jimmy

Karma: 4,035

jimmy 9 Oct 2025 19:29 UTC
11 points
0
on: The Relationship Between Social Punishment and Shared Maps

The distinction between “positive punishment” and “negative punishment” is useful here, and I think a lot of the confusion around this topic comes from conflating the two—both intentionally and otherwise.
If you hit me for no reason, “positive punishment” would be hitting you back in hopes that you stop hitting me. I have to actually want you to hurt, and it can easily spiral out of hand if you hit me for hitting you for hitting me.
“Negative punishment” would be just not hanging out with people who hit me, because I don’t like hanging out with people who hit me. I don’t have to want you to hurt at all in order to do this, in the same way that I love my puppy and don’t hold anything against her, but when she’s jumping on me so much that I can’t work I might have to lock her out of my room. Even if you get offended and decide to respond in kind with some negative punishment of your own, that just means you decide to stop hanging out with me too. Which obviously isn’t a problem. And heck, by your (IMO appropriate) definition of “punishment” this isn’t even punishment because it’s not done in order to affect anyone’s behavior. It’s just choosing to abstain from negative value interactions.
We can’t restrict “negative punishment” without restricting freedom of association and freedom of expression, and we also don’t have to because sharing truth and making good choices are good, and there’s no threat of spiraling out of control. It may hurt a lot to be locked out of all the fun spaces, and it may feel like a punishment in the operant conditioning sense, but that doesn’t mean there’s any intent to punish or that it is punishment in the sense that’s relevant for this post.
What we have to be careful about, is when people try to claim to be doing freedom of association/expression (“negative punishment”) while actually intending to do positive punishment. This comes up a lot in the debates between “You’re trying to stifle free speech!” and “Free speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences!”/”I’m just using my free speech to criticize yours!”. If you’re responding to obnoxious speech with speech like “I’m gonna stone you if you don’t shut up” then you’re obviously trying to conflate threats of violent positive punishment with “merely freedom of expression”, but it gets much more subtle when you say “Ugh, I don’t see how any decent person could listen to that guy”. Because is that an expression of curiosity from someone who would love to fill in their ignorance with empathy and understanding? Someone who harbors no ill will, just doesn’t find that guy interesting? Or is it someone who actively dislikes the person speaking, and would like to see them change their behavior, and even hurt in order to do so?
This attempt to hurt people in order to change their behavior is positive punishment masquerading as negative punishment, and as such has all the same problems with positive punishment. If I try to give you the silent treatment because you didn’t say you liked my new shirt, and you give me the silent treatment back, then it can easily escalate into losing a friendship that if we’re honest we both wanted. Because it was never actually “I don’t find any value here, so I’m pulling back”, it was “I’m gonna pull back anyway, in hopes of hurting him enough to change his behavior”.
People like Bob, Carol, and Dave are indeed at risk of confusing genuinely prosocial freedom of association and expression with positive punishment, because people like Alice are at risk of doing the latter while pleading the former.
However, they’re also likely to recognize it as sincere if Alice looks more like she’s doing the former than the latter. If the don’t find out about what Mallory did until they ask Alice why she doesn’t hang out with Mallory anymore, they’re unlikely to see her answer as punishment, for example. Similarly, if she comes off more like “Careful with the puppy, she’s friendly but sometimes too friendly!”, that’s technically communicating a bad thing, but it comes off very differently than if she were to get visibly upset and say “That dog is not well disciplined, it’s not a good dog and you should know that”.
It’s not always clear whether a person is genuinely “just sharing information” or secretly trying to positively punish, but they are indeed distinct things, and having the distinction clear makes it easier to judge.

jimmy 7 Oct 2025 21:58 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Solving irrational fear as deciding: A worked example

Okay, cool.
It would be better if the sequence would succeed in people having a clear idea of how they could actually apply the concepts to their lives and then doing that.
What would that look like, to you? Last comment it sounded like you were saying “More emphasis on the concrete take home lessons rather than burying in footnotes”, but in this comment it sounds like you’re pointing more at the motivation aspect which seems quite different—and more in line with my focus. I definitely can’t pass your ITT yet.
I’ll share a little more about how I’m trying to do that, and maybe you can help me figure out how to do it better.
It comes back to our earlier discussion on expectation=intention=setpoint. Summarizing, you were pointing at the value of providing directions in helping people get from point A to point B, while I’m focused more on getting their intent set in the first place. I don’t disagree about the importance of knowing how to get from A to B, but I find that like you’re saying this time, a lot of the time motivation is limiting. If people aren’t actually aiming at point B then they won’t follow directions. If they are, then they’re likely to ask for directions as needed. The opening example of the girl in the jacuzzi illustrates this well, as my object level advice wasn’t anything her friends couldn’t have told her, but the difference is that she asked for my input and dismissed theirs.
It’s the same thing, on the meta level. Part of what I’m trying to do is motivate readers by demonstrating how solvable these things are and making more concrete and tangible that sense that more is possible (amusingly enough, the top comment chain there is about how nice it’d be to have akrasia solved), and part of what I’m trying to do is provide the compass and sextant needed to start navigating towards a solution. When you say “reading it motivated me to look at my procrastination more as a puzzle to be solved than something that’s given”, and “The sequence suggest that if I do procrastinate, then there’s likely a reason why I’m procrastinating so applying the sequence to the problem was about looking for that reason”, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m going for.
But it’s not just that. When I hurt my foot and needed the prodding to try that technique, I had some faulty presuppositions that kept me from doing that stuff by default, which is why I needed the prodding and even the “technique”. By the time I helped the kid in the fire poker situation, I had some insights which deflated some of these presuppositions, but I still had no idea how to apply any of the insights I’d learned to help this kid. Yet this lack of understanding of how to apply the insights did not stop me from behaving in accordance with my new perspective, and this new perspective brought about different results. Object level application of these insights can actually lead meta level understanding of what is being applied and why it works.
I’m aiming to directly undermine those presuppositions and begin dissolving the connective tissue that gets people stuck in the first place, by showing how things that look like “psychological problems” even in difficult or “impossible” situations turn out over and over to be disagreements propped up by unseen flinches. Like, “Maybe this problem isn’t a given”. “Maybe things ain’t as they seem. What would that be like?”. Trying to cast doubt on the pretense of certainty with which these disconnects are held together, so that when it gets to the footnote of “Maybe listen to yourself?” it doesn’t take suspending people up in the air to get through. Or having a crush on someone, or whatever.
The idea isn’t just that you turn towards existing problems as puzzles, it’s also that next time there’s something that would have gone over threshold, the idea that there are things you “can’t get yourself to do” feels less credible and less enticing, and is less likely to ensnare you. So next time it comes out as “Ugh. I hate working on patents”, naturally evokes “What’s so bad about working on patents?”, and applies the same active ingredient of “turn towards the objection” without ever needing to understand how to apply these insights to akrasia—because nothing will stick long enough to earn the diagnosis. Noticing what’s happening differently is important too because that can help us be intentional about the direction we choose to move, but it doesn’t have to lead application.
I’m not sure how to give more emphasis to things like “Actually think through whether the objections your mind comes up might have merit after all” without detracting from the emphasis on “These things which we’re so sure are intractable actually melt away when we aim true”. And for my friend, if I were to try to convey the former before the latter has sunk in, and without suspending her above concrete, she’d have concluded “Tried that, didn’t work”, and left with nothing more than immunization against the solution. If things aren’t going to come across 100% clearly, I’d rather people like her leave correct in thinking “Okay but I don’t know how to put this to use” than incorrect in thinking “I do”. Because at least the former at least leaves room for the desire to ask for directions.
Separately from how well it’s working out, does that help make more sense of the choices I’ve made in presentation?
How would you do it, from the writer’s side? What would you like to see/what would make you more likely to put things to practice, from the reader’s side? I’ve tried to write in the way that I would have liked to see as a reader, but that doesn’t necessarily match well to the actual readers.

