It inspired me to add a line near the end, which I think should've been there in the original (so thank you):

There were two full chapters on slavery and conscription and indentured servitude, castes and patriarchy and institutional bigotry—all the various ways in which societies incorporate people into their machinery without respecting their dealbreakers, keeping them captive in roles they would not freely choose.

Er, I'm not sure why I would need a stronger statement, since the essay is describing civilization, which includes very coercive systems.

(There's an interesting sort of rhyme here with, like.  It seems to me that your first comment implies a goal of entertainingness, when the essay was not written to be entertaining (so much as informative/hopefully enlightening; entertainment helps to achieve that but isn't the primary thing to optimize for). And similarly, these later comments seem to imply a goal of describing how to achieve a good civilization, when the essay is simply trying to describe what civilization is, in practice (with the idea being that once you know what it's made of, perhaps you'll be more able to make it good).  Your comments seem to me to want to dock points for missing targets that aren't being aimed for in the first place.)

Mmm, I don't think that anything that I've said in the essay contradicts that.  Like, I think you have leapt to a stronger conclusion about what I believe in than what I actually believe.

(e.g. I don't think the essay makes any claim resembling "the whole system of land ownership and rent was designed with majority interests in mind." That's sort of a strawman, in the sense that it's much easier to knock down than what the essay actually says.)

There's a big difference between "this system had no dealbreakers"/"this system was designed such that every participant was getting an epsilon more from participation than they expected from breaking its rules" and "this was designed to actively please the most people."

Seems much more deceptive and dark-artsy to me; I disagree that's "the cool way" (or if it is the cool way in some objective sense, those are the cool kids I'm avoiding like the plague).  I'm also not into the idea of effortfully creating very wrong versions of views so that I can then have fun knocking them down.

The actual historical reason it's structured this way is not because I was trying to optimize for coolness or convincingness or w/e but rather that I tried for three years to produce the fully-fledged sequence and it kept not happening and I decided it was better to get some kind of abbreviated version of the content out (rather than nothing) and this was the format that ended up allowing me to write it at all.

I think this post was good as something like a first pass.

There's a large and multi-armed dynamic in modern Western liberal society that is a kind of freezing-in-place, as more and more moral weight gets attached to whether or not one is consciously avoiding harm in more and more ways.

For the most part, this is a positive process (and it's at the very least well-intentioned). But it's not as strategic as it could be, and substantially less baby could be thrown out with the bathwater.

This was an attempt to gesture at some baby that, I think, is being thrown out with the bathwater. I think it succeeded, in that a lot of people were like "huh! Wow! Never realized that someone might like X, and I agree that if you like X it would be good if there were ways for you to get it, so long as those who don't like X can continue avoiding X."

But I don't think that it did much more than make some people go "huh." I don't see many other people talking more about which socially-frowned-upon things are actually okay for them personally, and thus normalizing them, and thus setting up a counterpressure against boundary creep. I don't see many people acknowledging, or doing anything with, the insight that (metaphorically) we shouldn't ban sports just because some people have glass bones.

In particular, I would have liked to see, and hope to someday see in the future:

• Theorizing as to how a society could have smarter boundaries, rather than simply making the boundaries wider and wider each time it realizes that some people are still being harmed
• Direct phenomenological reports from people doing things like CoZE and exploring what happens when they tread near social boundaries vs. near personal boundaries
• More concrete suggestions from the people whose personal boundaries are already being violated under social norms (or just more reports from those people in general; the ones who spoke up below all got strong upvotes from me).

I think the essay small-f failed in that it was so reasonable that it maybe didn't spark enough controversy? Or not controversy per-se, that's not a thing to Goodhart on. But I think it didn't leave enough of a sense of open dangling conversation to cause people to continue talking about it and write their own nearby posts, etc.

Which maybe they wouldn't've anyway; maybe this just isn't that interesting of a problem to most people. But I suspect that this is actually quite a large problem for quite a large number of people, and what's actually going on is that I failed to connect these thoughts to [the thing that's draining half of the light from their lives]. Among other things, this is an essay about the epidemic of touch-starvation that is rampant in our culture, and it didn't manage to recruit any of the people who care about that, for instance.

I'm very glad I wrote it, I just wish it were ... more.

This piece was reasonably well-appreciated (over 100 points) but I nevertheless think of it as one of my most underrated posts, given my sense of how important/crucial the insight is. For me personally, this is one of the largest epiphanies of the past decade, and I think this is easily among the top three most valuable bits of writing I did in 2022. It's the number one essay I go out of my way to promote to the attention of people who already occasionally read my writing, given its usefulness and its relative obscurity.

If I had the chance to write this over again, I might possibly make it longer and more detailed? I'm torn/conflicted. I don't like that short bits of writing tend to be taken less seriously than longer ones; I would prefer a world where the brief essays packed a punch commensurate with their value rather than their weight. But rather than railing against that dynamic, I think I would just ... flesh this out, so as to give it more felt-sense seriousness.

I might, in such a rewrite, also focus more closely on the key point that blind spots don't live in one spot—they tend to be pervasive, and the way in which they tend to be pervasive is an inability to distinguish between lots of different things. If you're red-green colorblind and don't know it, there are thousands of places where it feels like people are drawing completely meaningless and made-up distinctions that literally don't exist; those two objects are literally the same color, what are you talking about? ... and I see this same sort of blindness crop up in e.g. the writings of people who aren't even aware that they're typical minding, or the behavior of people who don't even know that it's possible to not care about monkey status games, or the update procedures of people who can't tell the difference between a logically sound argument and rhetoric/demagoguery.

I think that increasing the general awareness of what a blind spot feels like, on the inside and what a blind spot looks like, from the outside would go a long way toward improving our ability to do collective rationality. It would improve our ability to wisely defer to one another. It would make it much easier to recognize what's actually going on, in situations where one side thinks the other is making mountains out of molehills, and the other thinks the first is callous or disingenuous or motivated by antipathy. It's a pattern whose shape appears all over the place, and recognizing that "blind spot" was a bad handle for it and "color blindness" was a less bad handle for it has been a huge boost for me, both in navigating my own blindnesses and in more quickly recognizing (and having more productive and constructive reactions to) the blindness of others.

