A Return to Discussion

There were times when internet was something for nerds they could enjoy in their free time, and suddenly it's a place where all the village idiots gather and where your future employers will make background checks about you. I miss the times when internet was... not even anonymous, but more like you could have used your real name or a fake name and no one gave a fuck anyway.

Today, any asshole can take your quote out of context, retweet it to thousands of people in a few minutes, and they are going to contact your employer and relatives, and there is no way to stop that or explain... it feels like if the whole world is covered by hidden cameras, which can take any random snapshot of your life and show it on television screens of the whole country.

Okay, two different aspects here:
-- annoying idiots; generally harmless, but can take your time and make you frustrated when they appear in your comments
-- the hysterical internet culture, where making a mountain out of a molehill is actually a great way to make AdSense bucks

Maybe these two are somewhat in tension. Being able to link online identities to real-world identities would help one to get rid of the annoying idiots once and for all; but it also would be a great tool for punishing people in real life for things they said online. On the other hand, anonymity means you can't stop someone from coming back after being banned, or from making an army of sock puppets. (In theory I can imagine a hypothetical solution: such as a third party registering pseudonymous handles for people on various web discussions, but only one handle per person per website. But that would be easy to abuse: by the third party, by it's random employees, by the government.)

In real life, I don't use the same persona for everyone. I behave differently and talk about different topics with my family vs with my friends. I talk differently with rationalists vs with less sane people I still need to keep good relationships with. On many platforms it is too easy to link these things together. Or, they will allow me to hide in a tiny group of my friends... but of course, I can't make new friends while hidden.

Real life sometimes provides... uhm... partial social filters. For example, if I go to a sci-fi convention, I am likely to meet other sci-fi fans I don't know (so it's open towards new people), but I am also unlikely to meet there my grandma or to meet people who completely dislike sci-fi (so it's mostly closed towards people who hate the topic itself). This is what I usually want -- a setting sufficiently open that I can discuss a topic with new people who care about the topic; and yet sufficiently closed that people who don't care about the topic are not watching me. And the risk that someone at the sci-fi con would film me on a camera, and later share the movie with my grandma (or ten years later with my potential employers) is close to zero.

If people hide from public squares, they can’t be exposed to Socrates’ questions.

The historical Socrates was also permabanned from the planet for sealioning. :D

I think this is key:

It’s almost as though the issue were accountability.

A blog is almost a perfect medium for personal accountability. It belongs to you, not your employer, and not the hivemind. The archives are easily searchable. The posts are permanently viewable. Everything embarrassing you’ve ever written is there. If there’s a comment section, people are free to come along and poke holes in your posts. This leaves people vulnerable in a certain way. Not just to trolls, but to critics.

I do want accountability. I do want criticism. I want to be made less wrong and more right. I want a community that helps me become more the person I want to be. This project seems well-suited to getting that, and terribly important for getting communal intellectual norms right.

And yet, I'm not going to cross-post everything on my blog to LessWrong. Here's why.

Sometimes I'm writing something where I'm fairly sure of the conceptual framework. In this case, most moderately intelligent, informed criticism will be helpful. But if I'm writing not to explain but to explore - or just using a nonstandard model and not taking great care to lead people in baby steps - criticism has to meet a much higher standard to be helpful. If I'm engaged in the act of concept-formation, I'm trying to point to the center of a cluster of things, and get other people to look there and report what they see. If someone responds by literal-mindedly assessing my initial pointer's fit to reality instead of taking a look at where I'm pointing and reporting what they see, they actively pull attention away from where it needs to go.

This is not the same as how certain I am that my conclusion is correct. If I'm uncertain about the facts or the inferences I'm drawing from them, detail-oriented criticism is helpful. If I'm uncertain about the basic conceptual framework, I don't understand the thing well enough to evaluate criticism, and I need collaborative seeing first.

I'm worried that this will be obscured by the superficially similar thing you're pointing to here:

You can preempt embarrassment by declaring that you’re doing something shitty anyhow.

I don't currently trust, based on experience, that the level of discourse at Less Wrong will be an interesting place to work out the ideas I can only barely point to on the verbal level. I don't see moving my whole intellectual life here. I feel some need to hold onto my own blog where I play with things unaccountably. I think it's important to have space for unaccountable displays of personality as part of the exploration process.

