I don’t want to include these in “Non-Violence”, because I’m thinking of that rule as relatively absolute. By comparison, “derision” and “mockery” should probably be kept to a minimum, but I’m not going to pretend I’ve never made fun of the Time Cube guy, or that I feel super bad about having done so.
I’ve made fun of people on Twitter, but:
Don’t think that reflects well on me as a rationalist
Don’t think such posts are acceptable content for LessWrong.
You may not feel bad about mockery (I don’t generally do so either), but do you think it reflects well on you as a rationalist?
I don’t want to include these in “Non-Violence”, because I’m thinking of that rule as relatively absolute.
I agree these aren’t acts of violence, but I listened to the rest of the post and didn’t hear you object to them anywhere else. This felt like the closest place (in that bad argument gets counterargument and doesn’t get any of the things I mentioned).
Similarly, “acts to make the argument low status” is a bit tricky to encode as a rule, because even things as simple as “generating a good counter-argument” can lower the original argument’s status in many people’s eyes. (Flawed arguments should plausibly be seen as lower-status than good arguments!)
An appropriately more nuanced version would be something like: “acts to make an argument low status for reasons other than its accuracy/veracity, and conformance to norms (some true things can be presented in very unpleasant/distasteful ways [e.g. with the deliberate goal of being maximally offensive])”.
You may not feel bas about mockery (I don’t generally do so either), but do you think it reflects well on you as a rationalist?
I like this example! I do indeed share the intuition “mocking Time Cube guy on Twitter doesn’t reflect well on me as a rationalist”. It also just seems mean to me.
I think part of what’s driving my intuition here, though, is that “mocking” sounds inherently mean-spirited, and “on Twitter” makes it sound like I’m writing the sort of low-quality viral personal attack that’s common on Twitter.
“Make a light-hearted reference to Time Cube (in a way that takes for granted that Time Cube is silly) in a chat with some friends” feels pretty unlike “write a tweet mocking and deriding Time Cube”, and the former doesn’t feel to me like it necessarily reflects poorly on me as a rationalist. (It feels more orthogonal to the spirit of rationality to me, like making puns or playing a video game; puns are neither rationalist nor anti-rationalist.)
So part of my reservation here is that I have pretty different intuitions about different versions of “tell jokes that turn on a certain claim/belief being low-probability”, and I’m not sure where to draw the line exactly (beyond the general heuristics I mentioned in the OP).
Another part of my reservation is just that I’m erring on the side of keeping the list of norms too short rather than too long. I’d rather have non-exhaustive lists and encourage people to use their common sense and personal conscience as a guide in the many cases that the guidelines don’t cover (or don’t cover until you do some interpretive work).
I worry that modern society is too norm-heavy in general, encouraging people to fixate on heuristics, patches, and local Prohibited Actions, in ways that are cognitively taxing and unduly ‘domesticating’. I think this can make it harder to notice and appropriately respond to the specifics of the situation you’re in, because your brain is yelling a memorized “no! unconditional rule X!” script at you, when in fact if you consulted your unassisted conscience and your common sense you’d have an easier time seeing what the right thing to do is.
So I’m mostly interested in trying to distill core aspects of the spirit of rationalist discourse, in the hope that this can help people’s common sense and conscience grow (/ help people become more self-aware of aspects of their common sense and conscience that are already inside themselves, but that they aren’t lucid about).
I suspect I’ve left at least one important part of “the spirit of rationalist discourse” out, so I’m mainly nitpicking your suggestions in case your replies cause me to realize that I’m missing some important underlying generator that isn’t alluded to in the OP. I care less about whether “mockery” specifically gets called out in the OP, and more about whether I’ve neglected an underlying spirit/generator.
Maybe Goodwill is missing a generator-sentence that’s something like “Don’t lean into cruelty, or otherwise lose sight of what your conscience or common sense says about how best to relate to other human beings.”
“acts to make an argument low status for reasons other than its accuracy/veracity, and conformance to norms (some true things can be presented in very unpleasant/distasteful ways [e.g. with the deliberate goal of being maximally offensive])”.
Yeah, I like that more. I still worry that “low status” is vague and different people conceive of it differently, so I have the instinct that it might be good to taboo “status” here. “Conformance to norms” is also super vague; someone would need to have the right norms in mind in order for this to work.
I’ve made fun of people on Twitter, but:
Don’t think that reflects well on me as a rationalist
Don’t think such posts are acceptable content for LessWrong.
You may not feel bad about mockery (I don’t generally do so either), but do you think it reflects well on you as a rationalist?
I agree these aren’t acts of violence, but I listened to the rest of the post and didn’t hear you object to them anywhere else. This felt like the closest place (in that bad argument gets counterargument and doesn’t get any of the things I mentioned).
An appropriately more nuanced version would be something like: “acts to make an argument low status for reasons other than its accuracy/veracity, and conformance to norms (some true things can be presented in very unpleasant/distasteful ways [e.g. with the deliberate goal of being maximally offensive])”.
I like this example! I do indeed share the intuition “mocking Time Cube guy on Twitter doesn’t reflect well on me as a rationalist”. It also just seems mean to me.
I think part of what’s driving my intuition here, though, is that “mocking” sounds inherently mean-spirited, and “on Twitter” makes it sound like I’m writing the sort of low-quality viral personal attack that’s common on Twitter.
“Make a light-hearted reference to Time Cube (in a way that takes for granted that Time Cube is silly) in a chat with some friends” feels pretty unlike “write a tweet mocking and deriding Time Cube”, and the former doesn’t feel to me like it necessarily reflects poorly on me as a rationalist. (It feels more orthogonal to the spirit of rationality to me, like making puns or playing a video game; puns are neither rationalist nor anti-rationalist.)
So part of my reservation here is that I have pretty different intuitions about different versions of “tell jokes that turn on a certain claim/belief being low-probability”, and I’m not sure where to draw the line exactly (beyond the general heuristics I mentioned in the OP).
Another part of my reservation is just that I’m erring on the side of keeping the list of norms too short rather than too long. I’d rather have non-exhaustive lists and encourage people to use their common sense and personal conscience as a guide in the many cases that the guidelines don’t cover (or don’t cover until you do some interpretive work).
I worry that modern society is too norm-heavy in general, encouraging people to fixate on heuristics, patches, and local Prohibited Actions, in ways that are cognitively taxing and unduly ‘domesticating’. I think this can make it harder to notice and appropriately respond to the specifics of the situation you’re in, because your brain is yelling a memorized “no! unconditional rule X!” script at you, when in fact if you consulted your unassisted conscience and your common sense you’d have an easier time seeing what the right thing to do is.
So I’m mostly interested in trying to distill core aspects of the spirit of rationalist discourse, in the hope that this can help people’s common sense and conscience grow (/ help people become more self-aware of aspects of their common sense and conscience that are already inside themselves, but that they aren’t lucid about).
I suspect I’ve left at least one important part of “the spirit of rationalist discourse” out, so I’m mainly nitpicking your suggestions in case your replies cause me to realize that I’m missing some important underlying generator that isn’t alluded to in the OP. I care less about whether “mockery” specifically gets called out in the OP, and more about whether I’ve neglected an underlying spirit/generator.
Maybe Goodwill is missing a generator-sentence that’s something like “Don’t lean into cruelty, or otherwise lose sight of what your conscience or common sense says about how best to relate to other human beings.”
Yeah, I like that more. I still worry that “low status” is vague and different people conceive of it differently, so I have the instinct that it might be good to taboo “status” here. “Conformance to norms” is also super vague; someone would need to have the right norms in mind in order for this to work.