’t take a pill to make himself like to kill people, even if he knew that he would have lots of opportunities to kill people at no cost. There is a very standard distinction between what you think you ought to do and what you think will give you the most pleasure. I would expect the inferential distance on LW for this to be very short. That is why I don’t see my position as contorted.
Give me just a little credit here: yes I do understand the difference between “this increases my pleasure” and “I should do this”; and yes, there should be low inferential distance on explaining such a point on LW. That’s wasn’t in dispute. What’s in dispute is how much contortion you have to go through to justify why that distinction would be relevant and applicable here (which even the contortion leaves out).
And you didn’t lay it out very cleanly in the linked comment: you just made one distinction that is a very small part of what you have to say to specify your position.
My view is that Alicorn probably perceives certain benefits from not disliking you, such as the ones you’ve enumerated. But evidently she also sees other costs from not disliking you (costs which are probably moral). In her estimation (which I think is incorrect) the costs outweigh the benefits. Therefore, she has chosen not to apply the advice in the OP.
What’s contorted about that? As I see it, I’m just taking her revealed preferences at face value, while giving her the benefit of the doubt that she has the powers described in the OP.
Not even close: I listed the reasons Alicorn unnecessarily adheres to a dislike that are specific to this situation, and how the unpleasantness can be good for and the site by switching to non-dislike … already it looks nothing like the reasoning you posited.
Okay, how about this*:
Alicorn knows** that she ought to like Silas. Therefore, if she had the power to like whomever she wanted, she would have chosen to like Silas. Since she hasn’t chosen to like Silas, she must not have the powers she claims in the OP. Therefore, she was deluded or lying when she wrote the OP, so we can dismiss her advice
* I’m honestly just trying to understand your view. I expect that my picture of your view is still wrong in significant respects. But the best way that I know to improve my understanding is to give you my picture so far, so that you can correct it. I am not trying to characterize your view for rhetorical purposes. Again, I know that my picture is probably wrong.
* It is not enough that she ought to know, any more than we should dismiss the hitman’s advice on how to kill just because he is so clearly wrong about when* to kill.
If you do get the distinction, do you recognize that Alicorn’s OP is entirely about (1), while your criticisms are entirely about (2)?
From the very first sentence the underlying premise supporting that ‘how’ is that the author can, in fact, do the thing in question. It isn’t presented as something known in theory, were that the case external evidence would be required, not implicit reference to personal experience. This being the case either a demonstrated strength in the area or a description of specific improvement in a weakness is required to give support to the ‘how to guide’ in question.
(The above is independent of whether Alicorn is hypocritical or otherwise a worthy subject of moral sanction. It is just a rejection of the claim of Tyrrell’s that observations of the poster is ‘entirely’ irrelevant to the credibility of the advice given. With extra rejection given to the condescending tone.)
From the very first sentence the underlying premise supporting that ‘how’ is that the author can, in fact, do the thing in question. It isn’t presented as something known in theory, were that the case external evidence would be required, not implicit reference to personal experience.
I don’t see what you’re saying here beyond what I myself said here, when I wrote,
I agree that someone giving advice on (1) should have applied (1). Otherwise, they don’t have a justified claim to the knowledge in (1).
To be a little more explicit, I meant “applied (1) successfully”. As I go on to say, this does not contradict the distinction between (1) and (2), because:
What I don’t get is why it is relevant if the advice-giver failed to realize that they should have applied (1) in some particular case, even if they ought to have known that they should have applied (1).
To give a gruesome example, a professional hitman might be able to give very good advice on how to kill someone you’ve decided to kill, even if his advice on when to decide to kill someone is spectacularly bad.
Similarly, your evaluation of Alicorn’s advice on how to like someone you’ve decided to like should be independent of your belief that she’s very bad at deciding when to like someone.
(I’m quoting myself at length here because someone downvoted me earlier for giving just a link to another comment when I thought that the other comment said all I would want to say.)
You go on to say,
This being the case either a demonstrated strength in the area or a description of specific improvement in a weakness is required to give support to the ‘how to guide’ in question.
I think that this is a form of asking for impossible evidence. Of course, the evidence you request is not really impossible. Alicorn could have given all sorts of identifying details of the people she forced herself to like, and she could have described at length the circumstances under which she did so.
However, it’s not reasonable to have expected her to do this in the OP. The social sanction against doing that kind of thing is too great, and with reason. It would not have helped the reception of her article to drag forth all of her grievances and peeves against someone, just to describe how she overcame all these issues and learned to like the person. To expect this of her is to have an unrealistic picture of human interaction.
Therefore, Alicorn’s lack of “description of specific improvement” is not Bayesian evidence against her ability to do what she advises, nor against the possibility that she has applied her advice with success. We just have to evaluate the plausibility of her hypothesis by other means, such as consistency with our prior knowledge and our own experimental tests.
With extra rejection given to the condescending tone.
My blunt tone is intended to be a sign of respect to Silas. One of the things that I admire about him is that, when he disagrees with someone, he says so plainly, often without expressing contempt (though not often enough). He does not obscure his position by softening it to save feelings. I extend to him the same courtesy.
Actually, there’s one more important thing I should add: I have conclusive evidence that Alicorn has much to gain from getting over this dislike, by her very own standards. I can prove this by showing that she enjoys my posting, and wishes to reply to—and even provoke—my posting, just so long as she knows it’s not me. That shows a critical failure to apply her advice when could actually do some good, or at least a failure to recognize a set of heuristics that correctly indicate when the advice should be used.
So why is Alicorn’s advice particularly insightful on this subject?
One possible reason Alicorn hasn’t applied her technique to you is that it simply isn’t powerful enough to overcome your unpleasantness. FWIW, I perceive you as a lot less civil than the LW norm, you seem possessed of a snarky combativeness. You also appear to have a tendency of fixating on personal annoyances and justifying your focus with concerns and observations that pop out of nowhere, context-wise.
In this case, your supposed insight into what would really be best for Alicorn plays that role. And then, having established this “lemma”, you carry through to the conclusion that… Alicorn’s behavior is inconsistent. Take a step back, and look at what you’re saying. You’re basically claiming to have reverse-engineered someone else’s utility function, as the premise of an argument which concludes that they’re being a hypocrite.
I hope you’ll come to see this sort of behavior as embarrassing.
I do not know you and I do not know Alicorn. I do not know who I would have the most sympathy for if I did know both of you. I find this whole discussion off topic. Alicorn gave some advice and I find the advice interesting whether she follows it or not, whether she even believes it or not.
It is very good advice (if and only if you may want from time to time to like someone that you have come to dislike). I personally have tried to develop ways to not start to dislike people in the first place and not worry about whether liking them is to my advantage. However, it has not always been the case that I could like someone and it was sometimes to my disadvantage - so I appreciate the advice.
I suggest that you judge the advice and not the person who gave it. The ‘others of us’ are not interested in this fight.
So why is Alicorn’s advice particularly insightful on this subject?
Again, because she’s not giving advice on knowing when you ought to like someone. She’s giving advice on what to do after you have decided that you ought to like someone, even though you don’t like them automatically.
No, she’s listing advice that can be used to like someone or remove dislike. And yet she’s shown a solid history of the advice’s complete ineffectiveness (or her belief in its ineffectiveness) when a frequent commenter on her favorite message board is causing her “undesirable peripheral psychological” harm by virtue of her extreme dislike!
If that’s not relevant to showing her advice to be phony, what would be? And why should I have stayed silent on the existence of these two Alicorns?
Alicorn’s time and attention and energy belong to her, not to you.
That forms a large part of why I’ve never suggested otherwise, and of why you figured it would be so hot-shot to pretend I meant otherwise.
Alcorn’s time/etc. do belong to her. The right to exclude my comments from public discussion does not. The right to lie about the tremendous psychological terror I’m inducing in her doesn’t belong to her either.
*Hence the disagreement.*
If you’re trying to get people to think worse of her and better of you, you don’t seem to be succeeding.
If I can be the one person willing to go on record on her “masterful” control of her dislike, I’ll gladly take the minor karma hit … though mine’s actually gone up since I started posting in the discussion, if you can even fathom that.
And yet she’s shown a solid history of the advice’s complete ineffectiveness (or her belief in its ineffectiveness) when a frequent commenter on her favorite message board is causing her “undesirable peripheral psychological” harm by virtue of her extreme dislike!
Of course her advice is ineffective if one has decided to dislike someone. But this is no mark against her, because her advice is entirely about what to do after one decides not to dislike someone.
If that’s not relevant to showing her advice to be phony, what would be?
What would be relevant would be a case where she had decided to like someone, applied the advice in the OP, and yet failed to like the other person. Also relevant would be a general theoretical argument that the techniques in the OP wouldn’t get you (the general you) to like someone even after you had decided that you ought to.
And why should I have stayed silent on the existence of these two Alicorns?
ETA: Why haven’t you applied this advice to me?
I hope you’ll all forgive the pedantry, but it seems clearly laying out the argument might be the best way to avoid a flame war that isn’t making anyone look good, or encouraging rationality particularly. If this post is downvoted, I’d suggest we leave the topic.
NB: I don’t know enough of the history to judge who is more/less right/wrong between Alicorn and SilasBarta, and even if I could, probably wouldn’t say. I solely intend to attempt to clarify what SilasBarta meant.
