Back in 2020, @Raemon gave me some extremely good advice.
@johnswentworth had left some comments on a post of mine that I found extremely frustrating and counterproductive. At the time I had no idea about his body of work, so he was just some annoying guy. Ray, who did know who John was and thought he was doing important work, told me:
You can’t save the world without working with people at least as annoying as John.
Which didn’t mean I had to heal the rift with John in particular, but if I was going to make that a policy then I would need to give up on my goal of having real impact.
John and I did a video call, and it went well. He pointed out a major flaw in my post, I impressed him by immediately updating once he pointed it out. I still think his original comments displayed status dynamics while sneering at them, and find that frustrating, but Ray was right that not all factual corrections will be delivered in pleasing forms.
A manager of mine of, speaking about Silicon Valley start-up ecosystem, advised me that it was a small world and I should relate to anyone I meet/deal with as someone who’d be my friend for ten years. I don’t know whether all her friendships were genuine, but the spirit of the advice was helpful.
not all factual corrections will be delivered in pleasing forms
Yep, but I think your example does not go far enough. “Annoying but good-faith LW comments” is one thing, but valuable critique can also come from the mouths of openly sneering bad-faith internet trolls.[1] If you can keep yourself from over-updating on negativity into depression spirals, you may extract some actually useful feedback from your haters’ drivel! (You may want to route it through spite instead of empathy, though. As in, “this fool wants me to fail, but they’ve just brought me useful information, of their own volition!”.)
I think it’s true there can be useful things about listening to bad faith internet trolls, but, I do kinda think you can save the world mostly without interact with bad faith internet trolls (unless you have some additional reason to take them seriously).
(the “at least as annoying as John” and “NOT at least as annoying as openly sneering internet trolls” is an empirical belief based on the contingent state of the rationalsphere and professional world and broader world. I don’t think the internet trolls are actually a good use of your time, en net)
I think the twitter user teortaxestex can often be as annoying as an openly sneering internet troll but is a good source of information. There’s some people like this in the prediction market space too.
I’m guessing it’s net positive to tune people out unless either they clearly-at-a-glance have some insight, or, you’ve heard from some other channel that that they say interesting/useful things.
(I’m not that confident the calculus shakes out this way but generally I think people pay way too much attention to internet trolls. They don’t just need to provide nonzero value, they have to provide more value than whatever else you were doing, on average)
Well yes of course only pay attention if they have something to say worth listening to. But imo this is pretty rare so it’s worth putting up with some rudeness to get.
Wrt your “don’t understand” react, my point being information sources that are contentful, high-density and have high KL-divergence wrt your existing sources of information are rare. And of course one reason they might be high-divergence is that they are in a distinct social cluster with distinct norms, possible even tribally opposed to your usual information sources. IMO most rationalists do not read widely enough in this sense.
People who work on politics often have to deal with adversaries who are openly sneering internet trolls (or similar), and sometimes run across valuable opportunities that require cooperating with them.
Yeah, it’s not a good use of your time to seek that out. But if you do happen to stumble upon them (e. g., if they intruded into your garden, or if Zvi’s newsletter covered an incident involving them, with quotes), and a statement from them causes a twinge of “hm, there may be something to it...”, investigating that twinge may be useful. You shouldn’t necessarily crush it in a burst of cognitive dissonance/self-protectivenss.
Giving attention to sneering comments that happen to bubble to your attention isn’t Pareto optimal on any front. If you want to learn where you are wrong, seek out the most insightful people who disagree with you (and not just the ones that use long essays to lay out their case logically).
Quite likely obvious to you, but to save near-me minds a step: this doesn’t mean you can’t ever tell people they did something annoying unnecessarily. Some minds that produce annoyance in others frequently would in principle like to not do that, but have had trouble updating away from it. If one can identify that the person who replied ~arrogantly is someone who doesn’t think they need to express ~arrogance in order to criticize, they can likely be requested-to-update. But of course that wouldn’t work for some.
I just wanted to say thank you for this. I have a low tolerance for annoyance that’s counterproductive for me, so this helped me reflect on that. Plus, great explainer of what LW interactions are supposed to result in.
You can’t save the world without working with people at least as annoying as John.
This is a great quote, and one that I should keep in mind myself.
