Duncan_Sabien

• Duncan_Sabien 30 Nov 2021 20:51 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Razied’s comment on: Reneg­ing Prosocially

  (Separating this bit out)

  pro-actively acknowledged that I’m just a tiny bit less their friend

  I didn’t advocate for this anywhere. I went back and checked, just to be sure. Somewhere, I’ve said something that you rounded off to this, but I’ll go ahead and agree: saying “I’m a tiny bit less your friend now because of this” seems crazy bad to me.

• Duncan_Sabien 30 Nov 2021 20:44 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Razied’s comment on: Reneg­ing Prosocially

  making all these friendship-point-computations explicit has much larger mental health and social costs than you believe

  This is a valid hypothesis, but I’m curious why you are so confident in it. I’ve had (no exaggeration) dozens of interactions of the form described above, either because I myself had to renege or because I was helping some pair of other people navigate a broken agreement, and there has not once been an instance of people claiming that it made things worse, and there have been multiple (5+?) instances of people specifically coming back later, unsolicited, to note how those unusual features of my method were unusually helpful.

  I think that “I would feel offended by the implication that my friendship is tit-for-tat” is more (accidental) strawmanning. I share the sense that friendships which are explicitly tit-for-tat are weaker/​broken in some important way; for instance, I tend to completely ignore debts of under $10. I buy my friend dinner. At some point in the future, they’ll buy me dinner. It’s all close-enough-to-even. The cool part is feeling comfortable and like there’s abundance of goodwill.

  Yet while feeling that, I nevertheless wrote the above post, and strongly advocate for it.

  This makes me think that there’s somewhere in the post (e.g. in point 5) where you’re … leaping ahead? Extrapolating out from what I said, to something you think is an implication or consequence of it, that I don’t think is an implication or consequence.

  My first guess is that you think that I think that the advice in 5 should generalize out across all aspects of the relationship, rather than being largely confined to the narrow domain of “here I am breaking an agreement.”

  As for the “should” in “they should be doing it subconsciously,” I note that I think you’ve got a pretty strong typical mind thing going on. You make a bunch of very strong universal claims in your first comment that are straightforwardly false for somewhere between 10% and 60% of the population, i.e. a non-negligible swath.
  

• Duncan_Sabien 30 Nov 2021 20:14 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Razied’s comment on: Reneg­ing Prosocially

  So, starting this off with “punch to the face” seems to me like a pretty straightforward instance of strawmanning, and is at least a change-of-topic.

  I’m not much interested in discussing [responses to violent attacks] here, but if you’d like to say something about reneging on agreements, or my suggestions for how to do so prosocially, I’d be happy to respond to that.

Reneg­ing Prosocially

• Duncan_Sabien 29 Nov 2021 20:22 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: Frame Control

  I agree with all of this, and just wanted to note that there are Kegan 4 frame-controllers and Kegan 3 frame-controllers, too.

• Duncan_Sabien 28 Nov 2021 2:28 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Frame Control

  (I like the above in part because I find it reassuring.)

• Duncan_Sabien 28 Nov 2021 0:27 UTC

  33 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Frame Control

  I’m particularly frustrated by the thing where, inevitably, the concept of frame control is going to get weaponized (both by people who are explicitly using it to frame control, and people who are just vaguely ineptly wielding it as a synonym for ‘bad’).

  I think a not-sufficient-but-definitely-useful piece of an immune system that ameliorates this is:
  
  ”New concepts and labels are hypotheses, not convictions.”

  i.e. this essay should make it more possible for people to say “is this an instance of frame control?” or “I’m worried this might be, or be tantamount to, frame control” or “I myself am receiving this as frame control.”

  And it should less (though nonzero) be license to say “AHA! Frame control, right here; I win the argument because I said the magic word.”

  (Duncan culture has this norm installed; I don’t think LW or rationalists or gray tribe in general does, though.)

• Duncan_Sabien 27 Nov 2021 23:21 UTC

  35 points

  on: Frame Control

  Frame control is an effect; very often, people who frame control will not be aware that this is what they’re doing, and have extensive reasoning to rationalize their behavior that they themselves believe.

  Of note: in my experience, as someone who accidentally did lots of frame control and now has it at least partly in his own view (and thus does a mix of “accidentally still doing it,” “endorsedly still doing it,” and “endorsedly specifically not doing it”), often the frame controller is themselves stuck in the frame. They either don’t know another kind of frame could even exist, or rely on it for their own self-image or self-worth or something.

  (I know this is sort of addressed in the above but I wanted to pull it out and highlight it. This is a clinical explanation of what happens and why, not an attempt to justify or excuse.)

• Duncan_Sabien 23 Nov 2021 6:05 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Lumpyproletariat’s comment on: Speak­ing of Stag Hunts

  Plausible to me. (Thanks.)