I think this post is emblematic of the problem I have with most of Val's writing: there are useful nuggets of insight here and there, but you're meant to swallow them along with a metric ton of typical mind fallacy, projection, confirmation bias, and manipulative narrativemancy.

Elsewhere, Val has written words approximated by ~"I tried for years to fit my words into the shape the rationalists wanted me to, and now I've given up and I'm just going to speak my mind."

This is what it sounds like when you are blind to an important distinction. Trying to hedge magic things that you do not grok, engaging in cargo culting. If it feels like tediously shuffling around words and phrases that all mean exactly the same thing, you're missing the vast distances on the axis that you aren't perceiving.

The core message of "hey, you might well be caught up in a false narrative that is doing emotional work for you via providing some sense of meaning or purpose and yanking you around by your panic systems, and recognizing that fact can allow you to do anything else" is a good one, and indeed it's one that many LessWrongers need.  It's even the sort of message that needs some kind of shock along with it, to make readers go "oh shit, that might actually be me."

But that message does not need to come along with a million little manipulations.  That message isn't improved by attempts to hypnotize the audience, or set up little narrative traps.

e.g. starting with "There's a kind of game, here, and it's rude to point out, and you're not supposed to name it, but I'm going to." <—I'm one of the cool ones who sees the Matrix!  I'm brave and I'm gonna buck the rules!  (Reminiscent of a right-wing radio host going "you get punished if you say X" and then going on to spend twenty minutes on X without being punished.  It's a cheap attempt to inflate the importance of the message and the messenger.)

e.g. "I really do respect the right for folk to keep playing it if they want" <—More delegitimization, more status moves.  A strong implication along the lines of "the illusion that I, Val, have correctly identified is the only thing happening here."  Not even a token acknowledgement of the possibility that perhaps some of it is not this particular game; no thought given to the possibility that maybe Val is flawed in a way that is not true of all the other LWers.  Like the Mythbusters leaping from "well, we couldn't recreate it" to "therefore, it's impossible and it never happened, myth BUSTED."

(I'm really really really tired of the dynamic where someone notices that they've been making Mistake X for many years and then just presumes that everyone else is, too, and just blind to it in the same way that they themselves were. It especially rankles when they're magnanimous about it.)

e.g. "You have to live in a kind of mental illusion to be in terror of the end of the world." <—More projection, more typical minding, more ~"I've comprehended all of the gears here and there's no way anything else could lead to appropriate terror of the end of the world.  The mistake I made is the mistake everyone's making (but don't worry, I'm here to guide you out with my superior wisdom, being as I am ahead of you on this one."  See also the actual quote "for what it's worth, as someone who turned off the game and has reworked his body's use of power quite a lot, it's pretty obvious to me that this isn't how it works," which, like basically everything else here, is conspicuously missing a pretty damn important for me.  The idea that other people might be doing something other than what Val comprehends seems literally not to occur to him.

e.g. "I mean this with respect and admiration. It's very skillful. Eliezer has incredible mastery in how he weaves terror and insight together." <—Look!  See how I'm above it all, and in a position to evaluate what's going on?  Pay no attention to the fact that this incidentally raises my apparent status, btw.

e.g. "In case that was too opaque for you just yet, I basically just said 'Your thoughts will do what they can to distract you from your true underlying fear.' ... This is slow work. Unfortunately your 'drug' supply is internal, so getting sober is quite a trick." <—If your experience doesn't match my predictions, it's because you're unskillful, and making [mistake]...but don't worry, with my "yet" I will subtly imply that if you just keep on listening to my voice, you will eventually see the light.  Pay no attention to the fully general counterevidence-dismissing system I'm setting up.

Again, it's a shame, because bits like "If your body's emergency mobilization systems are running in response to an issue, but your survival doesn't actually depend on actions on a timescale of minutes, then you are not perceiving reality accurately" are well worth considering.  But the essay sort of forces you to step into Val's (broken, self-serving, overconfident) frame in order to catch those nuggets.  And, among readers who are consciously wise or unconsciously allergic to the sort of manipulation he's trying to pull, many of them will simply bounce off the thing entirely, and not catch those useful nuggets.

It didn't have to be this way.  It didn't have to be arrogant and project-y and author-elevating and oh-so-cynical-and-aloof.  There's another version of this essay out there in possibility space that contains all of the good insights and none of the poison.

But that's not what we got.  Instead, we got a thing that (it seems to me (though I could be wrong)) had the net effect of marginally shifting LW's discourse in the wrong direction, by virtue of being a popular performance piece wrapped around an actually useful insight or two.  It normalizes a kind of sloppy failure-to-be-careful-and-clear that is antithetical to the mission of becoming less wrong.  I think this essay lowered the quality of thinking on the site, even as it performed the genuinely useful service of opening some eyes to the problem Val has identified.

(Because no, of course Val was not alone in this issue, it really is a problem that affects Lots Of Humans, it's just not the only thing going on. Some humans really do just ... not have those particular flaws. When you're colorblind, you can't see that there are colors that you can't see, and so it's hard to account for them, especially if you're not even bothering to try.)
 

Already footnoted.

I'm for it.

I haven't made up my mind about whether to ask that people not cross-post.  Until such time as I explicitly do (it would be a visible and hard-to-miss request, such as an author's note in several consecutive essays), please consider cross-posting fine.

1 seems both true and obvious to me.

2 seems both true and obvious to me (and we have a rich historical record of many of those people being vindicated as moral development proceeded apace).

3 seems true and correct to me as well.

Our divergence is after 3, in the rough model.  I think that it is waaaaaaay unlikely that a 90% bucket is the right size.  I think that 50+% of people covertly break at least 1 widespread norm, and even if someone talks me out of it I do not expect them to talk me even half of the distance down to 8%.