That said, I want more accountability, I want more spaces with accountability, and I plan to post things where I have some hope that criticism and accountability will help move the ball forward.

There's a discussion of a related split in norms at Status 451, Splain It to Me:

Here’s a series of events that happens many times daily on my favorite bastion of miscommunication, the bird website. Person tweets some fact. Other people reply with other facts. Person complains, “Ugh, randos in my mentions.” Harsh words may be exchanged, and everyone exits the encounter thinking the other person was monumentally rude for no reason. [...] I’ll name “ugh, randos” Sue and an archetypal “rando” Charlie. [...]

From Sue’s perspective, strangers have come out of the woodwork to demonstrate superiority by making useless, trivial corrections. Some of them may be saying obvious things that Sue, being well-versed in the material she’s referencing, already knows, and thus are insulting her intelligence, possibly due to their latent bias. This is not necessarily an unreasonable assumption, given how social dynamics tend to work in mainstream culture. People correct others to gain status and assert dominance. An artifice passed off as “communication” is often wielded as a blunt object to establish power hierarchies and move up the ladder by signaling superiority. Sue responds in anger as part of this social game so as not to lose status in the eyes of her tribe.

From Charlie’s perspective, Sue has shared a piece of information. Perhaps he already knows it, perhaps he doesn’t. What is important is that Sue has given a gift to the commons, and he would like to respond with a gift of his own. Another aspect is that, as he sees it, Sue has signaled an interest in the topic, and he would like to establish rapport as a fellow person interested in the topic. In other words, he is not trying to play competitive social games, and he may not even be aware such a game is being played. When Sue responds unfavorably, he sees this as her spurning his gift as if it had no value. This is roughly as insulting to Charlie as his supposed attempt to gain status over Sue is to her. At this point, both people think the other one is the asshole. People rightly tend to be mean to those they are sure are assholes, so continued interaction between them will probably only serve to reinforce their beliefs the other is acting in bad faith.

Not every stranger who responds to Sue is necessarily deemed by her a “rando,” however. Those who emphatically agree with her, for instance, before presenting their own information tend to get a much warmer response. It’s a social cue, a way to signal friendliness. Additionally, people she sees as belonging to her in-group may be given the benefit of the doubt, while out-groupers are more often judged to be malicious or stupid. Even her tweeting “ugh, randos” serves as peer bonding, like complaining with strangers about bad weather or train delays, an announcement soliciting solidarity from those who have been in her situation and sympathy from those who have not.

The reason these responses are seen as good-faith participation is because this model of communication emphasizes harmonious emotional experience. The responses that don’t attempt to establish emotional rapport are merely coming from a different context, one in which communication is about information sharing.

For nerds, information sharing is the most highly valued form of communication possible.

I say all this having once been an “ugh, randos” person myself. I thought the “randos in my mentions” were playing social games, so I often responded harshly, and when they met my hostility with hostility, I felt vindicated in my initial judgment. But as my perspective shifted from “ugh, randos” to “awesome, information,” virtually every signal I’d relied on to indicate an interaction was going to be unpleasant completely fell apart. Even many replies I’d pegged as obvious, blatant misogyny turned out to have been people eagerly offering me gifts of information bewildered that I rudely rejected them.

Two particular exchanges stick out in my mind, both “corrections” in response to a series of tweets of mine on esoteric Unix history. One of these replies was simply wrong, while the other assumed I was mistaken about something that I actually knew but had glossed over. I responded to both with information of my own that demonstrated this, and both people acknowledged that I was right. I thought they were attacking my credibility and that I’d defeated their attacks and won the status game. Except: both of them were happy I corrected them. This seemed bizarre to me at the time, and the only explanation I could come up with was that they must be attempting to save face. But, now that I realize they likely weren’t attempting to play the status game at all, their responses make perfect sense. All they saw was that I had accepted their gift and given them yet another.

I think there's two forces involved here.

It’s almost as though the issue were accountability.

And I think this is one of them. Under a Hanson hat, Talk isn't about Information. That is, for most things most people say on the net, this:

Author: “Hi! I just said a thing!”

is their only genuine content, no matter what words they happen to pick to express it. The fear is that others will hold them accountable for what they said rather than what they meant. They're playing the "I just said a thing!" game, but on a personal blog they might get accosted by people playing the "let's have discussions" game, and that would be awkward because one of the conceits of the former is that it pretends to be the latter.