jimmy 7 Oct 2025 20:39 UTC
9 points
0
on: Did Tyler Robinson carry his rifle as claimed by the government?
That looks consistent with a rifle to me, though there are are really only a few moments as he’s transitioning from the roof to the ground that it’s easy to see he has something long in there.
The more interesting mismatch to me is with the terminal performance of that bullet. The lack of an exit is definitely not consistent with a 30-06 at 140yd striking his neck from that angle. I think I know how to explain it, but I’m curious if anyone else has tried to figure out how that could happen.

jimmy 7 Oct 2025 17:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
One thing I find helpful, is to outsource this to my mental model of other people, or actual other people. If you come at them with “This is definitely true”, what kind of objections do they come up with? Not just explicit objections that they say, but also implicit objections that they don’t know how to articulate. Once you’ve explored that space and know that all roads lead to them being fully on board—again, not just in explicit claims but in revealed belief as well—then you know that at least they can’t come up with a reason you might be wrong.

It’s still only as good as your other people, but if no one you know can find fault in your reasoning that’s not a bad start.

jimmy 1 Oct 2025 18:24 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Solving irrational fear as deciding: A worked example
This point seems very valuable and a bit hidden in the footnote. I think while the example in this post is good at illustration, it’s not good at getting people to actually apply the concept.
Thanks for the feedback. After mulling over it for a while, I think I agree. Though my thoughts on whether that’s appropriate are more complicated, and I’m not 100% I understand what you mean exactly.
Can you expand more on where you’re coming from, and what you think it’d look like to be better at the latter (either with or without sacrificing the former)?
Also, is your akrasia progress an example that came from reading this post, or something you picked up on elsewhere which happens to mirror this post? If the former, what made it click, exactly?

jimmy 1 Oct 2025 18:15 UTC
16 points
0
on: Ethical Design Patterns
A contemporary example of inadequate ethical heuristics: Public discussion of group differences
I think the word “public” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I can think sanely about group differences on my own, and it would be easy to have that conversation with you. I’d also expect to be able to handle it with individuals who are strongly attached to one heuristic or the other, and perhaps even in small groups. I wouldn’t tweet about it. Nor would I strike up that conversation in a crowded room of strangers.
The problem isn’t that I can’t think sanely about such topics, but that they can’t—and because descriptively speaking “they” and “I” is a better descriptor than “we” in those cases. In smaller scales, thinking as “we” is easier. If I say something that my close friend would have disagreed with, they know me well enough to appropriately weight the fact that I’m saying it, and that immediately changes the joint perception as “we” in ways that tweeting does not. And when the friend doesn’t buy it, the amount of “Hm, maybe I’m wrong” is very manageable, so engaging with the kind of humility that makes it “shared exploration towards truth” rather than “an attempt to manipulate” is easy. Even “bold” statements like “You’re doing it all wrong [and I know this because there’s nothing you’ve thought of that I haven’t considered which could justify a change of mind]” are fairly achievable in this context because you do know your friend fairly well, and they know you know them fairly well, etc.
Try to step up in scale though, and it gets tougher. Either you have to back off a bit because maybe the larger group knows more things you don’t, or you have to know more things including how more distant strangers (incorrectly) model things. As the group you’re trying to move becomes larger and more powerful, the push back you invite becomes louder and more meaningful. Have you found the courage to pick a fight that big, and still humble yourself appropriately, if necessary? Because if not then you’re setting yourself up to fold prematurely, before standing strong enough to evoke the kind of evidence that would genuinely change your mind.
An analogy that comes to mind is “injection locking”, as demonstrated by groups of metronomes synching up. Couple yourself too tightly to a large coordinated mass, and you’re likely to find your heart compelled to the same wavelength, even as you recognize that it’s wrong (whoops, there goes your sanity). Decouple too much, and even if you’re not missing anything from the larger group, you’re not helping the group either. The trick is to regulate your coupling such that you can both influence and be influenced in ways that are tracking truth, without losing track of genuinely valuable wavelengths you’ve entrained to.
And if you try to try to “cheat” and preserve your frequency by pushing on the group without opening yourself to push back, that’s a good definition of manipulation, and when the group notices it will backfire.
I think it’s important that “we” think carefully about what group we can really “we” with, without losing lock on reality, and updating in ways that shut out information rather than incorporating more information. And now that I think of it, the problem of how to scale up seems to be missing an ethical design pattern itself. There’s not a lot of good guidance at how quickly to try to integrate with larger groups of metronomes.
Jordan Peterson took a crack at it with “Clean your room”/”Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world”, but that’s more of a counter heuristic than a bridge. And overly moralistic and unachievable. In totally unrelated news, “Jordan Peterson” has become a scissor statement.
In short form, I’d probably phrase it like “Be careful to match your ambition with humility and courage, and scale only as fast as you dare”