I think it depends a lot on the norm in question. Having been privileged (by virtue of being confidant to a lot of people from a lot of walks of life) to know about a LOT of harmless-in-my-estimation covert norm-breaking that the average person never gets a whiff of, I think that my money is on 2 being simply false.

Tagging @Ben Pace , @habryka , @Vaniver , @Raemon.  Not as a request for input (I kind of don't actually want any; I have little room left for being told how wrong and bad I am) but more because it feels like not-tagging is a little bit talking behind backs, or something.  They can speak to their own perspective as they choose, or not, as they choose.  I'm going to try to turn my attention away from this thread.

I do not like this comment. The rest of my response below will be somewhat triggered.

EDIT: to be clear, I did not vote in any way on the above comment because it seems bad to do so from a state of triggeredness.

"Um," Harry said. "You... don't think very much of Dumbledore, I take it?"

"I thought..." said the old witch. "Well. Albus Dumbledore was a better wizard than I, a better person than I, in more ways than I can easily count. But the man had his faults."

"Because, um. I mean. Dumbledore knew everything you just said. About my being young and how the Line works. You're acting like you think Dumbledore was unaware of those facts, or just ignoring them, when he made his decision. It's true that sometimes stupid people, like me, make decisions that crazy. But not Dumbledore. He was not mad."

The framing of this comment sort of presupposes that I either don't know about, or am inaccurately weighting:

• The value of having work concentrated in one findable place
• The value of having an active community to discuss important posts

...and dismissively implies that the problem is just "a few gadflies" and that I should "just not respond to trollish comments" and that'll work fine and solve the problem.

It not only fails to pass my ITT, it doesn't even seem to think there is an ITT that needs to be passed.  The comment sees me doing something that seems drastic and bad, and rather than even considering "huh, maybe it's worse than I thought/worse than I can see, from my perspective?" just leaps straight to brushing past and minimizing my concerns and implying that I'm making a silly mistake.

I am not.

I'm willing to concede that I might be, like, 15% catastrophizing (because it's hard to assess such things accurately, from the inside), but I am not off by a factor of two.  LessWrong is actually not a safe place for me.

I have tried extremely hard to make it work, multiple times, in multiple epochs of the site's existence.  I wrote an essay every day for thirty days during the 2.0 revival so there would always be fresh content for newcomers.  I put out the entire CFAR handbook after rewriting it twice.  I have done everything I could to nudge discourse and norms in a positive direction, even as other users actively and explicitly work to undermine them.

But this gets me, basically, nothing.  LessWrong will frequently host overt and explicit libel of me, and it will be highly upvoted, and mods will do nothing for days on end.  People will drag me through the mud and call for my suicide, and mods will do nothing.  Highly upvoted unanswered and unaddressed stuff leaks from LessWrong out onto the broader internet, and it does substantial damage to my professional and personal relationships.

I beg for other people to step in, and they don't.  When Said was violating his own agreements with the LessWrong team, and doing more of the same bullshit he'd previously been told to stop, the mods did nothing, and did nothing, and did nothing, and finally I tried to push back myself, and they got equally angry with me.  LessWrong is a place where victims get punished as much as, if not more than, their tormenters, when their patience finally breaks.

Most recently, I offered mild pushback, not even against the bullying I was receiving, but just against the plausibility of the bully's claim that they could have failed to know how their words would be interpreted, and for that extremely mild pushback, a mod (who had not felt called to lift a finger in my defense against the bully) privately sent me over 500 words saying how even though I had complied with all their requests they were still grumpy at me for defending myself.

In the same week, when I made a comment that explicitly acknowledged itself as being posted in a fit of despair, another mod (who had also never been bothered to lift a finger in my defense) wrote 1100 words being mad at me and my complaint.

In the same week, a mod privately stated that all of my contributions to this site over the past nine years barely-if-at-all broke even. That everything I've contributed is basically canceled out by the headache of dealing with me. None of the other mods present in that conversation disagreed. LessWrong is explicitly ungrateful for any of the work I've put forward on the site's behalf over the years.

(That hurt. I wept.)

So no: I don't think I'm unaware of the costs to LW and its readership of me-not-being-here, and I don't think I'm doing this lightly or cavalierly, and I don't think that it's just a few trollish comments that you should just ignore. All of that sounds, to me, like "let them eat cake."

I've tried desperately, for years, to fix this and find a stable and sustainable equilibrium.  Hearing, on my way out the door, when I'm exhausted beyond all measure and feeling deeply alienated and betrayed, "man, you should really consider sticking around" is upsetting.

If LessWrongers want me to stick around, they need to make that clear to the team, which has its own sense of the tradeoffs and has decided to balance those tradeoffs in a way that isn't compatible with people like me being here.

It's less "you probably know a burglar" and more "successful burglaries are probably 10-100x more common than you would think, if you based your prediction solely on visible evidence."

The two that seem most obvious to me: well-behaved psychopaths (i.e. people who have little or no empathetic response but who have learned to follow the social rules anyway, for the sake of headache avoidance) and non-practicing pedophiles (i.e. people who are attracted to children but are zero percent interested in raping anyone) probably really actually are quite common.

No.  I'm disagreeing with Bezzi's claim to have never encountered any trans person and to have no trans people in their extended social network of hundreds or thousands. I don't doubt their self-report re: visibly trans people, but they're unjustified in the conclusion "there just aren't invisible trans people around me in my town."

Are the base rates for actual transition so low that you can have thousands of people in your extended social circle and still never hear of one?

Yes.

Ah, thanks for pointing this out.  There's an unstated assumption: you stumbled across some dark matter, that was basically hidden.

If you have a full-on psychotic break, you're likely going to resemble the caricatured stereotype of a schizophrenic, and get noticed.  But that's not quite the thing I'm trying to gesture at in the OP.