My coworkers are pretty amazing in how not annoying they are (they’re low ego, interested in changing their mind when they’re wrong, smart, invested in getting better over time) and I still sometimes feel an urge to quit in a huff.
I can’t speak to the specific case here, but I object to the anti-sneering sentiment in the comments here. I am pro-sneering (in moderation!) and think sneering is more than a zero-sum social signaling game.
In defense of sneering:
Too much sneering gets in the way of productive conversation, as does too little sneering. Sneering is how communities mark posts/comments/people as not worth engaging with. If you don’t sneer, the bullshitters take over. You can’t just respond to bullshitters with logical arguments, because they’ll make ten posts in the time it takes you to respond to one, throwing up a smokescreen of bullshit you can never disperse.
When I sneer, I am saying “I think this post should be ignored.” How the person responds to the sneer is important, as usually it’s fairly uncertain whether a person should be excluded. A genuine, thoughtful response or a lighthearted quip is enough to defuse the sneer, whereas getting defensive, aggressive, or spewing further bullshit fails the “sneer test” in front of the audience. (The challenge-response nature of sneering is also a social game that is enjoyable beyond its mere utility in enforcing social norms, too. Enjoyable unless you’re the type of person who would fail the sneer test!)
On Substack I recently sneered someone. (I was probably being overly bitchy even for the much more sneer-tolerant culture of Substack, but whatever.) I sneered, and they sneered back. Essentially, what they were signalling was: “You’re testing me, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t be testing you. Your sneer test seems low-effort and not worth a serious response.” After a bit of back and forth, I eventually said, “I tried to think of a comeback in the shower but I couldn’t think of one, so I’ll concede here.” I lost the social status game of seeing who can outwit the other, but still passed the sneer test by being the sort of person who isn’t emotionally captured by internet comments, or the sort of person who always has to be right. They responded, “Maybe we’ll just be friends instead,” thereby passing the sneer test themselves. “Seems that’s the only option remaining,” I finished. There was no object-level discussion in this case. I wasn’t interested enough in the object-level discussion to return to it. But I would have been more willing to have an object-level discussion with this person in the future. Without this kind of sneering, I think object-level discussions become hard because you can’t sort out who is worth taking seriously.
I don’t think hard anti-sneering taboos work. They just drive sneering to become more subtle. LessWrong probably has less sneering than other platforms, but not much less. It’s just a subtle-sneer culture. “Yeah, nice try buddy, but you don’t know what you’re talking about” wouldn’t fly here (thankfully), but there’s a lot of “I think this conclusion requires a more delicate analysis” (read: your analysis sucks) or “Please help me understand what I’m missing” (maybe genuine, but often meaning: “I’m pretty sure I haven’t missed anything, and I want to signal that your criticism is unfounded by challenging you to provide justification you won’t be able to”).
Keep in mind sneering is a social behaviour and usually unconscious, so just because you don’t think you’re sneering doesn’t mean you’re not. Sneering may also have a plausible-sounding conscious justification (“I’m just asking for further clarification”) at odds with the true unconscious justification. Especially in cultures like LessWrong’s where naked sneering isn’t tolerated, and sneering is thereby ego-dystonic.
Rather than being against sneering altogether, I’m against sneering when it’s overly hostile, or when it too-often gets in the way of a productive object-level discussion (see: Twitter). There should in fact be a way to say “I don’t think you’ve done your homework on this subject,” or “Your critique is shallow and not worth responding to.” I’ve heard people on LessWrong complain about feeling obligated to respond to even low-quality comments on their posts, because they look bad if they don’t respond. Sneer! The answer is to sneer!
(I think Twitter might seem like a contradiction. It’s a community with a lot of sneering and which is overrun with bullshitters. But the core community on Twitter are people who like bullshit and sneer to reinforce it. Sneering is a way for a community to exclude people who threaten the community’s values, for better or for worse.)
Being on the receiving end of a good sneer isn’t that bad if you don’t take yourself too seriously, and the sneer isn’t too hostile. Getting sneered is how you learn. Yeah, maybe I didn’t put enough thought into that comment. Maybe that was overconfident. Okay, maybe I was being a dick there. Maybe I am full of shit this time. If every conversation happens at the object-level only, you’re not getting any meta-level feedback. (Maybe you think you can invent some way of giving meta-level feedback on a stranger’s post without sneering, but that sort of thing is usually equally emotionally hurtful to be on the receiving end of as a sneer, or even moreso, and I don’t think you should discard the sneering Chesterton’s fence until you’re certain your way of delivering meta-level feedback is better.)