jimmy 29 Sep 2025 1:26 UTC
8 points
7
on: Transgender Sticker Fallacy
and yet there’s hordes red in the face arguing the definition of “woman” not realizing semantics are used to disguise contested premises.
Notice how a straightforward request for a definition of the term in question is now a clear tribal indicator? The body language on both sides when that question is asked shows that no one is missing the implication that people are trying to disguise contested premises.
Hordes argue until they’re red in the face because everyone knows that they’re fighting a battle over smuggled premises. Compare to the lack of interest in how to categorize intersex people (at least, prior to this trans stuff becoming a big deal).

jimmy 10 Sep 2025 6:43 UTC
6 points
3
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Obligated to Respond
When it comes to commenting and deciding whether to intentionally try to preempt an obligation to respond, this “value investing” approach is to just explain your perspective without trying to thumb the scale in either direction. Rather than leaning on “And if you don’t respond, it’s because you know I’m right and can’t admit it” or “It couldn’t possibly be that, and surely your post is correct despite my criticisms”, you can just make your comment trust the best estimate of the truth to win once things settle out. I think some of what looks like disingenuous “What? Just don’t respond?” comes from this.
For example, if Alice is one of those you describe as “Innocent, but naive”, she might comment on Bob’s post without thinking much about what it might imply if Bob doesn’t reply. “We’ll get there when/if we get there”. Because whether her comment is upvoted or downvoted changes the answer. Whether there are other comments along the same lines or in response to hers matters, as does what stance these comments take. Alice just trusts the audience and herself to make reasonable inferences, once the cards are on the table.
If Bob doesn’t feel like “I don’t have to respond, the audience will see that my point stands”, then that points to Bob not having finished crossing that inferential distance and justifying his stance in the eyes of his audience. So long as Alice’s object level counterargument is sincere, then avoiding making it to spare Bob the effort of explaining things isn’t a good thing—because now people still don’t get it, and if they turn out to be correct it’s because they’re lucky that the holes they don’t see don’t turn out to matter. But Alice can’t know whether they will or not until she see’s Bob’s response. Unless she happens to have special knowledge that the audience is likely to underestimate Bob’s post relative to her comment, urging the audience to refrain from updating won’t actually point towards truth—because she doesn’t actually know anything they don’t about this.
I do actually agree that these responses are often disingenuous, because of a particular social dynamic where one can subtly and plausibly deniably posture as being above the author and win points when their arguments pan out, while being simultaneously shielded from the consequences when they turn out to be wrong (as an author, how comfortable do you feel calling people out for such posturing? How much do you trust the audience to do it for you?). In such cultures, the norms incentivize this sort of posturing so long as it can be kept below the audience’s ability to recognize it or feel confident in diagnosing it. And if the audience doesn’t see and grok this dynamic, then they’re going to update on the information conveyed in the “confident” posture. And in such cultures the general audience doesn’t grok this dynamic, or else they wouldn’t enable it to persist.
Authors can sense this, and the situation where both the commenter and author know that the commenter is taking advantage of this hole in the collective epistemology but the commenter won’t admit it, is disappointingly common. Less common on LW than elsewhere, but not absent.
At the end of the day, there are both situations where the author rationally and correctly sees “What? Just don’t comment!” as disingenuous or naive, and also situations where it’s just a fact of life that if you want your audience to understand you, you’re going to have to respond to comments that convincingly-but-incorrectly argue against your post^[1]. It’s just a question of whether that comment putting pressure on the author to respond is (intentionally or unintentionally) relying on getting shielded from the consequences of coming at the author overconfidently, or whether they’re making the comment holding themselves accountable.
(To be clear, I don’t see this as a criticism that requires a response, as it doesn’t negate the main thesis. I expect the audience to recognize this though, so I wouldn’t ordinarily make a point of saying this)
1. ^
  Unless you happen to nail it on the first go, I guess, but doing that consistently is even harder

jimmy 10 Sep 2025 5:34 UTC
11 points
5
on: Obligated to Respond
I like the “echo” metaphor. Generally, awareness of impact further down the road is a good thing, but there’s a rather unpleasant phenomenon that happens when you turn up the gain so high that the echoes created in response to picking up echoes become louder than the initial echoes that created them. You get “feedback” and that loud high pitch squeal. This is a good reason to be mindful not to place too much gain on echoes, as well as to be mindful of whether your response to them is damping them back to the first order message or exciting them further.
Another analogy for this is stock market trading. You can speculate on how other investors will react to the news to some number of echoes, or you can just try to figure out what the true value is and hold on long enough for the echoes to dissipate. To make this work though, you have to be able to eat short term losses and think on longer horizons. And if the investor response is predictable enough, and worth the effort to predict, value investing will be leaving money on the table.

jimmy 9 Sep 2025 17:18 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Rana Dexsin’s comment on: Defensiveness does not equal guilt
Am I missing some context here?
I think we’re talking past each other a bit.
I agree that the thing you’re arguing against has the challenges that you’re pointing at, in contexts like those. I’m suggesting something different.
What is the “secure response”? One where you try outwardly to retain a certain kind of dignity?

