And just, what? What? This is just such a wild thing to say in that context! “[D]eserve to live, or deserve to suffer”? People around here are, like, transhumanists, right? Everyone deserves to live! No one deserves to suffer! Who in particular was arguing that some people don’t deserve to live or do deserve to suffer, such that this basic level of mutual respect is in danger of not being achieved?
Come on man, you have the ability to understand the context better.
First of all, retaliation clearly has its place. If someone acts in a way that wantonly hurts others, it is the correct choice to inflict some suffering on them, for the sake of setting the right incentives. It is indeed extremely common that from this perspective of fairness and incentives, people “deserve” to suffer.
And indeed, maintaining an equilibrium in which the participants do not have outstanding grievances and would take the opportunity to inflict suffering on each other as payback for those past grievances is hard! Much of modern politics, many dysfunctional organizations, and many subcultures are indeed filled with mutual grievances moving things far away from the mutual assumption that it’s good to not hurt each other. I think almost any casual glance at Twitter would demonstrate this.
That paragraph of my response is about trying to establish that there are obviously limits to how much critical comments need the ability to offend, and so if you want to view things through the lens of status, about how its important to view status as multi-dimensional. It is absolutely not rare for internet discussion to imply the other side deserves to suffer or doesn’t deserve to live. There is a dimension of status where being low enough does cause others to try to cause you suffering. It’s not even that rare.
The reason why that paragraph is there is to establish how we need to treat status as a multi-dimensional thing. You can’t just walk around saying “offense is necessary for good criticism”. Some kinds of offense obviously make things worse in-expectation. Other kinds of offense do indeed seem necessary. You are saying the exact same thing in the very next paragraph!
If I had to guess, it’s an implied strong definition of respect that bundles not questioning people’s competence or stated intentions with being “treated like a person” (worthy of life and the absence of suffering)
No, it’s the opposite. That’s literally what my first sentence is saying. You cannot and should not treat respect/status as a one-dimensional thing, as the reductio-ad-absurdum in the quoted section shows. If you tried to treat it as a one-dimensional-thing you would need to include the part where people do of course frequently try to actively hurt others. In order to have a fruitful analysis of how status and offense relates to good criticism, you can’t just treat the whole thing as one monolith.
And just, what? What? This is just such a wild thing to say in that context!
I hope you now understand how it’s not “such a wild thing to say in that context”. Indeed, it’s approximately the same thing you are saying here. You also hopefully understand how the exasperated tone and hyperbole did not help.
But from the standpoint of the alleged aggressor who doesn’t accept that notion of respect, we’re not trying to say people should suffer and die. We just mean that opinion X is false, and that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction.
You absolutely do not “just mean” those things. Communicating about status is hard and requires active effort to do well at. People get in active conflict with each other all the time. Just two days ago you were quoted by Benquo as saying “intend to fight it with every weapon at my disposal” regarding how you relate to LessWrong moderation, a statement exactly of the kind that does not breed confidence you will not at some point reach for the “try to just inflict suffering on the LessWrong moderators in order to disincentivize them from doing this” option.
People get exiled from communities. People get actually really hurt from social conflict. People build their lives around social trust and respect and reputation and frequently would rather die than to lose crucial forms of social standing they care about.
I do not believe your reports about how you claim to limit the range of your status claims, and what you mean by offense. You cannot wish away core dimension of the stakes of social relationships by just asserting you are not affecting them when them being present in the conversation would inconvenience you. You have absolutely called for extremely strong censure and punishment of many people in this community as a result of things they said on the internet. You do not have the trust, nor anything close enough to a track record of accurate communication on this topic, to make it so that when you assert that by “offense” you just mean purely factual claims, people should believe you.
Like, man, I am so tired of this. I am so tired of this repeated “oh no, I am absolutely not making any status claims, I am just making factual claims, you moron” game. You don’t get to redefine the meaning of words, and you don’t get to try to gaslight everyone you interface with about the real stakes of the social engagements they have with you.
I thought Wei Dai’s comment was good. I responded to it, emphasizing how I think it’s an important dimension to think through in these situations.
