Posts
Comments
Zulip, Discord and Slack are all options as well
However, these are all very bad for searchability, archiving, multimedia content, and creation of permanent content of any sort.
In-general, bot issues are one of the top reasons for websites that accept user submissions either need to have a strict manual review phase, or be continuously updated with defenses.
Indeed. And what you’ll generally find is that mature, widely-used platforms tend to have many and varied tools for dealing with this sort of thing, whereas if you build custom software, you end up having to handle many more edge cases, attack types, etc., than you’d expected (because it’s very hard to think of all such possibilities in advance), and the project just balloons massively due to this.
(For example, Simple Machines Forum—which runs Data Secrets Lox, and which I, on the whole, do not recommend—has all sorts of options for gating user registration behind verification emails / manual moderator approval / captcha / verification questions / etc.; it has moderation tools, including settings that let you enforce per-post approval, on a per-subforum basis; it has a karma system; it has built-in GDPR compliance features; and all of this before you consider all the optional modifications that are available… and SMF is not even one of the better platforms in this category! How much development work would it take a small team to get a discussion forum platform to this state? How much work would it take even to just build the core functionality plus the moderation/security/anti-spam tools…?)
I don’t agree with most of this.
I agree with this part:
I would advise against setting up the software for yourself (unless this is the type of thing you also do for a job)
Yes, if you are not a “tech person” / programmer / engineer of some sort / otherwise have experience with software, you should not set this sort of thing up yourself. You should find/hire someone to do it for you. That is not difficult.
I disagree with the rest of what you say.
Choosing a free solution that is well-maintained is better than rolling your own. A standardized solution plus standardized exploits plus standardized mitigations to those exploits is better than a custom solution.
Basically, remember the situation when one person practically took down Less Wrong, and it had to be reprogrammed from scratch, because updating the original Reddit codebase would be too much work? Similar thing can happen when you use a free solution, and defending against it can turn out to be too much work.
First of all, as I recall, that wasn’t an “exploit” in the usual “software vulnerability” sense. Perhaps someone from the LW team who was around back then can better describe the details, but as I understand it, it was a design flaw in the “if someone does this bad thing, we have no good tools to catch them and/or prevent someone from doing it” sense. There is no reason whatsoever why a custom solution can’t have arbitrarily many such design flaws, and such an “exploit” in no way relies on having access to the source code or… anything like that.
And—again, to my recollection—old Less Wrong was never “hacked”.
But more importantly, the reason why any of this was a problem at all is that old LW used the old Reddit codebase—that is, one which had been deprecated and was no longer maintained. Indeed, it is a bad idea to choose such a platform, if you do not have a dedicated engineer to service it! This is why you should choose something popular and well-maintained.
For example, I linked MyBB in my earlier comment. It is updated regularly, and the developers clearly take security very seriously. I don’t know how much money you’d have to spend to get this degree of protection in a custom solution, but it sure ain’t a small number.
When you speak of standardized exploits to standardized solutions, I expect that you have Wordpress in mind, which is infamous for its exploitability (although I am unsure to what extent that reputation is still accurate; it may be an outdated characterization). But most web forums (which, note, Wordpress is not) get hacked approximately never. Ones based on well-designed, well-maintained, popular software like MyBB, even less so.
I also disagree with the advice to “use some cheap and simple solution that can (and will) be thrown away later”. In my experience, such platform choices tend to be quite “sticky”, and migration is often painful, expensive, and time-consuming. That is not to say that you should never migrate to a custom solution (although I am very skeptical about OP’s use case requiring anything more advanced than a good PHP bulletin board)… but even if you expect that you’ll want to migrate, it is far better to migrate from a basically working site which merely lacks some features you want, or has some annoying limitations, etc., than to migrate from a site which has broken or been hacked or otherwise exploded.
The fact is that a decent PHP-bulletin-board-type platform already is “a cheap and simple solution”. (Which can, of course, be thrown away later, but doesn’t have to be.) Trying to go even cheaper is setting yourself up for pain later on.
That’s true, but I’m not aware of one that does this combo and is good (uses a good forum software, is reliable, etc.). Are you?
MyBB (or similar) with a custom theme.
Aesthetic: lots of themes available, and making your own seems easy.
Inexpensive: can’t beat “free” for the software, and cheap hosting that supports PHP+MySQL is plentiful.
Private: trivial to set up basically arbitrary access controls, as with any half-decent forum software.
Easily set up: standard PHP+MySQL stuff.
(I strongly anti-recommend Discourse as a forum platform.)
Re-construction of Pathfinder game mechanics in setting
(Done poorly)
Thanks!
I agree that a link to a more substantive writeup would be very good… it’s hard to know what to make of the claim that “Pianists with a long professional experience show a statistically significant preference for the aurally tuned grand”, given that there were only 8 such pianists and 2 pianos (one tuned one way, one tuned the other way).
… also, this information comes to use from the website of this “entropy piano tuner”, which seems… well, I’d like to see another source, at least.
