I expect these topics are hard to write about, and that there’s value in attempting it anyway. I want to note that before I get into my complaints. So, um, thanks for sharing your data and thoughts about this hard-to-write-about (AFAICT) and significant (also AFAICT) topic!
Having acknowledged this, I’d like to share some things about my own perspective about how to have conversations like these “well”, and about why the above post makes me extremely uneasy.
First: there’s a kind of rigor that IMO the post lacks, and IMO the post is additionally in a domain for which such rigor is a lot more helpful/necessary than such rigor usually is.
Specifically: I can’t tell what the core claims of the OP are. I can’t easily ask myself “what would the world look like if [core claim X] was true? If it were false? what do I see?” “How about [core claim Y]”? “Are [X] and [Y] the best way to account for the evidence the OP presents, or are there unnecessary details tagging along with the conclusions that aren’t actually actually implied by the evidence?”, and so on.
I.e., the post’s theses are not factored to make evidence-tracking easy.
I care more about (separable claims, each separately trackable by evidence, laid out to make vetting easy) here than I usually would, because the OP is about politics (specifically, it is about what behaviors should lead to us “burning [those who do them] with fire” and ostracizing those folks from our polity. Politics is damn tricky stuff; political discussion in groups about who to exclude and what precedents to set up for why is damn tricky stuff.
I think Raemon’s comment is pretty similar to the point I’m trying to make here.
(Key to my reaction here is that this is a large public discussion. I’m worried that in such discussions, “X was claimed, and upvoted, and no one objected” may cause many readers to assume “X is now a vetted claim that can be assumed-and-cited when making future arguments.” I’m not sure if this is right; if it’s false, I care less.)
(Alternately put: I like this post fine for conversation-level discussion; it’s got some interesting examples and anecdotes and claims and hypotheses, seems worth reading and helpful-on-some-points. I don’t as much like it as a contribution to LW’s “vetted precedents that we get to cite when sorting through political cases”, because I think it doesn’t hit the fairly high and hard-to-hit standard required for such precedents to be on-net-not-too-confusing/“weaponizable”/something.)
I expect it’s slower to try to proceed via separable claims that we can separately track the evidence for/against, but on ground this tricky, slower seems worth it to me.
I’ve often failed at the standard I’m requesting here, but I’ll try to hit in in the future, and will be a good sport when people point out I’m dramatically failing at it.
—
Secondly, and relatedly: I am uneasy about the fact that many of the post’s examples are from a current conflict that is still being worked out (the rationalist community’s attempt to figure out how to relate to Geoff Anders). IMO, we are still in the process of evaluating both:
a) Whether Geoff Anders is someone the rationalist community (or various folks in it) would do better to ostracize, in various senses; and
b) Whether there really is a thing called “frame control”, what exactly it is, whether it’s bad, whether it should be “burned with fire,” etc.
I would much rather we try to prosecute conversation (a) and conversation (b) separately, rather than taking unvetted claims about what a new bad thing is and how to spot it, and relatively unvetted claims about Geoff, and using them to reinforce each other.
(If one is a prerequisite for the other, we could try to establish that one first, and then bring in the other.)
The reason I’d much rather they be done separately, is that I don’t trust my own, or most others’, ability to track evidence when they’re done at once. The sort of confusion I get around this is similar to the confusion the OP describes frame-controllers as inducing with “burried claims”. If (a) and (b) are both cited as evidence for one another, it’s a bit tricky to pull out the claims, and I notice myself getting sort of dizzy as I read.
—
Hammering a bit more here, we get to my third source of unease: there are plenty of ways I can excerpt-and-paraphrase-uncharitably from the OP, that seem like kinds of things that ought not to be very compelling, and that I’d kind of expect would cause harm if a community found them compelling anyhow.
Uncharitable paraphrase/caricature:
“Hey you guys. There’s a thing that is secretly very bad, but looks pretty normal. (So, discount your “this is probably fine”, “the argument for ostracism doesn’t seem very compelling here” reactions. (cf. “Finger-trap beliefs.)) I know it’s really bad because my dad was really bad for me and my mom during my childhood, and this not-very-specified thingy was the central thing; I can’t give you enough of a description to allow independent evaluation of who’s doing it, but I can probably detect it myself and tell you which people are/aren’t doing (the central and vaguely specified bad thing). We should burn it with fire when we see it; my saying this may trigger your “wait, we should be empathetic” reactions, but ignore those because, let me tell you so that you know, I’m normally very empathetic, and I think this one vaguely specified thing should be burned with fire. So you guys should override a bunch of your usual heuristics and trust (me or whoever you think is good at spotting this vaguely specified thing) to decide which things we should collectively burn with fire.”
It’s possible there are protective factors that should make me not-worry about this post, even if I’m right that a reasonable person would worry about some other posts that fit my above caricature. But I don’t clearly see them, and would like help with that if they are here!
I like a bunch of the ending, about holding things lightly and so on. I feel like that is basically enough to make the post net-just-fine, and also helpful, for an individual reading this, who isn’t part of a community with the rest of the readers and the author — for such an individual, the post basically seems to me to be saying “sometimes you’ll find yourself feeling really crazy around somebody without knowing how to pin down why. In such a case, feel free to trust your own judgment and get out of there, if that’s what your actual unjustifiable best guess at what to do is.” This seems like fine advice! But in a community context, if we’re trying to arrive at collective beliefs about other people (which I’m not sure we’re doing, and I’m even less sure we should be doing; if we aren’t, maybe this is fine), such that we’re often deferring to other peoples’ guesses about what was and wasn’t “frame control” and whether that “frame control” maps onto a set of things that are really actually “burn it with fire” harmful and not similar in some other sense… I’m uneasy!