But indeed, the way you handle the nature of offense and status in comment threads is not to declare defeat, say that “well, seems like we just can’t take into account social standing and status in our communication without sacrificing truth-seeking, and then pretend that dimension is never there”. You have to actually work with detailed models of what is going on, figure out the incentives for the parties involved, and set up a social environment where good work gets rewarded, harmful actions punished, all while maintaining sufficient ability to talk about the social system itself without everyone trying to gaslight each other about it. It’s hard work, it requires continuous steering. It requires hard thinking. It definitely is not solved by just making posts saying “We just mean that opinion X is false, and that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction”.
There is no “just” here. In invoking this you are implying some target social relationship to the people who are “perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction”. Should they be exiled, rate-limited, punished, forced to apologize or celebrated? Your tone and words will communicate some distribution over those!
It’s extremely hard and requires active effort to write a comment that is genuinely communicating agnosticism about how they think a social ecosystem should react to people to are “optimizing in an objectionable direction” in a specific instance, and you are clearly not generally trying to do that. Your words reek of judgement of a specific kind. You frequently call for social punishment for people who optimize such! You can’t just deny that part of your whole speech and wish it away. There is no “just” here. When you offend, you mean offense of a specific kind, and using clinical language to hide away the nature of that offense, and its implications, is not helping people accurately understand what will happen when they engage with you.
I hope you now understand now how it’s not “such a wild thing to say in that context”. Indeed, it’s approximately the same thing you are saying here.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. That’s my bad. Your additional explanation here helps me understand what you were saying. (Readers should feel free to assign me lower status for being so dumb as to misinterpret it the first time!)
The rest of your comment, about ignoring the status implications of one’s speech, is interesting. As you’ve noticed, I am often doing a thing where I deliberately ignore the social implications of my or others’ speech (effectively “declar[ing] defeat” and “pretend[ing] that dimension is [not] there”), but I think this is often a good thing. I’m going to think more carefully about your comment and write another post explaining why I think that.
I still think you have rose-colored glasses about how discussion works—not how it should work, but how it does work—and that this is causing you to make errors. E.g., the habryka quote sounds insane until you reflect on what discourse is actually like. E.g., in the past debate we’ve had you initially said that the moderation debates weren’t about tone, before we got to the harder normative stuff.
It’s probably possible to have your normative views while having a realistic model of how discussions work, but err I guess I think you haven’t reconciled them yet, at least not in, e.g., this post.
E.g., the habryka quote sounds insane until you reflect on what discourse is actually like.
Actually, it still sounds insane to me. I find the top-level comment of this thread to be completely unconvincing, to say the least. (This, despite quite a bit of “reflect[ing] on what discourse is actually like”.)
The view which you describe implies that one cannot punish whom one respects. (Because “respect” means “not wanting to inflict suffering”, punishment is the infliction of suffering, therefore if I respect someone, then I can’t punish that person.)
This obviously creates a huge problem, namely: what if someone whom we respect, does something bad and worthy of punishment? On your view, we either don’t punish them, or we have to stop respecting them.
If you then also declare that not respecting someone (required for punishing them) is bad, then this means that we can never punish bad behavior by someone who is a member of the ingroup. (Which is, I assume, the point.)
First of all, retaliation clearly has its place. If someone acts in a way that wantonly hurts others, it is the correct choice to inflict some suffering on them, for the sake of setting the right incentives. It is indeed extremely common that from this perspective of fairness and incentives, people “deserve” to suffer.
I don’t see why it’s good to punish people. If you threaten to punish me if I do a particular thing, I’ll just get upset that you might hurt me and likely refuse to interact with you at all. But you do sometimes have to hurt someone’s reputation as a side effect of some other necessary action, like warning other people that they’re untrustworthy.
In the high stakes case: MAD makes sense and retaliation is a better equilibrium than not threatening retaliation.
In the low stakes case: If you punch me, I will likely punch back (or otherwise try to get you punished). This generally works as a fine deterrent for most cases.
I feel like this isn’t a particularly rare or weird concept. Really as basic game theory as it gets.
I think there’s a difference between consequences and suffering (as written in the OP) though.
If a child plays too many videogames you might take away their switch, and while that might decrease their utility, I’d hardly describe it as suffering in any meaningful sense.
Similarly, in the real world, people generally get quite low utility from physical violence. It’s either an act of impulse not particularly sensitive to severity of punishment (like in people with anger management issues), or of very low utility. It’s therefore easy to imagine that the optimal level of punishment for crime might be a decrease in access to some goods, and seperation from broader society to decrease the probability of future impulsive acts harming anyone.