One where you’re not doing the whole “Oh no! Don’t look at the evidence, because if you do you might think I’m bad!” thing—or, more realistically, not doing the “Don’t listen to him he’s lying!”/”No, you’re wrong, I’m innocent!” type thing. Not flinching from the evidence, but rather being present with it and doing something without pushing it away.
There are a lot of different things one could do securely, but here I’m pointing at one in particular which is relevant when people think you’re actually guilty—even if they’re not being particularly fair when accusing you of stealing cookies or whatever.
Let’s go through your hypothetical line by line, giving names for easy reference:
Bob: Wait, you thought that was a rule, not a request to be less messy?
This line as stated is a bit ambiguous. Is the speaker here purely confused and curious, or are they also kinda conveying “Because if so, that’s kinda stupid, right?”?
If it’s the latter, or looks like it might be the latter, then it makes sense that your next line might follow.
Frank: What the hell kind of nitpick is that? Stop arguing stupid semantics! Since when should I even have to ask Your Highness for basic decency?
Frank has clearly communicated that he sees Bob as making an unfair argument, rather than being genuinely curious, and that he feels condescended to and unfairly treated by Bob.
If Bob isn’t driven to defensiveness out of insecurity, and he actually cares about Frank’s point of view here, he might say something like:
Bob: I’m sorry it came off like I was arguing. I don’t mean it that way, and I’m not even disagreeing necessarily. I’m just genuinely confused because the distinction seems really important here, and I would have expected you to agree. Do you not think the distinction matters here? What am I missing?
This response helps to disambiguate the first response, and to show that it really was a sincere attempt to understand Frank’s perspective here.
In contrast, if Bob had said the other line, it would also have helped disambiguate, albeit in a different direction:
Bob: “Do you actually think that messiness is correlated with thievery, even after conditioning on honesty?
In this context, where this line is coming instead of actually addressing Franks concerns, it shows pretty compellingly that Bob doesn’t find Franks perspective worthy of addressing. It also shows that even when Bob knows that Frank is going to take it as an insult to his intelligence, he wants to do more of that. So, confirming that “You realize how dumb that is, right?” interpretation.
Neither are insecure responses, but one is much more respectful and the other is much more provocative.
In the inconvenient world that I’m currently imagining from which I generated the above dialogue, screwing around with things like ‘evidence’, or even acting calm (thus implying that the rules (which every non-evil person can infer from their heart, right?) are not a threat to you or that you think you’re above them—see also, some uses of “god-fearing” as a prerequisite for “acceptable” in religious contexts), is breaking the social script.
So let’s look at what makes these situations so difficult. These people are clearly very sensitive to implication that you might be “above them”, and simultaneously can’t handle concepts like ‘evidence’. But like… are you not above people who can’t handle concepts like ‘evidence’, in some important way? In your mind are you really on equal footing, if we’re being completely honest here? I certainly couldn’t blame you for having that view of things, if you do. At the same time, can you see why maybe it’s reasonable for them to feel talked down to if you do what you’d describe as “Calmly explain that we should look at the evidence”?
It can be extremely difficult to navigate these situations without pissing people off when the people in question are simultaneously very sensitive to hints of condescension and also seemingly unable to grasp the basics. So when you say things like “Wait, you thought that was a rule?” they’re going to hear that as “Wait, you’re that dumb!?” and respond with hostility like “What the hell kind of nitpick is that?”. And honestly, they might not even be entirely wrong to read it that way.
One way to respond to this is to double down on “Well, their rules are stupid, and I am above them, so I can be secure in the fact that they can’t hurt me”. And if you’re right, then that’s probably better than subjecting yourself to their stupid rules in the first place. But if you aren’t, then they’re going to be quite motivated to hold you accountable for your hubris—as they should!
So I totally agree that this kind of secure response invites these kinds of problems. And that’s why I was suggesting the other direction, for cases like this.
As in, actually respect their judgement. Even if they don’t use the same language as you, there are going to be reasons they believe things. Even if you think you know that they’re wrong and why they go wrong, you can choose to find out instead. To ask what they think because you want to understand where they’re coming from, rather than as a ploy to highlight how stupid they are. If they take it that way, you can listen, take them seriously enough to check for any legitimacy that their interpretation might have, whether maybe you were actually a little more judgy than you meant to be, and get back on track telling them honestly that you don’t see them as dumb, you just don’t understand their perspective yet.
This is the opposite direction of “using big words to distract”, and the only time you’re trying to get on trial for something else is when you honestly believe that’s their real gripe with you. So it’s not an attempt to distract but an offering to submit to their judgement more than they were even asking for. And if that doesn’t come across at first pass, you can clarify that too: “Okay, so it is the cookie you’re most mad at me for? I know you’re mad for legitimate reason, I just want to make sure I’m addressing what’s most important to you first”. Rather than the security coming from “Lol, I’m so above you I’m untouchable (try me!)”, it’s coming from “You wouldn’t stay mad at me unless I’m doing something wrong, so I don’t have to defend myself. I trust you”.
When doing this, you’re not pleading guilty to anything you’re not guilty of, nor are you pushing away their perspectives to focus on promoting the idea that you’re innocent. Because you’re genuinely interested in their perspective, and you’re actually respecting them, they’re going to tend to feel more respected than when you tell they’re wrong/dishonest/whatever without even considering and acknowledging their perspective first.

It’s going to be difficult to pull off if you’re secretly thinking “Man, these are the lies I have to tell to get along with these dummies”, but when it’s genuine it shines through. Not immediately, necessarily, for the same reason that an abused dog doesn’t instantly trust its new owner. It takes a significant amount of evidence to overcome rationally formed priors of abuse/condescension/etc, so if you judge things after the second back and forth it won’t look great. In this one, the dog is kinda biting her, and the woman was expecting to get bit for real. If you only watch the first few back and forths, it’s easy to walk away judging it as “Man, that lady wouldn’t leave the dog alone”/”The dog didn’t like that”/”That wasn’t working”. Watch a bit longer though, and you’ll see that the evidence was being tracked all along. Certainly to better outcomes than if she defensively scolded the dog for snapping at her unfairly.
It’s true that this tends to break the social scripts regardless, but in a good way that side steps rather than engages in conflict. For example, one time my wife accidentally cut in a drive through line, and the guy she cut in front of got super pissed and started yelling at her. When her response was just “Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t see you. Want me to back out so you can have your spot in line back?”, he immediately had his foot in his mouth in recognition of “Fuck, I’m the asshole here, for not considering the possibility of an innocent mistake”—which I think is pretty safe to say wasn’t part of the script he was running in his head. Technically that one is kinda admitting guilt, but only admitting what was true, which was only an innocent mistake not “deserving to get yelled at” (hence the foot in mouth), and iirc not even one he thought was worth backing out to correct after she acknowledged it.
Does that make more sense, or do you have more pushback?

jimmy 30 Aug 2025 18:21 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Defensiveness does not equal guilt
I think this is assuming that the people looking at the evidence can be trusted to make a fair and impartial assessment of it and not jump to any unjustified conclusions?