Summary of what I take to be SilasBarta’s argument:
SilasBarta replying to Alicorn causes Alicorn psychological damage because Alicorn dislikes SilasBarta.
If Alicorn did not dislike SilasBarta, Alicorn would not incur psychological damage when SilasBarta replied to her.
There are advantages to Alicorn of being able to freely discuss with SilasBarta.
If Alicorn did not dislike SilasBarta, these advantages would outweigh the costs (e.g. time taken reading his replies).
Alicorn doesn’t get any benefit from disliking SilasBarta.
Hence it would be beneficial for Alicorn to cease disliking SilasBarta.
Alicorn is (as reasonable an approximation as a human fairly expect to be) rational.
Hence if something would be beneficial for Alicorn to do, she would do it.
Hence if Alicorn could stop disliking SilasBarta, she would do so/would have done so.
Alicorn has not ceased disliking SilasBarta, and does not appear to be doing so.
11) Hence Alicorn does not have a general method for stopping disliking people.
Possible counter-arguments:
Alicorn’s method relies on focusing on positive aspects; SilasBarta has no/too few positive aspects for this to work.
SilasBarta’s comments have no interest to Alicorn.
Alicorn has better things to be doing with her time than building a good relationship with SilasBarta.
Alicorn thinks there are lower-hanging fruit than SilasBarta.
To start liking SilasBarta would signal that her threats weren’t credible.
Alicorn’s method has to be used before a deep dislike has set in.
SilasBarta is undermining her attempts by posting comments about her, which she finds upsetting. In this situation, containment (e.g. asking him not to reply to her) is better than cure (creating a positive relationship).
Alicorn rarely gets to see SilasBarta at what she would consider ‘his best’ – she is most aware of his posts about her, which she doesn’t enjoy.
Alicorn thinks SilasBarta is very rational, and thus attributes his acts to him, rather than his environment.
Edit: list formatting.
Downvoted for needlessly snarky tone, especially when you already have a history of causing negative emotional reactions in Alicorn and from the tone it seems like you’re trying to cause more. A neutral “why haven’t you applied this advice to me?” would have been a reasonable query.
No, it wouldn’t have been, but let’s try that just so you’re convinced.
ETA:
When someone, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t practicing remotely close to what she preaches (and I’ve held silent on the first several times she preached this), and claims special insight on it, my obligation to point this out overrides most other obligations. That, and nothing else, motivates my comment.
ETA2: And before you suggest another brilliant idea like, “At least you should have kept this to PM”: no, Alicorn’s made pretty clear that’s not an option either.
EDIT: I’ve reconsidered this, and what I wrote here is unfair to SilasBarta. What really happened here, I think, is that Alicorn’s actions inadvertantly set up a feedback loop, which no one understood well enough to shut down before it blew up here. In this post, I chided Silas for not recognizing and disarming that feedback loop—but the truth is, there were plenty of people, including both Alicorn and myself, who could’ve repaired the situation with a little more awareness, and this comment really didn’t help.
And to clarify—what started this whole thing was Alicorn asking Silas not to respond to any of her comments, which was a strange and hostile thing to ask. In this comment, I interpreted that request by rounding it to the nearest non-strange request, which more than I thought. Unfortunately, when asked to clarify, Alicorn clarified it as literally “don’t reply to comments”, rather than “don’t try to initiate conversations”, as she should have.
Original comment below:
Ok, this has gotten painful to watch, and since no one has explained it properly, I feel I ought to overcome the bystander effect and step in. SilasBarta, you have dramatically misunderstood what is happening here. You are flagrantly violating a social norm that you do not seem to understand. Alicorn has acted in a way that is fully determined by your behavior towards her, and anyone else would do the same in her place.
When you speak someone’s name and know that they can hear you, you are, in effect, attempting to summon them. It effectively forces them to listen; if in public, they may need to step in to defend their reputation, and if in private they know they’re specifically being addressed. Attempts to initiate conversation are a social primitive; neurotypicals track a statistical overview of the nature, frequency, and response given to conversations with each person, and expect each other to do the same.
If you attempt to initiate conversation with someone, they give you a negative response, and you knew or should have known that they would give you a negative response, then you are pestering them. By “negative response”, I mean visible irritation, anger, or an attempt to push you out of their sphere of attention without using a pretext. If you repeatedly pester someone who has specifically asked you not to, and you don’t have a sufficiently suitable and important pretext, then you are harrassing them. Pestering someone is frowned upon. Harrassing someone is frowned upon, and can also be illegal if it either carries an implied threat or is sufficiently flagrant. Also, our culture assigns additional penalty points for this if you are male and the person you’re harrassing is female.
So here is the story, as I understand it. After an interaction that did not go well, Alicorn asked you not to reply to her comments. This means “don’t pester me” (or more succinctly, “go away”). This is one of a small number of standard messages which all neurotypicals expect each other to be able to recognize reliably and to pick out of subtext. You continued to participate in conversations Alicorn was involved in, by responding to other commenters, but every time you did so you spoke Alicorn’s name, even when you had no pretext for doing so. You interpreted her request in a literal-minded but incorrect way; you failed to generalize from “don’t respond to my comments” to “don’t try to pull me into a conversation with you by any means”.
I’m curious now about this community’s perceptions of a person A’s requests for a person B not to reply to A’s comments. (Note: I’m using letters A and B because this isn’t about the particular situation or the individuals in question, and I don’t want the individuals’ identities to distract from the issue here.)
I posted a comment stating that it wasn’t reasonable to ask someone not to reply, which got downvoted. I’m assuming this got downvoted because people disagree.
One person replied stating that A’s original request was not to avoid replying to any of A’s comments, but to stop making comments that specifically single A out. However, this was not B’s interpretation of the request. B seems to think, possibly incorrectly, that A asked B not to reply to any of A’s comments on LW.
For people who think this is a reasonable request, here’s a hypothetical: suppose C and D are enrolled in a philosophy class together. C and D have an unpleasant interaction, and C requests that D not raise her hand in class and participate in class discussion after C has made a comment. Do people agree that this would be an unreasonable request, unlike, say, “please don’t call or email me”? If so, why is a request to not reply to someone’s LW comments substantially different?
It depends on whether D’s intention in responding to a comment of C is to contribute to the class discussion or to needle C.
No, the request we’re talking about is “don’t comment at all in reply to my comments.”
Edited to fix link.
ETA: Also see here
In a classroom setting, the right to ask people to leave or to not participate is reserved exlusively for the professor; a student could not ask another student to shut up without the teacher’s express consent. On a blog, however, no such authority exists, so anyone can make such requests—but only in response to breaking certain social norms without a good excuse.
Well, blogs do have administrators, who hold a similar authority. I believe Eliezer has banned several people from LW for making only poor quality or trollish posts, for instance.
Well, yes, anyone can make such requests, just like I can request that LW commentors refrain from using the word “the” because I find it incredibly offensive. The point is that it isn’t a reasonable request. If someone’s violated enough of the community norms to be banned, that’s a matter for the administrator, but that’s different than an individual requesting “please don’t reply to my comments in a public discussion forum” as if it were comparable to “please don’t email or call me.”
Upvoted for the good explanation of the social norm of name-speaking; not necessarily because of the criticism of SilasBarta.
Ok, that’s ridiculous. Comments on LW are part of a large group discussion. A person can tell someone else to stop bugging them or emailing them or calling them, but it is not reasonable to ask someone to not make public comments on LW. No one has the right to do that, any more than I have the right to say “stop using the Internet; it bugs me.”
True, but that’s not the request that was made. She asked him to stop making comments which specifically single her out.
Sorry, jimrandomh, but you are flatly wrong here, and this misunderstanding underpins your entire criticism. Alicorn has asked that I not post any comments as a reply to hers, even if they don’t single her out, and even if they involve asking others not to mod her down because of the context of her comment! See here, and here.
Now, please revise your diplomatic comments in light of this new information.
(The funniest part is how Alicorn keeps appealing to her own non-neurotypicality, despite my being the only one accused of missing something due to non-NT. Go fig.)
The most accurate phrasing of the intended meaning of Alicorn’s request is the one I wrote in my first post: “do not try to pull me into a conversation with you by any means”. A direct reply does that; it singles out the author of the parent, to a degree that depends on how easily someone else could step in and take their place in the conversation. Non-reply comments also do that if they name her; she didn’t explicitly say that wasn’t allowed, but “leave me the fuck alone” should’ve covered it.
Except that I stated what I took the request to mean, and she agreed with that. And “do no try to pull me into a conversation …” just ain’t part of it. Take, for example, this comment and this one. Off limits? Well, Alicorn certainly reserves the right to make such comments on my top-level posts. And it doesn’t obligate her to respond directly.
So you still appear very confused about the topic you’re opining on so strongly and confidently.
Not even close: see here, another major example of Alicorn saying what is and is not okay. The comment I made, though nested under her comment, does not in any way draw her into a conversation, because it is a remark about someone else. It is not addressed to her, but to the group in general, regarding a different poster. Still off limits, for some reason.
Is it starting to dawn on you how you’ve misinterpreted Alicorn’s past demands, and why you should maybe withdraw your misconception -rounded, “noble” criticism of me from earlier?
I see two problems with your selected case.