If a child plays too many videogames you might take away their switch, and while that might decrease their utility, I’d hardly describe it as suffering in any meaningful sense.
Not sure this is important to discuss, but I definitely would. If I remember correctly, this kind of thing had a pretty strong effect on me when I was small, probably worse than getting a moderate injury as an adult. I feel like it’s very easy to make a small kid suffer because they’re so emotionally defenseless and get so easily invested in random things.
I don’t see why it’s good to punish people. If you threaten to punish me if I do a particular thing, I’ll just get upset that you might hurt me and likely refuse to interact with you at all.
Try to apply this logic to law enforcement, and you will see at once how it fails.
Come on man, you have the ability to understand the context better.
First of all, retaliation clearly has its place. If someone acts in a way that wantonly hurts others, it is the correct choice to inflict some suffering on them, for the sake of setting the right incentives. It is indeed extremely common that from this perspective of fairness and incentives, people “deserve” to suffer.
And indeed, maintaining an equilibrium in which the participants do not have outstanding grievances and would take the opportunity to inflict suffering on each other as payback for those past grievances is hard! Much of modern politics, many dysfunctional organizations, and many subcultures are indeed filled with mutual grievances moving things far away from the mutual assumption that it’s good to not hurt each other. I think almost any casual glance at Twitter would demonstrate this.
That paragraph of my response is about trying to establish that there are obviously limits to how much critical comments need the ability to offend, and so if you want to view things through the lens of status, about how its important to view status as multi-dimensional. It is absolutely not rare for internet discussion to imply the other side deserves to suffer or doesn’t deserve to live. There is a dimension of status where being low enough does cause others to try to cause you suffering. It’s not even that rare.
The reason why that paragraph is there is to establish how we need to treat status as a multi-dimensional thing. You can’t just walk around saying “offense is necessary for good criticism”. Some kinds of offense obviously make things worse in-expectation. Other kinds of offense do indeed seem necessary. You are saying the exact same thing in the very next paragraph!
No, it’s the opposite. That’s literally what my first sentence is saying. You cannot and should not treat respect/status as a one-dimensional thing, as the reductio-ad-absurdum in the quoted section shows. If you tried to treat it as a one-dimensional-thing you would need to include the part where people do of course frequently try to actively hurt others. In order to have a fruitful analysis of how status and offense relates to good criticism, you can’t just treat the whole thing as one monolith.
I hope you now understand how it’s not “such a wild thing to say in that context”. Indeed, it’s approximately the same thing you are saying here. You also hopefully understand how the exasperated tone and hyperbole did not help.
You absolutely do not “just mean” those things. Communicating about status is hard and requires active effort to do well at. People get in active conflict with each other all the time. Just two days ago you were quoted by Benquo as saying “intend to fight it with every weapon at my disposal” regarding how you relate to LessWrong moderation, a statement exactly of the kind that does not breed confidence you will not at some point reach for the “try to just inflict suffering on the LessWrong moderators in order to disincentivize them from doing this” option.
People get exiled from communities. People get actually really hurt from social conflict. People build their lives around social trust and respect and reputation and frequently would rather die than to lose crucial forms of social standing they care about.
I do not believe your reports about how you claim to limit the range of your status claims, and what you mean by offense. You cannot wish away core dimension of the stakes of social relationships by just asserting you are not affecting them when them being present in the conversation would inconvenience you. You have absolutely called for extremely strong censure and punishment of many people in this community as a result of things they said on the internet. You do not have the trust, nor anything close enough to a track record of accurate communication on this topic, to make it so that when you assert that by “offense” you just mean purely factual claims, people should believe you.
Like, man, I am so tired of this. I am so tired of this repeated “oh no, I am absolutely not making any status claims, I am just making factual claims, you moron” game. You don’t get to redefine the meaning of words, and you don’t get to try to gaslight everyone you interface with about the real stakes of the social engagements they have with you.
I thought Wei Dai’s comment was good. I responded to it, emphasizing how I think it’s an important dimension to think through in these situations.
