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It seems to me that rationality is extremely fragile and vulnerable, such that even though rationality might serves other goals, you have to be very uncompromising with regards to rationality, especially core things like hiding information from yourself (I was lightly opposed to the negative karma hiding myself) even if it that has appararant costs.

I agree with that. But people can have very different psychologies. Most people are prone to overconfidence, but some people are underconfident and beat themselves up too much over negative feedback. If the site offers an optional feature that is very useful for people of the latter type, it's at least worth considering whether that's an overall improvement. I wasn't even annoyed that people didn't like the feature; it was more about the way in which the person argued. Generally, more display of awareness of people having different psychologies would please me. :)

There are a bunch of conversations going on about the topic right (some in semi-private which might be public soonish).

Cool! And I appreciate the difficulty of the task at hand. :)

When I model these conversations, one failure mode I'm worried about is that the "more civility" position gets lumped together with other things that Lesswrong is probably right to be scared of.

So, the following is to delineate my own views from things I'm not saying:

I could imagine being fine with Bridgewater culture in many (but not all) contexts. I hate that in "today's climate" it is difficult to talk about certain topics. I think it's often the case that people complaining about tone or about not feeling welcome shouldn't expect to have their needs accommodated.

And yet I still find some features of what I perceive to be "rationalist culture" very off-putting.

I don't think I phrased it as well in my first comment, but I can fully get behind what Raemon said elsewhere in this thread:

Some of the language about "holding truth sacred" [...] has came across to me with a tone of single-minded focus that feels like not being willing to put an upper bound on a heart transplant, rather than earnestly asking the question "how do we get the most valuable truthseeking the most effective way?"

So it's not that I'm saying that I'd prefer a culture where truth-seeking is occasionally completely abandoned because of some other consideration. Just that the side that superficially looks more virtuous when it comes to truth-seeking (for instance because they boldly proclaim the importance of not being bothered by tone/tact, downvote notifications, etc.) isn't automatically what's best in the long run.

Some of these questions seem impossible to operationalize in a prediction market. For instance, if I bet that a recursively self-improving unfriendly AI will be developed in the next 10 years, and I'm right, how am I going to collect my money?

In general: making somatic reactions part of the mutual understanding of what is happening. The more you are aware of when you're abstracting from a somatic reaction the more you'll recognize when others are doing it too. E-Prime is aimed at this, as the step of symbolizing one thing as another thing (X *is* Y) is a moment in which you can catch this.

I think the same is true of NVC. If only one person's doing it, it's not going to work very well. It takes two. Some of my best memories are of conversations that took place between myself and somebody else schooled in NVC or something similar. Some of my worst are of applying NVC or similar techniques in a situation where the other person is used to getting their way through domineering or abusive behavior.

Hm. My experience is the opposite. I’ve found the most use in NVC type communication in cases where the other person is getting quite violent, as it can be remarkably disarming to see through the threats and care about the hurt that is driving the person to make them. It can also make it quite difficult for people to continue justifying their domineering and/or abusive behavior to themselves and others, if that’s what they’re doing.

My model of NVC is that’s useful in the way that neutron moderators can be useful. There’s a certain “gain” by which the “violence level” of communications are amplified after being expressed and received, and then having the response expressed and received. If you get multiplied by a number greater than one after going around the loop, things will melt down or explode. If one person is both interpreting and responding uncharitably, the other party is going to have to shoulder more of the burden to “moderate neutrons” and be extra clean in their communications so as to not escalate or allow for escalation. Additional effort to communicate nonviolently is going to make the most difference in the cases where you can actually cross unity. If you’re well below one to start with, then there’s no need. If you can’t get below one even with effort, it’s a bit futile (and therefore frustrating/discouraging).

You seem pretty aware of the failure mode of trying to use neutrality/rationality as an emotional defense mechanism, and how reaching for tools like NVC out of these motivations can lead to stifling of the important emotions that need to be expressed (which, interestingly, necessarily leads to misapplication/cargo culting of the tools). Do you think that could be behind your difficulties in getting good results with NVC in the “one sided” cases? Also, to me, your conversation with your brother looks like a perfect example of using NVC with someone who presumably isn’t trained in NVC to transform things from where they were coming off as domineering/abusive to one where you two are clearly on the same side and working together. Do you conceptualize it differently?

It seems like you're imagining a context that isn't particularly conducive to making intellectual progress. Otherwise, why would it be the case that John feels the need to regularly argue for veganism? If it's not obvious to the others that John's not worth engaging with, they should double-crux and be done with it. The "needs" framing feels like a tell that talking, in this context, is mainly about showing that you have broadcast rights, rather than about informing others.

The main case I can imagine where a truth-tracking group should be rationing attention like this, is an emergency where there's a time-sensitive question that needs to be answered, and things without an immediate bearing on it need to be suppressed for the duration.

I find myself wanting to question your side more

Thanks, I appreciate it a lot! You should be questioning my "side" as harshly as you see fit, because if you ask questions I can't satisfactorily answer, then maybe my side is wrong, and I should be informed of this in order to become less wrong.

Why do you think this prior is right?

The mechanism by which saying true things leads to more knowledge is at least straightforward: you present arguments and evidence, and other people evaluate those arguments and evidence using the same general rules of reasoning that they use for everything else, and hopefully they learn stuff.

In order for saying true things to lead to less knowledge, we need to postulate some more complicated failure mode where some side-effect of speech disrupts the ordinary process of learning. I can totally believe that such failure modes exist, and even that they're common. But lately I seem to be seeing a lot of arguments of the form, "Ah, but we need to coordinate in order to create norms that make everyone feel Safe, and only then can we seek truth." And I just ... really have trouble taking this seriously as a good faith argument rather than an attempt to collude to protect everyone's feelings? Like, telling the truth is not a coordination problem? You can just unilaterally tell the truth.

associated signals such as exasperation and incredulity

Hm, I think there's a risk of signal miscalibration here. Just because I feel exasperated and this emotion leaks into my writing, doesn't necessarily mean implied probabilities close to 1? (Related: Say It Loud. See also my speculative just-so story about why the incredulity is probably non-normative.)

(It's 1:20 a.m. on Sunday and I've used up my internet quota for the weekend, so it might take me a few days to respond to future comments.)

Still seems kind of inefficient, though :(

Just, the sort of thing that you should say 'ah, that makes sense. I will work on that' for the future.

It's actually not clear to me that I should work on that. As a professional hazard of my other career, I'm pretty used to people trying to use "You would be more persuasive if you were nicer" as an attempted silencing tactic; if I just believed everyone who told me that, I would never get anything done.

In philosophy, persistent impediments to solving a problem can result from a variant of this. There is an answer called Crazyism: http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2011/07/crazyism.html

Crazyism means noticing and accepting when every branch of a metaphysical dilemma leads to something Crazy, and accepting that we might, then have to accept something Crazy in order to progress.