(Apparently, the creators of this “EPT” are themselves affiliated with the University of Physics Würzburg, which certainly explains how/why they got the University of Music Würzburg involved in this test.)
Have you (or has anyone) ever done double-blind listening tests to determine whether in fact anyone can tell the difference in such cases?
The problem with economics, however, is that while it’s got theories, they are, by and large, not theories about humans.
The discipline which was, at least, intended to provide the theoretical grounding for psychology as a whole was evolutionary psychology. The best summary of the motivation for, and conceptual basis of, evo-psych is the following, written by great cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard in his paper “The Perceptual Organization of Colors: An Adaptation to Regularities of the Terrestrial World?” (1992; this paper was included as a chapter in The Adapted Mind, probably the most import text in evo psych):
STRUCTURE IN HUMAN PERCEPTION AND COGNITION IN GENERAL
For over a century, psychological researchers have been probing the structures and processes of perception, memory, and thought that mediate the behaviors of humans and other animals. Typically, this probing has taken the form of behavioral experiments suggested by evidence from one or more of three sources: (a) introspections into one’s own experience and inner processes, (b) information gleaned about the anatomy or physiology of the underlying physical mechanisms, and (c) results obtained from previous behavioral studies. More recently, in seeking to understand not only the nature but also the origins of psychological principles, some of us have been turning to a fourth source for guidance—namely, to the ecological properties of the world in which we have evolved and to the advantages to be realized by individuals who have genetically internalized representations of those properties.
Taken by themselves, findings based on introspective, behavioral, and physiological evidence alike, however well established and mutually consistent they may be, remain as little more than “brute facts” about the human or animal subjects studied. What such findings reveal might be merely arbitrary or ad hoc properties of the particular collection of terrestrial species investigated. Even our own perceptual and cognitive capabilities, as much as our own bodily sizes and shapes, may be the products of a history of more or less accidental circumstances peculiar to just one among uncounted evolutionary lines. Certainly, these capabilities do not appear to be wholly dictated by what is physically possible.
The following are just a few of the easily stated and well known of our perceptual/cognitive limitations, as these have been demonstrated under highly controlled but nonnaturalistic laboratory conditions:
- Although a physical measuring instrument can reliably identify a vast number of absolute levels of a stimulus, we reliably identify only about seven (Miller, 1956).
- Although a physical recording instrument can register a vast number of dimensions of variation of the spectral composition of light, the colors we experience vary, as I have already noted, along only three independent dimensions (Helmholtz, 1856–1866; Young, 1807).
- Although the red and violet spectral colors differ the most widely in physical wavelength, these colors appear more similar to each other than either does to the green of an intermediate wavelength (leading, as noted, to Newton’s color circle).
- Although a camera can record and indefinitely preserve an entire scene in a millisecond blink of a shutter, the “iconic” image that our visual system retains from a single brief exposure decays in less than a second and, during this time, we are able to encode only about four or five items for more permanent storage (Sperling, 1960).
- Although a computer can store an essentially unlimited number of unrelated items for subsequent retrieval, following a single presentation, we can reliably recall a list of no more than about seven items (Miller, 1956).
- Although a computer could detect correlations between events separated by any specified time interval and in either order of occurrence, in virtually all animals with nervous systems, classical conditioning generally requires that the conditioned stimulus last for a short time and either be simultaneous with the unconditioned stimulus or precede it by no more than a few seconds (Pavlov, 1927, 1928).
- Although a computer can swiftly and errorlessly carry out indefinitely protracted sequences of abstract logical operations, we are subject to systematic errors in performing the simplest types of logical inferences (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1974; Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972; Woodworth & Sells, 1935)—at least when these inferences are not of the kind that were essential to the fitness of our hunter-gatherer ancestors during the Pleistocene era (Cosmides, 1989).
Our performance in a natural setting is, however, a very different matter. There, our perceptual and cognitive capabilities vastly exceed the capabilities of even the most advanced artificial systems. We readily parse complex and changing visual scenes and auditory streams into spatially localized external objects and sound sources. We classify those objects and sources into natural kinds despite appreciable variation in the individual instances and their contexts, positions, or conditions of illumination. We infer the likely ensuing behaviors of such natural objects—including the recognition of animals and anticipation of their approach or retreat, the recognition of faces and interpretation of their expressions, and the identification of voices and interpretation of their meanings. We recode and transfer, from one individual to another, information about arbitrary or possible states of affairs by means of a finite set of symbols (phonemes or corresponding written characters). And we plan for future courses of action and devise creative solutions to an open class of real-world problems.
To the extent that psychological science fails to identify nonarbitrary reasons or sources for these perceptual/cognitive limitations and for these perceptual/cognitive capabilities, this science will remain a merely descriptive science of this or that particular terrestrial species. This is true even if we are able to show that these limitations and capabilities are consequences of the structures of underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. Those neurophysiological structures can themselves be deemed nonarbitrary only to the extent that they can be seen to derive from some ultimately nonarbitrary source.