First, you appeared to violate the stated version of the rule. You need a better reason just to create that appearance than wanting to make a jocular remark.
Second, jocular remarks are drawing people into conversations—they’re probably the number-one way to draw someone into a conversation. People joke around with people that they like, and Alicorn does not like you.
I had no idea the concept of “jocular” even applied at the time (and remember, the aspie defense can only be used by Alicorn, not me!) I still don’t see how such a remark somehow draws Alicorn to post further (maybe in real life, in-person situations that might be true?).
Does anyone really see why that general, light-hearted jab at Mitchell somehow gives Alicorn a social obligation to continue?
As for violating the stated rule, my (quite reasonable) understanding at the time (though not anymore) was that the mere nesting of the comment doesn’t matter; what matters is who it’s directed at. And from context, it’s clear it’s a general, big-picture remark bout Mitchell’s theory’s inadequacy. (And a bit of a rude one, but not to Alicorn.)
So it’s far from obvious I was doing anything wrong at the time—but apparently, even defending Alicorn for saying “leave me the fuck alone” is blatant disregard for her—go fig!
Your defense of Alicorn is at +1. Your original remark is at −6. This is because the former comment was appropriate, and the latter not.
Edit 5/27: I have been reminded that the primary reason given for downvoting the original comment was that it was rude, not that it was a reply to Alicorn—I had forgotten this, and left a misleading impression as a consequence.
I hope you know this already, but your social coprocessor is crap, dude. You really need to put in some hard work developing a better set of heuristics, because you’ve been making a lot of blunders, and it’s turning people off.
The defense of Alicorn was at 0 earlier today, and long ago it went negative very quickly. It has nothing to do with appropriateness and everything to do with Alicorn wanting to impose unreasonable rules on me out of some misguided spite.
Thanks—I’m glad that won’t work as a self-fulfilling prophesy or anything, and it’s not the kind of thing you could have said privately—very thoughtful of you.
Well, I’m glad to know that on a site like LW, I will be given more patience because of the understanding of non-neurotypicality, so long as you use Alicorn rather than SilasBarta as your handle.
SilasBarta, let me tell you something. I am bad with names. Very, very bad with names. So bad that I know a guy who made bet that I wouldn’t know the name of his friend, who I had been hanging out with for years—and won the bet. If someone tells me in public, “Robin, you are terrible with names”, I have no grounds whatsoever to take that as an insult. It would be like being insulted that people thought I was a man. I have a beard, no breasts, and worse recall for names than the average parakeet, and all these things are painfully obvious in a short period of time.
SIlasBarta, you get caught up in more flamewars than almost anyone on Less Wrong. Drop the conspiracy theorists and you’re a lock. That’s a warning sign, man, just as much as the crazy differential between people knowing my name and my knowing theirs—it’s a clue that you’re in the wrong tail of the distribution. If you want to say that Alicorn is on the same side of the peak, I won’t argue with you, but that’s Alicorn’s problem, not yours. You need to figure out what you’re doing that can explain why the population gets peeved at you more often than it does at other people, because the difference is too large to explain by chance.
Request reason for downmod.
To be fair, I’m not a neurotypical and have advertised this on the Internet.
I think jimrandomh may be mistaken in selecting “neurotypical” as the relevant criterion—the correlated criterion of “well-socialized” may be nearer the mark.
Good point; that terminology would do a better job of hiding the dissonance in scolding me for my autistic errors, even as Alicorn alone gets the sympathy for being non-NT. Make sure to tell Jim!
“Well-socialized”, like “real number”, is a perniciously misleading term.
Why?
Because society is not particularly well optimized, the implication of goodness in the modifier “well” is deceptive—a well-socialized person is quite likely to be tribalistic and repressed, for example.
They are? I would expect a well-socialized person to be secure and comfortable and friendly.
Sounds like your definition of “well-socialized” is closer to “well-adjusted” than RobinZ’s.
As I understand them, skill in navigating social situations, epistemic rationality and psychological well-being are all separate features. They do seem to correlate, but the causal influences are not obvious.
ETA: Depends a lot on the standard you use, too. RobinZ is probably correct if you look at the upper quartile but less so for the 99th percentile.
As an aside, I would say that jimrandomh’s point relies upon describing a substantial population—more like the set of those above the upper quartile than those above the 99th percentile.
I don’t know nearly enough to defend my original stance. Consider me confused.
I think the point was that Silas is and he should have responded appropriately. Personally I think NT issue is irrelevant here unless the person receiving the message is not NT, in which case not getting it is a somewhat valid excuse.
Since you advertised it, which “bucket” are you in? My son is on the spectrum, somewhat high functioning, so potential development branches are of personal interest.
I have an Asperger’s diagnosis. People who know me in person and know the details of autism symptoms find it entirely credible. People who wouldn’t know an autie from any other neuroatypicality are surprised when I tell them (I’m high functioning and have decent social heuristics, and in the minds of the completely uninformed, autism = retardation plus rocking and hand flapping).
Show of hands: who thinks I’m neurotypical?
My hand is horizontal; I think Jim’s assumption is that you are. If you are credibly not, and feel you did not get Alicorn’s signal due to this you should say so—I think it will create an good case to smoke some peace pipes. Personally, I like you both and wish to see this settled.
Actually, my assumption was that he isn’t, although this was not based on any strong evidence.
Whoa, when was evidence a pre-requisite for you to post strongly about something? Since two minutes ago?
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you put full credence in Alicorn’s self-serving, unverifiable claim to having been diagnosed with Asberger’s, despite her infamous, “Why not just meet women on the internet?” line … am I right?
And yet the very basis for your criticism of me was that I’m making a non-NT-characteristic mistake in interpreting a social situation? Did your arguments come before or after your conclusion?
I, Lucas Sloan, do solemnly swear that Alicorn is not neurotypical, and very probably has Asperger’s. I further attest that the information this comment is based on is the result of having physically interacted with her.
Are you also solemnly swearing to ignorance of Alicorn’s long-time inarticulable ease with which she makes long-term friendships, a strong non-Asperger’s indicator?
I did not know of her ability to purposefully create friendships in any way.
Systematizing something which most people do naturally (ie making friends with people) is an indicator of Aspergers.
Except that she’d done it naturally all her life without any rigorous systematization—which is why she finds her methods so inarticulable (“why not just meet girls/friends on the internet?”). Someone who’s systematized it has gone through all the steps (the “nuts and bolts”) explicitly and has no trouble telling others how to do it—yet Alicorn has spectacularly, laughably failed at that.
(Good for her if she can make friends—but she can’t seem to pass that skill on.)
So the evidence suggests that this friendship ability did not originate from Asperger’s-type systematization, rendering it unable to substantiate claims of Aspberger’s.
:\
I know you saw this, you replied to one of the replies to it.
Yes, to criticize the advice’s actual vacuousness.
The advice requires you to know things that, as an AS type, you wouldn’t know to begin with. Her advice is just another form of “do what the other person believes is okay for you to do, and do it right and stuff”—this shows serious lack of systematization.
And what kind of advice is it anyway, to say, “Um, okay, first assume the other person has started the conversation...”
I’ve read everything that Alicorn wrote in that thread four times now, and don’t see anywhere where she said to assume that the other person has started the conversation. She didn’t give explicit advice on how to start a conversation, but note that the original comment is marked “some tidbits”, not “everything you need to know about having a conversation”.
She does give a useful, if rough, heuristic for determining when one shouldn’t try to start a conversation with a stranger:
Further, auties can learn heuristics that mitigate some of our social skills deficits, and Alicorn’s advice is generally within the realm of such heuristics; she doesn’t suggest reading the other person’s body language, for example, but gives advice that is likely to work without the knowledge that body language gives. Also, as a strong extrovert, Alicorn is more likely than most auties to have developed those heuristics to the point where they can be built on to create more advanced heuristics that go well beyond what is stereotypically expected of an autie.
What about the thing I just quoted:
Next:
Except that’s not useful, because socially-adept people violate that in spades.
Wait, I thought she was autistic?
As I discussed here, I don’t think being autistic and being extroverted are mutually exclusive, although they may co-occur in many individuals. Alicorn was actually one of the people I had in mind as someone whom I’ve met who has AS and is also extroverted.
Yes, I’m quite aware of that. And be that as it may, the experience of an extroverted autistic is going to be significantly different from that of a normal autistic, questioning the usefulness of the former’s insight into the latter.
I agree with you on this point. To the extent that Alicorn has presented her socialization/luminosity advice as being applicable to all people (or all autistic people), she has certainly overstated her case. Indeed, I would guess the reason her comment about meeting people on the Internet was downvoted was that it appeared to promise universally applicable advice, and as HughRistik ably pointed out, it did not fulfill that promise.
But my guess, based on Alicorn’s posts, would be that at this point, even Alicorn would agree that her advice may not work for all people. She backed off somewhat on the universal applicability of her Internet-socializing advice in response to HughRistik’s comment (“It is possible I was overgeneralizing”). And I think her more recent posts have mostly recognized that her advice may not be helpful to all people. For example, in the introduction to the luminosity sequence, she wrote:
Yes, she backed down in response to my comment, which I noticed and greatly appreciated. But she never made any personal admission of fault or retraction to Silas, so I understand why he held a grudge. After all, she did tell him:
At this point in the conversation, I really don’t see what Silas had done to deserve such as assessment, other than proclaim frustration at his dating situation, and point out that her advice wasn’t helpful to him.
