You will always oversample from the most annoying members of a class.
This is inspired by recent arguments on twitter about how vegans and poly people “always” bring up those facts. I contend that it’s simultaneous true that most vegans and poly people are either not judgmental, but it doesn’t matter because that’s not who people remember. Omnivores don’t notice the 9 vegans who quietly ordered an unsatisfying salad, only the vegan who brought up factoring farming conditions at the table. Vegans who just want to abstain from animal products remember the omnivore who ordered the veal on purpose and made little bleating noises.
And then it spirals. A mono person who had an interaction with an aggro poly person will be quicker to hear judgement in the next poly person’s tone, and vice versa. This is especially bad because lots of us are judging others a little. We’re quiet about it, we place it in context instead of damning people for a single flaw, but we do exercise our right to have opinions. Or maybe we’re not judging the fact, just the logistical impact on us. It is pretty annoying to keep your mouth shut about an issue you view as morally important or a claim on your time, only to have someone demand you placate them about their own choices.
AFAICT this principle covers every single group on earth. Conservatives hear from the most annoying liberals. Communists hear from the most annoying libertarians. Every hobby will be publicly represented by its members who are least deterred by an uninterested audience.
Every hobby will be publicly represented by its members who are least deterred by an uninterested audience.
I’d distinguish between oversampling the annoying members of a class (yes), and a class being publicly represented by its most annoying members (not necessarily). A class that’s non-evangelical, that actively strategizes on how to control its evangelizers so that they’ll be less annoying, or that has a limited moral component, will tend not to establish an annoying public image.
Consider Mormons. They’re intensely moral, highly evangelical, but they have established a careful approach to evangelicism that lets them do an enormous amount of it while having their public image of evangelicism be nothing worse than a couple formally dressed young men politely knocking on your door.
Jews are also moral, but they do not attempt to convert non-Jews. What Jews often find intensely annoying (to say the least) about other Jews is when more conservative Jews tell typically less conservative Jews that they’re “not really Jewish” (i.e. because they don’t have an unbroken maternal chain of Jewish ancestry, even if they have been going to synagogue their entire life, etc).
Gardeners are another example. Gardening doesn’t have much of a moral or evangelical component in general, although gardeners often enjoy sharing their hobby with each other. Gardening has a highly pro-social, non-annoying public image.
EAs and rationalists are extraordinarily, and to my mind, inexplicably annoying to adjacent communities (i.e. people hate rationalists on Hacker News for some reason). EA and rationalism certainly have an intense moral component. Both are fairly evangelical. And it seems like the movements exert not much control over their members, or are not capable of giving them guidance, on how to be non-annoying in their evangelicism. Plenty of rationalists and EAs are highly annoying to other rationalists and EAs as well. The ratio of extremely bad actors to participants is highly unfavorable. Neither movement has much of a mechanism or norm for enforcing non-annoyingness on its membership.
Overall, I actually think there’s quite a bit of variance in how annoying specific identity groups are, both amongst themselves and in their interactions with the wider world. It seems like an important thing to understand better for those who would like to make improvements in the status quo.
EA and rationalism certainly have an intense moral component. Both are fairly evangelical.
What do you have in mind for rationality here? It’s clear to me with EA, which has poured tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars into growth programs, especially amongst students and young people, but I’m interested in what you’re thinking about for rationality, which doesn’t immediately strike me as having attempted to undergo massive growth (e.g. HPMOR is very popular but mostly grew because it was a well-written story and ppl loved it, not due to much in the way of active programs and propaganda).
Implicit or explicit in an enormous amount of rationalist text is the idea that people ought to be more rational and that we ought to make society more rational. Contrast that with a genuinely non-evangelistic religion like Judaism, which truly has no project of trying to make non-Jews into Jews and, by default, questions why gentiles would wish to convert.
What’s the delta between this and mormonism? Surely mormons believe & have many texts about how everyone should be mormon & are ignoring obvious truths if they’re not. Is it just a PR difference? A difference between the number of people who read the founding documents?
Not that this is directly relevant to your thesis comparing different groups today; but I do assume that Judaism had a massive evangelical period in its early growth (e.g. 2,000 years ago) that let it get so big that it could afford to pivot to being less evangelical today.
I’d distinguish between oversampling the annoying members of a class (yes), and a class being publicly represented by its most annoying members (not necessarily). A class that’s non-evangelical, that actively strategizes on how to control its evangelizers so that they’ll be less annoying, or that has a limited moral component, will tend not to establish an annoying public image.
This also requires that the annoying members still value group cohesion over their own impulse to be annoying. Otherwise they will simply split and not toe the party line, so to speak.
