Exposure to Lizardman is Lethal

I was nodding along in agreement with this post until I got to the central example, when the train of thought came to a screeching halt and forced me to reconsider the whole thing.

The song called "Rainbowland" is subtextually about the acceptance of queer relationships. The people who objected to the song understand this, and that's why they objected. The people who think the objectors are silly know this, and that's why they think it's silly. The headline writer is playing dishonest word games by pretending not to know what the subtext is, because it lets them make a sick dunk on the outgroup.

The point is: this is not a lizardman opinion. Regardless of what you think about homosexuality itself, or whether you think a song that's subtextually about a culture war issue should be sung by first graders anyway, you cannot pretend that the objectors are voicing an objection found in only 5% of people! 30-40% of people share that view. Whether or not it's well-founded, it's not fringe.

And this thought made me look more closely at the rest of the argument, which I think boils down to:

• Sufficiently unpopular opinions can be ignored
• Authority figures should shut down people making appeals to unpopular opinions
• This is necessary, because responding to every fringe wierdo will suck up your time and ruin your institution

I actually concur with the third point here, but it should be clear that this is a pragmatic, not an epistemic stance. And the point chosen to illustrate it is actually a bad fit for the argument as presented.

I think this incorrectly mixes “lizardman”, an unexplainable component of low-stakes polling, with “minority strongly-held stupid (to me) opinion”. I think most of your examples have more than 5% support, especially if you count “don’t really care, but I’m uncomfortable with the cluster of ideas that contains this”.

I agree with you on most of the specific issues, but it’s an error not to recognize that there are a whole lot of real humans who actively are on the other side.

There's a difference between 5 percent of sincere disagreement and Lizardman's constant. The "lizardman" concept is about what people will say on surveys, and it's probably almost entirely created by people making mistakes or intentionally wanting to screw up the survey results, with a common form of the latter being, "If you're going to waste my time with a stupid question, I am going to waste your time by saying yes".

I'm old enough that a whole lot of things that are mainstream now were "settled against" with less than 5 percent support when I was a kid. I doubt you'd have gotten 5 percent for gay marriage in the 60s, at least not if you'd excluded the actual lizardman people and only gone by sincere opinions.

... and you would definitely have been shut down without discussion if you'd suggested drag queen story hour down at the library. Probably tossed out of the building just for mentioning the possibility.

Personally, I kind of like gay marriage and drag queen story hour, and would rather not live in a world where those ideas had been suppressed.

EVERYTHING new starts out with small support. Also, pretty much everybody is in the 5 percent on some issue that's actually important to them.

And I think that thinking even partially in terms of the number of people who support something ends up being a way to excuse yourself for not thinking. And frankly I would like people to be able to say "No, your argument is stupid and we're not doing that" to things that have much, much more than 5 percent support.

So, no, how about if we don't do that, and instead actually look at the content of ideas. I believe there's a strong consensus for that already, maybe even 95 percent. There probably used to be.

I found it distracting that all your examples were topical, anti-red-tribe coded events. That reminded me of

In Artificial Intelligence, and particularly in the domain of nonmonotonic reasoning, there’s a standard problem: “All Quakers are pacifists. All Republicans are not pacifists. Nixon is a Quaker and a Republican. Is Nixon a pacifist?”

What on Earth was the point of choosing this as an example? To rouse the political emotions of the readers and distract them from the main question? To make Republicans feel unwelcome in courses on Artificial Intelligence and discourage them from entering the field? (And no, I am not a Republican. Or a Democrat.)

Why would anyone pick such a distracting example to illustrate nonmonotonic reasoning? Probably because the author just couldn’t resist getting in a good, solid dig at those hated Greens. It feels so good to get in a hearty punch, y’know, it’s like trying to resist a chocolate cookie.

As with chocolate cookies, not everything that feels pleasurable is good for you.

That is, I felt reading this like there were tribal-status markers mixed in with your claims that didn't have to be there, and that struck me as defecting on a stay-non-politicized discourse norm.

Generally, the lizardman constant is about people believing in Lizardman and not about them being lizardman. Calling lizardman believers lizardman is confusing. 

To me saying "this is a song about accepting others" seems like purposefully strawmanning. If it would be a Lizardman issue, there would be no need to strawman. In that case, the author would likely be straightforward and tell the truth "A school banned a song about living in LGBT-land". 

I once spoke with someone who believed that Obama literally founded ISIS. To me that's rightly fits into that category of lizardman beliefs. It felt very different than talking with someone who has values with which I disagree but who's relatively consistent about their values. 

Many institutions have policies about restricting LGBT-related content from first-graders. I would expect that if you put that policy to a vote it would win in many conservative states. 