(Here is an example of me sneering someone on LessWrong what I believe to be an appropriate amount, for reference. I think my touch was too light, maybe, but only a bit. The parent is an example of what not to do.)
Using polite phrasing instead of rude phrasing to communicate your issues with a post isn’t veiled sneering, it’s exercising manners. It’s frustrating to hear that you’re reading these emotional overtones onto perfectly normal ways to soften one’s phrasing. EDIT: Also, acknowledging that you might be wrong has important semantic differences from not doing that.
Okay, but why? I think being faux-polite is social deception because the purpose it serves usually isn’t to take a more cooperative approach with the person you’re arguing with, but to look nice to other people less invested in the argument who are reading through the comments. I’ve seen instances where people are genuinely trying to be nice, and I woud agree that that is “having manners”. I’ve just seen much more (esp. on LessWrong) of people sneering while pretending not to sneer, and when they do that to me it’s pretty obvious what they’re doing and I’m upset at the deception, but when they do it to others I notice it takes me longer to catch, and I’m sure the agree/upvote balance has been skewed by that.
I think a great example of this is many of the comments that reply to some of John Wentsworth’s more controversial opinions, like “My Empathy is Rarely Kind”.
I think, when someone feels negatively toward a post, that choosing to translate that feeling as “I think this conclusion requires a more delicate analysis” reflects more epistemic humility and willingness to cooperate than does translating it as “your analysis sucks”. The qualifier, first of all, requires you to keep in mind the fact that your perceptions are subjective, and could be incorrect (while also making it clear to other people that you’re doing so). Trying to phrase things in ways that are less than maximally rude is cooperative because it makes interacting with you more pleasant for the other person. Using words that aren’t strongly valenced and leave the possibility open that the other person is right also means that your words, if believed, are likely to provoke a smaller negative update about the other person; you do increase your credibility by doing so, but I’m skeptical that this cancels out that effect. (Also: it’s impossible not to make decisions about how you phrase things in order to communicate your intended message, and given that this is impossible, I think condemning the choice to phrase things more nicely is pretty much the opposite of what one should do.) As for the part where it makes you look good, the other person can look equally good simply by being equally polite. Of course if they respond with insults this might be bad for their image, but being polite makes insults less tempting for the typical interlocutor.
I would generalize my argument to: charisma is an adversarial game. If you are more charismatic, it does not mean you actually know what you are talking about, or are actually more skilled, but because you make people feel good about themselves, they will still choose you over someone who could actually help them out.
Part of this is an intelligence issue: if everyone had much more INT than CHA, people would easily notice and dismiss charismatic influences. In real life, too high-INT and low-CHA groups will get invaded (arbitraged?) by higher-CHA individuals. On forums, the dynamic plays out where people with more charisma get more upvotes, even if they’re actively making the discussion worse. So, we see dynamics like this:
There are about a dozen top-level comments similar to cata’s, but despite getting 10x the upvotes as Ben’s, they do not actually provide anything useful to the discussion. Basically, all of these comments say something like, “because you did not get the outcome I expected, you must have done the procedure wrong.” They do not justify why their expected outcome is the right one, and if they had a modicum of respect for John’s intelligence they would not believe he had done the procedure wrong. The only thing arguably useful about these comments is building a consensus around being fake-polite while saying, “John is stupid and wrong.” If they just said that, with none of the charisma, their comment would probably be as visible as it actually deserves to be.
I think, when someone feels negatively toward a post, that choosing to translate that feeling as “I think this conclusion requires a more delicate analysis” reflects more epistemic humility and willingness to cooperate than does translating it as “your analysis sucks”.
I think the epistemically humble thing to do is say, “this seems wrong because <...> though I notice I’m not super confident.” Or, if you don’t know why it seems wrong, just say, “this seems to go against my intuitions. There’s probably a reason I (and most people) have these intuitions, so a priori I want to say you’re wrong, but I can only vaguely point out that something seems wrong.”