EAs and rationalists are extraordinarily, and to my mind, inexplicably annoying to adjacent communities (i.e. people hate rationalists on Hacker News for some reason)
Isn’t the most straightforward common reason that many of us think that their jobs are evil? There are probably sophisticated, empathetic, high social-skills, nice ways to say
I think your work is contributing to the end of humanity and anybody who does this work is the scum of the Earth. Also, you regularly lie to the American people. I hope you go to jail soon.
with love and kindness and grace, but our community isn’t known for unusually high social skills and tact, and honestly I’m not sure many people would take the skillful version even if they knew how to.
I mean, I’m pretty sure animosity towards rationalists on Hacker News is older than the existence of OpenAI and probably even DeepMind. Also most people on Hacker News don’t work in AI. So I don’t really know why this hypothesis is coming to mind, I don’t think it’s relevant for most of what’s gone on.
I’d be more inclined to put it down to Hacker News having many standard online pathologies for bullying easy targets, and rationalists historically being a lot of weird and outcast kinds of people, along with some strains of anti-intellectualism in the tech/startup world.
Interesting, the only recent irl aggression (verbal, not physical) I’ve received from the techie crowd in SF was related to the Sam Altman firing[1]. I’ve also gotten more standard leftist anger but I don’t think that anger is very centrally Hacker News-y, I’d guess those people would also be angry at Hacker News.
I have Hacker News blocked so I cannot pull up threads now, but what I have in mind (and I’m pretty confident is what DirectedEvolution had in mind) is many many threads on Hacker News where, when LessWrong is mentioned, it’s called a cult and has a bunch of other low-quality critical comments about it with a derisive tone.
(I believe I recalled it getting better in the few years after LessWrong 2.0 started, though I think I’ve seen an uptick again around AI threads.)
Isn’t the most straightforward common reason that many of us think that their jobs are evil?
Most of the critical comments I see on HN involve accusing LW of being a cult, being too stupid to realize people can’t be fully rational, or being incredibly arrogant and overconfident about analysis based on ass-numbers and ill-researched personal opinion. I don’t see that much engagement with LW arguments around AI specifically.
On Twitter at least, a fair number of the cult allegations seem to be from (honestly fairly cult-ish people themselves) who don’t like what LW people say about AI, at least in the threads I’m likely to follow. But I defer to your greater HN expertise!
I don’t understand. Most vegans believe buying animal products is immoral, which implies they believe people who do are acting immorally. I’m not sure what else judgement could mean. (Maybe “expresses this”?)
Edit: This is copied from my comment in the thread, I should have written it at the start.
To elaborate more, I’d be confused in the same way by this labeling of, e.g., someone who opposed historical slavery but wasn’t loud about their beliefs every time they encountered it. Like, to me the central case of “A judges B” is “A thinks B is not living up to moral standards to the degree it’s reasonable to expect/hope others to”.
I think vegans are quiet about their beliefs for reasons that are usually not “they don’t actually think it’s that bad for others to eat animals.” I think the reasons are usually things like, “it wouldn’t help to speak up right now,” “they’d just mock me,” etc.
This is one of those things where there’s a lot of space between the central example of something and peripheral members, and the equivocation causes a lot of stress.
The central example of being judgmental involves being loud about the other person being bad in full generality, for whatever thing you’re judging. Making a judgement about a particular action, quietly, while still fully respecting the other party as a person doing the best they can, is a peripheral example of being judgmental.
Sometimes people confuse the latter for the former, or feel entitled to the judger’s good opinion on every aspect of themselves. Sometimes they aren’t confused but use confusing phrasing to get people on their side.
The below is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of dictionary definitions being helpful here.
This seems like one of those definitions that says little because it refers back to the base word (in this case “judge”). What does this actually mean? The link defines “judge” as “to form a negative opinion about”. I’m not sure what “characterized by a tendency (to form a negative opinion about) harshly” would mean. Replacing “harshly” with its dictionary definitions only makes things worse: whether a belief is “excessively critical or negative” is relative to one’s beliefs; some would label the belief “buying animal products is morally similar to buying things produced with slave labor” as “excessively critical or negative”, while others wouldn’t. “unduly severe in making demands”—same thing with “unduly severe”, also an “opinion” itself doesn’t make demands.
(Also, there’s the question of if “characterized by a tendency” means “as an intrinsic personal quality”, or if “consistently as conclusions of one moral idea” counts)
Therefore you don’t understand what Elizabeth meant by saying that most vegans are not judgemental.
You would like to understand what Elizabeth meant.
I tried to help you understand by pointing out that the relevant definition of judgemental specifies harsh judgement, and most vegans do not judge harshly. From context that is what I think Elizabeth meant.
Good luck with your quest for understanding. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help.
In my comment, (1) was ~”most vegans believe others are acting immorally.” The same isn’t true of OP’s other examples, like polygamists.
