Duncan_Sabien

• Duncan_Sabien 27 May 2022 14:29 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Bucky’s comment on: Benign Boundary Violations

  Yeah, I was hoping to catch a little resonance there.

• Duncan_Sabien 26 May 2022 23:43 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Pattern’s comment on: Benign Boundary Violations

  (Thanks)

  1. There’s been a bid elsewhere for “boundaries” to refer exclusively to the individually-specified thing, and “norms” to be used to indicate the social boundary. This … tracks, and seems good, although it leaves out that people e.g. say “Boundaries, Phil, geez!” in reinforcement of social ones, and that the word “norms” refers to many things besides boundaries.
     
     But I don’t object to using those as the terms if enough other people think they make sense.
     

  2. No disagreement that some things (many, even) require opting in or advance notice.

  3. I think they largely are one-thing-only within a subculture (where e.g. “LW” would count as a subculture, and “LWers who live in California when they meet in person” would count as a somewhat different one). I think there is approximately always, for any given collection of humans in any given time and place, a surprisingly-consistent-across-people sense of what the norms are.

• Duncan_Sabien 26 May 2022 22:54 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Pattern’s comment on: Benign Boundary Violations

  I am uncertain what the purpose of this comment is.

  (I mean that genuinely, not as like some snide comment. I started reading with the intent to engage and respond, and was unable to figure out what kind of engagement or response was wanted, or even if any was wanted.)

  If there’s a prompt for me or others, I missed it, and would appreciate a restatement of it. =)

• Duncan_Sabien 26 May 2022 20:25 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Benign Boundary Violations

  I agree that it’s not necessarily strong evidence, but it should in most cases focus your attention pretty heavily on a narrow subset of [hypotheses which would tend to produce that claim], one of which is usually [that claim being true].

  You probably already agree with that, but I wanted to spell it out.

• Duncan_Sabien 26 May 2022 17:51 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: green_leaf’s comment on: Benign Boundary Violations

  I can’t think of any examples where consent cannot be obtained explicitly (barring things like, the person is currently in a state where they’re not capable of being verbal or processing verbal communication, or whatever).

  The point is that there is a cost associated with obtaining explicit verbal consent. I think that it’s entirely plausible that that is, nevertheless, exactly the way to go—that this is the right distribution of costs, to protect people who are otherwise vulnerable.

  But I don’t think we can actually do the math unless we actually weigh the costs and take them into account. I think a certain kind of person thinks that explicit verbal communication is costless, and tends to typical-mind about this, and thereby not validate its costly nature for People Unlike Themselves (of whom there are a lot).

  Roughhousing-in-general is an example of the sort of place where, for a lot of humans and probably a majority (and probably a supermajority of males), obtaining explicit consent à la “wanna have a pillow fight?” is notably less nourishing than picking up a pillow and swinging away.

• Duncan_Sabien 26 May 2022 17:16 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Benign Boundary Violations

  I think that guess/​ask/​tell culture differences are definitely tangled up in this somewhere, but I don’t know if that’s the full explanation.

  The pattern would be that you don’t push people into pools if you don’t know them and push only those people who you know that like it into pools

  That’s close but not quite. I think if you require “knowledge” in a strict sense, then some precious opportunity has already been missed. Put another way, what I’m saying is that the surprise and discovery are part of the puzzle somehow?

  I don’t push people into pools if I don’t know them well enough to be pretty sure that they will like it. But I don’t think certainty is the bar to meet. I think “pretty sure, plus confident that it won’t be disastrously traumatic if I’m wrong” is closer.

  Or maybe the difference is that if you live through a decision you can just react and discover what you do which is relatively effortless but thinking about it before hand is a kind of work and requires self-knowledge?

  This feels like an important piece, yeah. Doing all of the calculation up front seems to be a pretty heavy burden, and the empirical result is that a lot of people just clam up or get frozen out or end up isolated and anxious because they can never be sure that it’ll go well. In the culture I want to participate in, there’s more slack and more support, such that people can explore more because they don’t fear extremely disastrous consequences of genuine well-meant exploration.

  I want to live in a culture where the expected pattern is approximately always:

  “No, I don’t like that.”

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know. I won’t go there again.”

  “Okay, good. No worries, then.”

  re: participating without knowing, that’s the part that signals trust. More precisely, you can’t have it in a context that lacks trust, so if you have it, this is strong evidence that trust is present.

• Duncan_Sabien 26 May 2022 17:05 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Stephen Bennett (Previously GWS)’s comment on: Benign Boundary Violations

  I absolutely personally want people to violate the social boundaries at me, in places where they genuinely expect that the social boundary is way overcompensating for me personally and that the [action] they’re considering will not violate my personal boundaries.

  I want people in my life, acquaintances included, to try to play in the actual space I have available, not (via their good intentions) make me feel like I’m isolated from them and everything by a ten-foot bubble.

  My generic social contract is “I will adhere to a policy of forgiving well-intentioned first-offense missteps where people genuinely couldn’t have known, in order to purchase your willingness to Try Things. In places where I can’t afford to absorb first-offense missteps, I’ll consider it my own responsibility to proactively inform, the same way I would if I had a lethal peanut allergy. Your primary responsibility in turn is to listen, and update, if I clarify a boundary.”

