If you want to discuss or debate an issue to resolution/conclusion with me, explicitly ask for that. I’m open, by request, to putting major effort into resolving disagreements.
curi
Karma: −990
Updating My LW Commenting Policy
gjm, going forward, I don’t want you to comment on my posts, including this one.
Thanks for the reply. I think privacy is important and worth analyzing.
But I’m not convinced of your explanation. I have some initial objections.
I view LoLE as related to some other concepts such as reactivity and chasing. Chasing others (like seeking their attention) is low status, and reacting to others (more than they’re reacting to you) is low status. Chasing and reacting are both types of effort. They don’t strike me as privacy related. However, for LoLE only the appearance of effort counts (Chase’s version), so to some approximation that means public effort, so you could connect it to privacy that way.
Some people do lots of publicly visible work. There are Twitch streamers, like Leffen and MajinPhil, who stream a lot of their practice time. (Some other people do stream for a living and stream less or no practice.) Partly I think it’s OK because they get paid to stream. But partly I think it’s OK because they are seen as wanting to do that work – it’s their passion that they enjoy. Similarly I think one could livestream their gym workouts, tennis practice sessions, running training, or similar, and making that public wouldn’t ruin their status. Similarly, Brandon Sanderson (a high status fantasy author) has streamed himself answering fan questions while simultaneously signing books by the hundreds (just stacks of pages that aren’t even in the books yet, not signing finished books for fans), and he’s done this in video rather than audio-only format. So he’s showing the mysterious process of mass producing a bunch of signed books. And I don’t think Sanderson gets significant income from the videos. I also don’t think that Jordan Peterson putting up recordings of doing his job – university lectures – was bad for his status (putting up videos of his lecture prep time might be bad, but the lecturing part is seen as a desirable and impressive activity for him to do, and that desirability seems like the issue to me more than whether it’s public or private). The (perceived) option to have privacy might sometimes matter more than actually having privacy.
I think basically some effort isn’t counted as effort. If you like doing it, it’s not real work. Plus if it’s hidden effort, it usually can’t be entered into evidence in the court of public opinion, so it doesn’t count. But my current understanding is that if 1) it counts as effort/work; and 2) you’re socially allowed to bring it up then it lowers status. I see privacy as an important thing helping control (2) but effort itself, under those two conditions, as the thing seen as undesirable, bad, something you’re presumed to try to avoid (so it’s evidence of failure or lack of power, resources, helpers, etc), etc.
When there is no transparency about why people exit discussions, it allows for them to leave due to bias, dodging, bad reasons, etc., and it’s not very provable. Your response is: they didn’t explain that they left for bad reasons, so you (curi) can’t really prove anything! Indeed. It’s ambiguous. That’s a large part of the problem.
I could go into detail about some of the specifics that I didn’t reply to, explain why I think some of the things people wrote were low quality, argue my case, answer every question, etc. but I don’t have a reasonable expectation that they would be responsive to the discussion. Different discussion norms or explicit request could change that.
My sense is that you’re trying to hold people to standards you fall short of.
I proposed that if both people want a serious discussion that tries to make progress and doesn’t end arbitrarily, then here’s some stuff you can do. I also proposed that the general norms here could be improved.
Me responding more energetically and thoroughly to people with different preferred discussion norms than me will not solve the problem. And yes I’ve already tried it (thousands of times).
I could also reply to people and say why I think their messages (as a whole or specific parts) are low quality so I don’t want to reply, but please correct me if my analysis is wrong. I have tried this too but people mostly rather dislike it. I am open to doing it by request.
I could also reply to people asking if they want a substantive discussion. I have tried that too. Yes answers are rare and doing it a lot here would annoy people.
So I’ve put in my bio here a note that people can make a request if they want a substantive discussion with me, and I’ve talked some about the general issue. I also have more detailed policies posted on my websites, including public promises re how anyone can get my attention and get responses, and I have established different discussion norms at my own forums.
Yes I’ve found it’s a major problem in practice, everywhere. I think most discussion interactions at LW end either at key moments or earlier. Hardly any make significant progress. The reasons they end early are rarely explained. Would examples help? There are multiple examples in this topic, e.g. remizidae dropped the discussion, as did G Gordon Worley III and Dagon.
note: i don’t want to particularly blame or criticize them compared to the people who didn’t write anything at all and would have done similarly well or worse. but discussion interactions like these are problematic – not taken far enough to actually really get anywhere – and typical. discussions where people try to actually resolve disagreements are uncommon, and when those begin they are usually dropped at some point too without much in the way of transparency, post-mortem, conclusion, etc.
regarding your article: I think a 2 more reply warning would be a large improvement over what people typically do.
I didn’t quote you en masse. I didn’t just dump all your posting history. I quoted some specific stuff related to my critical commentary. Did you even look?
No. Quoting is not a copyright violation. And I won’t have a discussion with you without being able to mirror it. Goodbye and no discussion I guess?
This discussion was on Slack (which unfortunately hides all but the most recent messages unless you pay them, which LW doesn’t).