If Alicorn had given Silas some kind of personal apology or retraction, admitting that it was premature to try to give him advice without understanding his situation, and imputing negative characteristics to him because of his difficulty accepting that advice, then perhaps the whole communication breakdown might not have happened.
While Silas has handled the interpersonal aspects of their interaction badly, so has Alicorn. I understand why he was frustrated, and felt motivated to point out seeming contradictions between the way she treated him and his arguments, and some of the other posting she did on LessWrong (I also noticed a contradiction between her excellent post on problems vs tasks, and her “let them eat cake” style dating advice to Silas). Along the way, Silas dug himself into a deeper and deeper hole with sarcasm and abrasiveness (despite the urging of me and many others to cool down) and convinced Alicorn and a bunch of other people that he is a jerk, even though he also seems to have made good faith efforts to have discussions with Alicorn on other subjects.
As a result, judgments of Silas by Alicorn or others based on his recent behavior risk falling prey to the fundamental attribution error that Alicorn correctly warns against in the original post. He does have (in my mind) a valid, unresolved beef with a certain lack of charity and hasty negative conclusions that Alicorn displayed to his arguments and character in the past. I strongly, strongly disagree with how he has been expressing it, but he does have a valid beef that people need to realize before piling on him (it’s a testament to the failure of his communication skills that he has slowly managed to alienate a large segment of the community even when he started out being in the right.)
Indeed with this single post you are a much better advocate for Silas than he has been with his many posts. I had not previously seen that post from Alicorn, and I suspect I am not the only one. I agree that Silas, while he has made some good points here and there, has mostly just dug himself a deeper and deeper hole. Whereas Alicorn’s radio silence, particularly in comparison with the frequency of Silas’s posting, has been the wiser move, whether or not it was calculated to be so.
Yes, they can afford to violate it because they can pick up on the relevant subtle cues. Any attempt at systematization in this sort is going to require having a more restrained set of options than that used by socially-adept people. That’s because the rules for how humans interact are really complicated. So even if you did have a decent descriptor for how they all worked, keeping track of all those rules would be really difficult.
And adhering to this rule will so constrain you and mark you as unusual, that it’s no different from just doing aspie SOP (what you’d do anyway).
If I could afford to only talk to people in these circumstances, I wouldn’t be asking for social advice.
It’s different in that it’s a kind of unusual behavior that helps one learn skills that can then be used to make one appear less abnormal.
Isomorphically, someone who was just learning to drive would not immediately try to drive on a busy highway; they would start by practicing in an empty parking lot, even though that’s not a normal venue for driving. Once they were confident in their ability to get the results that they wanted from their car, then they’d try driving on roads.
I concur with Lady Airedale, but from what I understand Alicorn is mostly extroverted in one-on-one settings and less so in large groups. I’m not sure how common this is for extroverts generally.
So then she is like most autistics, but still hasn’t actually systematized the problem in a way that she can articulate the solution to other real autistics.
I’m planning an article/series on how to explain, and I can definitely see more and more people every day who need it.
Downvote explanation requested.
Sorry, first hand knowledge wins.
I’m not familiar with this “infamous” remark and I’m not sure what you’re suggesting it proves or even implies. I recently read the book Born on a Blue Day, which was written by Daniel Tammet, a man with Asperger’s. He writes at one point:
Tammet met his partner on the Internet. His reasoning makes sense to me. Is there something ridiculous that I am missing about the suggestion that people, especially those with autism spectrum diagnoses, meet other people on the Internet, as opposed to real life?
Of course. Just check out HughRistik’s detailed explanation of how such a suggestion, like “let them eat cake” completely misunderstands the state of an AS male.
Yes, in some time and place it was possible for these internet chats to easily translate into dating for aspies, but apparently, everyone on the site seemed to disagree with Alicorn’s assessment.
But taking it as a given that Alicorn’s comment completely misunderstood the state of an AS male, how does it show that she also completely misunderstands the state of an AS female, and how does the comment therefore provide support for your suggestion that Alicorn’s AS is in doubt because she made that comment?
Because if she had AS, she would be approaching sociality from (more of a) blank slate, and would have to get explicit, conscious knowledge of the rules of sociality she learned, which could then be explained to other AS blank slates, male or female. But her advice is spoken from the perspective of someone who never had to systematize, but only had tacit understanding of sociality—and hence sounds vague to those who really need the advice.
Sorry, that ship has already sailed. Alicorn’s not interested until first I follow a divaesque list of demands, including “justifying the [probably fake] psychological stress” of having to deal with me, the same stress that somehow manages to disappear when higher-status members do the exact same things she doesn’t like.
No, everyone else who’s voiced an opinion on this has said that they would never ask someone what Alicorn has asked of me: that I never post a reply to her comments, even if it’s not directed at her.
I think that’s a large part of why I didn’t do any of that in the original comment, just in the version that Kaj asked me to post instead! Who should I listen to here, you or Kaj? Which is the real neurotypical standard that I violated?
No, as I said in my other reply to you, this isn’t Alicorn’s request at all. It’s:
-Don’t post any comments nested under Alicorn’s, irrespective of content or who the comment is directed at.
-Don’t PM Alicorn, even and especially if it’s something she would want to know but prefer not be said publicly. (?)
-But posting comments in reply to top-level posts is okay, because Alicorn wants to do so on my top-level posts.
Which comments are you talking about? Be specific. I don’t recall violating what Alicorn’s request actually was until this conversation, and even then, it wasn’t until I substituted my comment for what Kaj asked me to say, and I warned of this at the time!
That’s certainly the narrative you want to put on it, sure, but if you actually look at the history of what exactly she asked for (including the very specific clarificaitons), your interpretation is mistaken.
And while I’m believably non-NT, I think I can safely guess there wasn’t a lot of nobility in your intent to reply to this comment—not when anything I could have done would have given you a pretense to build yourself up by pointing out the “obvious” error on my part.
For the record: I wasn’t fully aware of the history and magnitude of this conflict, and I didn’t realize Alicorn had specifically asked for you to not reply to her at all.
Regardless, as I remember, both versions of the comment were (are) addressed to Alicorn. It was just more implicit in the first one (“I know someone this advice hasn’t been applied to” or something along those lines, I think), but it was still pointing out that Alicorn hadn’t applied the technique to you. Therefore it was referencing her, just as strongly as if you’d mentioned her.
psst! I’m still waiting for you to revise this comment in light of the demonstrable misconceptions you grounded it on.
Though if retracting some of your bold, noble statements would cost you a little status here and there, I just want to let you know, I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to step down from your position on the bandwagon. That’s just a decision you have to make between you and your god (or Omega, as the case may be).
She’s not necessarily failing to practice what she preaches.… after all, she never said that it’s a good idea to like everyone, only that it’s possible to like someone intentionally, and that this can be instrumentally useful in some circumstances. It’s entirely possible, however, that she simply has no desire to like you—on purpose or otherwise.
Much better, thank you. Changed my downvote to an upvote.
Thanks, but keep in mind I can’t even reply to this comment, where she tries to explain herself, as she will consider it an atrocity (much like terrorism is an atrocity), simply because she categorically demands that I not post a reply to any of her comments.
Considering that we talk about things other than “the history of Alicorn and Silas” on LW, and that I occasionally have good reason to reply to her comments, this gets to be very inconvenient, very quickly.
I hope it’s starting to become obvious why refusal to apply her own advice seems rather inconsistent and unbecoming of someone who would offer such advice.
Once again, how is it that she’s failing to apply her own advice? Several people now have offered a retort to this claim—either rebut it, or stop making the claim.
I did rebut those retorts. Now, respond to those rebuttals, or stop making the same claim (and starting an information cascade).
No, you just explained why it would be instrumentally useful to YOU for her to intentionally like you.
No, she clearly gains from being able to post impersonal replies nested under my comments—just as she gains from making posts replying to my top-level posts, even though I could revoke this privilege, and she would be obligated, by symmetry, to honor it.
So, even if she really, truly doesn’t care about having to avoid my comments, and even she doesn’t get “peripheral psychological” damage from seeing the existence of my comments (which, truth be told, she probably doesn’t), then this state only exists because of diplomacy on my part—not from following the advice in this article.
Can you substantiate this claim about what she considers to be morally equivalent better than you did in this conversation?
Re-read my comment above and note what it does and does not allege; and if “Alicorn deems violation of her demands to be an atrocity” is a reasonable characterization of where she stands.
The narrowest way that I can read your comment is as follows:
“There is badness level x such that Alicorn calls any act with badness level at least x an ‘atrocity’. Alicorn thinks that responding to her would have badness level at least x and that terrorism also meets or surpasses this level.”
Is that, and no more, all that you meant to imply? You intended no implication that Alicorn considers responding to her and terrorism to be anything remotely close to morally equivalent? Do you believe that terrorism is a representative example of the kinds of acts that Alicorn believes are worse than x? If not, why did you choose that example?
And did she actually use the word “atrocity” to describe your responding to her?
1) When paraphrasing others’ views, it’s not necessary that they have used the exact words before that you use in the paraphrase. That’s what makes it a paraphrase.