I expect these topics are hard to write about, and that there’s value in attempting it anyway. I want to note that before I get into my complaints. So, um, thanks for sharing your data and thoughts about this hard-to-write-about (AFAICT) and significant (also AFAICT) topic!
Having acknowledged this, I’d like to share some things about my own perspective about how to have conversations like these “well”, and about why the above post makes me extremely uneasy.
First: there’s a kind of rigor that IMO the post lacks, and IMO the post is additionally in a domain for which such rigor is a lot more helpful/necessary than such rigor usually is.
Specifically: I can’t tell what the core claims of the OP are. I can’t easily ask myself “what would the world look like if [core claim X] was true? If it were false? what do I see?” “How about [core claim Y]”? “Are [X] and [Y] the best way to account for the evidence the OP presents, or are there unnecessary details tagging along with the conclusions that aren’t actually actually implied by the evidence?”, and so on.
I.e., the post’s theses are not factored to make evidence-tracking easy.
I care more about (separable claims, each separately trackable by evidence, laid out to make vetting easy) here than I usually would, because the OP is about politics (specifically, it is about what behaviors should lead to us “burning [those who do them] with fire” and ostracizing those folks from our polity. Politics is damn tricky stuff; political discussion in groups about who to exclude and what precedents to set up for why is damn tricky stuff.
I think Raemon’s comment is pretty similar to the point I’m trying to make here.
(Key to my reaction here is that this is a large public discussion. I’m worried that in such discussions, “X was claimed, and upvoted, and no one objected” may cause many readers to assume “X is now a vetted claim that can be assumed-and-cited when making future arguments.” I’m not sure if this is right; if it’s false, I care less.)
(Alternately put: I like this post fine for conversation-level discussion; it’s got some interesting examples and anecdotes and claims and hypotheses, seems worth reading and helpful-on-some-points. I don’t as much like it as a contribution to LW’s “vetted precedents that we get to cite when sorting through political cases”, because I think it doesn’t hit the fairly high and hard-to-hit standard required for such precedents to be on-net-not-too-confusing/“weaponizable”/something.)
I expect it’s slower to try to proceed via separable claims that we can separately track the evidence for/against, but on ground this tricky, slower seems worth it to me.
I’ve often failed at the standard I’m requesting here, but I’ll try to hit in in the future, and will be a good sport when people point out I’m dramatically failing at it.
—
Secondly, and relatedly: I am uneasy about the fact that many of the post’s examples are from a current conflict that is still being worked out (the rationalist community’s attempt to figure out how to relate to Geoff Anders). IMO, we are still in the process of evaluating both: a) Whether Geoff Anders is someone the rationalist community (or various folks in it) would do better to ostracize, in various senses; and b) Whether there really is a thing called “frame control”, what exactly it is, whether it’s bad, whether it should be “burned with fire,” etc.
I would much rather we try to prosecute conversation (a) and conversation (b) separately, rather than taking unvetted claims about what a new bad thing is and how to spot it, and relatively unvetted claims about Geoff, and using them to reinforce each other.
(If one is a prerequisite for the other, we could try to establish that one first, and then bring in the other.)
The reason I’d much rather they be done separately, is that I don’t trust my own, or most others’, ability to track evidence when they’re done at once. The sort of confusion I get around this is similar to the confusion the OP describes frame-controllers as inducing with “burried claims”. If (a) and (b) are both cited as evidence for one another, it’s a bit tricky to pull out the claims, and I notice myself getting sort of dizzy as I read.
—
Hammering a bit more here, we get to my third source of unease: there are plenty of ways I can excerpt-and-paraphrase-uncharitably from the OP, that seem like kinds of things that ought not to be very compelling, and that I’d kind of expect would cause harm if a community found them compelling anyhow.
Uncharitable paraphrase/caricature: “Hey you guys. There’s a thing that is secretly very bad, but looks pretty normal. (So, discount your “this is probably fine”, “the argument for ostracism doesn’t seem very compelling here” reactions. (cf. “Finger-trap beliefs.)) I know it’s really bad because my dad was really bad for me and my mom during my childhood, and this not-very-specified thingy was the central thing; I can’t give you enough of a description to allow independent evaluation of who’s doing it, but I can probably detect it myself and tell you which people are/aren’t doing (the central and vaguely specified bad thing). We should burn it with fire when we see it; my saying this may trigger your “wait, we should be empathetic” reactions, but ignore those because, let me tell you so that you know, I’m normally very empathetic, and I think this one vaguely specified thing should be burned with fire. So you guys should override a bunch of your usual heuristics and trust (me or whoever you think is good at spotting this vaguely specified thing) to decide which things we should collectively burn with fire.”
It’s possible there are protective factors that should make me not-worry about this post, even if I’m right that a reasonable person would worry about some other posts that fit my above caricature. But I don’t clearly see them, and would like help with that if they are here!
I like a bunch of the ending, about holding things lightly and so on. I feel like that is basically enough to make the post net-just-fine, and also helpful, for an individual reading this, who isn’t part of a community with the rest of the readers and the author — for such an individual, the post basically seems to me to be saying “sometimes you’ll find yourself feeling really crazy around somebody without knowing how to pin down why. In such a case, feel free to trust your own judgment and get out of there, if that’s what your actual unjustifiable best guess at what to do is.” This seems like fine advice! But in a community context, if we’re trying to arrive at collective beliefs about other people (which I’m not sure we’re doing, and I’m even less sure we should be doing; if we aren’t, maybe this is fine), such that we’re often deferring to other peoples’ guesses about what was and wasn’t “frame control” and whether that “frame control” maps onto a set of things that are really actually “burn it with fire” harmful and not similar in some other sense… I’m uneasy!