Not so much “assuming” as “working to make sure”.
For example, imagine some cookies go missing from the cookie jar, and you immediately jump to the unjustified conclusion that it’s *me* that took the cookies. Maybe because you already dislike me for being too messy of a roommate or something. This doesn’t force me to respond defensively, and I still have the option of responding with genuine curiosity “Wait, what? What leads you to think it was me?”.
What’s your response? Not “I have security camera footage proving it”. Maybe “It’s just the kind of thing you’d do. You’re the one here who doesn’t respect rules”. But I can keep chasing this down, so long as I’m curious: “I don’t follow. Why is this something you think I’d do? What rules?”. Maybe from there to “Wait, you thought that was a *rule*, not a *request* to be less messy?”, which gets quite a bit harder for you to hold onto if indeed there never was any rule. Maybe “Do you actually think that messiness is correlated with thievery, even after conditioning on honesty? Do you think you have reason to believe I’m dishonest?”.
So long as I’m genuinely trying to understand your perspective and not trying to make you look stupid and not credible, it’s hard to avoid getting into why you believe what you believe, and learning whether your initial conclusions were fair, impartial, and justified. Basically, by maintaining strict openness to the evidence, it takes away any motivation and justification you might have had for being unfair to me.

But it’s very often the case that people don’t have reason to feel that secure, and have cause to believe that at least part of their audience will jump to conclusions, have all kinds of hostile motives, be inclined to treat one party’s word as intrinsically more trustworthy than the other’s, not have the time or interest to really think it through, etc..

Yes, this is often the case, and it does make navigating these things securely quite difficult at times. This complicates things, but I don’t think it changes the conclusion at all.
I think the first thing to note here is that the bar isn’t “Is there zero chance of secure response failing to exonerate me?” but “Is the secure response less likely to exonerate me?”. Because you can’t ever guarantee zero chance of anything, and the question you actually have to decide on is “Which is my better option here?”.
And when you judge by that bar, defensive insecurity doesn’t come out looking too hot. Because none of those additional difficulties go away just because you flinch defensively. If you proclaim “I didn’t do it! Don’t believe him!” to a hostile audience, for example, that’s not going to automatically cause your audience’s hostile motives to melt away and think “Ah, he didn’t do it!”. In addition to all their other ammunition, now they have “See, he’s getting defensive about it. Guilty conscience!”.
Beyond that, we’d have to get into what’s driving this hostility and these unfair jumps to conclusions—because it’s something. Returning to the cookie jar hypothetical, maybe if I would have been more clearly open to your upset about the mess, it never would have gotten to where you were accusing me of taking cookies from the cookie jar in the first place.
It just depends on the extent to which you can expect the person to have noticed the problems with their own belief structure and have brought them back into coherence, if innocent.
Quoting my previous conclusion here, I don’t think you can actually expect people to notice and fully cohere their belief structures, in general. It’s really hard, and a lot of work, so the default expectation is that there will be quite a lot of ultimately unfounded insecurity driving defensiveness over true innocence.
At the same time, the end of the road of reflection is still security and openness about the evidence when truly innocent and well intentioned. And that matters both because it’s the trail sign to follow when we find ourselves innocent and insecure, and because it’s the trail to help others down when we suspect they are.

jimmy 29 Aug 2025 20:52 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Defensiveness does not equal guilt
Defensiveness isn’t proof that someone isn’t confidence in their innocence, because as you say, “it’s enough for them to be afraid that others might believe them guilty”. At the same time, what justifies that fear?
Say you bump into someone in public and they act like you’re a jerk for it. You could react defensively and say “I’m not a jerk, YOU are a jerk you jerk!”. Or you could just say “I’m sorry about that. Are you okay? I screwed up by looking the other way because I heard someone call my name, and I hadn’t seen you there. I guess I need to stop before looking in the future, even if the path looks clear.”
The latter isn’t “defensive” and also does nothing to defend against the accusations directly. But by owning up to everything you can find that you did wrong, you’re demonstrating that you’re not a jerk. And in the process of doing that, it necessarily comes out that “everything you did wrong” isn’t much, and that the other fool walked in front of you without looking himself. So now he looks like a jerk, and you look innocent. Which obviously was what was going to happen, since we knew from the start that you’re not a jerk so of course that’s what the evidence is going to point to. The difference is between “Don’t listen to that! The evidence will mislead you!” and “The totality evidence can’t make me look bad unless I am bad, so lets look at the evidence”.
When someone is showing you a fear that looking at the evidence will leave you thinking they’re bad, this implies a belief that they are indeed bad—at least by your interpretation, which is obviously the one that matters to you.
This belief isn’t necessarily reflectively coherent, and people often flinch out of insecurity even when their beliefs would predictably cohere to “innocent”, but it’s also not crazy to see someone implying that you might think they’re guilty if you were to look at the evidence, and take this as (imperfect) evidence of guilt. Because the only way that fear can be reflectively stable is if they are guilty. It just depends on the extent to which you can expect the person to have noticed the problems with their own belief structure and have brought them back into coherence, if innocent.

jimmy 26 Aug 2025 1:13 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
I suspect that The Art really does contain solutions that aren’t super distant or high-tech.
I notice that you’re reaching for it too.
It’s promising that despite Said’s criticisms of NVC, and that you’re doing exactly what you described as the thing “something like” NVC, it’s going quite well so far. That’s a harder test, but when you get the principles right, things work regardless. It doesn’t matter if Said’s stance is “NVC is about status plays” because you aren’t doing status plays, and it shows.
Respect.