To elaborate more, I’d be confused in the same way by this labeling of, e.g., someone who opposed historical slavery but wasn’t loud about their beliefs every time they encountered it. Like, to me the central case of “A judges B” is “A thinks B is not living up to moral standards to the degree it’s reasonable to expect/hope others to”.
I think vegans are quiet about their beliefs for reasons that are usually not “they don’t actually think it’s that bad for others to eat animals.” I think the reasons are usually things like, “it wouldn’t help to speak up right now,” “they’d just mock me,” etc.
You will always oversample from the most annoying members of a class.
This is inspired by recent arguments on twitter about how vegans and poly people “always” bring up those facts. I contend that it’s simultaneous true that most vegans and poly people are either not judgmental, but it doesn’t matter because that’s not who people remember. Omnivores don’t notice the 9 vegans who quietly ordered an unsatisfying salad, only the vegan who brought up factoring farming conditions at the table. Vegans who just want to abstain from animal products remember the omnivore who ordered the veal on purpose and made little bleating noises.
And then it spirals. A mono person who had an interaction with an aggro poly person will be quicker to hear judgement in the next poly person’s tone, and vice versa. This is especially bad because lots of us are judging others a little. We’re quiet about it, we place it in context instead of damning people for a single flaw, but we do exercise our right to have opinions. Or maybe we’re not judging the fact, just the logistical impact on us. It is pretty annoying to keep your mouth shut about an issue you view as morally important or a claim on your time, only to have someone demand you placate them about their own choices.
AFAICT this principle covers every single group on earth. Conservatives hear from the most annoying liberals. Communists hear from the most annoying libertarians. Every hobby will be publicly represented by its members who are least deterred by an uninterested audience.
I’d distinguish between oversampling the annoying members of a class (yes), and a class being publicly represented by its most annoying members (not necessarily). A class that’s non-evangelical, that actively strategizes on how to control its evangelizers so that they’ll be less annoying, or that has a limited moral component, will tend not to establish an annoying public image.
Consider Mormons. They’re intensely moral, highly evangelical, but they have established a careful approach to evangelicism that lets them do an enormous amount of it while having their public image of evangelicism be nothing worse than a couple formally dressed young men politely knocking on your door.
Jews are also moral, but they do not attempt to convert non-Jews. What Jews often find intensely annoying (to say the least) about other Jews is when more conservative Jews tell typically less conservative Jews that they’re “not really Jewish” (i.e. because they don’t have an unbroken maternal chain of Jewish ancestry, even if they have been going to synagogue their entire life, etc).
Gardeners are another example. Gardening doesn’t have much of a moral or evangelical component in general, although gardeners often enjoy sharing their hobby with each other. Gardening has a highly pro-social, non-annoying public image.
EAs and rationalists are extraordinarily, and to my mind, inexplicably annoying to adjacent communities (i.e. people hate rationalists on Hacker News for some reason). EA and rationalism certainly have an intense moral component. Both are fairly evangelical. And it seems like the movements exert not much control over their members, or are not capable of giving them guidance, on how to be non-annoying in their evangelicism. Plenty of rationalists and EAs are highly annoying to other rationalists and EAs as well. The ratio of extremely bad actors to participants is highly unfavorable. Neither movement has much of a mechanism or norm for enforcing non-annoyingness on its membership.
Overall, I actually think there’s quite a bit of variance in how annoying specific identity groups are, both amongst themselves and in their interactions with the wider world. It seems like an important thing to understand better for those who would like to make improvements in the status quo.
What do you have in mind for rationality here? It’s clear to me with EA, which has poured tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars into growth programs, especially amongst students and young people, but I’m interested in what you’re thinking about for rationality, which doesn’t immediately strike me as having attempted to undergo massive growth (e.g. HPMOR is very popular but mostly grew because it was a well-written story and ppl loved it, not due to much in the way of active programs and propaganda).
Implicit or explicit in an enormous amount of rationalist text is the idea that people ought to be more rational and that we ought to make society more rational. Contrast that with a genuinely non-evangelistic religion like Judaism, which truly has no project of trying to make non-Jews into Jews and, by default, questions why gentiles would wish to convert.
What’s the delta between this and mormonism? Surely mormons believe & have many texts about how everyone should be mormon & are ignoring obvious truths if they’re not. Is it just a PR difference? A difference between the number of people who read the founding documents?
Not that this is directly relevant to your thesis comparing different groups today; but I do assume that Judaism had a massive evangelical period in its early growth (e.g. 2,000 years ago) that let it get so big that it could afford to pivot to being less evangelical today.
This also requires that the annoying members still value group cohesion over their own impulse to be annoying. Otherwise they will simply split and not toe the party line, so to speak.