To be epistemically humble myself: your comment seems generally correct when you’re talking as individuals, and I think the issue only really comes about when you have lots of people interacting so that it’s too costly for them all to analyze every comment they read/upvote/reply to. Also, although I implied intention when I said things like, “I think your version of ‘having manners’ is social deception to get people to like you and hate the person you’re replying to,” it seems more a function of the system you’re interacting in (the system ends up promoting such things) rather than the individuals (except Reddit; there people are just karma farming). It isn’t really fair to say this is intentional.
As for the part where it makes you look good, the other person can look equally good simply by being equally polite.
This is just unfortunately not true. They cannot always respond politely while remaining honest. For example, a Mormon might find it impolite if, when they ask why you don’t want to join their church, you say, “it’s a cult.” If you instead say, “it’s just not my cup of tea—or more like, I enjoy my cups of tea too much,” it would definitely be more polite, but they’ll also always wonder why people are willing to give up on eternal happiness for a little caffeine. You might think someone else will surely come along and be a little more rude and honest and help them overcome their confusion, but I think most Mormons below the age of sixteen have invited a friend or two to church and also have no idea most people consider their church a cult.
Polite, impolite—it’s all sneering. If I tell someone their post sucks, it doesn’t matter whether I say it in so many words, or I use my manners and dress it up. I’m attempting to socially exclude them at the meta-level, rather than engaging with the post at the object level. (Different are the cases where someone actually breaks down at an object level what’s wrong with someone’s post, which I would not count as sneering!)
It’s hard to have an object-level disagreement with you here without any in-context examples, but I’ll say I’m very certain this sort of thing happens constantly on LessWrong, as everywhere. I don’t think I’m just some oversensitive lunatic reading emotional overtones that aren’t there. In general, the idea people are blind to social games is a lot more believable to me than that people are seeing them where they don’t exist, since most social games happen unconsciously and ego-dystonically. I’m sure you don’t believe you play such games, and I’m sure you’re wrong. (Your use of italics betrays you!)
No, it isn’t. It is possible to disagree with people on the object level. I realize that there exist people who cannot descend below simulacrum level three, but the world is not filled with them.
I acknowledge the possibility of having disagreements on the object level, I’m just trying to put forward the idea that sometimes higher-level disagreements are actually valuable, and that a community that only has object-level discussions would be overrun by bullshitters.
Sure. Goodness knows we don’t need to redebate creationism every time. But softening your phrasing isn’t sneering. It’s acting to make your words less upsetting and more pleasant to hear. That is very nearly the opposite of sneering. (It also, in cases where you insert qualifiers, has the valuable effect of making you look more reasonable should you happen to be wrong.)
Sorry, maybe we are miscommunicating; I don’t think the act of softening your speech itself is sneering. Rather, I think you can appear to speak fairly politely and still be sneering. Subtle sneering, which is common on sites like LessWrong where unsubtle sneering is taboo.
As for inserting qualifiers: he who excuses himself accuses himself.
To mock or deride to make other people think less of the target of the sneering. The effect is to cause the community to dismiss the thing that was sneered at, if the sneering is successful.
I’m not sure about that. If you’re engaging at the object-level, you’re not dismissing. If you indicate that something is meta-level not valuable, that seems very hard to do non-hurtfully, since social exclusion is inherently hurtful. And maybe should be appropriately hurtful.
It’s a tenet of LessWrong that factual content and emotional valence are separate axes. Or more plainly, disagreeing on a matter of fact never makes you an asshole, but delivery can.
I like the reduced emotionality of LessWrong, but in this case it seems to me that socially excluding someone is inherently hurtful in a way that no website’s social norms can override. And I’m not even convinced that if you could eliminate the sting of sneering entirely that you should. But if you wanted to, how would you recommend someone take actions that cause people to dismiss a comment without being sneering? Or even harder, to dismiss a person entirely?
I do think that is good advise, and true regardless of trollish or good/bad faith. I read your comment and immediately thought of the shooting messengers rather than messages. In other words, don’t let the messenger distract you from the actual message.
Reading the comments, though, it almost seems like many still focus on the “messenger” rather than the message carried—and here I’m not specifically pointing at Elizabeth’s post but the whole annoying/sneering/troll/just plain difficult person aspect, in other words the characteristics of the delivery rather than the value of the message/information/things the other person might contribute.
Back in 2020, @Raemon gave me some extremely good advice.