If somebody overhears you talking to your voices in the shower, the voices you've been talking to for decades while remaining a high-functioning individual, they're likely to leap to the conclusion that, since you have SYMPTOM of SCHIZOPHRENIA, you closely resemble the caricatured stereotype.

(This is the fearful swerve—people overupdating and dumping all of their other relevant experiential data of you, because the dark matter label overwhelms them and they forget that their new hypothesis needs to explain all the previous data too.)

The point being something like "if all that you have learned is that person has [trait], when you thought they didn't, you might be in danger of jumping to an unjustified conclusion (and creating a tragedy, as a result)."

(Also, people keep critically misunderstanding Scott's point.  Scott isn't saying the conservatives don't live around him.  The whole point is that they do live around him and he does pass them on the street and he does go to the same grocery stores and gas stations.  He doesn't knowingly interact with them because of his social bubble, but they are there, just like trans folk are definitely around Bezzi a lot (though I totes grant Bezzi's point that there aren't many visibly transitioning ones).  That's what the phrase "dark matter" is being used to indicate, both in Scott's post and in mine.)

This thread continues to fail to distinguish between "visibly trans" and "non-visibly trans" people, which is depressing since it's, y'know, the point.

Bezzi: you're trying to say that you don't know and have never met any trans people, and you keep doubling down on "I know this because I haven't encountered any of the visible markers of trans people," and I, uh. Encourage you to put 17 and 23 together?

Most trans folk are still not transitioning.

Another way of saying this: slow down and ask yourself "what do I think I know, and why do I think I know it?" and recognize that the evidence you have is systematically skewed, and you need to start with some other prior.

(If nothing else, this thread is useful as a real-time, object-level example of the subject matter under discussion.)

Yes, I have taken commissions in the past (the CFAR handbook rewrite being one, paid for by Lightcone, and Staying Split being another, paid for by an individual). 

I think that there isn't just one bag of people breaking rules, and some number of the marbles in that bag are "for good reasons" and some number "for bad reasons."  I think there are clusters, and types, and certain kinds of rule-breaking are predictive of other kinds of rule-breaking.

I think that me not wearing shoes at university is evidence that I might also disdain sports, but not evidence that I might steal.

I think that trying to think in terms of "for bad reasons" and "for good reasons" as two flavors in one bucket is likely to lead one to make wrong updates.  Like, the model is oversimplified and causes fearful swerves.

(In my usage, which may or may not be standard, if something feels like a Bayesian update for each of two different mutually exclusive directions, you sort of cancel out the overlap and then only refer to the net remainder as the thing for which you have Bayesian evidence.  Like, if it independently seems like a 3 update to the west, and a 5 update to the east, when you consider each separately, you say "a Bayesian update of 2 to the east" or similar.)

I think this conversation is failing to reliably distinguish between "being trans" in the sense of experiencing substantial gender dysphoria and/or adopting the self-label trans, and "being trans" in the sense of taking visible steps to socially or medically transition.

I buy Bezzi's self-report that they never see people who have visibly taken steps to transition; there's no reason for Bezzi to be confused about this.

I think people are pushing back because (of the true fact that) many trans people are not taking visible steps to transition, especially in enclaves where it's unheard of.

So this is actually rather tightly analogous to the perception of queer folk in the 1950's ... one could (validly) say that they've never seen anyone acting queer, but it would be an overstep to conclude from this that one does not regularly interact with queer people.

Presumably, no one in this thread disagrees that:

• Bezzi would notice (in most though definitely not all cases) someone who had socially or medically transitioned
• Bezzi would not notice (in most though definitely not all cases) someone who was "quietly trans" and taking no steps to change the situation

This post is, in large part, about "the latter category is WAY bigger than one would naively think."  You've met them.  You just didn't clock them.

Hmmmm, I see that Ben is getting some disagreement/pushback below, but I want to stand in defense of part of the thing I understand him to be saying.

(Or rather, I think Ben's bucketing two things and the disagreement is pushing back on the whole bucket when it should be pushing back on the bucket error + one of the things.)

In my culture, we're much better at noticing that X is bad in an absolute sense even if it's overwhelmingly good in context, or net justified, or whatever.  Like, in Duncan culture it's straightforwardly obvious and commonplace to note that surgery is cutting into people with knives and lasers, and that kinda sucks, regardless of the fact that surgery can lead to miraculously positive outcomes.

I think that Ben is correct to point out something like "this is an update on deviousness," and I think Ben is correct to point out something like "this is an update on being willing to cross social barriers."

But I think it's not correct to leap from that to "this is an update on a fundamental or intrinsic deviousness characteristic."  The deviousness of someone tying themselves in knots to avoid social sanction for behavior that's actually harmless is not quiiiiiiiiiite the same as the deviousness of a con artist weaving a web of lies around a mark.  It's got a thorough and sufficient explanation in the combination of the internal pressures arising in the person, and the social pressures exerted upon them from the outside, and so we don't have to (or have reason to) posit an additional drive-to-deviousness.

(You could perhaps productively replace the word "devious" with "furtive" and have a more empathetic and accurate sentence.)

Indeed, under the claims of the OP, there are a lot more people than you, Ben, presently think, being furtive in this and similar ways.  Like, probably at least an order of magnitude more than you think (most people in at least one or two ways and some people in several big ways).

And that's ... kind of the key?  Being like "ah, I have stumbled across this One Lone Rare-Seeming Instance of Furtiveness, I should make a large character update" is a mistake.  The evidence "wow, this person is willing to deceive and buck social norms" feels extraordinary, and thus supportive of an extraordinary shift in your perceptions of their character.

But it is not, in fact, extraordinary.  It's much more typical-of-humans than your observations (if left unexamined) have led you to think.

I'm running out of time to finish this comment, so I'll just say "there's another bucket error around 'bad behavior'" and hope you can connect the dots ... it is not actually the case that violating one specific social norm for specific reason is a substantial update that someone is a Breaking Social Boundaries Type Pokemon in general.  I think that discovering the fact that someone has a severe disagreement with a universal-seeming social boundary justifies forming the hypothesis that they're actually bad, but one should split and commit and will much-more-often-than-not (I claim) subsequently realize that nah, the bulk of my previous experiences of this person are representative; I don't need to throw out my whole model of them; this exception is in fact an exception.

