Meta-discussion from "Circling as Cousin to Rationality"

Yes, I disagree with that as stated, although I would agree with a slightly softened version that replaced "the author should be interpreted as ignorant" with "the post should be regarded as less trustworthy".

I want to again draw your attention to this comment of mine [LW(p) · GW(p)]. You are, it seems to me, interpreting the given quote much too narrowly (which was reasonable when I had just posted it, but is not reasonable now that I’ve clarified).

And curious how Said would have felt about writing it, or something like it.

I have no idea why your proposed alternative version of my comment would be “less social-attack-y”. Of course, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why my actual comment would be “social-attack-y” in the first place, unless we assume something extremely unflattering about Vaniver (which I was not assuming) (but note that even in that scenario, your proposed edit seems to me to change nothing).

What’s more, I suspect that no possible version of my comment would change anything about this “perceived social attack” business.

In this, as in so many things, we can look for guidance to esteemed philosopher John Gabriel, who puts the matter concisely in this Penny Arcade strip:

Gabe: If all I could say was “nice,” I would mean it ironically.

Were someone else to write exactly the words I wrote in my original comment, they would not be perceived as a social attack; whereas if I write those words—or the words you suggest, or any other words whatsoever, so long as they contained the same semantic content at their core^[1]—they will be perceived as a social attack. After all, I can say something different, but I cannot mean something different.

The fact is, either you think that asking what an author means by a word, or asking for examples of some phenomenon, is a social attack, or you don’t. If I ask a question along such lines, no reassurances, no disclaimers, will serve to signal anything but “I am complying with the necessary formalities in order to ask what I wish to ask”. If you think my question is a social attack without the disclaimers, then their addition will change nothing. It is the question, after all, that constitutes the social attack, if anything does—not the form, in other words, but the content.

Best to minimize such baroque signaling. There is a certain baseline of courtesy that ought to be observed, but it is mostly negative—no name-calling, no irrelevant personal attacks, etc. Almost anything beyond that only adds noise. Better to be clear and concise.

I do not think that anyone can argue that my comments violate any sensible standards of basic politeness or courtesy; beyond that, let the content stand on its own. If it’s viewed as a social attack, then that says quite a bit more about those who view it thus, than it does about my intentions (which, as any reasonable person can see [LW(p) · GW(p)], are free of any personal hostility). Trying to disguise the matter with elaborate disclaimers is pointless.

The author could just choose to ignore questions they haven’t the time to answer. It’s not the job of the questioner to self-censor. It is especially not their job to turn a simple question into an essay on truth in order to satisfy some moderator. That wastes everyone’s time by having us read repetitive fluff instead of a single, sharp question.

If this were moderator policy, then I can’t see LW being of value and I know I’d leave. My time is not worth that BS.

I mean, I think Inadequate Equilibria is on-par with all of Eliezer’s other writing (I actually think in terms of insight-per-page it is much denser than the average section of the sequence)

I do not concur with your evaluation. (But there is not much point in discussing this further, so we can leave it at that.)

Yes, we can judge [Eliezer’s] reasons, but independently of his reasons, his absence is obviously a major loss for the site.

Is it?

Here’s the thing: the loss of Eliezer, the author of the ~2007–2011 era Less Wrong posts (and comments) is, indeed, a major one. But it’s futile to bemoan that loss, as it was inflicted only by time. The loss we must examine instead is the counterfactual loss. Eliezer could be writing on Less Wrong right now (and for the last decade or so), but is not, and has not been; is that a major loss?

Suppose (as seems to be the implication of your comments) that Eliezer would write for Less Wrong if, and only if, the environment (both technical and social) were comparable to that which now exists on Facebook (his current platform of choice). It seems reasonable to conclude that Eliezer’s writings, therefore, would also be more or less the things he now is (and has been) writing on Facebook; the only difference would be that those very same writings would be hosted here—and the same discussion, too, would take place here—instead of on Facebook.

That we do not have these things—is that a great loss?

As I have alluded to earlier, I think the answer is “no”. In fact, I think that such writings, and (especially! emphatically!) the sorts of discussions that I have seen taking place in the comments on Eliezer’s Facebook posts, would substantially lower the average quality of Less Wrong.

