LesserWrong is dead to me. Trust nothing here; it is not truth-tracking.
PDV
Karma: 143
Blind Goaltenders: Unproductive Disagreements
They both are situations of enforced sharing, ostensibly optional but socially mandated. They establish rules within which you must operate, which can and inevitably will be used against anyone less skilled in them. They can be good, but mostly for people who are already socially secure and powerful, and the downside risk is very large risk of totally losing self-image and identity, destroying load-bearing coping mechanisms, and generally taking someone with very few tools to deal with the world and breaking those tools in the name of giving them better ones.
One thing I think is widely underappreciated about the color wheel as a classification system is the extent to which everything nonwhite is alien to modern society. We live in a culture and society dominated to a very large extent by white values. Our virtues are white; our fears are white; 1984, Stranger in a Strange Land, the Borg, FDR’s Four Freedoms, the UN Charter of Human Rights, the military, the Peace Corps. The major geopolitical and ideological struggles of the 20th century were between various flavors of white; royalism vs. democracy, communism and.democracy vs. fascism, communism vs, democracy. Tradition vs. feminism and vs. racial equality. Religion and separation of church and state are also both white concepts.
There are important nonwhite concepts; capitalism is black at its most prosocial, atheism is blue, the sexual revolution brought on by The Pill is primarily red. Rationalism is, naturally, extremely blue.
But just like the correct answer to “What D&D alignment are you?” is almost always true neutral, the correct answer to “What main MtG color are you?” is almost always white. In order to get useful classification power you must adjust away from the baseline by treating someone who’s 70% white and evenly split between everything else as your zero point.
Bay Solstice 2017: Thoughts
This is an accurate description of my mental state in this situation.
It’s somewhat broader than that. It’s not necessary for the environment to insist on NVC, as long as it treats NVC as high-status and… I’m going to say “aspirationally normative” and hope that makes sense. See Val’s comment here. That is, from my standpoint, an obvious social attack, enabled by NVC being, not necessarily normative, but treated as aligned with a general goal. As long as I accept the framing that NVC is good, I have no recourse but to take the status hit and accept the implicit premise that I need to demonstrate I’m not morally/epistemically/socially inferior.
I do believe that is possible to use NVC ethically. (It is also probably possible to Circle ethically.) But Hagbard’s Law still applies; communication is only possible between equals, whether it’s ostensibly nonviolent or not. If there is a power struggle in progress, all signals are distorted; all utterances are going to be received as moves in the power game first, communication second.
Not by default and no, respectively.
Most people are unknown to me and do not share my values. They are trustworthy to the extent of my ability to model them and my confidence that they are not manipulating me.
I was systematically subtly pulled down by ostensible friends in middle school and early high school, but I don’t consider that I was ever betrayed in any stronger sense, or by anyone I trusted to any high degree.
I did not see this comment until this moment (the comment display when there are more than 100 of them is really screwy). I will break off for the next day.
I expect content’s prominence on LesserWrong to be the result of political dynamics and filter bubbles, not insight or value. I do not expect it to be truth-tracking.
I’ve had a hard time with people using emotional/social rapport-building tools in communication, because it feels like it’s exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply.
Yes, this. Extremely this.
I happen to believe that “learn the skill already“ is far safer than “denounce it wherever it occurs”, especially when the skill is something as universal as *exerting social pressure*.
I don’t think learning the social pressure manipulation skill is sufficient. The counterskill, resisting social pressure, is much harder to learn and much harder to execute.
That seems likely, so I have changed the title.
>CECIE: There are indeed some voters who want stupid things, and under the European system, their voice can be heard. There are also voters who want smart things and whose voices can be heard, like in the Pirate Party in Finland. But European parliamentary systems have different problems stemming from different systemic flaws.
The Hamming Problem of Group Rationality
It is good to have great things in your life. It is not necessarily good to have things you feel are great in your life; those feelings are not necessarily accurate. Many things that feel really good are metaphorical junk food. They are the Symbolic Representation of The Thing. Anything that quickly generates emotional attachment is most likely to be Goodharting, optimizing for feeling great and generating attachment, rather than being great.
An element that’s easy to leave out in a description, but which I understand to be fairly critical, is the deliberate over-the-top nature of it. You don’t just say “That is your doom”, you go DOOOOOM, DOOMY DOOMY DOOM between one person receiving doom and the next. I believe its function is to both allow for people to be more extreme than they would if they didn’t have the vague feeling that anything could be taken as exaggeration, and simultaneously to lessen the emotional impact of the criticism.
I don’t have confidence that it was just [Munchkin] who was the problem, among kids. At past events that has been true, but there were more kids of an age with them this time, and so I specifically avoided rushing to that judgment. (Not that it kept me from getting yelled at on Facebook.)
I do think that the overall argument about kids at events has, up to this point, been a disguised referendum on [Munchkin] specifically, basically every time. Mentioning this did and honestly still does feel unspeakably rude because there’s basically no way to have that discussion without it being a direct social attack on something intensely personal for them and their parental figures.
[EDIT NOTE: This previously contained a particular kid’s name. Benquo pointed out that they have not and probably can’t yet consent to that, so I have replaced the real name with [Munchkin]. I will privately share the kid’s name on request, if it isn’t clear from context.]
I agree that there are multiple competing visions of Solstice, but I don’t see the religious ritual format and community gathering format in as much of a conflict as you.
As I said in another thread, I see the purpose of Solstice, and rationalist holidays generally, as community values affirmation. Borrowing some traits of religious ceremonies is a powerful but dangerous tool for this purpose. Size and fellow-feeling is another tool. Theatricality is another, but definitely secondary. For the established arc and values of “The world is dangerous and fragile, but we have overcome impossible challenges and can do it again” for the Brighter Than Today, they seem like the correct tools. Other holidays, mine and other people’s, use different tools and affirm different values; ideally, we would have all the central values of the community attached to at least one regular event.
I definitely do not think that Solstice as theatrical event is good or valuable. If it isn’t serving a higher purpose than entertainment, it’s just bad political art.
UnTAPed Learning
I am a dom, and while I dislike nearly everyone in the BDSM scene, it’s not for reasons at all related to this. I am unaware of any writing on BDSM from anyone I’ve heard of saying that BDSM is “praised as a way to be a better person”; when it’s held up as better, it’s on hedonistic grounds, not moral ones. Which is a critical piece of the problem; the difference between “you really should try this, you’re missing out” and “you really should try this, you’re weaker and worse because you don’t” is enormous in terms of what social pressure it exerts.
Also, I don’t appreciate the social posturing/attack in your latter paragraph.
Based on recent experience in the community around the subject, I think Circling is both toxic and a feedback-loop trap.
To paraphrase two friends who had similar strong negative reactions:
This is something I would not do with anyone I did not trust absolutely. No matter what it ostensibly holds about how it should not “force you to open up or try to get you to be vulnerable”, I am quite sure that, as practiced by humans, it will, and participants will be blinded to this obvious truth by the benefits and feeling of purity they have gained from it. Like NVC, I consider anyone engaging in this while in interaction with me a hostile actor.
EDIT:
I notice I feel trepidation and fear as I prepare to discuss this. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give you what you want, that you’ll become bored or start judging me.
[^This is a Circling move I just made: revealing what I’m feeling and what I’m imagining will happen.]
If this were an actual circle, I could ask you and check if it’s true—are you feeling bored? [I invite you to check.]
My instinctive reaction to this entire chunk is “ENEMY, HOSTILE, GET GONE, YOU ARE NO FRIEND OF MINE.” And I endorse that reaction. Anyone who uses this kind of frame is someone who is unsafe to know.