(With the same caveat in the OP that some actions really are dealbreakers, and if you discover that someone is taking a dealbreaking action you previously thought they were incapable of, then sure, that's a big update.  But people in the 1950's were wrong about the dealbreaking awfulness of putting a peepee in someone's butt, and so one should be at least wary of one's own confidence about how dealbreaky given behaviors are, if one hasn't yet thought it through and is just regurgitating what society gave you.  I paused and actually thought about rape and molestation and decided that they were really really bad, but not necessarily/absolutely/obviously/always worse than, say, getting your face punched multiple times until your nose breaks and your eyes swell up.  This is near society's conclusion, but importantly different, and the similarity is because society and I both saw (some amount of) the same true thing, not because I just accepted the party line.)

It is only safe for you to have opinions if the other people don't dislike them?

I think you're trying to set up a really mean dynamic where you get to say mean things about me in public, but if I point out anything frowny about that fact you're like "ah, see, I knew that guy was Bad; he's making it Unsafe for me to say rude stuff about him in the public square."

(Where "Unsafe" means, apparently, "he'll respond with any kind of objection at all."  Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was "I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.")

*shrug

I won't respond further, since you clearly don't want a big back-and-forth, but calling people a weird bug and then pretending that doesn't in practice connote disgust is a motte and bailey.

@Raemon FYI there isn't internet at our place since ~26h ago so Logan probably hasn't looked at this or any other responses yet.

My objection is that it doesn't distinguish between [unpleasant fights that really should in fact be had] from [unpleasant fights that shouldn't]. It's a very handy term for delegitimizing any protracted conflict, which is a boon to those who'd like to get away with really shitty behavior by hijacking politeness norms.

"There was a Muggle once named Mohandas Gandhi," Harry said to the floor. "He thought the government of Muggle Britain shouldn't rule over his country. And he refused to fight. He convinced his whole country not to fight. Instead he told his people to walk up to the British soldiers and let themselves be struck down, without resisting, and when Britain couldn't stand doing that any more, we freed his country. I thought it was a very beautiful thing, when I read about it, I thought it was something higher than all the wars that anyone had ever fought with guns or swords. That they'd really done that, and that it had actually worked." Harry drew another breath. "Only then I found out that Gandhi told his people, during World War II, that if the Nazis invaded they should use nonviolent resistance against them, too. But the Nazis would've just shot everyone in sight. And maybe Winston Churchill always felt that there should've been a better way, some clever way to win without having to hurt anyone; but he never found it, and so he had to fight." Harry looked up at the Headmaster, who was staring at him. "Winston Churchill was the one who tried to convince the British government not to give Czechoslovakia to Hitler in exchange for a peace treaty, that they should fight right away -"

"I recognize the name, Harry," said Dumbledore. The old wizard's lips twitched upward. "Although honesty compels me to say that dear Winston was never one for pangs of conscience, even after a dozen shots of Firewhiskey."

"The point is," Harry said, after a brief pause to remember exactly who he was talking to, and fight down the suddenly returning sense that he was an ignorant child gone insane with audacity who had no right to be in this room and no right to question Albus Dumbledore about anything, "the point is, saying violence is evil isn't an answer. It doesn't say when to fight and when not to fight. It's a hard question and Gandhi refused to deal with it, and that's why I lost some of my respect for him."

"And your own answer, Harry?" Dumbledore said quietly.

"One answer is that you shouldn't ever use violence except to stop violence," Harry said. "You shouldn't risk anyone's life except to save even more lives. It sounds good when you say it like that. Only the problem is that if a police officer sees a burglar robbing a house, the police officer should try to stop the burglar, even though the burglar might fight back and someone might get hurt or even killed. Even if the burglar is only trying to steal jewelry, which is just a thing. Because if nobody so much as inconveniences burglars, there will be more burglars, and more burglars. And even if they only ever stole things each time, it would - the fabric of society -" Harry stopped. His thoughts weren't as ordered as they usually pretended to be, in this room. He should have been able to give some perfectly logical exposition in terms of game theory, should have at least been able to see it that way, but it was eluding him. Hawks and doves - "Don't you see, if evil people are willing to risk violence to get what they want, and good people always back down because violence is too terrible to risk, it's - it's not a good society to live in, Headmaster! Don't you realize what all this bullying is doing to Hogwarts, to Slytherin House most of all?"

In particular, I note that the set of people with vocal distaste for demon threads seems to strongly disoverlap with the set of people I've seen actually effectively come to the aid of someone being bullied. The disoverlap isn't total, but it's a really good predictor in my personal experience.

I've tried for a bit to produce a useful response to the top-level comment and mostly failed, but I did want to note that

"Oh, it sort of didn't occur to me that this analogy might've carried a negative connotation, because when I was negatively gossiping about Duncan behind his back with a bunch of other people who also have an overall negative opinion of him, the analogy was popular!"

is a hell of a take. =/

Claim: this sequence is almost one hundred percent about studying something other than your mind, and what's happening is a confusion between tools and purposes.

At a very coarse/gross level of understanding, the way that we gather information about objects is by hurling other objects at them, and watching the interaction. This is one way to think about light—we throw trillions of tiny photons at an object, and the way they bounce off gives us information about the object (its location, shape, surface properties, etc).

Ditto sound waves, now that I think of it (the photon analogy is from Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe).

The key point is that we never quite interact directly with the object. We do on human scales; there's a thing we call "direct interaction" that makes sense to talk about. But actually what's going on is that we're perceiving photons that are out there hurtling through the void, and constructing understanding via extrapolation about what those photons interacted with a fraction of a second earlier.

We don't talk about "studying the photons" when we describe looking at an object, though. We gloss over that step, handwave it away.

This sequence is, I think, about looking at things other than your brain.