There is some value to (counterfactually) having Eliezer’s stuff here, instead of on Facebook: accessibility, searchability, linkability, archiving, etc.—all the things I’ve noted, in the past. But would it be worth the corruption, the dismantling, of Less Wrong’s epistemic standards? I think not.

So, going back, is there anyone else who you would trust to settle the issue of norms on this reasonably decisively? How about Vaniver, or lukeprog, or Kaj Sotala, or Anna Salamon, or Jacobian, or Zvi, Raymond, or So8res? I am happy to set up some kind of board, or court here that helps us settle this issue, but I think it being unresolved is causing massive ongoing costs for the site.

There is no need to go that far (though of course I’ll participate if you feel it’s necessary). But I am happy to take your word for the views of any of these people; I certainly don’t disbelieve you when you say that such-and-such Less Wrong regular (or historical regular) has expressed to you such-and-such a view.

But what is the value in that? If, let us say, Zvi (to pick an author whose posts I’ve certainly found to have a lot of value, in the past) says “I don’t comment on Less Wrong because I don’t like responding to comments that challenge me to justify my claims, or provide examples, or explain my terms”, should I take this to mean that such comments are detrimental—or should I instead downgrade my assessment of Zvi’s posts, ideas, etc.? “One man’s modus ponens…”, after all…

You write as if an author’s posts simply have value, because of who the author is, on the basis of past performance, and regardless of any actual qualities of the actual (new) posts! But surely this is an absurd view? I have written things in the past, that are useful and good; and yet suppose that I were invited to write for a venue where my ideas would never be challenged, where my writing were not subjected to scrutiny, where no interested and intelligent readers would ask probing questions… shouldn’t I expect my writing (and my ideas!) to degrade? Shouldn’t I expect the proportion of dross and nonsense in my output to increase? Why should I expect to maintain whatever previous level of quality (modest as it may have already been) my writing had possessed? (Think of all the popular authors who, having “made it” in the literary world, gained the proverbial “immunity from editors”, and proceeded to write, and to publish, piles of of mediocre-at-best scribblings…)

In any case, it’s a moot point… you’ve asked me to abstain from commenting on posts like this, and in ways like this, and so I will. No further action is necessary.

Said has in the past many times expressed an interest in following the rules of different spaces, even if he disagrees with them, out of a general consideration that it’s good for spaces to establish their own rules and have their own local norms. At least that’s the sense I’ve gotten from him in the discussions we’ve had about Archipelago.

Yes, I endorse this (and your second paragraph).

Re: the third paragraph—see my other comment.

I have this intuitive notion that:

I do think the relevant question is whether your comments are being perceived as demanding in a similar way. From what I can tell, the answer is yes, in a somewhat lesser magnitude, but still a quite high level, enough for many people to independently complain to me about your comments, and express explicit frustration towards me, and tell me that your comments are one of the major reasons they are not contributing to LessWrong.

I agree that you are not as bizarrely demanding as curi was, but you do usually demand quite a lot.

When people talk about "demanding" in this sense what they're actually doing is a very low level reasoning mistake EY talks about in his post on Security Mindset:

AMBER: That sounds a little extreme.

CORAL: History shows that reality has not cared what you consider “extreme” in this regard, and that is why your Wi-Fi-enabled lightbulb is part of a Russian botnet.

AMBER: Look, I understand that you want to get all the fiddly tiny bits of the system exactly right. I like tidy neat things too. But let’s be reasonable; we can’t always get everything we want in life.

CORAL: You think you’re negotiating with me, but you’re really negotiating with Murphy’s Law. I’m afraid that Mr. Murphy has historically been quite unreasonable in his demands, and rather unforgiving of those who refuse to meet them. I’m not advocating a policy to you, just telling you what happens if you don’t follow that policy. Maybe you think it’s not particularly bad if your lightbulb is doing denial-of-service attacks on a mattress store in Estonia. But if you do want a system to be secure, you need to do certain things, and that part is more of a law of nature than a negotiable demand.