Isn’t the most straightforward common reason that many of us think that their jobs are evil? There are probably sophisticated, empathetic, high social-skills, nice ways to say
with love and kindness and grace, but our community isn’t known for unusually high social skills and tact, and honestly I’m not sure many people would take the skillful version even if they knew how to.
I mean, I’m pretty sure animosity towards rationalists on Hacker News is older than the existence of OpenAI and probably even DeepMind. Also most people on Hacker News don’t work in AI. So I don’t really know why this hypothesis is coming to mind, I don’t think it’s relevant for most of what’s gone on.
I’d be more inclined to put it down to Hacker News having many standard online pathologies for bullying easy targets, and rationalists historically being a lot of weird and outcast kinds of people, along with some strains of anti-intellectualism in the tech/startup world.
Interesting, the only recent irl aggression (verbal, not physical) I’ve received from the techie crowd in SF was related to the Sam Altman firing[1]. I’ve also gotten more standard leftist anger but I don’t think that anger is very centrally Hacker News-y, I’d guess those people would also be angry at Hacker News.
Oh I remember another time an ML person got mad at me for mentioning Bostrom’s Superintelligence.
I have Hacker News blocked so I cannot pull up threads now, but what I have in mind (and I’m pretty confident is what DirectedEvolution had in mind) is many many threads on Hacker News where, when LessWrong is mentioned, it’s called a cult and has a bunch of other low-quality critical comments about it with a derisive tone.
(I believe I recalled it getting better in the few years after LessWrong 2.0 started, though I think I’ve seen an uptick again around AI threads.)
Most of the critical comments I see on HN involve accusing LW of being a cult, being too stupid to realize people can’t be fully rational, or being incredibly arrogant and overconfident about analysis based on ass-numbers and ill-researched personal opinion. I don’t see that much engagement with LW arguments around AI specifically.
On Twitter at least, a fair number of the cult allegations seem to be from (honestly fairly cult-ish people themselves) who don’t like what LW people say about AI, at least in the threads I’m likely to follow. But I defer to your greater HN expertise!
I don’t understand. Most vegans believe buying animal products is immoral, which implies they believe people who do are acting immorally. I’m not sure what else judgement could mean. (Maybe “expresses this”?)
Edit: This is copied from my comment in the thread, I should have written it at the start.
This is one of those things where there’s a lot of space between the central example of something and peripheral members, and the equivocation causes a lot of stress.
The central example of being judgmental involves being loud about the other person being bad in full generality, for whatever thing you’re judging. Making a judgement about a particular action, quietly, while still fully respecting the other party as a person doing the best they can, is a peripheral example of being judgmental.
Sometimes people confuse the latter for the former, or feel entitled to the judger’s good opinion on every aspect of themselves. Sometimes they aren’t confused but use confusing phrasing to get people on their side.
The relevant meaning of judgemental from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/judgmental is “characterized by a tendency to judge harshly”.
Most vegans (and most non-vegans) are not characterized by a tendency to judge harshly.
The below is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of dictionary definitions being helpful here.
This seems like one of those definitions that says little because it refers back to the base word (in this case “judge”). What does this actually mean? The link defines “judge” as “to form a negative opinion about”. I’m not sure what “characterized by a tendency (to form a negative opinion about) harshly” would mean. Replacing “harshly” with its dictionary definitions only makes things worse: whether a belief is “excessively critical or negative” is relative to one’s beliefs; some would label the belief “buying animal products is morally similar to buying things produced with slave labor” as “excessively critical or negative”, while others wouldn’t. “unduly severe in making demands”—same thing with “unduly severe”, also an “opinion” itself doesn’t make demands.
(Also, there’s the question of if “characterized by a tendency” means “as an intrinsic personal quality”, or if “consistently as conclusions of one moral idea” counts)
I read your prior comment as saying:
Vegans make moral judgments
Therefore all vegans are judgemental
Therefore you don’t understand what Elizabeth meant by saying that most vegans are not judgemental.
You would like to understand what Elizabeth meant.
I tried to help you understand by pointing out that the relevant definition of judgemental specifies harsh judgement, and most vegans do not judge harshly. From context that is what I think Elizabeth meant.
Good luck with your quest for understanding. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help.
In my comment, (1) was ~”most vegans believe others are acting immorally.” The same isn’t true of OP’s other examples, like polygamists.
To elaborate more, I’d be confused in the same way by this labeling of, e.g., someone who opposed historical slavery but wasn’t loud about their beliefs every time they encountered it. Like, to me the central case of “A judges B” is “A thinks B is not living up to moral standards to the degree it’s reasonable to expect/hope others to”.
I think vegans are quiet about their beliefs for reasons that are usually not “they don’t actually think it’s that bad for others to eat animals.” I think the reasons are usually things like, “it wouldn’t help to speak up right now,” “they’d just mock me,” etc.