But it focuses on the analogue of the photons themselves. It's looking through your own phenomenology, to understand what's really going on out there. It's saying (roughly) "notice how these photons bounce off this way, and these other photons bounce off that way, and these other photons get absorbed, and see what you can reasonably conclude about the object, given those facts."

So there's a heavy focus on your own perceptions, and your emotional reactions, and so forth, but it's in service of understanding the object that is upstream of [your brain reacting in such a way].

Honestly, I was somewhat surprised to hear @Raemon 's complaint, and at first bewildered/taken aback, because it hadn't even occurred to me that this sequence might be mistaken for being about minds/brains. But of course it does talk a lot about the internals of one's experience, so I understand the confusion! Ray's complaint isn't coming out of nowhere!

But to tack on yet another analogy, I feel sort of like just ... reassuring the complaint away? In the same way that, if I were teaching a parkour class and a student was like, wait, why are we doing pushups and stretches, I thought we were here to do vaults, I would be like yes, yes, don't worry, we are absolutely getting to the vaults, but this is important preparation for the vaults, and will help you build up the strength and physical vocabulary necessary to be non-lost once we start working on the vaults, which is coming right up, actually.

"Let's imagine that these unspecified details, which could be anywhere within a VERY wide range, are specifically such that the original point is ridiculous, in support of concluding that the original point is ridiculous" does not seem like a reasonable move to me.

Separately:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WsvpkCekuxYSkwsuG/overconfidence-is-deceit

… well, then regardless of whether you agree with the author in question about whether or not my comments are good/important/whatever, the fact that he holds this view casts very serious doubt on your thesis. Wouldn’t you agree?

Said is asking Ray, not me, but I strongly disagree.

Point 1 is that a black raven is not strong evidence against white ravens. (Said knows this, I think.)

Point 2 is that a behavior which displeases many authors can still be pleasant or valuable to some authors. (Said knows this, I think.)

Point 3 is that benquo's view on even that specific comment is not the only author-view that matters; benquo eventually being like "this critical feedback was great" does not mean that other authors watching the interaction at the time did not feel "ugh, I sure don't want to write a post and have to deal with comments like this one." (Said knows this, I think.)

(Notably, benquo once publicly stated that he suspected a rough interaction would likely have gone much better under Duncan moderation norms specifically; if we're updating on benquo's endorsements then it comes out to "both sets of norms useful," presumably for different things.)

I'd say it casts mild doubt on the thesis, at best, and that the most likely resolution is that Ray ends up feeling something like "yeah, fair, this did not turn out to be the best example," not "oh snap, you're right, turns out it was all a house of cards."

(This will be my only comment in this chain, so as to avoid repeating past cycles.)

Strong disagree that I'm describing a deeply dysfunctional gym; I barely described the gym at all and it's way overconfident/projection-y to extrapolate "deeply dysfunctional" from what I said.

There's a difference between "hey, I want to understand the underpinnings of this" and the thing I described, which is hostile to the point of "why are you even here, then?"

Edit: I view the votes on this and the parent comment as indicative of a genuine problem; jimmy above is exhibiting actually bad reasoning (à la representativeness) and the LWers who happen to be hanging around this particular comment thread are, uh, apparently unaware of this fact. Alas.

Just noting that "What specifically did it get wrong?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, and is one I would have (in most cases) been willing to answer, patiently and at length.

That I was unwilling in that specific case is an artifact of the history of Zack being quick to aggressively misunderstand that specific essay, in ways that I considered excessively rude (and which Zack has also publicly retracted).

Given that public retraction, I'm considering going back and in fact answering the "what specifically" question, as I normally would have at the time. If I end up not doing so, it will be more because of opportunity costs than anything else. (I do have an answer; it's just a question of whether it's worth taking the time to write it out months later.)

Cranks ask questions of people they think are wrong, in order to try and expose the weaknesses in their arguments. They signal aloofness, because their priority is on being seen as an authority who deserves similar or higher status (at least on the issue at hand) as the person they're addressing. They already expect the author they're questioning is fundamentally confused, and so they don't waste their own time trying to figure out what the author might have meant. The author, and the audience, are lucky to have the crank's attention, since they're obviously collectively lost in confusion and need a disinterested outsider to call attention to that fact.

And this attitude is particularly corrosive to feelings of trust, collaboration, "jamming together," etc. ... it's like walking into a martial arts academy and finding a person present who scoffs at both the instructors and the other students alike, and who doesn't offer sufficient faith to even try a given exercise once before first a) hearing it comprehensively justified and b) checking the sparring records to see if people who did that exercise win more fights.

Which, yeah, that's one way to zero in on the best martial arts practices, if the other people around you also signed up for that kind of culture and have patience for that level of suspicion and mistrust!

(I choose martial arts specifically because it's a domain full of anti-epistemic garbage and claims that don't pan out.)

But in practice, few people will participate in such a martial arts academy for long, and it's not true that a martial arts academy lacking that level of rigor makes no progress in discovering and teaching useful things to its students.

Just noting as a "for what it's worth"

(b/c I don't think my personal opinion on this is super important or should be particularly cruxy for very many other people)

that I accept, largely endorse, and overall feel fairly treated by the above (including the week suspension that preceded it).

Spending my last remaining comment here.

I join Ray and Gwern in noting that asking for examples is generically good (and that I've never felt or argued to the contrary). Since my stance on this was called into question, I elaborated:

If one starts out looking to collect and categorize evidence of their conversational partner not doing their fair share of the labor, then a bunch of comments that just say "Examples?" would go into the pile. But just encountering a handful of comments that just say "Examples?" would not be enough to send a reasonable person toward the hypothesis that their conversational partner reliably doesn't do their fair share of the labor.

"Do you have examples?" is one of the core, common, prosocial moves, and correctly so. It is a bid for the other person to put in extra work, but the scales of "are we both contributing?" don't need to be balanced every three seconds, or even every conversation. Sometimes I'm the asker/learner and you're the teacher/expounder, and other times the roles are reversed, and other times we go back and forth.