The question that matters is: are her actions consistent with classifying my (unapproved) replies to her as an atrocity? I say yes. For one thing, she brooks no excuse whatsoever for violating her demands, even when it goes against her interests. One time:
-She says it’s okay to post replies to her top level comments, but not by PM.
-I realize that one such “okay” comment would cause her to lose face, so I say it by PM.
-She accepts that it would cause her to lose face, but that PMing her was just as bad, but would have been okay if I said it publicly.
2) I invoke terrorism to emphasize her over-the-top responses to minor offenses (as she ignores them in others). (And also to remove the sting from the word, but that’s a different story.)
Then it sounds like “atrocity” is a prime candidate for tabooing. You made a step towards unpacking “atrocity” by saying that “she brooks no excuse whatsoever for violating her demands”.
But your evidence does not show that she brooks no excuse. It shows only that saving her face is an insufficient excuse. Saving her face sounds like a pretty small payoff for getting a PM, at least on a scale that includes terrorism. Therefore, the fact that saving face is an insufficient excuse is weak evidence for the claim that all excuses are insufficient. (Suppose you knew that there was a carbon monoxide leak in her room, and you could only tell her by PM. Do you really think that she would be upset with you if you did?)
But, I gather, you did not mean to imply that her moral evaluation of these “minor offenses” is actually equivalent to her moral evaluation to terrorism. Is that right?
Already done, as you mention, so you don’t need to belabor the issue of tabooing.
Okay, now re-interpret everything I’ve said or will say under standard conventions, in which one does not expect statements to be perfectly exceptionless.
No, it shows intransitive values, which suggests simplistic, trigger-happy moral evaluations.
Of course? The point was the hyperbole she uses in describing my affect on her, emphasized by reference to terrorism.
Why do you think that I took you to mean that your statement was “perfectly exceptionless”? If it is only because I used the phrase “no excuse”, then you are failing to extend to me the consideration that you are requesting.
This is not relevant, because I am not challenging your contention that she ought to like you. I am challenging the following contentions:
(1) It is appropriate to say “I can’t even reply to this comment . . . as she will consider it an atrocity (much like terrorism is an atrocity)”.
(2) Her decision not to like you shows that she is unqualified to give the advice in the OP.
You know that her description of psychological stress is hyperbole? That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you could establish reliably over the internet. Not without some smoking gun like her saying, “You know, Silas, I really like interacting with you.”
Because you base your entire reply to it on the assumption that it is substantively refuted the moment you find one atypical exception?
Second time: I do have solid proof for this in that she very much enjoys my contributions and even makes non-specific comments attempting to draw me out, so long as she doesn’t know it’s me. I have the smoking gun, however implausible you might think that to be. (Though I assure you I did not seek out such a gun, as no amount of effort would have reliably gotten Alicorn to do this; it’s too improbable.)
I will reveal who Jocaste is[1] once enough people can agree this would be sufficiently informative evidence.
[1] “reveal who Jocaste is” = an term I just made up which should make sense if you’re familiar with the story of Oedipus.
No, that was not the assumption of my reply. The assumption of my reply was that the excuse I gave (carbon monoxide leak) would not justify committing an atrocity. Therefore, if the excuse is an exception, then PMing her would not be an atrocity.
Suppose she said, “You know, Jocaste*, I really like your comments. I wish that you would post more often, especially in reply to my comments.”
That would not prove that her claims of psychological stress were hyperbole. The stress evidently arises from interacting with an entire picture of a person built from an entire comment history, not from any arbitrary subportion of that comment history.
* Here I’m using “Jocaste” as a place-holder.
Then why did you make this alternate identity?
For all of the reasons anyone would make a separate account here: to make an (unrelated) point, to see if my comments are modded differently if people don’t know it’s me, to pose questions I wouldn’t want to ask under my real name, etc. etc.
Again, Blueberry, I could have gotten CIA covert ops to help me trick Alicorn into making the comments I have in mind; it still wouldn’t have done any good. These are remarks you just can’t reliably lure people into saying.
I’m really curious now who it is. So why don’t you just switch over to your new identity?
Enough. If you really want to know, then add your name to and promote this petition,
“We, the undersigned, are prepared to believe Alicorn has been deliberately and unnecessarily vindictive toward Silas, as judged by her treatment of Silas when she doesn’t know it’s him; and that this behavior casts doubt on the merit of her interpersonal advice, once we learn who Silas’s alternate identity is and see Alicorn’s relevant posts regarding that person.”
which is one of the few reasons I’d couple myself to the other screenname. (And I suspect Alicorn is taking a long walk through her comment history right about now...)
That’s ridiculous and insulting. If she reacts differently to your other identity, it’s because your other identity has acted differently. And if you want a person to like you, then circulating a petition saying bad things about them, as you are doing now, is among the very worst things you could do.
Furthermore, creating an alternate identity and interacting with Alicorn under it is extremely threatening behavior; it demonstrates both an unhealthy obsession and a willingness to deceive.
By the way, regarding this:
I think you could really benefit from a hot cup of “get some perspective”. Despite all the flak I get for characterizing Alicorn et al’s reactions to me as calling them “atrocities” and “terrorism”, it’s comments like yours here that show that people really dive into the hyperbole when talking about what I did.
“Extremely threatening behavior”? Um, hello? I don’t know who Alicorn is, or what she looks like, and only sketchy information about where I’d find her. If you believe that anything about my behavior here, anything whatsoever, is “extremely threatening”, then start acting like it—go get the police involved, since you think such a severe threat is going on.
And after the police laugh in your face, you could take a deep breath, drop the hyperbole, and stop looking for reasons to smear me. Sound like a plan?
It’s easy to throw off a damaging, irresponsible allegation that someone else is dangerous. The hard part is to actually substantiate that chest-beating. And it’s yet harder to unring the great “evil” bell you’ve just rung over my head. An apology is in order—but I’ve learned long ago not to expect that, from anyone here, once they’ve comitted to a position publicly.
Very true. And since I was the one giving you a hard time for the “atrocity” and “terrorism” remarks, I feel bound to point out that accusing you of “extremely threatening behavior” is not only hyperbolic, but also more damaging to discourse because it amounts to accusing you of a crime. Definitely not cool.
“threatening” doesn’t necessarily imply threats of violence or criminality, it can simply refer to threats of further harassment.
But how about we remove the word “threatening” and replace it with plain ole “creepy”.
Does anyone disagree with this statement?
It would be creepy for someone to create an alternative identity and use it to interact intentionally with Alicorn in a way that they couldn’t with their original identify.
But that’s not what Silas did.
OK. I have no idea what Silas did, beyond what’s been said in this thread. I was just trying to rephrase the statement in a way that removed the connotation of criminality that was alleged to be embedded in the word “threatening”
But when this identity acts like that identity, somehow, that’s not enough to change her reaction! Go fig.
What a crock. Even when the comment was up (which it hasn’t been for 15+ minutes), it wasn’t doing that. But I guess deleted comments are the easiest targets for misrepresentation.
Seriously, are you capable of having all the facts before you criticize someone? Is that just not in your job description?
Except a) I didn’t seek to “interact with Alicorn”. Rather, Miss “I’m terrified of Jocaste” replied to Oedipus’s mother!
and
b) alternate screennames, in and of themselves, are acceptable behavior on LW and do not count as deception for the numerous justifiable reasons for using them.
Wait, I forgot—this is Silas we’re talking about. Screw the rules.
Ok, there’s some unfortunate timing here in that I saw and replied to the post above without knowing that it was deleted. I infer from the fact that you deleted it, that you realized the subtext was saying something you didn’t mean to say. So, I applaud your discretion and will delete my criticisms in the grandparent. I also had wrongly assumed that you had used your alternate identity to post replies to Alicorn rather than the other way around, which would have very different significance.
I do think you ought to take a lesson from Prof Quirrell on backing down gracefully, though.
No, you just explained why it would be instrumentally useful to YOU for her to decide to like you.
You keep using this analogy to terrorism. Where does it originate?
A story for curious onlookers:
On March 25 I received a PM from Morendil. Its full text follows.
I replied:
Morendil’s reply (including a minor edit he clarified in a separate message):
I said:
Apart from a mis-addressing of the passing on of this message, I heard nothing more on the topic from anyone thereafter.
Not enough context—where is the fight itself?
There was an extended series of interactions, not all of which I can remember well enough to dig up via search; the bit where I told him to leave me alone is here.
Evidently, she doesn’t think that it would be instrumentally useful to like you. Perhaps you can sympathize, since you don’t seem to think that it would be instrumentally useful to like her.
Yes, but at least I want to lift off the albatross of having to avoid replying her comments (and her mine) even when it adds to the discussion and is not specifically directed at her. The advice she’s given in this article (and past ones) show she believes herself to be an expert on this, but won’t take even this reasonable step.
In my opinion, you are a poor judge of when a reply to Alicorn’s comments will add to a discussion. Your judgment seems to me to be biased strongly in favor of deciding to reply to Alicorn’s comments so as to highlight what you see as their shortcomings, possibly because you wish to lower her status. Thus, what you see as a useful contribution might be seen by others as the latest in a series of unwarranted snarky put-downs.