@johnswentworth had left some comments on a post of mine that I found extremely frustrating and counterproductive. At the time I had no idea about his body of work, so he was just some annoying guy. Ray, who did know who John was and thought he was doing important work, told me:
Which didn’t mean I had to heal the rift with John in particular, but if I was going to make that a policy then I would need to give up on my goal of having real impact.
John and I did a video call, and it went well. He pointed out a major flaw in my post, I impressed him by immediately updating once he pointed it out. I still think his original comments displayed status dynamics while sneering at them, and find that frustrating, but Ray was right that not all factual corrections will be delivered in pleasing forms.
A manager of mine of, speaking about Silicon Valley start-up ecosystem, advised me that it was a small world and I should relate to anyone I meet/deal with as someone who’d be my friend for ten years. I don’t know whether all her friendships were genuine, but the spirit of the advice was helpful.
Yep, but I think your example does not go far enough. “Annoying but good-faith LW comments” is one thing, but valuable critique can also come from the mouths of openly sneering bad-faith internet trolls.[1] If you can keep yourself from over-updating on negativity into depression spirals, you may extract some actually useful feedback from your haters’ drivel! (You may want to route it through spite instead of empathy, though. As in, “this fool wants me to fail, but they’ve just brought me useful information, of their own volition!”.)
You know how that meme goes, “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point”.
I think it’s true there can be useful things about listening to bad faith internet trolls, but, I do kinda think you can save the world mostly without interact with bad faith internet trolls (unless you have some additional reason to take them seriously).
(the “at least as annoying as John” and “NOT at least as annoying as openly sneering internet trolls” is an empirical belief based on the contingent state of the rationalsphere and professional world and broader world. I don’t think the internet trolls are actually a good use of your time, en net)
I think the twitter user teortaxestex can often be as annoying as an openly sneering internet troll but is a good source of information. There’s some people like this in the prediction market space too.
I’m guessing it’s net positive to tune people out unless either they clearly-at-a-glance have some insight, or, you’ve heard from some other channel that that they say interesting/useful things.
(I’m not that confident the calculus shakes out this way but generally I think people pay way too much attention to internet trolls. They don’t just need to provide nonzero value, they have to provide more value than whatever else you were doing, on average)
Well yes of course only pay attention if they have something to say worth listening to. But imo this is pretty rare so it’s worth putting up with some rudeness to get.
Wrt your “don’t understand” react, my point being information sources that are contentful, high-density and have high KL-divergence wrt your existing sources of information are rare. And of course one reason they might be high-divergence is that they are in a distinct social cluster with distinct norms, possible even tribally opposed to your usual information sources. IMO most rationalists do not read widely enough in this sense.
Okay, I think I get what you mean. Still disagree with your comment but I already listed why in the comment before, so not getting into it more.
People who work on politics often have to deal with adversaries who are openly sneering internet trolls (or similar), and sometimes run across valuable opportunities that require cooperating with them.
Mm nod. (I would classify that under “you have some other reason to take them seriously” although it’s a different kind of seriously)
Yeah, it’s not a good use of your time to seek that out. But if you do happen to stumble upon them (e. g., if they intruded into your garden, or if Zvi’s newsletter covered an incident involving them, with quotes), and a statement from them causes a twinge of “hm, there may be something to it...”, investigating that twinge may be useful. You shouldn’t necessarily crush it in a burst of cognitive dissonance/self-protectivenss.
Giving attention to sneering comments that happen to bubble to your attention isn’t Pareto optimal on any front. If you want to learn where you are wrong, seek out the most insightful people who disagree with you (and not just the ones that use long essays to lay out their case logically).
Quite likely obvious to you, but to save near-me minds a step: this doesn’t mean you can’t ever tell people they did something annoying unnecessarily. Some minds that produce annoyance in others frequently would in principle like to not do that, but have had trouble updating away from it. If one can identify that the person who replied ~arrogantly is someone who doesn’t think they need to express ~arrogance in order to criticize, they can likely be requested-to-update. But of course that wouldn’t work for some.
Your use of hyperlinks is very amusing to me.
I just wanted to say thank you for this. I have a low tolerance for annoyance that’s counterproductive for me, so this helped me reflect on that. Plus, great explainer of what LW interactions are supposed to result in.
This is a great quote, and one that I should keep in mind myself.