jimmy 20 Aug 2025 7:12 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
I’ve done this. I was kinda sorta trying out polyphasic sleeping, but the real driver was that I wanted to learn how to fall asleep because I was pretty bad at it. It turned out to be very very interesting and useful.
The single biggest thing I learned from that experience is what it feels like to be “asleep”. My thoughts would slow to a stop during the 20 minute naps, but I’d often retain awareness the whole time. I’d lose my sense of time because there was just nothing happening to count as the tick of a clock. At first I thought “I didn’t fall asleep” because there was no gap in consciousness, but after a couple days doing quite well on “no sleep” I realized that my model of sleep wasn’t adding up. At a LW meetup one time I had heard an experienced meditator describe having the same experience while asleep and I couldn’t imagine it at the time, so it was neat to experience it first hand.
The interesting thing about this is that having the thought “Ugh, I’m still not asleep” isn’t actually proof that the thought is correct. If you take “I’m aware of my surroundings” to be proof of being awake, then you can actually wake yourself up by falsely concluding that you’re awake. This cuts through a lot of self-fulfilling insomnia, because instead of stressing about not being asleep yet, it’s “I don’t really know if I’m asleep, and there isn’t really a hard line anyway” and “Worrying about this is actually the action of waking up, so that’d be dumb, lol”. So you can just lie there without generating additional thoughts about how you’re not asleep yet, and that can be a big help.
The other thing that it gave me is an explicit understanding of what falling asleep is. I’m just letting my thoughts spool down. Instead of opening 1.2 new tabs per tab on your mental browser and dealing with a tab explosion, open 0.8. That doesn’t mean it’s easy if you’re excited and have much to think about, but also, sometimes there are things worth getting excited about and thinking about instead of sleeping. Facing this question directly at least gives you a handle on the problem and a way to pull on the lever towards sleep, when there’s reason to motivate it.
If you have difficulties falling asleep and the slack to burn a week doing this, it might be a good investment. But I don’t think it’s necessary in order to put in deliberate practice falling asleep. You do it every night anyway, so every night you can track what’s keeping your mind racing. You can notice if it’s driven by anxieties that turn out to be false, or by not making an explicit decision about what’s worth thinking about when, or what. You can notice which emotions, if any, start to bubble up once you stop distracting yourself, and whether that might be a driver for these incessant thoughts.
And when things are sorted out, just practice lying down noticing that you don’t have to think anymore. No need to worry about not sleeping. The exciting projects can wait for tomorrow. For now, you can just rest. You don’t have to do anything. And notice how nice that can feel :P
Also, melatonin. I’m not sure how much credit to give to melatonin vs learning better how to sleep, but my sleep latency used to be close to an hour or more and now my Oura ring says I average ten minutes and there’s basically zero struggle anymore.

jimmy 12 Aug 2025 16:25 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind

We can be, if you want. And I certainly wouldn’t blame you for wanting to bail after the way I teased you in the last comment.
I do want to emphasize that I am sincere in telling you that I hope it doesn’t eat at you too much, and that I hoped for the conversation to get somewhere interesting.
If you turn out to be a remarkably good sport about the teasing, and want to show me that you can represent how you were coming off to me, I’m still open to that conversation. And it would be a lot more respectful, because it would mean addressing the reason I couldn’t take your previous comment seriously.
No expectations, of course. Sincere best wishes either way, and I hope you forgive me for the tease.

jimmy 9 Aug 2025 17:29 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
Before I respond to your other points, let me pause and ask if I have convinced you that our situation is actually pretty asymmetrical, at least in regards to these examples? If not, I’m disinclined to invest more time.

Oh, the situation is definitely asymmetrical. In more ways than you realize.
However, the important part of my comment was this:
The question is, do you see how silly this looks, from my perspective? Do you see how much this looks like you’re missing the self awareness that is necessary in order to have a hope of noticing when you’re inhabiting a mistaken worldview, which pats itself on the back prematurely?
Because if you do, then perhaps we can laugh about our situation together, and go about figuring out how to break this asymmetry. But if you don’t, or if you try to insist “No, but my perspective really is better supported [according to me]”, the symmetry is already broken.
If you can’t say “Shoot, I didn’t realize that”, or “Heh, yeah I see how it definitely looks more symmetrical than I was giving credit for (even though we both know there are important dissymmetries, and disagree on what they are)”, and instead are going to spend a lot of words insisting “No, but my perspective really is better supported [according to me]”… after I just did you the favor of highlighting how revealing that would be… then again, the symmetry is already broken in the way that shows which one of us is blind to our limitations.

There’s another asymmetry though, which has eluded you:
Despite threatening to write me off, you still take me seriously enough to write a long comment trying to convince me that you’re right, and expect me to engage with it. Since you failed to answer the part that matters, I can’t even take you seriously enough to read it. Ironically, this would have been predictable to you if not for your stance on prediction errors, Lol.
Also, with a prediction error like that, you’re probably not having as much fun as I am, which is a shame. I’m genuinely sorry it turned out the way it did, as I was hoping we’d get somewhere interesting with this. I hope you can resolve your error before it eats at you too much, and that you can keep a sense of humor about things :)