In short, blogs signal the wrong things to non-nerds, they're the wrong kind of conversation. Our signal is their noise.

For one rather public and hilarious example, witness Scott Alexander’s flight from LessWrong

But I think something different is going on here, and with other diasporists. Scott et al are clearly playing the discussion game, really well. I think the second force driving people from forums to blogs and from blogs to social media is convenience.

Not having direct control of your posting environment is a trivial inconvenience. Having to run your own posting environment is also a trivial inconvenience, once the novelty of owning it wears off. Tumblr and twitter are extremely convenient. Especially twitter; you don't have to feel bad about emitting opinions without thought if the format makes depth of thought impossible! Both even make it possible to Say A Thing without saying any thing!

Never bet against convenience. Discussion moves from formats that ask more of the discussants to those that ask less. This rule is good when applied to the process of posting, and bad when applied to the content of posting, but in practice applies equally to both.

Couple of random observations.

First, with regard to privacy, I think it took a remarkably long time to sink in that "I hope you know this goes down on your permanent record". Internet activity is publishing, it is, in a large number of cases, both forever and searchable. And, of course, "anything you say can and will be used against you".

For nobodies that's not much of problem. But for people with something to lose it is. The net effect is evaporative cooling where smart, interesting, important people either withdraw from the open 'net or curate their online presence into sterility.

Second, "let's play at discussions" vs sealioning and "randos in my mentions" -- I think a major issue here is the value of time. There is a rather obvious inverse relationship between the value of someone's time and how much that someone spends wandering the 'net and random-commenting things which catch his eye. So random comments are generally low-value and worthless -- which means that people who value their time are not only going to not make them, they are also not going to pay much attention to them.

In the golden age covered by the mists of time (aka before the Eternal September) the barriers to entry were high and the people who made it inside were both smart and similar. Thus the early 'net was a very high-trust club. But that changed. Oh, how that changed.

The issue, of course, is discovery: how do you locate and identify new interesting people in the sea of hyperactive idiots? It's an interesting problem. You can create walled gardens. You can set out bait and filter mercilessly, or just hang out in places where only interesting-to-you people are likely to wander into. You can try to follow connections from people you know piggybacking on their filtering skills. Any other ways come to mind?

But I would say that these disadvantages are necessary evils that, while they might be possible to mitigate somewhat, go along with having a genuinely public discourse and public accountability.

I'm often afraid of being an unwanted participant, so I've thought about this particular point somewhat. The worst case version of this phenomenon is the Eternal September, when the newbies become so numerous that the non-newbies decide to exit en masse.

I think there's something important that people miss when they think about the Eternal September phenomenon. From Wikipedia:

Every September, a large number of incoming freshmen would acquire access to Usenet for the first time, taking time to become accustomed to Usenet's standards of conduct and "netiquette". After a month or so, these new users would either learn to comply with the networks' social norms or tire of using the service.

The lever that everyone has already thought to pull is the 'minimize number of new users' lever, primed perhaps by the notion that not pulling this lever apparently resulted in the destruction of Usenet. Additionally, social media platforms often have moderation features that make pulling this lever very easy, and thus even more preferable.

But cultures don't have to leave new users to learn social norms on their own; you could pull the 'increase culture's capacity to integrate new users' lever. It makes sense that that lever hasn't been pulled, because it requires more coordination than the alternative. This post calls for a similar sort of coordination, so it seems like a good place for me to mention this possibility.

This applies not just to social norms, but to shared concepts, especially in cultures like this one, where many of the shared concepts are technical. It's easy to imagine that everyone who decreases discussion quality lacks the desire or wherewithal to become someone who increases discussion quality, but some newbies may have the aspirations and capability to become non-newbies, and it's better for everyone if that's made as easy as possible. In that way, I find that some potential improvements are not difficult to imagine.

As far as "playing the comments game", I admit I am guilty of that. At a deeper level it comes from a desire to connect with like-minded people. I may even be doing it right now.

We like to think people post because they are genuinely intellectually engaged in the material we've written, but the truth is people post comments for a myriad of different reasons, including wanting to score comment 'points' or 'karma' or engage in a back-and-forth with a figure they admire. People like getting attention. [even shy nerdy people who are socially isolated or socially awkward, for which commenting on an internet blog may count as a significant social engagement] As you point out, the 'comments game' motivation isn't necessarily bad in terms of the consequences -- it gets debate and discussion going. Given the importance of the topics discussed on LW and elsewhere, even low quality discussion is better than no discussion, or shutting people out.

