I think that smart people can hack LW norms and propagandize / pointscore / accumulate power with relative ease. I think this post is pretty much an example of that:
- a lot of time is spent gesturing / sermoning about the importance of fighting biases etc. with no particularly informative or novel content (it is after all intended to “remind people of why they care”.). I personally find it difficult to engage critically with this kind of high volume and low density.
- ultimately the intent seems to be an effort to coordinate power against types of posters that Duncan doesn’t like
I just don’t see how most of this post is supposed to help me be more rational. The droning on makes it harder to engage as an adversary, than if the post were just “here are my terrible ideas”, but it does so in an arational way.
I bring this up in part because Duncan seems to be advocating that his adherence to LW norms means he can’t just propagandize etc.
If you read the OP and do not choose to let your brain project all over it, what you see is, straightforwardly, a mass of claims about how I feel, how I think, what I believe, and what I think should be the case.
I explicitly underscore that I think little details matter, and second-to-second stuff counts, so if you’re going to dismiss all of the “I” statements as being mere window dressing or something (I’m not sure that’s what you’re doing, but it seems like something like that is necessary, to pretend that they weren’t omnipresent in what I wrote), you need to do so explicitly. You need to argue for them not-mattering; you can’t just jump straight to ignoring them, and pretending that I was propagandizing.
If people here really think you can’t propagandize or bad-faith accumulate points/power while adhering to LW norms, well, I think that’s bad for rationality.
I am sure that Duncan will be dissatisfied with this response because it does not engage directly with his models or engage very thoroughly by providing examples from the text etc. I’m not doing this stuff because I just don’t actually think it serves rationality to do so.
While I’m at it:
Duncan:
I’m not trying to cause appeals-to-emotion to disappear. I’m not trying to cause strong feelings oriented on one’s values to be outlawed. I’m trying to cause people to run checks, and to not sacrifice their long-term goals for the sake of short-term point-scoring.
To me it seems really obvious that if I said to Duncan in response to something, “you are just sacrificing long-term goals for the sake of short-term point-scoring”, (if he chose to respond) he would write about how I am making a bald assertion and blah blah blah. How I should retract it and instead say “it feels to me you are [...]” and blah blah blah. But look, in this quote there is a very clear and “uncited” / non-evidentiated claim that people are sacrifiing their long-term goals for the sake of short-term point-scoring. I am not saying it’s bad to make such assertions, just saying that Duncan can and does make such assertions baldly while adhering to norms.
To zoom out, I feel in the OP and in this thread Duncan is enforcing norms that he is good at leveraging but that don’t actually protect rationality. But these norms seem to have buy in. Pooey!
I continuously add more to this stupid post in part because I feel the norms here require a lot of ink gets spilled and that I substantiate everything I say. It’s not enough to just say “you know it seems like you are doing [x thing I find obvious]”. Duncan is really good at enforcing this norm and adhering to it.
But the fact is that this post was a stupid usage of my time that I don’t actually value having written, completely independent of how right I am about anything I am saying or how persuasive.
Again I submit:
I explicitly underscore that I think little details matter, and second-to-second stuff counts, so if you’re going to dismiss all of the “I” statements as being mere window dressing or something (I’m not sure that’s what you’re doing, but it seems like something like that is necessary, to pretend that they weren’t omnipresent in what I wrote), you need to do so explicitly. You need to argue for them not-mattering; you can’t just jump straight to ignoring them, and pretending that I was propagandizing.
Look, if I have to reply to every single attack on a certain premise, before I am allowed to use this premise, then I am not going to be allowed to use the premise ever. Because Duncan has more time than me allocated to this stuff, and seemingly more than most people who criticize this OP. But that seems like a really stupid norm.
I made this top level because, even though I think the norm is stupid, among other norms I have pointed out, I also think that Duncan is right that all of them are in fact the norm here.
Brevity