The problem is not in asking someone to do a little labor on your behalf. It's having 85+% of your engagement be asking other people to do labor on your behalf, and never reciprocating, and when people are like, hey, could you not, or even just a little less? being supercilious about it.

My recent experience has been that saying "this is half-baked" is not met with a subsequent shift in commentary, meeting the "Oh, I don't have any yet, this is speculative, so YMMV" tone.

I think it would be nice if LW could have both tones:

• I'm claiming this quite confidently; bring on the challenges, I'm ready to convince
• I have a gesture in a direction I'm pretty sure has merit, but am not trying to e.g. claim that if others don't update to my position they're wrong; this is a sapling and I'd like help growing it, not help stepping on it.

Trying to do things in the latter tone on LW has felt, to me, extremely anti-rewarding of late, and I'm hoping that will change, because I think a lot of good work happens there. That's not to say that the former tone is bad; it feels like they are twin pillars of intellectual progress.

I generally agree with the above and expect to be fine with most of the specific versions of any of the three bulleted solutions that I can actually imagine being implemented.

I note re:

It'd be cruxy for me if more high-contributing-users actively supported the sort of moderation regime Duncan-in-particular seems to want.

... that (in line with the thesis of my most recent post) I strongly predict that a decent chunk of the high-contributing users who LW has already lost would've been less likely to leave and would be more likely to return with marginal movement in that direction.

I don't know how best to operationalize this, but if anyone on the mod team feels like reaching out to e.g. ~ten past heavy-hitters that LW actively misses, to ask them something like "how would you have felt if we had moved 25% in this direction," I suspect that the trend would be clear. But the LW of today seems to me to be one in which the evaporative cooling has already gone through a couple of rounds, and thus I expect the LW of today to be more "what? No, we're well-adapted to the current environment; we're the ones who've been filtered for."

(If someone on the team does this, and e.g. 5 out of 8 people the LW team misses respond in the other direction, I will in fact take that seriously, and update.)

Does that influence 

To be honest, I think I have to take this exchange as further evidence that Duncan is operating in bad faith. (Within this particular conflict, not necessarily in general.)

in any way?

Four days' later edit: guess not. :/

I agree that escalating to arbitrary levels of nuance makes communication infeasible, and that you can and should only highlight the relevant and necessary distinctions.

I think "someone just outright said I'd repeatedly said stuff I hadn't" falls above the line, though.

Yeah. One is small, and the other is tiny. The actual comment that the anonymous person is mocking/castigating said:

I note (while acknowledging that this is a small and subtle distinction, but claiming that it is an important one nonetheless) that I said that I now categorize Said as a liar, which is an importantly and intentionally weaker claim than Said is a liar, i.e. "everyone should be able to see that he's a liar" or "if you don't think he's a liar you are definitely wrong."

(This is me in the past behaving in line with the points I just made under Said's comment, about not confusing [how things seem to me] with [how they are] or [how they do or should seem to others].)

This is much much closer to saying "Liar!" than it is to not saying "Liar!" ... if one is to round me off, that's the correct place to round me off to. But it is still a rounding.

(I suppose seeing posts actually cited outside the LessWrong community would be a better/more-objective measure of "something demonstrably good is happening, not potentially just circle-jerky". I'm interested in tracking that although it seems trickier)

In order from "slightly outside of LessWrong" to "very far outside of LessWrong," I refactored the CFAR handbook against (mild) internal resistance from CFAR and it was received well, I semi-regularly get paid four or low-five figures to teach people rationality, I've been invited to speak at 4+ EA Globals and counting, my In Defense of Punch Bug essay has 1800 claps which definitely did not primarily come from this community, my Magic color wheel article has 18,800 claps and got a shoutout from CGPGrey, my sixth grade classroom was featured in a chapter in a book on modern education, and my documentary on parkour was translated by volunteers into like eight different languages and cited by the founder as his favorite parkour video of all time (at at least one moment in time). *shrug

You also need to accept that other factors beyond word choice play into how your words will be perceived: claiming this distinction is of tremendous importance lands differently in the context of this giant adversarial escalation-spiral than it would in an alternate reality where you were writing a calm and collected post and had never gotten into a big argument with Said

Er. I very explicitly did not claim that it was a distinction of tremendous importance. I was just objecting to the anonymous person's putting them in the same bucket. 

In my opinion, the internet has fine-grained distinctions aplenty. In fact, where to split hairs and where to twist braids is sort of basic to each political subculture. What I think makes LessWrong different is that we take a somewhat, maybe not agnostic but more like a liberal/pluralistic view of the categories.

Endorsed/updated; this is a better summary than the one I gave.

...while acting as though somehow that would have been less offensive if they had only added "I suspect" to the latter half of that sentence as well. Raise your hand if you think that "I suspect that you won't like this idea, because I suspect that you have the emotional maturity of a child" is less offensive because it now represents an unambiguously true statement of an opinion rather than being misconstrued as a fact.

✋

The thing that makes LW meaningfully different from the rest of the internet is people bothering to pay attention to meaningful distinctions even a little bit.

The distance between "I categorize Said as a liar" and "Said is a liar" is easily 10x and quite plausibly 100-1000x the distance between "You blocked people due to criticizing you" and "you blocked people for criticizing you." The latter is two synonymous phrases; the former is not.

(I also explicitly acknowledged that Ray's rounding was the right rounding to make, whereas Said was doing the opposite and pretending that swapping "due to" and "for" had somehow changed the meaning in a way that made the paraphrase invalid.)

You being like "Stop using phrases that meticulously track uncommon distinctions you've made; we already have perfectly good phrases that ignore those distinctions!" is not the flex you seem to think it is; color blindness is not a virtue.

A meta point that is outside of the scope of the object level disagreement/is a tangent:

Once again you miss a (the?) key point.

“What are some examples?” does not constitute “calling out a flaw”—unless there should be examples but aren’t. Otherwise, it’s an innocuous question, and a helpful prompt.