Obviously though, there is a tension in the 'rational-sphere', though between wanting to draw in lots of new people and wanting to maintain a sense of community, or people who are on the 'same wavelength'. This tension is not at all unique to rationalism, and it typically leads to some type of fragmentation -- people who want to 'spread rationalism' and grow the movement go one way and the people who want to maintain a sense of community and maintain purity go another. I've seen the same dynamic at work in the Libertarian party and in Christian churches. I think we have to accept both sides have good points.

But getting back to your post, it seems like you are more on the 'we need to maintain a sense of community' side. Personally I haven't been very active in forums or online communities, but from what I have seen, maintaining a community online is possible , but it takes work - it requires considerable organization, active moderators and administrators, etc. Some platforms are more conducive to it than others. I can't really comment on the viability of LW, since I'm kinda new here, but it seems to be a good place.

As a side note, I'm not sure how much 'social trust' is required for commenting. While I might be very hesitant to talk to someone at a cocktail party for fear of annoying them, or because I don't trust them to take me seriously, I don't feel that way about commenting, or if I do, it's to a much lower extent. There is a difference - talking to someone in real life requires really interrupting them and taking their time, while writing a comment doesn't really interrupt someone as they can always ignore it if they want to. What you said about more socially privileged people being more trusting or confident is definitely true though.

To re-kindle the old-timers... Maybe re-opening the SL4 would help? I really liked its cleanliness, and the ability to participate directly via e-mail.

Three claims here:

(1) The public internet is better for accountability than social media.

(2) People fled the public internet for social media because of 1.

(3) 2 is bad and we should undo it.

1 seems right. I want to argue with 2. It's obviously right in some cases. The randos in my mentions thing happens. But sometimes, people go to Facebook because that's where the people are. Facebook's been optimizing for this, and almost exclusively this, for a long time. So any discourse-building strategy that doesn't take into account this competitor will hit walls it can't see.

I hadn't sufficiently considered the long term changes of LW to have occurred within the context of the overall changes in the internet before. Thank you very much for pointing it out. Reversing the harm of Moloch on this situation is extremely important.

I remember posting in the old vbulletin days where a person would use a screenname, but anonymity was much higher and the environment itself felt much better to exist in. Oddly enough, the places I posted at back then were not non-hostile and had a subpopulation who would go out of their way to deliberately and intentionally insult people as harshly as possible. And yet... for some reason I felt substantially safer, more welcome, and accepted there than I have anywhere else online.

To at least some extent there was a sort of compartmentalization going on in those places where serious conversation was in one area while pure-fluffy, friendly, jokey banter-talk was going on in another. Attempting to use a single area for both sounds like a bad idea to me and is the sort of thing that LessWrong was trying to avoid (for good reason) in order to maintain high standards and value of conversation but places like Tumblr allow and possibly encourage. (I don't really know about tumblr since I avoid it, but that's what it looks like from the outside.) There may also have been a factor that I had substantially more in common with the people who were around at that time whereas the internet today is full of a far mroe diverse set of people who have far less interest in acculturating into strange new environments.

Short-term thinking, slight pain/fear avoidance, and trivial conveniences that shifted everyone from older styles like vbulletin or livejournal to places like reddit and tumblr ultimately pattern matches to Moloch in my mind if it leads to things like less common widescale discussion of rationality or decreased development of rationalist-beloved areas. Ending or slowing down open, long-term conversations on important topics is very bad and I hope that LW does get reignited to change the progression of that.

I have a different experience with my blog. Seems no one feels comfortable commenting (or many people simply find nothing to say but seem to pass around the links enough). I move to these more obscure sites to find my audience and to have dialogue on the content/arguments. But I am not looking for students so much as teachers...people that might correct me.

Also I have learned and found of very significant writers/writings through these different social networks, that I wouldn't have found otherwise.

I think then we can re-solve the two views by suggesting we are each looking for something and these different outlets provide different solutions, but they are complex and inextricable in regard to the reasoning for our preferences for any one.

I came to LW for these sentiments, but the hoops and protocol I have to jump through just to make a submission isn't related to why I am here (or I don't understand it!) ;p