• Duncan_Sabien 22 Nov 2021 17:49 UTC

  5 points

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

  Link?

• Duncan_Sabien 22 Nov 2021 17:48 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Nathan Fish’s comment on: Con­cen­tra­tion of Force

  Yeah, my first suggestion is some kind of (extremely) low-effort ritual, early in the day, that causes you to notice the potential for taking a walk, without any pressure to do anything about that fact.

• Duncan_Sabien 22 Nov 2021 4:11 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: tomcatfish’s comment on: Shoulder Ad­vi­sors 101

  Yeah, I am indeed toying around with a 100-ish-day curriculum of such insights.

• Duncan_Sabien 22 Nov 2021 2:10 UTC

  14 points

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

  … I’m assuming this is a joke, but just in case it isn’t:

  If the only other theory one is capable of coming up with is “the house elves are to blame,” one has a Serious Problem as an aspiring rationalist, and making a general habit of split and commit will help one to develop a muscle that will come in handy.

  I am reminded (quite memorably) of a colleague I once worked with who had a self-image of being a competent rationalist, but was frequently literally incapable of coming up with non-straw reasons why someone would have [a model different from his own] about any number of situations. Like, he actually tried, and was several times unable to get past “house elves are stealing our magic” phase.

  “I can’t think of any reason why this would be upsetting to someone. My best guess is that you’re so depressed that you’re delusional.”

  “I can’t think of any reason you would take this position except maybe that your romantic partner has literally brainwashed you.”

  “The only justification I can think of for taking this position is that you’re secretly trying to make a society where murder is okay.”

  … these are not exact quotes, but they’re really actually quite distressingly close to exact quotes. Typical mind fallacy is a hell of a drug.

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Nov 2021 23:56 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: tivelen’s comment on: Com­pe­tence/​Confidence

  How about “anticipated okayness of failure”? Like, one may typically proceed “more confidently” in an arena that doesn’t matter/​where there are low or no stakes, than in an arena where one fears the consequences of a misstep. Does that match any subjective experience you have?

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Nov 2021 18:21 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Thomas Sepulchre’s comment on: Com­pe­tence/​Confidence

  The second one is intending to showcase a skill where it’s simply dangerous for beginners, period. It’s dangerous to be low-competence, and also it’s dangerous to be low-confidence, and it doesn’t much matter whether your competence and confidence are particularly linked once you’re above moderate on either.

  The easiest example coming to mind (but it’s not a particularly good example) is standing backflips. Doing them badly is lethal, and also being underconfident as you attempt them makes lethal failure substantially more likely (the things an underconfident brain tries to do to protect itself during a backflip attempt are counterproductive).

  But backflips are not actually particularly hard once you know how to do them, i.e. once you get past three successes.

• Duncan_Sabien 21 Nov 2021 6:35 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: tivelen’s comment on: Com­pe­tence/​Confidence

  The word “confidence” is a bit fuzzy, and is conflating a few things, here, but also I think that’s okay.

  One of the things is the delta between one’s self-reported competence and one’s felt sense of confidence—I agree that in a certain sense they would always be the same if people were perfect perceivers and perfect reasoners, but they usually aren’t.

  Another is something like … maybe you would call it meta-confidence? i.e. “I’m just a white belt and I really suck at these roundhouse kicks, but I’m going to confidently proceed throwing them, counting on repetition to help me improve!”

Split and Commit

Com­pe­tence/​Confidence

• Duncan_Sabien 19 Nov 2021 21:53 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: cmessinger’s comment on: Speak­ing of Stag Hunts

  I like it, but not as much as I like two-axis proposals, which I think can be done with a smooth enough UI that they don’t impose a burden.

  With something like the below, you can click to weak vote and hold to strong vote, just like we currently do, and can in one click express each of the four following positions:

  • I like/​agree with this point, and furthermore think it’s being expressed correctly/​is in line with norms of reasoning and discourse I want to see more of on LW (dark blue)

  • I like/​agree with this point, but I want to note objection with how it’s being expressed/​have reservations about whether it’s good rationality or good discourse (pale orange)

  • I dislike/​disagree with this point, and want to note objection with how it’s being expressed (dark orange)

  • I dislike/​disagree with this point, but want to endorse/​support the way it was arrived at and expressed (pale blue)

  

• Duncan_Sabien 19 Nov 2021 17:22 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Speak­ing of Stag Hunts

  Mechanistically… since stag hunt is in the title of the post… it seems like you’re saying that any one person committing “enough of these epistemic sins to count as playing stag” would mean that all of lesswrong fails at the stag hunt, right?

  No, and if you had stopped there and let me answer rather than going on to write hundreds of words based on your misconception, I would have found it more credible that you actually wanted to engage with me and converge on something, rather than that you just really wanted to keep spamming misrepresentations of my point in the form of questions.