I think there’s an occasionally occurring thing where people will post “gooey stuff” on LW and it’s rejected not because it’s gooey but because it’s overconfidently and/or sloppily argued. Then in some cases, rather than responding to the criticisms, the authors will attribute the negative reaction to the gooiness of the post rather than to the fact that people had reasonable criticisms the authors weren’t willing to address. In turn, LW readers will see that the people making the gooey posts are unable to take criticism, and make the inference that all of the gooey stuff just melts people’s brains and makes them unable to reason rationally… making them more likely to actually be prejudiced towards more gooey stuff in the future.
But this only happens because there’s a perceived dichotomy between gooey and prickly stuff in the first place. If the people posting the gooey stuff wouldn’t make a big deal out of how their gooey stuff is more sophisticated than the simple-minded prickly readers are capable of comprehending, the bias against gooey stuff wouldn’t get formed in the first place. Rather the bad articles would be seen just as bad articles, rather than tainting all the gooey stuff by association.
I fear that this post is further playing into the same dynamic. Its tone reads to me as slightly strawmanny and condescending, further reinforcing the frame of, depending on who you ask, “the gooey people who get it vs. the unenlightened prickly people who need to be taught that non-prickly things can be useful too” and “the gooey people who think of themselves better as prickly people when they’re actually just more sloppy thinkers vs. the prickly people who haven’t melted their brains and can still reason sensibly”.
An addition to that: If we look through the goggles of Sara Ness’ Relating Languages, the rationalist style of doing conversations is at the far end of the internal-focusing dialects Debater/Chronicler/Scientist. In my experience, more gooey communities have way more Banterer/Bard/Spaceholder-heavy types of interactions, which focus more on peoples’ needs in the situation than on forming and communicating true beliefs. People don’t necessarily know which dialects they speak themselves, because their way of interacting just feels normal to them, and everyone else weird. It’s hard to learn speak in dialects that are not your natural default. For example, I didn’t even notice myself slipping into Bard/Banterer during writing this post, but in hindsight it’s fairly obvious how it digresses from the LessWrong language game.
I think the LW-way is ideal for its purpose, but I’m realizing that there’s a whole lot of tacit knowledge and implicit norms involved in understanding and doing it. This strong selection for a particular style of communication may be responsible for a significant chunk of the difficulty I’m perceiving in interfacing between the rationalist and other memeplexes. In both directions, both for the rationalist community learning from other memeplexes, and for useful memes getting from rationalist circles into the outside world.
Agree with this.
I think there’s an occasionally occurring thing where people will post “gooey stuff” on LW and it’s rejected not because it’s gooey but because it’s overconfidently and/or sloppily argued. Then in some cases, rather than responding to the criticisms, the authors will attribute the negative reaction to the gooiness of the post rather than to the fact that people had reasonable criticisms the authors weren’t willing to address. In turn, LW readers will see that the people making the gooey posts are unable to take criticism, and make the inference that all of the gooey stuff just melts people’s brains and makes them unable to reason rationally… making them more likely to actually be prejudiced towards more gooey stuff in the future.
But this only happens because there’s a perceived dichotomy between gooey and prickly stuff in the first place. If the people posting the gooey stuff wouldn’t make a big deal out of how their gooey stuff is more sophisticated than the simple-minded prickly readers are capable of comprehending, the bias against gooey stuff wouldn’t get formed in the first place. Rather the bad articles would be seen just as bad articles, rather than tainting all the gooey stuff by association.
I fear that this post is further playing into the same dynamic. Its tone reads to me as slightly strawmanny and condescending, further reinforcing the frame of, depending on who you ask, “the gooey people who get it vs. the unenlightened prickly people who need to be taught that non-prickly things can be useful too” and “the gooey people who think of themselves better as prickly people when they’re actually just more sloppy thinkers vs. the prickly people who haven’t melted their brains and can still reason sensibly”.
Hah, this makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
An addition to that: If we look through the goggles of Sara Ness’ Relating Languages, the rationalist style of doing conversations is at the far end of the internal-focusing dialects Debater/Chronicler/Scientist. In my experience, more gooey communities have way more Banterer/Bard/Spaceholder-heavy types of interactions, which focus more on peoples’ needs in the situation than on forming and communicating true beliefs. People don’t necessarily know which dialects they speak themselves, because their way of interacting just feels normal to them, and everyone else weird. It’s hard to learn speak in dialects that are not your natural default. For example, I didn’t even notice myself slipping into Bard/Banterer during writing this post, but in hindsight it’s fairly obvious how it digresses from the LessWrong language game.
I think the LW-way is ideal for its purpose, but I’m realizing that there’s a whole lot of tacit knowledge and implicit norms involved in understanding and doing it. This strong selection for a particular style of communication may be responsible for a significant chunk of the difficulty I’m perceiving in interfacing between the rationalist and other memeplexes. In both directions, both for the rationalist community learning from other memeplexes, and for useful memes getting from rationalist circles into the outside world.