Inquiry into community standards

Those aren't weird deontological rules and you're just throwing in those words to describe those phrases as boo lights. MOST things people say aren't meant as strict rules, but as contextual and limited responses to the conversation at hand.

There is a very particular mental process of deontological thinking that epistemic rationalists should train themselves to defuse, in which an argument is basically short-circuited by a magic, invalid step. If the mental process that actually takes place in someone's head is, 'This person criticised a net-positive figure. Therefore, they must be belittled', and that's as far as their ability to justify actually goes, that seems like the kind of thinking an epistemic rationalist would want to be alerted to and detrain, if it's taking place subconsciously.

You're proposing the alternative that shminux could justify it further but is using it as a shorthand, and that I'm confusing that omission for an absence of recursive justification. The bare bones of shminux's comment would be "gwern is imperfect but hugely net positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect." If that's not deontological thinking, then it remains such a general heuristic argument, bare of any specific details of the case at hand, that it's a crappy comment to make to someone who feels that they've been bullied by a senior member and is probably worried the community will close ranks. It's not just a matter of 'What is the most charitable interpretation of shminux's comment', it's also e.g. 'What is the distribution over interpretations that would actually occur to someone who feels bullied and aggrieved?'

It looks like I'm making a fully general counterargument against arguments by calling anything short of a computer-verifiable argument deontological. It looks like you're making a fully general counterargument against accusations of deontological argument.

Your point (3) is an example of a recurring thing where I question a particular comment someone makes to a post, and then someone comes along and makes a bunch of arguments about why the original poster is in fact an idiot or defector or whatever and gets a bunch of upvotes by (intentional or otherwise) sleight of hand; they look like they're refuting my comment, but all they've done is justify general skepticism of the original poster, rather than a specific justification of the response that I questioned. It introduces a false dichotomy between belittling the original poster and 'opening the floodgates', and (intentionally or otherwise) makes me look like the naive idiot who wants to open the floodgates and the other person like the heroic, gritty defender of the forum. When all I was saying was that being mean in that specific way isn't the best thing from a consequentialist perspective. Specifically:

You can't treat everyone who complains about being bullied by the community seriously.

This is the false dichotomy. You are (intentionally or otherwise) completely misrepresenting what I'm saying. It looks to me like I got rounded off in your mind to 'naive person who thinks all claims of bullying deontologically have to be taken seriously', which is what annoyed you. You should be more careful when interpreting in future in such situations.

That's like auto-cooperating in a world full of potential defectors.

Or I'm not using a deontological or generalised heuristic, and I'm just making the specific claim that the exact response from this exact person in this exact case was not great. Apply your own skepticism of assumptions of deontology to me, if you will insist they be applied to shminux.

It creates an incentive to punish anyone you dislike by starting a thread about how mean they are to you

It's not obvious to me that this slippery slope is slippery enough to justify the specific response in this specific case.

and also has a chilling effect on conversation in general.

If I'm correct and shminux's reply was inappropriate, then that also has a chilling effect on those who have grievances. Additionally, I found shminux's reply and the amount of support it originally had very off-putting. I knew that I'd have to take a long time responding to it to try to point out what was wrong with it, and risk downvotes and obnoxious responses to do so. Then I found that some of the responses I did actually get (including yours) made me feel emotionally disgusted enough, and seemed so fundamentally crappy down several inferential layers, that it took me this long to respond and even begin to be able to roughly convey my position. I say this not as a definitive assertion that nobody should have challenged me, but to point out that you only mentioned the chilling effects on the accused without mentioning the effects on the accuser and other community members.

Despite the rudeness, Gwern's replies in the linked conversation were lengthy and tried to convey information and thoughts. I've seen plenty of examples of people afraid to talk because they might offend someone online, and I don't really want the threshold for being punished for rudeness to be that low on Lesswrong.

This seems very far away from my specific criticisms of shminux's comment.

Point (4) also does not connect to the specifics of shminux's comment.

Point (5) is defused by the obsevation that I was not defending ThisSpaceAvailable's post, but rather was criticising shminux's comment on the grounds that there are better responses than shminux's to the post. I find it extremely telling that you then state there are much better ways to make Less Wrong less rude, when you failed to understand that my comment was saying to shminux that there are much better ways of responding to a post like this than making a comment that pattern-matches extremely strongly to closing ranks around a senior community member. I.e. the form of your (5) is similar to the form of my comment, yet you missed what my comment was saying, and this seems like significant evidence to me that you were mindkilled by my comment.

I didn't say anything about banning.