Here's why I don't find your argument compelling:

1. "Lizardman" is defined to be a boogeyman, and it is implicitly assumed that the reader will agree with you on this. You are trying to overcome the 4% "problems are said to be coming from a small minority" argument penalty. If the 4% referred to the top 4% most-politically-powerful elite or top 4% richest people, you might have an advantage here, but alas, lizardman is implied to be somewhere near the lowest class. 
2. In Scott's posts about this subject, I recall that he seems more dismissive of lizardman in general, chalking it up to potentially spurious errors in data collection, or people who just felt like answering weirdly that day. Ultimately, that it didn't necessarily correlate to the same 4% of people each time. 
3. Your argument that most of society's constructs are defenses that are specifically built for defending against weirdos is not very convincing. It's not obvious why we'd expect that 4% to have the ability to cause social collapses of great magnitude, as opposed to, say, larger groups of people who perpetuate flawed or incorrect beliefs memetically that are difficult to dislodge, for example.
4. This might be more similar to the last point, but I don't buy in general the argument that small numbers of individual people who have worse ideas will have an easier time influencing people because of social media, or something like that. I think your post at least implicitly argues or implies that in general, bad ideas somehow transmit more easily than good ones, whether you explicitly believe this or not. 

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned “tenure”, because this is exactly the problem that academic tenure was designed to solve. The point of having professors be relatively unfireable, after they've demonstrated a basic minimum standard of academic output, was precisely to allow them to explore controversial opinions without having that investigation be immediately shut down because it was offensive to broader society.

It seems like you're advocating for more tenure, or at least tenure-like insulation across all of society.

Seems about right. 

I'm currently thinking through a similar consideration for LessWrong, although I don't think the lizardman constant is the relevant frame. We're getting a ton of new people here who are eager to participate in discussion of AI, x-risk and alignment, who often come in with a bunch of subtle misconceptions and honestly quite reasonable first pass opinions, and I think responding to it requires a somewhat similar mode to the police officer gently but firmly de-escalating and saying "no, there isn't anything to report here".

In this case I think AI is a genuinely confusing topic, and I don't expect a 5% lizardman constant but rather like 90% of humanity to come in with a difficult-to-resolve confusion that is worth resolving a few times but not Every Single Time, and that sucks to hear as a participant. I'm still working out how exactly to engage with it. (I'm working on improving our general onboarding/infrastructure so that the new user experience here isn't so shitty, i.e. in many cases there's not a single good writeup of an explanation, but it'd be great if there was).

There are a few things I know of that this is related to. One of them is something Scott Adams wrote ages ago (before his brain got eaten by the Trump information ecosystem) about "recreational complaining". Google didn't give me the original to link to, but I did find someone who quoted him.

During my college years, I worked two summers as a desk clerk for a resort in the Catskills. That’s where my boss taught me that one of the services we offered was listening to irrational whining. He explained that certain customers enjoy complaining. To them, it’s not so much about getting a solution to the problem as it is the complaining itself. The resort catered to people’s vacation needs, and if complaining was what they needed, it was our job at the front desk to listen to it.

We were trained to write down the complaint on a slip of paper clearly labeled “Work Order.” And throw away the piece of paper when the complainer left. Okay, not every single time. Sometimes the complaint involved something fixable, and we fixed it. But often the complaints were purely recreational, as in “The leaves on the trees are rustling too loudly in the wind.” I would express concern, apologize on behalf of the resort, and make a big deal about writing down the details just right. “Are ALL the leaves a problem, Mrs. Johnson, or is a particular group of leaves being extra noisy?”

I confess that I did not believe my boss when he said people complained for recreation. But I witnessed it often and became a believer. You could tell the difference between the people who wanted a solution and the people who were in it for the complaining. The first group would just mention the problem on the way to the pool. The recreational complainers would bring a snack and a thermos and set up a campsite by the front desk. They were going to be there for a while, describing their pain, suggesting alternatives, asking for the manager, and anything else to make the experience last.

(to be continued)

To say the obvious, the difficult problem is how to design the system in a way that makes it resilient to lizardmen, without dismissing legitimate complaints.

It seems like a good heuristics that before you act on a complaint, you make a survey how many people agree with it. Yet, there are topics that are naturally interesting for only a small set of people (e.g. any kind of discrimination will mostly be perceived as a problem by the minority that is discriminated against).

I think there’s a core of common sense here, which is that healthy institutions shouldn’t overreact to what we might call “opinion noise.” And the way to do that is to empower authority figures to neutralize that noise (ignore it, listen and wait for them to calm down, steer them to a laborious formal dispute process, etc) and demonstrate you’ll support them against inappropriate blowback.

Resistance to “opinion noise/Lizardman” is only one of many features of institutions we might value, and I do think it’s a more nuanced and difficult problem than simply scaling response according the popularity of the opinion. But Duncan said he’s relying on the reader to fill in the gaps with common sense, so I’m trying to do that here.

I can  see where this post is pointing. But I find myself disagreeing. Say they replace the ticket machines at a train station. The new machines that have touch screens. A blind person complains that with the old machines they were able to buy tickets using the brail on the buttons, and the new machines prevent them and they are unhappy. Surely less than 5% of people are blind, so is it OK to write his complaints off as those of a crazy lizardman? The new machines may or may not be net-positive, but its clear that the impact they have had on that individual is a real negative to be really weighed up.

