I think instead of ‘high trust environment’ I would want a phrase like ‘intention to cooperate’ or ‘good faith’, where I expect that the other party is attempting to seek the truth and is engaging in behaviors that will help move us towards the truth
I agree—I think ‘intention to cooperate’ or ‘good faith’ are much more appropriate terms that get more at the heart of things. To move towards the truth or improve yourself or what-have-you, you don’t necessarily need to trust people in general but you do need to be willing to admit some forms of vulnerability (ie “I could be wrong about this” or “I could do better”). And the expectation or presence of adversarial manipulation (ie “I want you to do X for me but you don’t want to so I’ll make you feel wrong about what you want) heavily disincentivizes these forms of vulnerability.
To be clear, I would not ban someone for only writing Affordance Widths; I think it is one element of a long series of deceit and manipulation, and it is the series that is most relevant to my impression.
Thanks for clarifying—and I think this point is also born out by many statements in your original post. My response was motivated less by Affordance Widths specifically and more by the trading firm analogy. To me, the problem with Ialdabaoth isn’t that his output may pose epistemic risks (which would be analogous to the fraud-committer’s output posing legal risks); it’s that Ialdabaoth being in a good-faith community would hurt the community’s level of good faith.
This is an important distinction because the former problem would isolate Ialdabaoth’s manipulativeness just to Bayesian updates about the epistemic risks of his output on Less Wrong (which I’m skeptical about being that risky) while the latter problem would considers Ialdabaoth’s general manipulativeness in the context of community impact (which I think may be potentially more serious and does definitely take into consideration things like sex crimes, to address Zack_M_Davis’s comments a little bit).
I agree—I think ‘intention to cooperate’ or ‘good faith’ are much more appropriate terms that get more at the heart of things. To move towards the truth or improve yourself or what-have-you, you don’t necessarily need to trust people in general but you do need to be willing to admit some forms of vulnerability (ie “I could be wrong about this” or “I could do better”). And the expectation or presence of adversarial manipulation (ie “I want you to do X for me but you don’t want to so I’ll make you feel wrong about what you want) heavily disincentivizes these forms of vulnerability.
Thanks for clarifying—and I think this point is also born out by many statements in your original post. My response was motivated less by Affordance Widths specifically and more by the trading firm analogy. To me, the problem with Ialdabaoth isn’t that his output may pose epistemic risks (which would be analogous to the fraud-committer’s output posing legal risks); it’s that Ialdabaoth being in a good-faith community would hurt the community’s level of good faith.
This is an important distinction because the former problem would isolate Ialdabaoth’s manipulativeness just to Bayesian updates about the epistemic risks of his output on Less Wrong (which I’m skeptical about being that risky) while the latter problem would considers Ialdabaoth’s general manipulativeness in the context of community impact (which I think may be potentially more serious and does definitely take into consideration things like sex crimes, to address Zack_M_Davis’s comments a little bit).