Those aren't weird deontological rules

Asserting disagreement with a compound term engenders ambiguity. Are they not weird? Not deontological? Not rules? A combination?

It creates an incentive to punish anyone you dislike by starting a thread about how mean they are to you, and also has a chilling effect on conversation in general.

"Treating everyone who complaining about being bullied seriously" isn't the same as "Automatically taking the side of everyone who complains". It's bizarre to claim that you must oppose the general phenomenon of complaints, rather than addressing a problem with a specific complaint. My karma is now 42% positive for the last month. This one thread has lost me more karma than I've accrued over the entire last month. And you're saying that there's a chilling effect against gwern?

Despite the rudeness, Gwern's replies in the linked conversation were lengthy and tried to convey information and thoughts.

Really? In the first thread, gwern wrote that the threats were bluffs, and then said he had not said that and I was dishonest in thinking he did. In the other one, he spent several posts evading the question of how IQ is additive.

Regardless of whether this person feels bullied by Gwern, everyone can take a look at the threads involved and decide if it's an appropriate response.

And everyone can look at posts and decide for themselves whether downvoting was justified. And yet that didn't stop several people from making top level post complaining about mass downvoting. And really, what kind of response is "Everyone can decide whether the response was appropriate" to accusations of bullying?

I don't think calling someone out for something like this in a top level post (not to mention that's a pretty low quality post even for discussion) and impugning the entire community as irrational or whatever is at all proportional.

So, on the one hand, you say that everyone can see for themselves whether the behavior is appropriate, but on the other hand you take umbrage at my concluding from the lack of downvotes against gwern that the community as a whole is expressing a lack of concern regarding gwern's behavior?

If thisspaceavailable (or you) want Lesswrong as a WHOLE to be less rude, rather than making a post that (clearly in my mind) is just getting back at Gwern, there are a LOT better ways to do it.

What are they? And is there a way to ask what those are, that don't involve people calling me a whiner and massively downvoting me?

I liked the part with weird deontological rules.

You more-or-less said, "gwern is imperfect but net-positive. So deal with it. Not everyone can be perfect.". I think such a response, in reply to someone who feels bullied by a senior members and worries the community is/will close ranks, is not the best course of action, and in fact is better off not being made. Even assuming your comment was not a deontological imperative, but rather a shorthand for a heuristic argument, I am very uncertain as to what heuristic you are suggesting and why you think it's a good heuristic.

Even if you ignored all that and rewrote your original comment differently, that might be sufficient to make headway.

Does that make things clearer? If this line of inquiry also seems too unweildy to begin replying to, can you go up meta levels and suggest a way to proceed?

Different cultures have different notion of what's friendly behavior.

Yes. This is the point. If a there is a project to build a "Friendly" AI by a community that sees nothing wrong with gwern's behavior, then that is not a FAI that I want built.

You expect certain cultural customs to hold that you probably learned in the Social Justice warrior scene. Those customs don't hold in this community and that's why you behave in a way that get's you into this conflict where people vote down your posts a lot.

I feel that you are not listening to what I am saying. I think that I was quite clear in saying that gwern's behavior is contrary to what I consider to be entailed by the values that this community purports to have. A valid response to that is to claim that I have misunderstood what values this community purports to have. Another valid response is to say that gwern's behavior does not, in fact, violate those values. Saying that I am simply expecting people to follow a particular set of norms because those are the norms that have been inculcated in me from another community is not a valid response.

but part of being friendly usually means "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."

And apparently, part of doing as the Romans do is not starting threads asking what the Romans do. Because that's "passive aggressive".

Well, I should seriously consider this point of view, try to figure out where this other person is coming from, and assume that they have good reason for believing it, even if it's not true.

As far as the IQ debate goes, of course a lot of people have a good reason for being critical of IQ. IQ suggests that people are somehow unequal and many people consider that to be unfair. Gwern isn't oblivious of that fact. He's rather overly optimistic about the prospect of convincing people by pointing them to the research.

It is quite unclear to me how you think that is a response to what you quoted.

Now, as for the statement that you quoted, is it uncivil to point out someone else's incivility?

Yes. It raises the emotional tension of the discussion in a way that not beneficial.

You have said that "sometimes" it's beneficial to call someone a liar. Yet you say that calling someone's behavior uncivil is not beneficial. And since you're saying that my behavior is uncivil, it follows that your behavior is also uncivil.

I don't see why it is not beneficial to mention when I am taking offense at something that someone said, and giving them an opportunity to correct it.

What is wrong with saying "If you can't act like a rationalist, then I'm going to conclude you're not a rationalist"?