But indeed, the way you handle the nature of offense and status in comment threads is not to declare defeat, say that “well, seems like we just can’t take into account social standing and status in our communication without sacrificing truth-seeking, and then pretend that dimension is never there”. You have to actually work with detailed models of what is going on, figure out the incentives for the parties involved, and set up a social environment where good work gets rewarded, harmful actions punished, all while maintaining sufficient ability to talk about the social system itself without everyone trying to gaslight each other about it. It’s hard work, it requires continuous steering. It requires hard thinking. It definitely is not solved by just making posts saying “We just mean that opinion X is false, and that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction”.
There is no “just” here. In invoking this you are implying some target social relationship to the people who are “perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction”. Should they be exiled, rate-limited, punished, forced to apologize or celebrated? Your tone and words will communicate some distribution over those!
It’s extremely hard and requires active effort to write a comment that is genuinely communicating agnosticism about how they think a social ecosystem should react to people to are “optimizing in an objectionable direction” in a specific instance, and you are clearly not generally trying to do that. Your words reek of judgement of a specific kind. You frequently call for social punishment for people who optimize such! You can’t just deny that part of your whole speech and wish it away. There is no “just” here. When you offend, you mean offense of a specific kind, and using clinical language to hide away the nature of that offense, and its implications, is not helping people accurately understand what will happen when they engage with you.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. That’s my bad. Your additional explanation here helps me understand what you were saying. (Readers should feel free to assign me lower status for being so dumb as to misinterpret it the first time!)
The rest of your comment, about ignoring the status implications of one’s speech, is interesting. As you’ve noticed, I am often doing a thing where I deliberately ignore the social implications of my or others’ speech (effectively “declar[ing] defeat” and “pretend[ing] that dimension is [not] there”), but I think this is often a good thing. I’m going to think more carefully about your comment and write another post explaining why I think that.
I still think you have rose-colored glasses about how discussion works—not how it should work, but how it does work—and that this is causing you to make errors. E.g., the habryka quote sounds insane until you reflect on what discourse is actually like. E.g., in the past debate we’ve had you initially said that the moderation debates weren’t about tone, before we got to the harder normative stuff.
It’s probably possible to have your normative views while having a realistic model of how discussions work, but err I guess I think you haven’t reconciled them yet, at least not in, e.g., this post.
Actually, it still sounds insane to me. I find the top-level comment of this thread to be completely unconvincing, to say the least. (This, despite quite a bit of “reflect[ing] on what discourse is actually like”.)
The view which you describe implies that one cannot punish whom one respects. (Because “respect” means “not wanting to inflict suffering”, punishment is the infliction of suffering, therefore if I respect someone, then I can’t punish that person.)
This obviously creates a huge problem, namely: what if someone whom we respect, does something bad and worthy of punishment? On your view, we either don’t punish them, or we have to stop respecting them.
If you then also declare that not respecting someone (required for punishing them) is bad, then this means that we can never punish bad behavior by someone who is a member of the ingroup. (Which is, I assume, the point.)
I don’t see why it’s good to punish people. If you threaten to punish me if I do a particular thing, I’ll just get upset that you might hurt me and likely refuse to interact with you at all. But you do sometimes have to hurt someone’s reputation as a side effect of some other necessary action, like warning other people that they’re untrustworthy.
In the high stakes case: MAD makes sense and retaliation is a better equilibrium than not threatening retaliation.
In the low stakes case: If you punch me, I will likely punch back (or otherwise try to get you punished). This generally works as a fine deterrent for most cases.
I feel like this isn’t a particularly rare or weird concept. Really as basic game theory as it gets.
I think there’s a difference between consequences and suffering (as written in the OP) though.
If a child plays too many videogames you might take away their switch, and while that might decrease their utility, I’d hardly describe it as suffering in any meaningful sense.
Similarly, in the real world, people generally get quite low utility from physical violence. It’s either an act of impulse not particularly sensitive to severity of punishment (like in people with anger management issues), or of very low utility. It’s therefore easy to imagine that the optimal level of punishment for crime might be a decrease in access to some goods, and seperation from broader society to decrease the probability of future impulsive acts harming anyone.
Not sure this is important to discuss, but I definitely would. If I remember correctly, this kind of thing had a pretty strong effect on me when I was small, probably worse than getting a moderate injury as an adult. I feel like it’s very easy to make a small kid suffer because they’re so emotionally defenseless and get so easily invested in random things.
Try to apply this logic to law enforcement, and you will see at once how it fails.