Tee hee … allow me to recount the story of the one other person who lives in the same mental bucket in my head as Mitchell (lightly edited from a FB post from late 2021):
When I say things like “other people genuinely feel like a different species to me,” it’s because it would literally never occur to me to:
- Agree to meet with Person X, who had a grievance with me
- Tell Person X what things I was upset about, because Person X started off the meeting by saying “I think my job here is to listen, first.”
- Listen to, accept, and thank Person X, explicitly, for their subsequent apology, which they offered without asking for any sort of symmetrical concession from me
- Maybe even cry a little, because things have been hard, and accept their clumsy attempts to offer a little comfort and empathy
- Years later, after no other substantive interactions of any kind, join in a dogpile against Person X behind their back where I besmirched their apology and insinuated that it was insufficient and rooted in an invalid motivation
- Outright lie in that dogpile, and claim that Person X had insisted that I jump through hoops that they never asked me to jump through
- Give no sign of any of this ongoing resentment in private communication initiated by Person X on that very same day
Like, there’s a whole bunch of people out there for whom this is just … business as usual, nothing to see here.
I think there are indeed enmities that call for that kind of blatantly adversarial two-facedness, but I think they take WAY more in the way of inciting incident than anything I’ve ever done, had done to me, or seen happen around me with my own two eyes.
Alternate title: This Is The Sort Of Thing That Makes Coordination Hard
...all of which is to say, re: “you can still provide people with data that loudly and inarguably contradicts the dark hypothesis” … I do want to emphasize just how hard it is to create that data. The test can’t actually be run, but I would bet several hundred dollars to someone’s one dollar that a panel of a dozen neutral observers watching the whole interaction described above from start to finish would have agreed that it was a clearly unpressured, sincere, caring, and genuine attempt to rebuild a bridge, but this did not stop the other party (who is a well-respected member of the social group that calls itself the rationalist community, e.g. gave multiple talks at LessOnline this past weekend) from being … well, shitty. Really, really, really shitty.
Just noting that I have deleted a comment whose entire content was “I dropped this into an AI and it gave me the following summary.”
The text of this essay is public, and the public will do with it what they will; I’m aware of (and somewhere between “resigned to” and “content about”) the fact that a certain kind of reader is impatient, and instead of choosing between “read it, and get the value” and “don’t read it, and preserve my time/attention for other things” tries to shoot for the fabricated third option of “don’t spend the time but somehow get the value anyway” via things like AI summary. It’s fine for individuals to choose to make that mistake.
However, I’m not willing to let the … tick? … of an AI summary (that does in fact fail to convey the thing while giving the false impression of conveying the thing) to just live parasitically right here attached to the body of the essay. It’s misleading in the sense that the-thing-that-happens-to-you-when-you-spend-time-in-a-gestalt can’t in fact be captured and conveyed by the skeleton outline.
(There are some places where all you need is the skeleton outline; I’m not anti-distillation or anti-summary in a general sense. And again, individuals are free to consume AI summaries both when it’s a good idea and when it’s not; I’m not a cop. I’m just not going to signal-boost those myself, nor allow them to piggyback.)