  More broadly, on the social level, “I will defend others in what I perceive to have been well-intentioned first-offense missteps where they genuinely couldn’t have known, from attacks which tend to take those missteps in bad faith and chill/​deter people from Trying Things At All.”

• Duncan_Sabien 26 May 2022 16:58 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: Benign Boundary Violations

  Strong upvote because:

  • Forgive first violations, but also make sure they learn from their mistake. If they seem uninterested in learning, maybe be less forgiving.

  • Severely punish people who don’t back off when told to.

  • Convince everyone that there exist people who are radically different from them, or something. I’m so fed up with not being believed when I explain how I’m different. (This is not a problem among LWers.)

  is almost exactly the Duncan-culture solution as well.

Benign Boundary Violations

• Duncan_Sabien 23 May 2022 0:40 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Caperu_Wesperizzon’s comment on: Rul­ing Out Every­thing Else

  This comment makes me sad, but I upvote it for the reminder (I’m sad at how it’s probably true, at least for some people, not sad because it’s inaccurate). Something something affordance widths.

• Duncan_Sabien 9 May 2022 21:57 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: LoganStrohl’s comment on: Brien­neYud­kowsky’s Shortform

  Additional verbal upvote because strong upvote not enough.

• Duncan_Sabien 28 Apr 2022 18:08 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: claudeshannon’s comment on: Chap­ter 1: A Day of Very Low Probability

  It’s unlikely that most parents would want a 7-year-old reading it; some might be more comfortable with a 9-year-old. There is nothing sexually explicit, and the violence is rare and treated seriously and not graphic.

  But there are clear references to sexual violence, and there are some deaths, and there is also frank talk of war and rape and death itself in ways that I suspect a lot of parents would prefer their kid not be exposed to quite so early.

  (I would likely let my own 7-year-old start reading, and keep going if they were interested, but I would want to be on-hand for providing context and comfort and so forth.)

• Duncan_Sabien 23 Apr 2022 17:00 UTC

  4 points

  on: Does ra­tio­nal­ity ac­tu­ally help?

  Strong yes, and this is true for a large number of people in my orbit (>30).

• Duncan_Sabien 23 Apr 2022 16:58 UTC

  1 point

  on: Does ra­tio­nal­ity ac­tu­ally help?

  Strong yes, and this is true for a large number of people in my orbit (>30).

• Duncan_Sabien 23 Apr 2022 16:56 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: redbird’s comment on: Lies Told To Children

  The above strikes me as more true than false, but not true thanks to some combination of making its claim too strongly/​too universally/​via a kind of typical-mind channel.

  If I had been trying to convey [my own version of this claim], I would have written something like:

  The ability to make clear distinctions between fantasy and reality isn’t present in humans from birth. It’s absent in very young children, and doesn’t become possible until they’ve reached a certain age. The process of coming to reject the Santa myth is one of our culture’s tools for helping them make that distinction, though that comes with other downsides.

  It’s interesting to me that very young kids function as well as they do without the notions of true/​false, real/​pretend, and that even some kids who are technically old enough to have made the shift still don’t bother to make the distinction. What does “belief” even mean in that context, for a person who changes their beliefs from minute to minute to suit the situation?

  Even for most adults, it seems like most (or at least many) beliefs are instrumental. There are a lot of people who only separate true from false to the extent that it’s immediately/​locally useful to do so.

  … these hedges and caveats might feel like nitpicks, but they feel pretty important to me personally for not immediately losing track of what’s true! =P

• Duncan_Sabien 22 Apr 2022 16:02 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Lies Told To Children

  I note that when I ran the Conor Moreton experiment, it seemed to me to confirm that karma and attention does accrue to good writing without prior reputation. Perhaps it takes a couple of rounds, to get past people’s ordinary why-should-this-be-promoted-to-my-attention-above-everything-else-competing-for-that-attention heuristics, but.

  Nobody had a clue who Conor Moreton was, and after a week, he was being listened to.

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Mar 2022 15:28 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Civ­i­liza­tion as Self-Restraint

  That’s the topic of the next essay, yeah; see footnote.

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Mar 2022 6:25 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Civ­i­liza­tion as Self-Restraint

  I tried to address that within the essay a little bit with the last section, but the more true answer is “I think that’s just what’s actually going on.”

  Like, sort of the thesis of the sequence is “this is what civilization is, in fact—it’s the voluntary relinquishment of technically available options.”

  As I squinted at all sorts of instances of civilization, and people being what-felt-like more civilized versus more savage or lawless or whatever, it seemed to me that it was always the case that what was going on was people eschewing various weapons. As with any model, if you simplify things all the way down to one axis/​one property, you’re going to be abstracting away some pretty important detail. But it feels much less false to me than it usually does, to say “this is what’s actually going on; this is the sole and sufficient explanation.”

  Or, to look at it another way: every escalation of civility comes, concretely, from the shelving of some particular weapon. Future essays will talk a lot about that, but when two people or two groups or whatever go from relatively-less-civilized to relatively-more-civilized, it is via the relinquishment of an option they were previously exercising (or at least retaining the right to exercise).

Civ­i­liza­tion as Self-Restraint

• Duncan_Sabien 10 Mar 2022 5:21 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Split and Commit

  I have not received feedback that I seem less legible since adopting this norm, tho a) I might just not be told and b) you may be more pointing at a cost of widespread adoption.