Therefore, if your primary desire is to discuss general issues that Alicorn also contributes to, you should take great pains to make it clear that you are not attempting to interact with Alicorn, much less disparage her. Concretely, this means that you would:
(1) not address Alicorn in the second person (2) not state or imply that Alicorn’s posts are worthless or nearly worthless (3) not ask, directly or indirectly, what Alicorn’s opinion on a subject is
but would instead
(4) make assertions about an abstract topic, using the third person (5) use polite phrases like “no offense,” “nothing personal,” or “in my opinion” (6) ask for the opinion of other LW commenters in general or for the opinion of specific named LWers who you get along with.
Minor note- the phrases “nothing personal” and “no offense” can often have the exact opposite of the intended result. Tthey can come across as condescending and very often when people use them they really are trying to be offensive, although they may not realize it. (A relevant quote from me from about 10 years ago “No offense, but the only thing saving that argument from being completely stupid is that sections of it are incoherent.” (Yes, I’d like to think I don’t say things like that now)). And “in my opinion” is very rarely useful unless the point being made is that one is a subject matter expert. It also personalizes things unnecessarily in the same way that the 2nd person does, just to a lesser extent.
It probably appears that way because in all the cases since ~Nov ’09 when I have a substantive reply to an Alicorn comment, I just don’t make it because of this ban. So all the remaining ones you see will be less engaging and productive. Hey—maybe we should lift that ban … oh, wait.
I feel I have already demonstrated mastery of this in such comments as these. I don’t see how any reasonable person would find those offensive, even as they violate your extensive standards.
As for your (1) to (4) -- yeah, that’s an inconvenient, ridiculous set of hoops to jump through, which is why I want to get to the root of our disagreement, and eliminate the need to have to walk through a minefield to exchange ideas. Why doesn’t Alicorn want the same? You tell me.
I am not going to vote on or address the content of this post because, in my opinion, it engages in doublespeak and straw-manning. I have a blanket policy of not responding to such tactics on an Internet forum. I am extremely unlikely to make further public comments on the Alicorn-SilasBarta dispute(s).
She is not claiming to be an expert on recognizing when it would be good to like someone. Here is her claim of knowledge:
There is really no contradiction or hypocrisy here unless you are someone whom she wants to like deliberately.
It’s not necessary that I be someone she wants to like; the advice is just as relevant for canceling out dislike. And the extensive demands she makes out of that dislike suggest she doesn’t actually use this advise in at least one clear case where the dislike is having severe consequences.
Seriously, if the mere sight of a comment of mine replying to her—no matter what it says, no matter how impersonal—causes “undesirable peripheral psychological effects”, effects that must be elaborately justified by others in order for her to consider enduring them … you fill in the blank.
Look, I don’t claim to know the entire history of Silas v Alicorn… but I think you would have a much easier time making your case if the comments you made in this very thread hadn’t been so unnecessarily antagonistic.
Alright, so having been convinced I have something important to add, you decide that whatever I did to get you to that point was inappropriate. Fair enough.
But tell me, where would be the appropriate place to point out that this Alicorn is completely different from the one I’ve come to know? As far as possible from where she promotes her deep wisdom? Or near?
I honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say here.
Rhetorical question: Is here the best place to bring up the failures of her advice?
Non-rhetorical question.If I have evidence that suggests Alicorn acts completely differently than implied by this article, what is the best way to go about it, that would have (potentially) convinced you of its merit?
I’m not sure how this question is rhetorical, since it seems to have a perfectly straightforward answer: here would be a perfectly suitable place to bring up failures of her advice, if such failures actually existed.
We’ve made this point so many times now I feel silly even typing it again, but maybe one more time will do it: her advice has not failed. She wrote an article about how to go about intentionally liking someone. The fact that she’s chosen not to intentionally like you is not evidence that she is incapable of doing so in other cases, nor that the advice may not be useful to others.
Since she makes no claims about when or under what circumstances she makes use of the described method, the only thing I read the article to imply about her behavior is that she has had, on at least one occasion, some success in applying this method. So convincing me of the merit of the proposition that this is false would require documentary evidence of her entire life, exhaustively showing a complete absence of any instance of success with this method. Yes, that’s a tall order, but you’re the one who’s trying to prove a negative.
Isn’t Alicorn choosing not to try to like him based on an existing negative impression of him? In other word, she has decided not to try to like him… because she doesn’t like him in the first place...? Isn’t this exactly the kind of error that her post warns against? [Edit: I retract this particular paragraph for making assumptions about Alicorn’s motives that I can’t verify.]
I wonder if the whole breakdown between the two could have been minimized if Alicorn (and Silas) had been applying the type of strategies she mentions in the post from the start. She did mention avoiding the fundamental attribution error (emphasis mine):
In this case, there actually is a relevant circumstance (which I attempt to recount ): Alicorn was kind of a jerk to him in both intellectual and personal ways without any retraction or apology. He followed her around being increasingly sarcastic, and she wrote him off as a jerk, resulting in him becoming even more abrasive. [Edit: This is my perception as an observer with (a) significant agreement with Silas on substantive issues, (b) significant disagreement with Silas’ communication style, and (c) significant disagreement with Alicorn on certain issues.]
Alicorn doesn’t seem to have acknowledged the circumstance in which Silas was being abrasive and sarcastic towards her. People recently seeing their exchanges won’t know the circumstance, either. As a result, his comments may read as more hostile to them, when to me many of them read like frustration at being treated unfairly by someone and then being made into the bad guy when attempting to seek redress with them. Yes, many of his comments sound flat-out hostile to me, too (and I’ve told Silas in the past to tone it down), but these mainly started appearing after communication between the two of them had broken down, which seems a lot due to communication errors on Alicorn’s end, also.
When judging how much of a jerk someone is and deciding whether it’s worth trying to like them, it’s probably an example of the fundamental attribution error to judge them a jerk for being consistently sarcastic to you after you were a jerk to them and didn’t apologize. Alicorn’s assessment of Silas seems, to a large degree, a self-fulfilling prophecy (which also implies that there is a degree to which Silas’ sarcasm level isn’t justified by the way Alicorn treated him… though I do have sympathy for him for reasons I explain below).
Now, normally, I wouldn’t feel motivated to point a contradiction I perceived between a top-level post, and the behavior of a poster. I tend to treat people’s arguments in isolation. However, I’m not in Silas’ shoes. I know that I would feel frustrated and helpless if I was treated unfairly by a higher status member of a community, and then notice that person receiving acclaim from the community for advocating virtues that seemed absent in their treatment of me. I would start to feel a bit bullied if, when I had tried to point out the contradiction at various points and seek some updating from the high status person, members of the community sided with the high status person, rather than with me. I hope I would be able to just get over it, or communicate my frustration in a constructive way that put people on my side.
I have a decent level of social support, so I can handle someone giving me poor advice that is ignorant of my experience. I can handle people telling me something like what Alicorn told Silas (see my first link): that my female friends must not like me very much because they aren’t introducing me to more women. I could even handle someone saying: “If you’d like to add a less polite data point, I’d neither date you nor introduce you to my single friends based on what little I know of you” (Alicorn’s words to Silas, which were not justified by anything he had said at that point).
To me, I can shrug these things off; they aren’t a big deal… because I have social support. But it’s important to realize that to someone who has a below average level of social support, such presumptions are a big deal. People, including me, kept telling Silas to “get over” his issues with Alicorn, but perhaps what she said might have been disproportionately hurtful or angering to him than it would have been to any of us, and consequently harder to just “get over.” Silas still should have followed our advice, but our judgments of him based on the fact that he didn’t must take this potential background into account.
For people with lower social support, being asked to “get over it” can trigger past issues of bullying: being bullied by a more popular bully and then being told that it isn’t a big deal, and people judging you as more uncool for making a big deal about it than they judge the bully uncool for originally mistreating you. I am not saying that Alicorn was bullying Silas (though she may owe him some sort of apology or retraction), only presenting a hypothesis that her treatment of him, and our insistence that he “get over it” without any kind of apology or retraction from her, could well trigger a less-than-graceful response from someone with lower than average social support who have suffered interpersonal maltreatment in the past. If Silas belongs to such a class of people, it would explain a lot of the sarcasm and abrasiveness he has been flinging around towards people.
The ability to “just get over” people being a jerk to you and devaluing your social desirability is a privilege of people with social support. Since many of the people here might experience lower-than-average levels of social support, it’s a bad precedent on LessWrong if the norms allow someone to be a jerk to someone with a low level of social support, and then write the victim off as a jerk because they get mad and don’t respond as gracefully as someone with high social support would. It’s also a bad norm to allow poster A to be a jerk to poster B, and then accept that poster A can demand that poster B stop replying to them after poster B acts like a jerk in return.
For various reasons, Alicorn herself may not have realized that Silas felt maligned in that original discussion, or that she owed him an apology/retracion, and perhaps thought the updating she showed towards my explanation of where he was coming from was enough (again, see the first post I link to). As a result, she might have been mystified by why he was consistently being sarcastic to her, and imputed his behavior as a negative reflection of his character, such that he wasn’t worth communicating with or even trying to like. [Edit: Although these potential explanations of Alicorn’s thought processes are charitable, I acknowledge them as speculation.] This would be an example of the fundamental attribution error, even though it might have been an unknowing one.
Upvoted for being constructive and evenhanded. But I think a consensus has emerged that we should stop talking about this, or at least move it off this comment thread.