Where, there is a certain level of detail and effort that simply has to go into describing concepts if you want to do so clearly and reliably. There are inviolable, non-negotiable laws of communication. We may not be able to precisely define them but that doesn't mean they don't exist. We certainly know some of their theoretical aspects thanks to scholars like Shannon.

I think a lot of what Said does is insist that people put in that effort, that The Law be followed so to speak. Unfortunately there is no intrinsic punishment for not following the law besides being misunderstood (which isn't really so costly to the speaker, and hard for them to detect in a blog format). That means they commit a map/territory error analogous to the Rust programmer who insists Rust makes things much harder than C does. There's probably some truth to this, but a lot of the thing is just that Rust forces the programmer to write code at the level of difficulty it would have if C didn't let you get away with things being broken.

I think I can take a stab at this; timing myself out of curiosity.

@Said: let me draw an analogy to a fictional online interaction (without implying that comment that started all of this is analogous in *all* relevant ways to the fictional one):

Author Andy: "...a destructive mode of communication."

Commenter Cody: "What do you mean by destructive in that context?"

If Andy had written something like "a tangerine mode of communication," it would be understandable if Cody (and most other readers) had *literally* no referents for "tangerine" which would cause that sentence to parse at all. If Andy had instead written something like "...a mode of communication harms the ability of conversational participants to reach agreement on the definition of terms [x, y, and z]," and Cody asked what "harms" meant in that context, as an outsider, it would be very difficult to understand where the communication had broken down, because "harms" is a widely-used term with referents that map relatively cleanly to the concepts at play, even if it is not the most common use for the term. "Destructive" is a more interesting case, because it is rarely used as a modifier to "mode of communication", but if Cody were to claim that there was no "plausible interpretation" or "standard usage" he could assume, it would be difficult to understand how to help him construct the mental machinery to map the dictionary definition (as, for example, a "standard usage") of "destructive" as an adjective to another concept. "Destructive" has a widely-known and well-accepted definition, and while Cody is not claiming that he does not know that definition (or any others), he is claiming that *none* of the definitions he knows produce coherent output when used to modify "mode of communication".

This is what this looks like, from the outside. You are claiming that you have no referents for "authentic" which produce a coherent-in-context (note: no claim about whether it is justified) interpretation for the given sentence(s). Authentic has a dictionary definition of "genuine"; if we replace "authenticity" with "being genuine" in

Similarly, why should “that which can be destroyed by authenticity” be destroyed? Because authenticity is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.”

...it seems to be a coherent claim (though, again, no claim on whether it is sufficiently justified). If you have the same problem with "genuine", then perform another substitution: "truthful self-representation" (that substitution tied together the external context with the modifier, which is maybe a sign that it's a clearer way of communicating the mapping? Need to think about that...). It is difficult to understand what kind of answer you are looking for when you ask "what is the standard usage of authenticity", because this is a query that is trivially resolved by a dictionary lookup/google search. If the answer that procedure provides is insufficient to provide a mapping to the broader context the term is used in, then repeating it back to you won't help; it's clear that your confusion is elsewhere (this is gesturing the direction of a definition for "shape of confusion"). If you don't see any way in which any plausible definition/referent for "authentic", set in that context, allows you generate expectations from the resulting sentence(s) (for example, being able to come up with hypothetical situations which would *not* be accurately described as such), then there's either incompatible mental machinery, or a more subtle misunderstanding. I don't think that's the case, though. I believe you know (or could look up) the definition of "authentic", and I believe that if you ran the iterated procedure of substituting synonyms (or sufficiently close referents in concept-space, accounting for the surrounding context), you would quickly find an interpolation that was sufficiently coherent. It is possible that you ran this procedure and decided that the predictions that could be generated by the result were very "fuzzy" (the distribution of possible expectations would be extremely wide; you would have trouble cleaving reality at a sensible set of joints). If so, this is the point where I would describe to the author of the original post what my interpretation of the claim was, with some hint as to what shape the distribution of generated expectations my interpretation would imply, so that the author could help me narrow the boundaries of that distribution (or point me to another spot on the map entirely, if my interpretation was completely wrong rather than insufficiently well-specified).

...almost an hour, and I don't think I did a great job, but maybe this crosses some inferential distance.