Related from the Sequences: Whining-Based Communities, Rationality is Systematized Winning

The paragraph calling out certain people in our community for scoring points (and to some extent the last paragraph) felt, ironically, like you were suddenly scoring points, whereas the rest of the post was trying to win.

[Edit: Note that this is me responding to what turns out to be a misreading of the author's intent, which was to call out the responders for scoring points rather than the named posters. I think it led somewhere worthwhile but Conner wasn't doing the thing I thought he was doing.]

It also has an interesting implication, which is that scoring points won't accomplish anything in the context of those three subjects - that it won't help those people win. In Ben's situation that seems valid. Ben's mother is following the rule that curfew is curfew basically no matter what and Ben's arguments are irrelevant. In the other referenced examples, that does not seem to be the situation. No, it's not a sporting event where the most points wins, but it does not seem pointless to point out economic drivers of future AGI arms races if you're trying to convince people of the likelihood of AGI arms races, it does seem like pointing out how toxic things evolve is an argument in favor of getting people to change those dynamics and/or recognize that the end products might be toxic, it does seem like pointing out what causes lynch mobs might be useful information that informs people's actions.

That doesn't mean that such actions are optimal. But I don't think it's fair to say that saying things to justify your beliefs is something people don't do when trying to win. Arguments are won on points all the time. Beliefs are changed by point scoring all the time. Points are often not sufficient, but they are even more often helpful and they are also often required. Your points allow you to win, get people to listen, get you consideration, make people update, and so on.

A response might be, if they are helpful that's not scoring points. But yes, they are totally scoring points. There are things that help you win that don't score points, and there are things that both score points and help you win (and the other two quadrants as well).

What's bad is when you score the wrong kind of points. Irrelevant points. Points that bounce off their targets. Especially points that only serve to drag the other person down rather than make a point. So what's the difference between relevant points and irrelevant points, in this context?

My intuition is that it's points that matter to you versus points that matter to the judges. Ben is scoring points that matter to him but don't matter to the judges. Telling the cop you pay his salary really doesn't help. If you're scoring points that matter to the person you're arguing with, or the audience, and shift their opinion, that's a different story. Telling the cop that your wife is in labor and you're driving her to the hospital is totally scoring points but also works if he buys it. Starving people point out their desperation, thereby scoring points in the eyes of their judge, in order to elicit help. Yes, it would be better/cleaner to win in a way that didn't score points at all to avoid our natural inclination towards scoring more points than is efficient, but that doesn't mean scoring points isn't useful.

Relationships even depend on a points balance, in some sense. If you're constantly scoring points in your own eyes but not scoring points in the other person's eyes and they're doing the same, that's really bad. Both of you will think you're way ahead on points and wonder why the other person is defecting slash being so terrible. Much better is if you can both put those points on the board in some sense, so no one thinks they're somehow way ahead or feels totally unappreciated or unvalued or what not. This stuff matters.

I wonder how much of this is about naming things. I like that you're attempting to name all your things with resonant terms, and I think that consequences like my reactions here are features rather than bugs because they lead to revealing real differences in world models and perceptions that would otherwise be harder to spot, but there is certainly the risk this is largely about terms instead.

I appreciate the fact that you posted this on a forum where you can literally score points for saying this.

Does "point-scoring" correspond to status-seeking behavior?

Presumably people agree that in some circumstances, status seeking can be rational. If the actual disagreement is about who should have higher status, is whataboutism actually a fallacy?

(More generally, I would have liked to see more speculation about why point-scoring behavior evolved/what people who engage in it are trying to accomplish.)

In my head, this is flavored as a kind of question substitution. Ben was wishfully living in the universe where things would go the way he wanted them to, rather in the universe where things just are what they are, and you have to adapt to the rules that are handed to you. The question Ben was originally faced with was something like "how do I talk my mom into letting me stay out late?" This is a hard question, with no clear, predetermined roadmap.

Not performing this kind of question substitution is the kind of thing I view as a key skill that correlates strongly with psychological development, and in particular that the divide you are pointing at here is the one between pre- and post-formal stages, with the formal stage being a period of transition from the wishful-thinking worldview to the actually-doing-it worldview.

But even if you disagree with the developmental psychology relationship, making the change from wishful-thinking to actually-doing-it is the thing that was the seed of my motivation starting about 4 years ago when I moved to Berkeley and discovered way more wishful-thinking than I thought existed in the community when I read what people wrote online. Developmental psychology has been one tool for helping me understand why this divide exists, and I like this idea of talking about "scoring points" because it describes a what of what it seems to me people are doing from the inside where they play the game to win but play the game at a lower level where they don't even see the bigger game being played around them.

I feel that you've used Scoring Points in two distinct ways.

In the first, you are scoring points with an imaginary judge. Perhaps you are doing it so that people will support you later when you tell them what happened, but a lot of the time it is just so that you feel justified in your actions.

In the second, you are saying things that you know will impress the audience. The idea is to leverage social pressure against the person so that they have to agree with you or to just gain social status.

I'm not sure whether these distinct circumstances should be combined in a single term.