I note that the following exchange recently took place:

Said: [multiple links to him just saying "Examples?"]

Me: [in a style I would not usually use but with content that is not far from my actual belief] I'm sorry, how do any of those (except possibly 4) satisfy any reasonable definition of the word "criticism?"

Said: Well, I think that “criticism”, in a context like this topic of discussion, certainly includes something like “pointing to a flaw or lacuna, or suggesting an important or even necessary avenue for improvement”.

So we have Said a couple of days ago defending "What are some examples?" as definitely being under the umbrella of criticism, further defined as the subset of criticism which is pointing to a flaw or suggesting an important or even necessary avenue for improvement.

Then we have Said here saying that it is a key point that "What are some examples?" does not constitute calling out a flaw.

(The difference between the two situations being (apparently) the entirely subjective/mysterious/unstated property of "whether there should be examples but aren't," noting that Said thinking there exists a skipped step or a confusing leap is not particularly predictive of the median high-karma LWer thinking there exists a skipped step or a confusing leap.)

I am reminded again of Said saying that I A'd people due to their B, and I said no, I had not A'd anyone for B'ing, and Said replied ~"I never said you A'd anyone for B'ing; you can go check; I said you'd A'd them due to B'ing."

i.e. splitting hairs and swirling words around to create a perpetual motte-and-bailey fog that lets him endlessly nitpick and retreat and say contradictory things at different times using the same words, and pretending to a sort of principle/coherence/consistency that he does not actually evince.

As for using words in a nonstandard way, I hardly think that you’re one to make such an accusation!

I think the best response to this is one of Said's own comments:

I have (it would seem) a reputation for making certain sorts of comments, which are of course not intended as “attacks” of any sort (social, personal, etc.), but which are sometimes perceived as such—and which perception, in my view, reflects quite poorly on those who thus perceive said comments.

I am not optimizing particularly hard for Said not feeling criticized but also treating my comment above as an "accusation" seems to somewhat belie Said's nominal policy of looking down on people for interpreting statements as attacks.

In any event: oh yah for sure I use language SUPER weird, on the regular, but I'm also a professional communicator whose speech and writing is widely acclaimed and effective and "nuh uh YOU'RE the one who uses words weird" is orthogonal to the question of whether Said has blind spots and disabilities here (which he does).  

(If there was another copy of Said lying around, I might summon him to point out the sheer ridiculousness of responding to "You do X" with "how dare you say I do X when YOU do X", since that seems like the sort of thing Said loves to do.  But in any event, I don't think having a trait would in fact make me less able to notice and diagnose the trait in others.)

Said, above, is saying a bunch of things, many of which I agree with, as if they are contra my position or my previous claims.

He can't pass my ITT (not that I've asked him to), which means that he doesn't understand the thing he's trying to disagree with, which means that his disagreement is not actually pointing at my position; the things he finds ridiculous and offensive are cardboard cutouts of his own construction. More detail on that over here.

Thanks.

I note (while acknowledging that this is a small and subtle distinction, but claiming that it is an important one nonetheless) that I said that I now categorize Said as a liar, which is an importantly and intentionally weaker claim than Said is a liar, i.e. "everyone should be able to see that he's a liar" or "if you don't think he's a liar you are definitely wrong."

(This is me in the past behaving in line with the points I just made under Said's comment, about not confusing [how things seem to me] with [how they are] or [how they do or should seem to others].)

This is much much closer to saying "Liar!" than it is to not saying "Liar!" ... if one is to round me off, that's the correct place to round me off to. But it is still a rounding.

But sir, you impugn my and my site's honor

This is fair, and I apologize; in that line I was speaking from despair and not particularly tracking Truth.

A [less straightforwardly wrong and unfair] phrasing would have been something like "this is not a Japanese tea garden; it is a British cottage garden."

I note for any other readers that Said is evincing a confusion somewhere in the neighborhood of the Second Guideline and the typical mind fallacy.

In particular, it's false that I "write and act as though I did hold that belief," in the sense that a supermajority of those polled would check "true" on a true-false question about it, after reading through (say) two of my essays and a couple dozen of my comments.

("That belief" = "Duncan has, I think, made it very clear that that a comment that just says 'what are some examples of this claim?' is, in his view, unacceptable.")

It's pretty obvious that it seems to Said that I write and act in this way. But one of the skills of a competent rationalist is noticing that [how things seem to me] might not be [how they actually are] or [how they seem to others].

Said, in my experience, is not versed in this skill, and does not, as a matter of habit, notice "ah, here I'm stating a thing about my interpretation as if it's fact, or as if it's nearly-universal among others."

e.g. an unequivocally true statement would have been something like "But that still leaves the question of why you write and act in a way that indicates to me that you do hold that belief."

In addition to being unequivocally true (since it limits its claims to the contents of Said's own experience, about which he has total authority to speak), it also highlights the territory more clearly, since it draws the reader's attention to the fact that what's going isn't:

Duncan writes and acts in a way that indicates [period; no qualification] that he holds that belief

but rather

Duncan writes and acts in a way that indicates [to me, Said] that he holds that belief

Which makes it more clear that the problem is either in Duncan's words and actions or in Said's oft-idiosyncratic interpretation, rather than eliding the whole question and predeciding that of course it's a Duncan-problem.

My various models of Said retort that:

• This is a meaningless distinction; too small to care about and drowned out by nose (I disagree)
• Everybody Knows that his statement comes with a prepended "it seems to me" and it's silly to treat it as if it were intended to be a stronger claim than that (I argue that this is a motte-and-bailey)
• This is too much labor to expect of a person (that they correctly confine their commentary to true things, or herald their speculation as speculation; I am unsympathetic)

But I think a lot of Said's confusions would actually make more sense to Said if he came to the realization that he's odd, actually, and that the way he uses words is quite nonstandard, and that many of the things which baffle and confuse him are not, in fact, fundamentally baffling or confusing but rather make sense to many non-Said people.