Well, fortunately, I did save copies of those discussions. You could find them in the FI archives if you wanted to. (Not blaming you at all but I do think this is kinda funny and I don’t regret my actions.)
FYI, full disclosure, on a related note, I have mirrored recent discussion from LW to my own website. Mostly my own writing but also some comments from other people who were discussing with me, including you. See e.g. http://curi.us/2357-less-wrong-related-dicussion and http://curi.us/archives/list_category/126
I don’t plan to review the 3 year old discussions and I don’t want to re-raise anything that either one of us saw negatively.
If you are interested in pursuing any of those discussions, maybe I can make a post summarizing my position and we can proceed in comments there.
Sure but I’d actually mostly prefer literature, partly because I want something more comprehensive (and more edited/polished) and partly because I want something more suitable for quoting and responding to as a way to present and engage with rival, mainstream viewpoints which would be acceptable to the general public.
Is there any literature that’s close enough (not exact) or which would work with a few modifications/caveats/qualifiers/etc? Or put together a position mostly from selections from a few sources? E.g. I don’t exactly agree with Popper and Deutsch but I can provide selections of their writing that I consider close enough to be a good starting point for discussion of my views.
I also am broadly in favor of using literature in discussions, and trying to build on and engage with existing writing, instead of rewriting everything.
If you can’t do something involving literature, why not? Is your position non-standard? Are you inadequately familiar with inductivist literature? (Yes answers are OK but I think relevant to deciding how to proceed.)
And yes feel free to start a new topic or request that I do instead of nesting further comments.
what I think about what Popper thinks about induction
I actually think the basics of induction would be a better topic. What problems is it trying to solve? How does it solve it? What steps does one do to perform an induction? If you claim the future resembles the past, how do you answer the basic logical fact that the future always resembles the past in infinitely many ways and differs in infinitely many ways (in other words, infinitely many patterns continue and infinitely many are broken, no matter what happens), etc.? What’s the difference, if any, between evidence that doesn’t contradict a claim and evidence that supports it? My experience with induction discussions is a major sticking point is vagueness and malleability re what the inductivist side is actually claiming, and a lack of clear answers to initial questions like those above, and I don’t actually know where to find any books which lay out clear answers to this stuff.
Another reason for using literature is I find lots of inductivists don’t know about some of the problems in the field, and sometimes deny them. Whereas a good book would recognize at least some of the problems are real problems and try to address them. I have seen inductivist authors do that before – e.g. acknowledging that any finite data set underdetermines theory or pattern – just not comprehensively enough. I don’t like to try to go over known ground with people who don’t understand the ideas on their own side of the debate – and do that in the form of a debate where they are arguing with me and trying to win. They shouldn’t even have a side yet.
I think I looked at that argument in particular because you said you found it convincing
FYI I’m doubtful that I said that. It’s not what convinced me. My guess is I picked it because someone asked for math. I’d prefer not to focus on it atm.
I’d be more interested in discussing Popper and Bayes stuff than your LoLE comments. Is there any literature which adequately explains your position on induction, which you would appreciate criticism of?
FYI I do not remember our past conversations in a way that I can connect any claims/arguments/etc to you individually. I also don’t remember if our conversations ended by either of our choice or were still going when moderators suppressed my participation (slack ban with no warning for mirroring my conversations to my forum, allegedly violating privacy, as well as repeated moderator intervention to prevent me from posting to the LW1.0 website.)
I hereby grant you and everyone else license to break social norms at me. (This is not a license to break rational norms, including rational moral norms, which coincide with social norms.) I propose trying this until I get bent out of shape once. I do have past experience with such things including on 4chan-like forums.
I agree with you about common cases.
What I don’t see in your comment is a solution. Do you regard this as an important, open problem?
I’m flexible. An option, which I think is hard but important, is what people want from a discussion partner and what sort of discussion partners are in shortage. I think our models of that are significantly different.
Would you like to try to resolve one of our disagreements by discussion?
But if you reckon my comments are low-quality and I’m likely to bail prematurely, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s a risk you want to take.
I have decided and I don’t want to take that risk in this particular case.
But I believe I’m socially prohibited from saying so or explaining the analysis I used to reach that conclusion.
This is a significant issue for me because I have a similar judgment regarding most responses I receive here (and at most forums). But it’s problematic to just not reply to most people while providing no explanation. But it’s also problematic to violate social norms and offend and confuse people with meta discussion about e.g. what evidence they’ve inadvertently provided that they’re irrational or dumb. And often the analysis is complex and relies on lots of unshared background knowledge.
I also think I’m socially prohibited from raising this meta-problem, but I’m trying it anyway for a variety of reasons including that there are some signs that you may understand what I’m saying. Got any thoughts about it?
Do you have any proposal for how to solve the problems of people being biased then leaving discussions at crucial moments to evade arguments and dodge questions, and there being no transparency about what’s going on and no way for the error to get corrected?
I was using rationality in the same way you normally do – about a process, not about best or optimal. I don’t know why you read it otherwise.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rationality
Rationality is the art of thinking in ways that result in accurate beliefs and good decisions.