A lot. To take the most obvious thing: You presume that gwern cares about whether you consider him to be a rationalist.

That is not an unreasonable inference, but I did not say that. Rather, I explained why I felt that gwern was not being rational, and provided an opportunity for gwern, if he so chose, to address that. Again, I note that this is an area where it is difficult to communicate an idea without unwanted implicatures. If I say "If you want me to respect you as a rationalist", people will take that as me arrogantly expecting that to be important to them. But that's not what I'm saying. I'm simply saying that I am finding a conclusion to be warranted from their words, and I am giving them an opportunity to correct that if they so choose. Whether it is important enough for them to correct it is completely up to them.

In the Social Justice community people care about whether other people see them as a "real feminist". We don't have something similar on LW.

Sure we do. The karma system exists purely to communicate how other posters feel about you.

I think that, generally speaking, it's rude to downvote someone without them knowing why you're downvoting them, and giving them an opportunity to correct it. I downvoted gwern, and I told him why. That's not "presuming" that gwern cares that I am downvoting him. If gwern doesn't care about my downvotes, then he can ignore my post. It's a bit odd that you're twisting my giving gwern an explanation of my downvotes into some sort of presumptive act. If my exlpaining the downvotes is presumptive, then surely the downvotes themselves are presumptive. So, are you saying that every time someone downvotes a post, they are presuming that the other person cares about their opinion?

I don't care how other people on LW mentally label me. I care whether or not other people interact with me in a way that provides utility to me

:sigh:

This getting rather tiresome.

If you care about how people interact with you, how can you possibly not care how people label you? Gwern's behavior was increasing my inclination to interact with him in a way that would likely provide less utility. I explained to gwern what this behavior was, and why it was having that effect. And you're objecting to that based on how I phrased it. Suppose, instead of saying ""If you can't have a calm, rational, and civil conversation about this, then I can only conclude that it you are not a rationalist.", I had said ""If you can't have a calm, rational, and civil conversation about this, then I will modify my behavior towards you in a manner likely to result in less utility towards you". Would that have avoided your opprobrium?

We don't use labels in a way to press obligations on other people and expect the people to fulfill the obligations to be worthy of the label.

That's not what I was was doing.

To gwern your posts suggested that you lack the mediocre amount of intelligence necessary to see A -> B or you do have the intelligence and pretend to not see A -> B to mess with him. That means the in his interpretation of the situation the two options are that you are either a idiot for failing to have the amount of intelligence to see A -> B or a troll for pretending to fail to see it.

To what does "A->B" refer to? Given that what I was confused about was that gwern said that the threat was a bluff, and then said that he had not said that, a more appropriate summary would be "A -> ~A". Gwern claimed that he thought his post was clear. Assuming that he wasn't lying, there are at least THREE explanations for why I was claiming to not understand it. One is that I am an idiot. Another is I was lying. And the third is ... it actually was not clear. The fact that gwern didn't even CONSIDER that possibility shows him to be an arrogant asshole. As I said, I got a third party to confirm that it was confusing. I was willing to consider the possibility that I was at fault. But gwern was not.

Is there anyone who thinks the post makes sense? And if so, are they willing to explain it?

He didn't call you a idiot or troll to make you feel bad but because those are the terms that accurately describe the situation he perceived to exist.

And what is the point of describing your hypotheses, if you have already foreclosed any possibility of updating away from it? When I described my belief that gwern was being anti-rational, I was doing so to provide him an opportunity to falsify the hypothesis.

It's more likely inferential distance given a different cultural background.

Like, what? Acquiring an idiolect that agrees with the acrolect on the meaning of the word "which"? That's the only hypothesis I can come up with.

Whenever you run a test and that test produces a number that number is a metric for what the test measures. That's a core basis on talking about measurements. Debating that fact is like debating whether 1+1=2.

But I never debated that.

I find the treatment of the term "entitled" to be rather uncharitable as to addressing my intention.

I can imagine someone acting nicely out of purely selfish motives, but I don't think that that is most people's reason. I think most people, even at Less Wrong, have some sense of moral obligation to act civilly. The idea that anyone who is not insulting me is so refraining purely for personal benefit is rather horrific to me. And if one is coming from a pure utilitarian point of view, what useful purpose does it serve to accuse me of dishonesty?

The default is a neutral position, no respect but no disrespect either.

You're quibbling between "disrespectful" and "lack of respect".

If you look at the top right corner of your browser window, there is probably a little X there. Just click it.

The issue at hand is whether Less Wrong aspires to be anything more than a clique that panders to the in-group and provides no recourse to those who feel marginalized, other than leaving. I see you vote "no".