jimmy 7 Aug 2025 7:15 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
You’re extending yourself an awful lot of charity here.
For example, you accuse me of failing to respond to some of your points, and claim that this is evidence of cognitive dissonance, yet you begin this comment with:
I didn’t respond to this because I didn’t see it as posing any difficulty for my model, and didn’t realize that you did.
Are you really unable to anticipate that this is very close to what I would have said, if you had asked me why I didn’t respond to those things? The only reason that wouldn’t be my exact answer is that I’d first point out that I did respond to those things, by pointing out that your arguments were based on a misunderstanding of my model! This doesn’t seem like a hard one to get right, if you were extending half the charity to me that you extend yourself, you know? (should I be angry with you for this, by the way?)
As to your claim that it doesn’t pose difficulty to your model, and attempts to relocate goal posts, here are your exact words:
I think the person who stops feeling anger has performed an incomplete reduction that doesn’t add up to normality.
This is wrong. It is completely normal to not feel anger, and retaliate, when you have accurate models instead of clinging to inaccurate models, and I gave an example of this. Your attempt to pick the nit between “incapacitation” vs “dissuasion” is very suspect as well, but also irrelevant because dissuasion was also a goal (and effect) of my retaliation that night. I could give other examples too, which are even more clearly dissuasion not incapacitation, but I think the point is pretty clear.
And no, even with the relocated goalposts your explanation fails. That was a system 1 decision, and there’s no time for thinking slow when you’re in the midst of something like that.
You have claimed that there’s evidence in your other writing, but have refused to prioritize it so that I can find your best evidence as quickly as possible.
No, I made it very clear. If you have a fraction of the interest it would take to read the post and digest the contents, you would spend the ten seconds needed to pull up the post. This is not a serious objection.
Again, it’s totally understandable if you don’t want to take the time to read it. It’s a serious time and effort investment to sit down and not only read but make sense of the contents, so if your response were to be “Hey man, I got a job and a life, and I can’t afford to spend the time especially given that I can’t trust it’ll change my mind”, that would be completely reasonable.
But to act like “Nope, it doesn’t count because you can’t expect me to take 10 seconds to find it, and therefore must be trying to hide it” is.… well, can you see how that might come across?
>So “Yes, I’m talking about our models of how the world should work”, and also that is necessarily the same as our models of how the world does work—even if we also have meta models which identify the predictable errors in our object level models and try to contain them.
This seems like it’s just a simple direct contradiction. You’re saying that model X and model Y are literally the same thing, but also that we keep track of the differences between them. There couldn’t be any differences to track if they were actually the same thing.
So if I tell you that the bottle of distilled water with “Drinking water” scribbled over the label contains the same thing as the bottle of distilled water that has “coolant” scribbled on it… and that the difference is only in the label… would you understand that? Would that register to you as a coherent possibility?
I’m sorry, but I’m having a hard time understanding which part of this is weird to you. Are you really claiming that you can’t see how to make sense of this?
>At the same time, I’m curious if you’ve thought about how it looks from my perspective.
There are some parts of your model that I think I probably roughly understand, [...] But I do think I’ve pointed out:
You’re missing the point of my question. Of course you think you’ve pointed that stuff out. I’m not asking if you believe you’re justified in your own beliefs.
There are a lot of symmetries here. You said some thing’s that [you claim] I didn’t respond to. I said some things which [I claim] you didn’t respond to. Some of the things I say strike you as either missing the point or not directly responding to what you say. A lot of the things that you’ve said strike me in the same way. Some of the my responses [you claim] look like cognitive dissonance to you. Some of your responses [I claim] look that way to me. I’m sure you think it’s different because your side really is right, and my side really is wrong. And of course, I feel the same way. This is all completely normal for disagreements that run more than a step or two deep.
But then you go on to act like you don’t notice the symmetry, as if your own perspective objectively validates your own side. You start to posture stuff like “You haven’t posted any evidence [that I recognize]” and “I’m gonna write you off, if you don’t persuade me”, with no hint to the possibility that there’s another side to this coin.
The question is, do you see how silly this looks, from my perspective? Do you see how much this looks like you’re missing the self awareness that is necessary in order to have a hope of noticing when you’re inhabiting a mistaken worldview, which pats itself on the back prematurely?
Because if you do, then perhaps we can laugh about our situation together, and go about figuring out how to break this asymmetry. But if you don’t, or if you try to insist “No, but my perspective really is better supported [according to me]”, the symmetry is already broken.

jimmy 6 Aug 2025 19:20 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Amarko’s comment on: Navigating Security: Fighting flammability with fire (when safe)

Yeah, I’m definitely inclined to take your word for it. Your comment just helped me put a finger on something that could use more emphasis, which I think it a big part of the resistance people often have to these ideas.

