In the 'keep the organization from being overrun' sense, see also sealioning. The search space of worthwhile things is very large and idiosyncratically explored by well meaning, intelligent people. Aggressive value laden 'logical arguments' often point to a tacit value to have everyone converge on the same set of metaheuristics. This is because the person doing this has a strong need for internal consistency that they are externalizing onto their social space. And there's nothing wrong with wanting internal consistency. But if pressed hard, it is anti-truth seeking as an aggregate strategy because you lose out on the consilience of having different people pursuing different search methods. Epistemology is a team sport. The objection would be 'but if we don't then argue about what we've discovered what's the point?' The point is that adversarial processes as a part of the truth seeking process needs to be consensual. This applies doubly when you aren't in a 101 space and people might be sick of a dynamic where simple seeming questions with complicated answers make newer members feel entitled to the effort needed to explain said complicated answers. This is one of the reasons well written blog posts that can be referenced by name can be so helpful for community discourse.

I like this post by the way and my comment wasn't an objection to it.

or they're doing some sort of socratic move (in the latter case, this is a style of conversation I'd rather not have on my posts

Very well. I will endeavor to be more direct.

there are clear answers to them if you spend a few minutes steelmanning how the aforementioned organization would work well

The fourth virtue is evenness! If you first write at the bottom of a sheet of paper [LW · GW], "And therefore, the aforementioned organization would work well!", it doesn't matter what arguments you write above it afterward—the evidential entanglement [LW · GW] between your position and whatever features-of-the-world actually determine organizational success, was fixed the moment you determined your conclusion. After-the-fact steelmanning that selectively searches for arguments supporting that conclusion [LW · GW] can't help you design better organizations unless they have the power to change the conclusion. Yes requires the possibility of no. [LW · GW]

they're looking for impossible certainty in an obviously context specific and highly variable situation

We're looking for a decision procedure. "It's context-specific; it depends" is a good start, but a useful proposal needs to say more about what it depends on.

A simple example of a decision procedure might be "direct democracy." People vote on what to do, and whichever proposal has more votes is implemented. This procedure provides a specific way to proceed when people don't agree on what to do: they vote!

In both the OP and your response to me, you tell a story about people successfully talking out their differences, but a robust institution needs to be able to function even when people can't talk it out—and the game theory of "What happens if we can't talk it out" probably ends up shaping people's behavior while talking it out.

For example, suspects of a police investigation might be very cooperative with the "good cop" who speaks with a friendly demeanor and offers the suspect a cup of coffee: if you look at the radically transparent video of the interview, you'll just see two people having a perfectly friendly conversation about where the suspect was at 8:20 p.m. on the night of the seventeenth and whether they have witnesses to support this alibi. But the reason that conversation is so friendly is because the suspect can predict that the good cop's partner might not be so friendly.

Edit: I hadn't read Zack's long reply [LW(p) · GW(p)] when making this comment, so it wasn't factored into it. Likely would have said something very slightly different if I had.

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Entirely fair of you to make the meta-note. Data point from me: I actually found the question/answer pairs quite helpful + think they're reasonable; I probably could have generated answers for a system I set up, but I haven't fully absorbed your proposal enough to do so on your behalf.

Actually, something generally helpful to hear is the "it's highly context specific." That seems true and a good answer. I think I would have tried to specify some overarching principle for all these cases and done so poorly.

Treading carefully, I'll say that I can't speak to the motivations/attitudes behind the questions, and I thought the wording in the other question wasn't very good, but both questions themselves seem good to 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.

Edited to add: I admit it's a delicate balance to walk. But sometimes, people are inconsiderate in a way that definitely harms discussions. The principle of charity isn't just a thing in philosophy to make people feel good; there's also some methodological use to it. Likewise with trying to understand that other people have different minds from one's own. There has to be a way to point out inconsiderateness that doesn't get met with a response a la "tact doesn't matter because truth is the only virtue."

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. :)

Something that I'm maybe able to put into words now:

The classical example of "sacred values run amok" in my mind is when you ask people how much money a hospital should spend on a heart transplant for a dying child. People try to dodge the question, avoiding trading off a sacred value for a mundane value. Despite the fact that money can buy hospital equipment that saves other lives.