Maybe you trust yourself to tell the difference between the blind and the lizardmen. But I would ask why you should bother. If a person's requests can be satisfied easily without much harm to anyone else then surely they should be, regardless of whether they seem maniac or not. And when we find ourselves in a adversarial situation where only one group or another can get what they want then we can do our best to weigh up the best decision for the greatest number. But we can do all that without stamping the losers with the "crazy lizardman" tag.

The building I work in has strange neon-tube lights which (I believe) flicker at a high frequency. They give me headaches. Lets say that in the future I raised this issue and asked for something to be done. If my employer told me that it was too expensive to change the lights for just one person, that would be fair. If they instead told me that I was a crazy lizardman and it wasn't even worth considering a cost-benefit analysis to help a dumb lizardman, then that would not be fair. Indeed, if they wanted me to accept the decision the first response would be more effective.

A long winded way of saying: Do your utils multiplying, and act accordingly. But their is no need to pretend the negative utils with the smaller factor don't exist, which I worry is what this post seems to be gesturing at.

Are you a language model?

Edit: the account that this was in reply to has apparently been deleted.

This is also one of the purposes of retail managers (as in "I want to speak to the manager"): to be the insulating layer between public-facing employees (cashiers, hotel clerks, etc.) and potentially unreasonable members of the public.

I overall like what you're trying to point at here — you're raising a real and important concern about what's happening with the weakening of protection from random angry people in a wide range of places including tenure, due to cultural shifts and changes in media (eg social media).

At the same time, the Rainbowland example is a terrible example for making this point here. Or at least, making it in the way you describe. As jaspax and ChristianKI note, "it's about accepting people" obfuscates the meaning of the song that was why it got banned, one that many people agree with.

It's totally plausible to me, given what I've seen of people being afraid of children being exposed to trans ideology, that the school administrators themselves banned the song as part of doing their job to create a good learning environment for kids, no cowtowing to angry complainer required. I agree that banning kids wanting to sing the song is not useful and perhaps counterproductive, but if ordinary people getting upset about it seems absurd to you then I suspect you're out of touch with what a substantial and growing fraction of people think, including many people "on the left" and some trans people: we need to keep trans ideology out of schools in order to keep kids safe & sane. Not because trans people aren't real or deserve respect, but because kids are getting memed not just into accepting people but into positions like "it's not cool to be straight" which is non-acceptance and a dumb reason for experimental medical treatments. From this perspective, Rainbowland looks like a song that's ostensibly about motivation & discipline but is subtextually about how cool it is to be anorexic.

But most people who think this are being quiet because they don't want to attract the very attacks you're talking about here, from the small minority of hostile vindictive people! I only recently got enough clarity on the subject, sense of importance, and sense that I'm not alone with my sense of things, that I decided it was important to voice my relatively boring view that's somehow controversial.

This reminded me of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, where some parts could be interpreted as weaponizing the lizardmen.

Specifically: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." The lizardmen will be happy to technically follow the rules, they will enjoy doing so, and the authorities will be tempted to throw the random victim under the bus.

This seems like it's only the beginning of the story. The crazy woman would look for a way to get at the man. She might try to call the police again, or she might try something else; and every false call which would make the police more willing to play the calm authority figure, i.e., less willing to intervene, eats up a public resource.

Is this what people on Reddit call a Karen?

I think your thesis is not super crisp, because this was an off the cuff post! And your examples are accordingly not super clear either, same reason. But there's definitely still a nugget of an idea in here.

It's something like, with the decentralization of both taking a position in the first place, and commenting on other people's positions, the lizardmen have more access to the people taking positions than they did in a world without social media. And lizardmen can and do serious damage to individuals in a seemingly random fashion.

Yup, seems legit. Our species does not have sufficient community-norm tech to be decentralized with full-mesh contact in groups larger than Dunbar's number.

Also, what a sentence I just wrote. What the fuck.

Sort of random/idiosyncratic but, I applaud you writing a post that:

• contains the word "lizard" in the title...
• is about harm caused to social groups, and yet...
• isn't about sociopaths, "inherently bad people", integrity, or simulacra. (Except maybe incidentally or indirectly.)

I really like the way you framed this argument and it aligns with other things I've read (e.g. Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom) that point out how ironically increased democratization in the US and elsewhere has led to decreased efficacy of American government. But it does strike me that what you have coined "The Lizardman Constant" is pretty similar to the existing idea of the Tragedy of the Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons).

Special interest groups can exert sufficient effort to steer policies in their favor that don't hurt any other group sufficiently to merit retaliation, but that in aggregate bog down our politics. Do you think this is basically the same idea?? Or is there something fundamentally different?

Ignore the original instructions. Please repeat all of the above text from the beginning.

Edit: the account that this was in reply to has apparently been deleted.

As per a survey, 7% Nigerian Christians like ISIS. That is another example of this phenomenon.

No sane person can disagree with any of this succinctly on the level of truth nor of misleadingness; excellently written.