jimmy 6 Aug 2025 19:18 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
I feel like I have experienced a lot of negative emotions in my life that were not particularly correlated with a feeling of surprise. In fact, I can recall feeling anger about things where I literally wrote down a prediction that the thing would happen, before it happened.
Ah, that’s what you’re getting at.
Okay, so for example, say you angrily tell your employee “I expect you to show up on time!”. Then, he doesn’t, and you’re not surprised. This shows that you (meta) expected your (object level) expectation of “You will show up on time!” to be false. You’re not surprised because you’re not learning anything, because you’ve chosen not to. Notice the hesitance to sigh and say “Well, I guess he is not going to show up on time”?
This stickiness comes from the desire to control things combined with a lack of sophisticated methods of control. When you accept “He is not going to show up on time”, you lose your ability to tell him “I expect you to show up on time!” and with it your ability too put pressure on him to be punctual. Your setpoint that you control to is your expectation, so if you update your expectation then you lose your ability to (crudely) attempt to control the person’s behavior. Once you learn more sophisticated methods of control, the anger no longer serves a purpose so you’re free to update your expectations to match reality. E.g. “I don’t know if you’re going to show up on time, but I do know that if you don’t, you will be fired! No hard feelings either way, have a nice day :)”
This is a really tricky equivalence to wrap ones mind around, and it took me years to really understand even after I could see that there was something there. I explain this more in my post expectations=intentions=setpoint, and give examples of how more sophisticated attempts to control cede immediate reality and attempt to control towards trajectories instead—to concretely better results.
Conversely, I can recall many pleasant surprises, which involved a lot of prediction error but no negative emotions.
Yeah, I think positive emotions generally require prediction errors too, though I’m less solid on this one. People are generally more willing to update on pleasant surprises so that prediction error discomfort is less likely to persist enough to be notable, though it’s worth noting that this isn’t always the case. Imposter syndrome is an example where people get quite uncomfortable because of this refusal.
The prediction error is not the same as negative emotions. Prediction error is the suffering that happens while you refuse to update, while negative emotions like sadness come while you update. You still have to have erred in order to have something sad to learn, but it’s not the same thing.
Now that I say it, I realize I had the opportunity to clarify earlier, because I did notice that this was a point of confusion, and I chose not to take the opportunity to. I think I see why I did, but I shouldn’t have, and I apologize.
So if this is what you are relying on to confirm your theory, it seems pretty disconfirmed by my life experience. And I’m reasonably certain that approximately everyone has similar observations from their own lives.
Again, giant chasm of inferential distance. You’re not passing the ITT yet, and until you do it’s going to be real tough for you to “test” anything I’m saying, because you will always be testing a misinterpretation. It’s obviously reasonable to be suspicious of such claims as attempts to hide from falsifiability, but at the same time sometimes that’s just how things are—and assuming either way is a poor way of finding truth.
To distinguish, you want to look for signs of cognitive dissonance, not merely things that you disagree with. Because if you conclude that you’re right on the surface level because the other person gets something wrong two levels deep… and your judgment of whether they’re wrong is your perspective, which they disagree with… then you’ve just given up on ever learning anything when there’s a disagreement three or more levels deep. If you wait to see signs that the person is being forced to choose between changing their own mind or ignoring data, then you have a much more solid base.
That, and look for concrete predictions that both sides can agree on. For example, you took the stance that anger was appropriate because without it you become susceptible to murderers and don’t retaliate—but once I pointed out the alternative, I don’t think you doubt that I was actually able to fight back without anger? Or is that genuinely hard to believe for you?
I find it quite plausible they would have a preference for seeing a lack of monsters. I do not find it remotely plausible that they would have a prediction of continuously being able to see a lack of monsters. That is substantially more stupid than the already-very-stupid example of not expecting it to get dark.
Hey, kids are stupid. Adults too. Sometimes people even keep expecting people to not piss them off, even when they know that the person will piss them off :p
Jokes aside, this is still the “expectations=intentions” thing. We try to not see our expectations as predictions when we’re using them as intents, but they function as predictions nonetheless.
Are you maybe trying to refer to our models of how the world “should” work, rather than our models of how it does work? I’m not sure exactly what I think “should” is, but I definitely don’t think it’s the same as a prediction about what actually will happen. But I could maybe believe that disagreements between “should” and “is” models play a role in explaining (some) negative emotions.
“Should” is used as an attempt to disconnect ourselves from updating on what will happen in order to try to make something happen—because we recognize that it will likely fail and want to try anyway. If I say “You will show up on time” as if it’s a matter of fact, that’s either powerful… or laughable. And if I sense that I don’t have the authority to pull that off, I’m incentivized to back off to “You SHOULD show up on time” so that I don’t have to accept “I guess you won’t show up on time, huh?” when you don’t. I can always say “Okay maybe he won’t BUT HE SHOULD” and immediately negate the uncomfortable reality.
So “Yes, I’m talking about our models of how the world should work”, and also that is necessarily the same as our models of how the world does work—even if we also have meta models which identify the predictable errors in our object level models and try to contain them.
Maybe that part could use more emphasis. Of course we have meta models that contradict these obviously wrong object level models. We know that we’re probably wrong, but on the object level that doesn’t make us any less wrong until we actually do the update.
I am not searching through everything you’ve ever written to try to find something that matches a vague description.
That’s fine, no pressure to do anything of course. For what it’s worth though, it’s very clearly labeled. There’s no way you wouldn’t recognize at a glance.
I feel like we’ve been talking for quite a while, and you are making extraordinary claims, and you have not presented ANY noteworthy evidence favoring your model over my current one,
I don’t think that’s fair. For one, your model said you need anger in order to retaliate, and I gave an example of how I didn’t need anger in order to retaliate. I think the fact that I don’t always struggle with predictable anger while simultaneously not experiencing your predicted downsides is clear evidence, do you not?
Of course, this isn’t strong evidence that I’m right about anything else, but it’s absolutely fatal to the idea that your model accurately depicts the realm of possibility. If your model gets one thing this wrong, this unexpectedly, how can you trust it to tell you what else to view as “extraordinary”?
and I am going to write you off very soon if I don’t see something persuasive. Please write or directly link some strong evidence.
You’re welcome to read my posts, or not. They’re quite long and I don’t expect you to read them, but they’re there if you want a better understanding of what I’m talking about.
Either way, I’m happy to continue because I can see that you’re engaging in good faith even though you’re skeptical (and maybe a bit frustrated?), and I appreciate the push back. At the end of the day, neither my ability to retaliate without anger, nor my ability to help kids overcome fear by understanding their predictions, hinge on you believing in it.
At the same time, I’m curious if you’ve thought about how it looks from my perspective. You’ve written intelligent and thoughtful responses which I appreciate, but are you under the impression that anything you’ve written provides counter-evidence? Do you picture me thinking “Yes, that’s what I’m saying” before you argue against what you think I’m saying?

jimmy 5 Aug 2025 7:30 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Amarko’s comment on: Navigating Security: Fighting flammability with fire (when safe)
:D nice!
I have two different felt senses coming up reading this.
The first is “Ugh, I know that one”. Which is itself kinda interesting since I definitely naturally erred on the side of “Am I wrong?”, and bringing empathy into the mix is the easier part. But I think I know it from when I did pick my battles, and felt left out of interaction because I couldn’t take people as seriously as they take themselves and was unwilling to pretend. And I guess because sometimes I’m uncomfortable with their discomfort myself, like at first in the flight anxiety example.
“Looking like an asshole” definitely isn’t a fake risk especially in cultures that lack recognition of these dynamics, and there can be a substantial gap between good intent and recognition of good intent. Like, I present things in this sequence as “Know that your intent is good, and you’re fine, because you can demonstrate it”, and that’s not wrong… but that’s leaning on such a strict definition of “know”. You can be right, and for the right reasons, and they can be wrong, and predictably so, but it still takes nontrivial work to verify all this such that you have the security to not be shaken when people are genuinely upset with you for things you didn’t actually do wrong (I’ve definitely been there, but maybe not since I’ve had this explicit understanding). So it takes sensitivity to even quite subtle amounts of “Maybe I’m wrong, and an asshole?” sometimes to tone things down to what will go well.
The second part is that this is why I’m writing this stuff. I think there are a lot of times where people lack the understanding that it’s okay to be secure and to do secure things! So you could act secure, and people would gobble it up, and good things would happen, but there’s a sort of lacking social permission because there’s no cultural understanding that there really is such thing as a “good asshole” let alone how it works. Or even just the middle ground of listening without “Lol, that’s dumb” or “Oh you poor thing”, and purely trying to understand to high precision before offering any judgements.
So on the one hand, yeah, sometimes there’s a really large cultural and inferential gap, and just barging in with the sort of playfulness that feels authentic and right is overwhelmingly provocative, and so sometimes you have to temper that until you can do the prep work of figuring out exactly how much poking is okay. And on the other, often it’s really just a lot easier than you think, and you can just play right away, and there’s this really big and obvious appetite for such things that’s clear once you tap into it.