My coworkers are pretty amazing in how not annoying they are (they’re low ego, interested in changing their mind when they’re wrong, smart, invested in getting better over time) and I still sometimes feel an urge to quit in a huff.
I can’t speak to the specific case here, but I object to the anti-sneering sentiment in the comments here. I am pro-sneering (in moderation!) and think sneering is more than a zero-sum social signaling game.
In defense of sneering:
Too much sneering gets in the way of productive conversation, as does too little sneering. Sneering is how communities mark posts/comments/people as not worth engaging with. If you don’t sneer, the bullshitters take over. You can’t just respond to bullshitters with logical arguments, because they’ll make ten posts in the time it takes you to respond to one, throwing up a smokescreen of bullshit you can never disperse.
When I sneer, I am saying “I think this post should be ignored.” How the person responds to the sneer is important, as usually it’s fairly uncertain whether a person should be excluded. A genuine, thoughtful response or a lighthearted quip is enough to defuse the sneer, whereas getting defensive, aggressive, or spewing further bullshit fails the “sneer test” in front of the audience. (The challenge-response nature of sneering is also a social game that is enjoyable beyond its mere utility in enforcing social norms, too. Enjoyable unless you’re the type of person who would fail the sneer test!)
On Substack I recently sneered someone. (I was probably being overly bitchy even for the much more sneer-tolerant culture of Substack, but whatever.) I sneered, and they sneered back. Essentially, what they were signalling was: “You’re testing me, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t be testing you. Your sneer test seems low-effort and not worth a serious response.” After a bit of back and forth, I eventually said, “I tried to think of a comeback in the shower but I couldn’t think of one, so I’ll concede here.” I lost the social status game of seeing who can outwit the other, but still passed the sneer test by being the sort of person who isn’t emotionally captured by internet comments, or the sort of person who always has to be right. They responded, “Maybe we’ll just be friends instead,” thereby passing the sneer test themselves. “Seems that’s the only option remaining,” I finished. There was no object-level discussion in this case. I wasn’t interested enough in the object-level discussion to return to it. But I would have been more willing to have an object-level discussion with this person in the future. Without this kind of sneering, I think object-level discussions become hard because you can’t sort out who is worth taking seriously.
I don’t think hard anti-sneering taboos work. They just drive sneering to become more subtle. LessWrong probably has less sneering than other platforms, but not much less. It’s just a subtle-sneer culture. “Yeah, nice try buddy, but you don’t know what you’re talking about” wouldn’t fly here (thankfully), but there’s a lot of “I think this conclusion requires a more delicate analysis” (read: your analysis sucks) or “Please help me understand what I’m missing” (maybe genuine, but often meaning: “I’m pretty sure I haven’t missed anything, and I want to signal that your criticism is unfounded by challenging you to provide justification you won’t be able to”).
Keep in mind sneering is a social behaviour and usually unconscious, so just because you don’t think you’re sneering doesn’t mean you’re not. Sneering may also have a plausible-sounding conscious justification (“I’m just asking for further clarification”) at odds with the true unconscious justification. Especially in cultures like LessWrong’s where naked sneering isn’t tolerated, and sneering is thereby ego-dystonic.
Rather than being against sneering altogether, I’m against sneering when it’s overly hostile, or when it too-often gets in the way of a productive object-level discussion (see: Twitter). There should in fact be a way to say “I don’t think you’ve done your homework on this subject,” or “Your critique is shallow and not worth responding to.” I’ve heard people on LessWrong complain about feeling obligated to respond to even low-quality comments on their posts, because they look bad if they don’t respond. Sneer! The answer is to sneer!
(I think Twitter might seem like a contradiction. It’s a community with a lot of sneering and which is overrun with bullshitters. But the core community on Twitter are people who like bullshit and sneer to reinforce it. Sneering is a way for a community to exclude people who threaten the community’s values, for better or for worse.)
Being on the receiving end of a good sneer isn’t that bad if you don’t take yourself too seriously, and the sneer isn’t too hostile. Getting sneered is how you learn. Yeah, maybe I didn’t put enough thought into that comment. Maybe that was overconfident. Okay, maybe I was being a dick there. Maybe I am full of shit this time. If every conversation happens at the object-level only, you’re not getting any meta-level feedback. (Maybe you think you can invent some way of giving meta-level feedback on a stranger’s post without sneering, but that sort of thing is usually equally emotionally hurtful to be on the receiving end of as a sneer, or even moreso, and I don’t think you should discard the sneering Chesterton’s fence until you’re certain your way of delivering meta-level feedback is better.)