It's plausible that hospital should hold "keeping people healthy and alive" as an overall sacred value, which they never trade off against. This might forbid some paths where resources are spent on things that weren't necessary to keep people healthy and alive. But it doesn't tell you what are the best strategies to go about it are. You're allowed to sacrifice a boy's life to buy hospital equipment. You're even allowed to sacrifice a boy's life to make sure your employees are well rested and not overly stressed. Running a hospital is a marathon, not a sprint.

Over the past couple years, I have updated to "yes, LessWrong should be the place focused on truthseeking." I think I came to believe that right around the time I wrote Tensions in Truthseeking [LW · GW], in the process of writing the paragraph about instrumental sacredness. But that tells us what the question is, not what the answer is.

Some of the language about "holding truth sacred" (things you've said, and others) 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?"

There's also the bit where operationalization matters. "Minimize falsehood" is a different function than "maximize true, good ideas over time" which is a different function than "maximize true, good ideas that are communicated well enough to impact the world."

I had trouble reading this as it felt like there were a lot of presumptions in conflict.

If you let people bring random norms in the quality of the discussion will be random. In selecting some norms to be non-random the site must somehow encourage certain norms and suppress incompatible ones. If people were "smart" they could know the norms beforehand and then all speech would be flawless from a norm standpoint. But the interesting case is when someone in the discussion fails to effectively employ a norm. After the norm discussion speech should be norm compliant and I think change from non-compliant to compliant means supressing the "offending" parts. If no supression happens the harmful elements are left alive to do their damage.

Thus if a norm-officer is talking to you there is some goal how your speech is supposed to change. It's good goal to try get to this goal by selling why the norm is a good idea. However I think the norm will be or should be enforced even if such "selling" fails. At the very least the moderator needs to make a call whether the conversation is sufficient remedy for the detected danger or whether the issue should be escalated to less discussive "actual action" levels. If the discussion concluded "I will raise veganism just as often as I have previously" escalation would be the conclusion (or some kind of weird thing were the defiance tries to upset the whole norm structure with the defiant party banking on that the wider community will overrule the moderators effected principles).

Compliant people wil lnot constatnlyu trigger the norm-violations but that places a limit on effectively expressible stances and I think the effective communicaiton what does and does not cause schism falls outside of that and the closest thing you get is a kind of plausible stereotype needs. At worst talking about what does and does not cause a schism causes a schism which would trigger supression of schism analysis. Thus what a schism is is largely depend on the inertia of how it was understood when schism supression is implemented and is less responsive to peoples actual needs. My thoughts might be too muddy about it but it might culminate to a point where there is a "it is a norm violation to have those private values or declare them as targets that the system should care about even in slight degree".

I don't know the following model it is too shaky a model but I am banking on the norm of describing how you think rather than what is convincing. Have starting situations

*1: 1000 flies, 1 human

• A:1000 humans ,1 fly

and a later distribution of

• 2:5000 flies, 100 000 humans
• B: 5000 humans and 100 000 flies.

Assume there is a brown substance that is olfactorily attrractive to flies and repulsive for humans. a situation that goes from 1 to 2 is likely to be substance decorated as all humans that joined must be "fly needs compatible" or atleast find the whole deal of the community participation to be worth it overall. However if there is no such inertia then a situation that goes from A to B means the substance decoration will be introduced (and would be conductive to cause the abandon rate of the humans to skyrocket). The scheme of making the minority to conform relieves value tension but makes the overall values of the organizaiton to drift. What started as a human organization but drifted to a fly organization might no longer be human-aligned. For entities that try to survive this might not matter that much. But for things that are tools if it starts to do another task that can plausibly be counted as a malfunction (althoguth if my hammers randomly morphed into saws I might still find saws not to be useless but if I made a highly spesific tool and it morphed into a generic one I would probably be pretty upset).

I guess there aer two distinct points. If you allow changes based on how your organization serves the general lifes of it's participants this will drift the communitys purpose away from being highly specialised in one task. And that majorities can't be relied onto keep the macro aligment stable, it's not that we are trading microaligment for better macroaligment but that there is a real chance that macroaligment will also be compromised (or I am missing the fence that keeps mission critical aligment operating on different rules than irrelevant aligment)

I think is possibly very true, and I suspect a "Crocker's Rules" type policy to have a similar issue, however, I think the radical transparency (as opposed to radical honesty, which is having to share everything) on net is pretty good because it prevents political games.

Is that an update for you or something that seemed true when you wrote the OP, that you feel you accounted for when proposing the radical transparency thing?