There are discussion ending methods which are compatible with this and others which aren’t. The same goes for other rationality issues like finding out if you’re mistaken, biases being found instead of hidden, etc. What is the type error?
Also I hereby grant you and everyone else unlimited license to give me advice.
Suppose hypothetically that the worldwide availability of this type of discussion was zero. Do you think that would be important or consequential?
So are you on board with something like differentiating and labelling a particular type of discussion and using procedures along these lines for that type of discussion?
My assumed context, which I grant I underspecified, was intellectual discussion or discussion of ideas (though no doubt there is room to specify further). Stuff like LW comments are on a forum where substantive discussion and trying to seek the truth is, to some extent, the expected norm. I didn’t intend this to apply to e.g. all small talk (though tbh I think people would benefit from applying norms like this much more widely, ).
I’m glad that you seem to have largely understood me and also given a substantive response about your main concern. That is fairly atypical. I’m also glad that you agree that there are important issues in this general area.
I will agree to discuss to a length 3 impasse chain with you (rather than 5) if that’d solve the problem (I doubt it). I’d also prefer to discuss impasse chains and discussion ending issues (which I consider a very important topic) over the conjunction fallacy or law of least effort, but I’m open to either.
I think you’re overestimating how much effort it takes to create length 5 impasse chains, but I know that’s not the main issue. He’s an example of a length 5 impasse chain which took exactly 5 messages, and all but the first were quite short. It wasn’t a significant burden for me (especially given my interest in the topic of discussion methods themselves) and in fact was considerably faster and easier for me than some other things I’ve done in the past (i try very hard to be open to critical discussion and am interested in policies to enable that). If it had taken more than 5 messages, that would have only been because the other guy said some things I thought were actually good messages.
Discussion ending policies and the problems with walking away with no explanation are a problem that particularly interests me and I’d write a lot about regardless of what you did or didn’t do. I actually just wrote a bunch about it this morning before seeing your comment. By contrast, I don’t want to discuss the LoLE stuff with you without some sort of precommitment re discussion ending policies because I think your messages about LoLE were low quality and explaining the errors is not the type of writing I’d choose just for my own benefit. (This kind of statement is commonly hard to explain without offending people, which is awkward because I do want to tell people why I’m not responding, and it often would only take one sentence. And I don’t think it should be offense: we disagree, and i expect your initial perspective is that there were quality issues with what I wrote, so I expect symmetry on this point anyway, no big deal.) It’s specifically the discussions which start with symmetric beliefs that the other guy is wrong in ways I already understand, or is saying low quality stuff, or otherwise isn’t going to offer significant value in the early phases of the discussion, that especially merit using approaches like impasse chains to enable discussion. The alternative to impasse chains is often no discussion. But I’d rather offer the impasse chain method over just ignoring people (though due to risk of offending people, sometimes I just say nothing – but at least I have a publicly posted debate policy and paths forward policy, as well as the impasse chain article, so if anyone really cares they can find out about and ask for options like that.)
As a next step, you can read and reply to – or not – what I wrote anyway about impasse chains today. Rationally Ending Discussions
You may also, if you want, indicate your good faith interest in the topic of too much effort going into bad discussions, and how that relates to rationally ending discussions. If you do, I expect that’ll be enough for me to write something about it even with no formal policy. (I didn’t say much about that in the Rationally Ending Discussions linked in the previous paragraph, but I do have ideas about it.) Anyone else may also indicate this interest or request a discussion to agreement or impasse chain with me (i’m open to them on a wide range of topics including basically anything about rationality, and i don’t think we’ll have much trouble finding a point of disagreement if we try to).
That makes sense.
You can also orient your work to a group, e.g. a subculture. As long as its a large enough group, this rounds to orienting to the world in general.
Orienting to smaller groups like your high school, workplace or small academic niche (the 20 other high status people who read your papers) is fine from the perspective of people in the group. To outsiders, e.g. college kids, orienting to your high school peers is lame and is due to you being lame enough not yet to have escaped high school. Orienting to a few other top academics in a field could impress many outsiders – it shows membership in an exclusive club (high school lets in losers/everyone and hardly any the current highest status people are in the club).
I think orienting to a single person can be OK if 1) it’s reciprocated; and 2) they are high enough status. E.g. if I started making YouTube videos exclusively to impress Kanye West, that’s bad if he ignores me, but looks good for me if he responds regularly (that’d put me as clearly lower status than him, but still high in society overall). Note that more realistically my videos would also oriented to Kanye fans, not just Kanye personally, and that’s a large enough group for it to be OK.
I didn’t have other immediate, specific comments but I generally view these topics as important and hard to find quality discussion about. Most people aren’t red-pilled and hate PUAs/MRAs/etc or at least aren’t familiar with the knowledge. And then the PUAs/MRAs/etc themselves mostly aren’t philosophers posting on rationalist forums … most of them are more interested in other stuff like getting laid, using their knowledge of social dynamics to gain status, or political activism. So I wanted to end by saying that I’m open to proposals for more, similar discussion if you’re interested.