(Here is an example of me sneering someone on LessWrong what I believe to be an appropriate amount, for reference. I think my touch was too light, maybe, but only a bit. The parent is an example of what not to do.)
Using polite phrasing instead of rude phrasing to communicate your issues with a post isn’t veiled sneering, it’s exercising manners. It’s frustrating to hear that you’re reading these emotional overtones onto perfectly normal ways to soften one’s phrasing.
EDIT: Also, acknowledging that you might be wrong has important semantic differences from not doing that.
I think your version of “having manners” is social deception to get people to like you and hate the person you’re replying to.
Good for you. I think you’re stupid.
Okay, but why? I think being faux-polite is social deception because the purpose it serves usually isn’t to take a more cooperative approach with the person you’re arguing with, but to look nice to other people less invested in the argument who are reading through the comments. I’ve seen instances where people are genuinely trying to be nice, and I woud agree that that is “having manners”. I’ve just seen much more (esp. on LessWrong) of people sneering while pretending not to sneer, and when they do that to me it’s pretty obvious what they’re doing and I’m upset at the deception, but when they do it to others I notice it takes me longer to catch, and I’m sure the agree/upvote balance has been skewed by that.
I think a great example of this is many of the comments that reply to some of John Wentsworth’s more controversial opinions, like “My Empathy is Rarely Kind”.
I think, when someone feels negatively toward a post, that choosing to translate that feeling as “I think this conclusion requires a more delicate analysis” reflects more epistemic humility and willingness to cooperate than does translating it as “your analysis sucks”. The qualifier, first of all, requires you to keep in mind the fact that your perceptions are subjective, and could be incorrect (while also making it clear to other people that you’re doing so). Trying to phrase things in ways that are less than maximally rude is cooperative because it makes interacting with you more pleasant for the other person. Using words that aren’t strongly valenced and leave the possibility open that the other person is right also means that your words, if believed, are likely to provoke a smaller negative update about the other person; you do increase your credibility by doing so, but I’m skeptical that this cancels out that effect. (Also: it’s impossible not to make decisions about how you phrase things in order to communicate your intended message, and given that this is impossible, I think condemning the choice to phrase things more nicely is pretty much the opposite of what one should do.) As for the part where it makes you look good, the other person can look equally good simply by being equally polite. Of course if they respond with insults this might be bad for their image, but being polite makes insults less tempting for the typical interlocutor.
I would generalize my argument to: charisma is an adversarial game. If you are more charismatic, it does not mean you actually know what you are talking about, or are actually more skilled, but because you make people feel good about themselves, they will still choose you over someone who could actually help them out.
Part of this is an intelligence issue: if everyone had much more INT than CHA, people would easily notice and dismiss charismatic influences. In real life, too high-INT and low-CHA groups will get invaded (arbitraged?) by higher-CHA individuals. On forums, the dynamic plays out where people with more charisma get more upvotes, even if they’re actively making the discussion worse. So, we see dynamics like this:
There are about a dozen top-level comments similar to cata’s, but despite getting 10x the upvotes as Ben’s, they do not actually provide anything useful to the discussion. Basically, all of these comments say something like, “because you did not get the outcome I expected, you must have done the procedure wrong.” They do not justify why their expected outcome is the right one, and if they had a modicum of respect for John’s intelligence they would not believe he had done the procedure wrong. The only thing arguably useful about these comments is building a consensus around being fake-polite while saying, “John is stupid and wrong.” If they just said that, with none of the charisma, their comment would probably be as visible as it actually deserves to be.
I think the epistemically humble thing to do is say, “this seems wrong because <...> though I notice I’m not super confident.” Or, if you don’t know why it seems wrong, just say, “this seems to go against my intuitions. There’s probably a reason I (and most people) have these intuitions, so a priori I want to say you’re wrong, but I can only vaguely point out that something seems wrong.”