Upvoted for being an accurate and fair summary of the kerfuffle.
Please reconcile your obvious advice with jimrandomh’s equally-obvious but opposite advice given here. Specifically, on the issue of whether I should have made a comment in this discussion that implicitly requests a response from Alicorn.
Moderators: please withdraw your upvotes from the parent until you can come up with a course of action that would have satisfied both kodos96 and jimrandomh’s constraints; otherwise, you’re venturing deep into politicsland.
This is a fair point. Following jimrandomh’s advice would imply never criticizing Alicorn’s comments or posts. The letter of your “agreement” with Alicorn doesn’t require that, but jimrandomh’s advice does. I’ve upvoted this comment of yours and removed my upvote from jimrandomh’s. (I hadn’t upvoted kodos96′s.)
Merely being you and criticizing Alicorn ought not to be counted as pestering by this community. (Of course, certain kinds of criticism can count as pestering. And context, such as the poster’s identity, does count.)
My understanding of your agreement with Alicorn was that you were allowed to comment on each other’s top level posts, just not address each other directly. It may be that my understanding is incorrect (I don’t really care). The important part of what I said was the conditional, “if such failures actually existed.” If you’re pulling your claims of hypocrisy out of your ass, then there is no appropriate place for them.
And how’s that working out for you?
Well, it is indeed incorrect. The agreement’s not supposed to make sense—I found out the hard way what Alicorn is demanding.
Well, that’s subjective. If I have a good-faith suspicion of Alicorn not following this advice when in critical cases where it actually matters, surely, it obviously belongs here. Except that to jimrandomh, it obviously does. Which of these two contradictory obvious positions is right? And what inference should I draw from this kafkaesqueness?
… I don’t know how many more ways we can rephrase this till you get it: her advice is solely about how, not when or whether, to go about liking someone. So even if everything you’re saying is absolutely true, it does not refute the claims in the article.
Our positions aren’t contradictory. His is that you should refrain from commenting at all. Mine is that as long as you’re making personal accusations irrelevant to the OP, you should refrain from commenting. Since, in this case, you’re making personal accusations irrelevant to the OP, both our positions recommend the same course of action.
Granted, her advice is also relevant to canceling out dislike of someone whom you’ve already decided that you don’t want to dislike. But since she evidently has not made that decision with regard to you, it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to use her advice in this case. The relationship that you two have is not in a state where her advice is relevant. If Alicorn started writing posts about when one ought to like someone, then your criticisms would be relevant.
But her advice here is just not relevant to cases where one has decided that one really ought to dislike the other person.
I have already provided more than enough reasons why, by her own actions, she reveals that she believes she loses significantly (note those psychological stresses) by not counteracting her hatred. When you start addressing those points, you’ll have a case.
As it stands, Alicorn speaks as if from a different world than the one any named witness has seen her in.
Such a case would be for the claim that she ought not to like you. But I never made that claim, and I have no desire to make such a case. I like you and I think that she should, too.
But her wrong decision to dislike you does not imply that she is unqualified to give the advice in the OP, because the advice in the OP doesn’t concern the question of when one ought to dislike someone. The OP concerns the question of what to do after you have decided, by whatever means, that you ought not dislike someone whom you dislike.
Haven’t I shown that, by any reasonable measure—like the psychological stresses she claims (questionably) to get from merely noticing my comments—Alicorn ought to try to reverse this dislike, by her very own values?
Given that she does not apply the advice she gives here to this very real-world scenario, and I’m the only one so far with a name to go on record stating the impacts of these heuristics of engagement …
I too have observed a certain ironic discordance between some of Alicorn’s top level posts (including the luminosity series) and her observable behavior.
Do you get the distinction between (1) knowing how to do something, and (2) knowing when you ought to do that thing?
If you do get the distinction, do you recognize that Alicorn’s OP is entirely about (1), while your criticisms are entirely about (2)?
Do you get why demonstrating (2) shows why someone giving advice on (1) should, for consistency, have applied (1)? And therefore why (2) is relevant?
I’m actually am having a little trouble grasping your meaning with these questions. I agree that someone giving advice on (1) should have applied (1). Otherwise, they don’t have a justified claim to the knowledge in (1). But this is the case whether or not they demonstrate (2), which is why I’m confused by the wording of your question.
What I don’t get is why it is relevant if the advice-giver failed to realize that they should have applied (1) in some particular case, even if they ought to have known that they should have applied (1).
To give a gruesome example, a professional hitman might be able to give very good advice on how to kill someone you’ve decided to kill, even if his advice on when to decide to kill someone is spectacularly bad.
Similarly, your evaluation of Alicorn’s advice on how to like someone you’ve decided to like should be independent of your belief that she’s very bad at deciding when to like someone.
So that’s what your entire criticism amounts to? That maybe Alicorn just didn’t recognize this as an opportunity to use her skills, even as she goes through the terror of seeing my comments pop up all over the place?
That would kind of require you to believe that Alicorn was lying about the whole psychological stress thing, which is a spectacularly nasty thing to lie about. If you’re fine with that if it proves me wrong … I guess that’s a call you have to make.
I don’t follow this inference at all.
I would guess that she “didn’t recognize this as an opportunity to use her skills” because of the psychological stress.
That is, because of the psychological stress of interacting with you, she came to the mistaken conclusion that she ought not to like you, so she never tried to apply her advice. That would be my guess.
ETA: Maybe this is your reasoning (please confirm or deny): A person with the ability to choose to like anyone would choose to like everyone, especially the people that he or she really, really doesn’t like. This is because disliking someone is unpleasant, and it’s more unpleasant the more you dislike them. But liking someone is pleasant, so that is what someone with the power in the OP would choose to do. Therefore, someone who claims to have the power in the OP, but who also evidently doesn’t like someone, is probably lying or deluded.
Fourth time: the advice applies to canceling dislike, just as much as changing to like.
So, your position is now that Alicorn suffers psychological stress from seeing my name all over her favorite[1] discussion site, but feels this is just “something she has to live with” (though it has disadvantages of its own), becuase of the severe wrongness of turning off her dislike of me?
It’s okay to say “oops”.
ETA:
Not even close: I listed the reasons Alicorn unnecessarily adheres to a dislike that are specific to this situation, and how the unpleasantness can be good for and the site by switching to non-dislike … already it looks nothing like the reasoning you posited.
[1] please, please don’t nitpick this one—you get the point, I hope
You know, I’ve been thinking the same thing :).
Yes, I think that that is a fair description of my position. (ETA: However, the “severe wrongness” need not be moral wrongness. Humans often want to do unpleasant things and very much don’t want to do something that would increase their pleasure. It’s not all that unusual. Usually this is for moral reasons, as conventionally understood, but not always.)
Did you read my edit to my last comment? Does it capture your reasoning (with “like” replaced with “not dislike”, if you like)?
Cute, but considering how contorted your position has turned out to be, you can forgive me for wondering if you wanted to stick with it.
And that’s what I mean: on top of the already contorted position I attributed to you, you’re adding this moral-or-maybe-something else wrongness, which has no precedent in your earlier justifications. Do you think it’s probably one of the non-moral-wrongness things? Is that just a matter of terminology?
My earlier comment has been revised to respond to your addition, but it’s just an elaboration of “wtf? no”.
Do you take enjoyment in participating in these long, often repetitive arguments? Do you not find the antagonism consistently grating or stressful? If you have been wronged, surely from experience you can see that repeatedly bringing it up is simply not going to change anything. I’m curious as to whether this apparent futility bothers you in the same way that I know it would bother me.
No.
I do find the antagonism grating and/or stressful. (The same with questions posed in the negative, but I digress.)
It’s definitely going to change the cardinality of the set of non-anonymous people who can indepently confirm or disconfirm being on the receiving end of Alicorn’s wisdom, which is what I was mainly hoping for.
To your broader, implied query: I’m between a rock in a hard place. I’ve wanted to point out what a crock Alicorn’s supposed insight on the matter is since her luminosity series (this isn’t the first time she’s posted advice in direct contradiction of how all evidence reveals she handles situations). After about the ~8th article, I couldn’t let her go on promoting this two-faced act, so I spoke up.
No, I don’t enjoy becoming LW’s whipping boy every three months. But what can I say—no good deed goes unpunished.
This doesn’t work online, but Steve Rayhawk has cultivated the habit of consistently responding to questions in the negative with an affirmative response (‘Yes, I do not believe that’, or simply ‘Yes’) and thus I feel I do not have to sacrifice meaning for ease of conversational flow. I really wish this would become a more common disposition. Anyway, sorry for doing that.
I think you discount the possibility (I have no idea how probable it is, by the way) that Alicorn is actually a generally luminous and thoughtful person and that for some reason you seem to be an especially rare and difficult case for her. Maybe she has legitimate things to say to help people generally, even if she messed up (or you messed up for her) the dynamic between you two specifically. I know Alicorn. She can be critical, but she’s genuinely a good person. It could be that you’ve been wronged, but it could also be that this is an an atypical result for people who interact with Alicorn, as most of the evidence seems to suggest. Generalizing from one example, although it probably feels justified, might actually be the wrong thing to do here. It might be impossible for you, but I’d suggest letting it go. All of the writing time you’ve spent on comments in this thread could have been spent on a good post, which is your strong point. One should generally not spend their time optimizing for cold harshies.