To be epistemically humble myself: your comment seems generally correct when you’re talking as individuals, and I think the issue only really comes about when you have lots of people interacting so that it’s too costly for them all to analyze every comment they read/upvote/reply to. Also, although I implied intention when I said things like, “I think your version of ‘having manners’ is social deception to get people to like you and hate the person you’re replying to,” it seems more a function of the system you’re interacting in (the system ends up promoting such things) rather than the individuals (except Reddit; there people are just karma farming). It isn’t really fair to say this is intentional.
This is just unfortunately not true. They cannot always respond politely while remaining honest. For example, a Mormon might find it impolite if, when they ask why you don’t want to join their church, you say, “it’s a cult.” If you instead say, “it’s just not my cup of tea—or more like, I enjoy my cups of tea too much,” it would definitely be more polite, but they’ll also always wonder why people are willing to give up on eternal happiness for a little caffeine. You might think someone else will surely come along and be a little more rude and honest and help them overcome their confusion, but I think most Mormons below the age of sixteen have invited a friend or two to church and also have no idea most people consider their church a cult.
Polite, impolite—it’s all sneering. If I tell someone their post sucks, it doesn’t matter whether I say it in so many words, or I use my manners and dress it up. I’m attempting to socially exclude them at the meta-level, rather than engaging with the post at the object level. (Different are the cases where someone actually breaks down at an object level what’s wrong with someone’s post, which I would not count as sneering!)
It’s hard to have an object-level disagreement with you here without any in-context examples, but I’ll say I’m very certain this sort of thing happens constantly on LessWrong, as everywhere. I don’t think I’m just some oversensitive lunatic reading emotional overtones that aren’t there. In general, the idea people are blind to social games is a lot more believable to me than that people are seeing them where they don’t exist, since most social games happen unconsciously and ego-dystonically. I’m sure you don’t believe you play such games, and I’m sure you’re wrong. (Your use of italics betrays you!)
No, it isn’t. It is possible to disagree with people on the object level. I realize that there exist people who cannot descend below simulacrum level three, but the world is not filled with them.
I acknowledge the possibility of having disagreements on the object level, I’m just trying to put forward the idea that sometimes higher-level disagreements are actually valuable, and that a community that only has object-level discussions would be overrun by bullshitters.
Sure. Goodness knows we don’t need to redebate creationism every time. But softening your phrasing isn’t sneering. It’s acting to make your words less upsetting and more pleasant to hear. That is very nearly the opposite of sneering. (It also, in cases where you insert qualifiers, has the valuable effect of making you look more reasonable should you happen to be wrong.)
Sorry, maybe we are miscommunicating; I don’t think the act of softening your speech itself is sneering. Rather, I think you can appear to speak fairly politely and still be sneering. Subtle sneering, which is common on sites like LessWrong where unsubtle sneering is taboo.
As for inserting qualifiers: he who excuses himself accuses himself.
Could you define sneering, as you use it? It sounds to me like you mean something like “dismissing in entirety”, which is not my definition.
To mock or deride to make other people think less of the target of the sneering. The effect is to cause the community to dismiss the thing that was sneered at, if the sneering is successful.
Is it possible to take actions that cause people to dismiss something, without being sneering?
I’m not sure about that. If you’re engaging at the object-level, you’re not dismissing. If you indicate that something is meta-level not valuable, that seems very hard to do non-hurtfully, since social exclusion is inherently hurtful. And maybe should be appropriately hurtful.
It’s a tenet of LessWrong that factual content and emotional valence are separate axes. Or more plainly, disagreeing on a matter of fact never makes you an asshole, but delivery can.
I like the reduced emotionality of LessWrong, but in this case it seems to me that socially excluding someone is inherently hurtful in a way that no website’s social norms can override. And I’m not even convinced that if you could eliminate the sting of sneering entirely that you should. But if you wanted to, how would you recommend someone take actions that cause people to dismiss a comment without being sneering? Or even harder, to dismiss a person entirely?
I do think that is good advise, and true regardless of trollish or good/bad faith. I read your comment and immediately thought of the shooting messengers rather than messages. In other words, don’t let the messenger distract you from the actual message.
Reading the comments, though, it almost seems like many still focus on the “messenger” rather than the message carried—and here I’m not specifically pointing at Elizabeth’s post but the whole annoying/sneering/troll/just plain difficult person aspect, in other words the characteristics of the delivery rather than the value of the message/information/things the other person might contribute.