I’m not generalizing from one example, and my reaction is not atypical. Looking at the moderation difference between Alicorn and HughRistik regarding her advice here, and the numerous other times she posts dating/meeting friends advice in the comments section (rather than as an article), it seems that most men here aren’t benefitting from what she has to say in their daily lives—though they may certainly find the advice intellectually stimulating.
Point taken (and I think you meant atypical?). It’s funny, because I know Hugh and I know Alicorn, and I bet they’d make decent friends in person (if they haven’t met already at a Less Wrong meetup while I was on vacation or something). Anyway, your claim here seems way more reasonable than the dramatized ones above. (“I couldn’t let her go on promoting this two-faced act”.) It seems you have narrowed your argument specifically to relationship advice, in which case I’m much more tempted to agree that your point has merit. But I think her luminosity sequence got a lot of upvotes for a reason. I personally found some useful concepts in there, and looking at the comments it seems many others also discovered her ideas about luminosity to be useful. First, I don’t think shouting ‘hypocrisy’ is a good argument against the usefulness of a post; second, I don’t think that shouting ‘hypocrisy’, or attempting ad hominem attacks, is going to get you anywhere anyway. If you want to make people think Alicorn is a bad person, fine, but why the heck would you want to do that? Vengeance? It seems you take the more reasonable position that Alicorn might be being trusted as an expert where she lacks skill, but continuing to attack her in areas where skill has been demonstrated erodes Less Wrongers’ ability to believe you are acting in good faith.
Hmm. I thought that I laid it out very cleanly here.
I think that it’s probably moral wrongness, but I’m less certain, so I’m more cautious about attributing that view to her.
But, at any rate, I honestly don’t see the contortions to which you refer. Perhaps she would experience a certain increase in pleasure if she modified herself not to dislike you. If she has this power, but chooses not to use it, then you may conclude that she cares about something more than that pleasure. It’s sort of like how Ghandi wouldn’t take a pill to make himself like to kill people, even if he knew that he would have lots of opportunities to kill people at no cost. There is a very standard distinction between what you think you ought to do and what you think will give you the most pleasure. I would expect the inferential distance on LW for this to be very short. That is why I don’t see my position as contorted.
Give me just a little credit here: yes I do understand the difference between “this increases my pleasure” and “I should do this”; and yes, there should be low inferential distance on explaining such a point on LW. That’s wasn’t in dispute. What’s in dispute is how much contortion you have to go through to justify why that distinction would be relevant and applicable here (which even the contortion leaves out).
And you didn’t lay it out very cleanly in the linked comment: you just made one distinction that is a very small part of what you have to say to specify your position.
My view is that Alicorn probably perceives certain benefits from not disliking you, such as the ones you’ve enumerated. But evidently she also sees other costs from not disliking you (costs which are probably moral). In her estimation (which I think is incorrect) the costs outweigh the benefits. Therefore, she has chosen not to apply the advice in the OP.
What’s contorted about that? As I see it, I’m just taking her revealed preferences at face value, while giving her the benefit of the doubt that she has the powers described in the OP.
Okay, how about this*:
* I’m honestly just trying to understand your view. I expect that my picture of your view is still wrong in significant respects. But the best way that I know to improve my understanding is to give you my picture so far, so that you can correct it. I am not trying to characterize your view for rhetorical purposes. Again, I know that my picture is probably wrong.
* It is not enough that she ought to know, any more than we should dismiss the hitman’s advice on how to kill just because he is so clearly wrong about when* to kill.
From the very first sentence the underlying premise supporting that ‘how’ is that the author can, in fact, do the thing in question. It isn’t presented as something known in theory, were that the case external evidence would be required, not implicit reference to personal experience. This being the case either a demonstrated strength in the area or a description of specific improvement in a weakness is required to give support to the ‘how to guide’ in question.
(The above is independent of whether Alicorn is hypocritical or otherwise a worthy subject of moral sanction. It is just a rejection of the claim of Tyrrell’s that observations of the poster is ‘entirely’ irrelevant to the credibility of the advice given. With extra rejection given to the condescending tone.)
I don’t see what you’re saying here beyond what I myself said here, when I wrote,
To be a little more explicit, I meant “applied (1) successfully”. As I go on to say, this does not contradict the distinction between (1) and (2), because:
(I’m quoting myself at length here because someone downvoted me earlier for giving just a link to another comment when I thought that the other comment said all I would want to say.)
You go on to say,
I think that this is a form of asking for impossible evidence. Of course, the evidence you request is not really impossible. Alicorn could have given all sorts of identifying details of the people she forced herself to like, and she could have described at length the circumstances under which she did so.
However, it’s not reasonable to have expected her to do this in the OP. The social sanction against doing that kind of thing is too great, and with reason. It would not have helped the reception of her article to drag forth all of her grievances and peeves against someone, just to describe how she overcame all these issues and learned to like the person. To expect this of her is to have an unrealistic picture of human interaction.
Therefore, Alicorn’s lack of “description of specific improvement” is not Bayesian evidence against her ability to do what she advises, nor against the possibility that she has applied her advice with success. We just have to evaluate the plausibility of her hypothesis by other means, such as consistency with our prior knowledge and our own experimental tests.
My blunt tone is intended to be a sign of respect to Silas. One of the things that I admire about him is that, when he disagrees with someone, he says so plainly, often without expressing contempt (though not often enough). He does not obscure his position by softening it to save feelings. I extend to him the same courtesy.
Actually, there’s one more important thing I should add: I have conclusive evidence that Alicorn has much to gain from getting over this dislike, by her very own standards. I can prove this by showing that she enjoys my posting, and wishes to reply to—and even provoke—my posting, just so long as she knows it’s not me. That shows a critical failure to apply her advice when could actually do some good, or at least a failure to recognize a set of heuristics that correctly indicate when the advice should be used.
So why is Alicorn’s advice particularly insightful on this subject?
One possible reason Alicorn hasn’t applied her technique to you is that it simply isn’t powerful enough to overcome your unpleasantness. FWIW, I perceive you as a lot less civil than the LW norm, you seem possessed of a snarky combativeness. You also appear to have a tendency of fixating on personal annoyances and justifying your focus with concerns and observations that pop out of nowhere, context-wise.
In this case, your supposed insight into what would really be best for Alicorn plays that role. And then, having established this “lemma”, you carry through to the conclusion that… Alicorn’s behavior is inconsistent. Take a step back, and look at what you’re saying. You’re basically claiming to have reverse-engineered someone else’s utility function, as the premise of an argument which concludes that they’re being a hypocrite.
I hope you’ll come to see this sort of behavior as embarrassing.
“FWIW” == “For What It’s Worth,” to save a few person-minutes for other passive readers here.
I wish I could upvote this 10 or 20 times
I do not know you and I do not know Alicorn. I do not know who I would have the most sympathy for if I did know both of you. I find this whole discussion off topic. Alicorn gave some advice and I find the advice interesting whether she follows it or not, whether she even believes it or not.
It is very good advice (if and only if you may want from time to time to like someone that you have come to dislike). I personally have tried to develop ways to not start to dislike people in the first place and not worry about whether liking them is to my advantage. However, it has not always been the case that I could like someone and it was sometimes to my disadvantage - so I appreciate the advice.
I suggest that you judge the advice and not the person who gave it. The ‘others of us’ are not interested in this fight.
Again, because she’s not giving advice on knowing when you ought to like someone. She’s giving advice on what to do after you have decided that you ought to like someone, even though you don’t like them automatically.
No, she’s listing advice that can be used to like someone or remove dislike. And yet she’s shown a solid history of the advice’s complete ineffectiveness (or her belief in its ineffectiveness) when a frequent commenter on her favorite message board is causing her “undesirable peripheral psychological” harm by virtue of her extreme dislike!
If that’s not relevant to showing her advice to be phony, what would be? And why should I have stayed silent on the existence of these two Alicorns?
Alicorn’s time and attention and energy belong to her, not to you.
You’re free to have opinions about how she uses them, but you aren’t the final arbiter of what she’s doing.
If you’re trying to get people to think worse of her and better of you, you don’t seem to be succeeding.
That forms a large part of why I’ve never suggested otherwise, and of why you figured it would be so hot-shot to pretend I meant otherwise.
Alcorn’s time/etc. do belong to her. The right to exclude my comments from public discussion does not. The right to lie about the tremendous psychological terror I’m inducing in her doesn’t belong to her either.
*Hence the disagreement.*
If I can be the one person willing to go on record on her “masterful” control of her dislike, I’ll gladly take the minor karma hit … though mine’s actually gone up since I started posting in the discussion, if you can even fathom that.
I reply to this point here.
Since you’re being so thorough, want to reply to the rest of the comment? Or do you feel that was done adequately elsewhere?
Of course her advice is ineffective if one has decided to dislike someone. But this is no mark against her, because her advice is entirely about what to do after one decides not to dislike someone.
What would be relevant would be a case where she had decided to like someone, applied the advice in the OP, and yet failed to like the other person. Also relevant would be a general theoretical argument that the techniques in the OP wouldn’t get you (the general you) to like someone even after you had decided that you ought to.
Because your criticisms do not address the OP.