Where, then, should we look for such a nonarbitrary source? The answer can only be, “In the world.” All niches capable of supporting the evolution and maintenance of intelligent life, though differing in numerous details, share some general—perhaps even universal—properties. It is to these properties that we must look for the ultimate, nonarbitrary sources of the regularities that we find in perception/cognition as well as in its underlying neurophysiological substrate.
Some of the properties that I have in mind here are the following (see Shepard, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1989): Space is three-dimensional, locally Euclidean, and endowed with a gravitationally conferred unique upward direction. Time is one-dimensional and endowed with a thermodynamically conferred unique forward direction. Periods of relative warmth and light (owing to the conservation of angular momentum of planetary rotation) regularly alternate with periods of relative coolness and darkness. And objects having an important consequence are of a particular natural kind and therefore correspond to a generally compact connected region in the space of possible objects—however much those objects may vary in their sensible properties (of size, shape, color, odor, motion, and so on).
Among the genes arising through random mutations, then, natural selection must have favored genes not only on the basis of how well they propagated under the special circumstances peculiar to the ecological niche currently occupied, but also, as I have argued previously (e.g., Shepard, 1987a), even more consistently in the long run, according to how well they propagate under the general circumstances common to ail ecological niches. For, as an evolutionary line branches into each new niche, the selective pressures on gene propagation that are guaranteed to remain unchanged are just those pressures that are common to all niches.
(Shepard then goes on to describe the deep questions which underlie his own work on color perception, one of which the rest of the paper is dedicated to examining and answering. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.)
Sure. Now, as far as I understand it, whether the extrapolated volition of humanity will even cohere is an open question (on any given extrapolation method; we set aside the technical question of selecting or constructing such a method).
So Eli Tyre’s claim seems to be something like: on [ all relevant / the most likely / otherwise appropriately selected ] extrapolation methods, (a) humanity’s EV will cohere, (b) it will turn out to endorse the specific things described (dismantling of all governments, removing the supply of factory farmed meat, dictating how people should raise their children).
Right?
And… you claim that the CEV of existing humans will want those things?
You don’t think that most humans would be opposed to having an AI dismantle their government, deprive them of affordable meat, and dictate how they can raise their children?
Er… yes, I am indeed familiar with that usage of the term “Friendly”. (I’ve been reading Less Wrong since before it was Less Wrong, you know; I read the Sequences as they were being posted.) My comment was intended precisely to invoke that “semi-technical term of art”; I was not referring to “friendliness” in the colloquial sense. (That is, in fact, why I used the capitalized term.)
Please consider the grandparent comment in light of the above.
Doesn’t this very answer show that an AI such as you describe would not be reasonably describable as “Friendly”, and that consequently any AI worthy of the term “Friendly” would not do any of the things you describe? (This is certainly my answer to your question!)
It also seems to strongly imply than mind uploading into some kind of classical artificial machine is possible, since it’s unlikely that all or even most of the classical properties of the brain are essential.
Could you say more about this? Why is this unlikely?
One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. I agree that the LW-style decision theory posting encourages this type of thinking, and you seem to infer that the high-quality reasoning in the decision theory posts implies that they give good intuitions about the philosophy of identity.
I draw the opposite conclusion from this: the fact that the decision theory posts seem to work on the basis of a computationalist theory of identity makes me think worse of the decision-theory posts.
Strongly seconding this.
I see, yeah, that would explain it.
Let’s perhaps try and clarify what we mean here. Cooking has a larger margin of error than baking—is that what you’re referring to? (If so, then I agree.) Or are we talking about being able to repeatably get a specific result (which is how I read the OP)?
Sure, but yeast itself is not a bacteria, is the point. But indeed, a sourdough starter contains both.
Indeed. It’s right in the name: “saccharomyces” = “sugar fungus”.
I have been baking for 25 years and I have never heard the term “patissing” before now. Not once.
The term for making cakes is… “baking”.
EDIT: Also—baking cakes, less reliable than cooking? Well, all I can say is that this is pretty much the opposite of my experience…
Yes, we have been hearing about this sort of “challenge” for several decades now. I think that, at this point, we can say that we’ve given views like what you describe a fair hearing, and can be justified in dismissing them.
Bursting into tears in a professional or academic situation is something to be sorry about. Not that sorry—it’s not like assaulting someone, or stealing, or committing fraud, or whatever else—but certainly a faux pas. A forgiveable one (if it doesn’t happen often, anyway), by all means—but a faux pas nonetheless. That is as it should be. People absolutely should repress the urge to cry in situations of this sort, just as they should repress the urge to kick the table in anger, or start yelling insults at one’s interlocutor, or shriek in glee, or have any other sort of uncontrolled emotional outburst. That is the mark of a healthy ability to control one’s emotional expression, and is not somehow problematic.
we have to opportunity to stop reproducing these kind of beliefs and help to create a world in which everybody feels safe enough to not only express there own pain but to sit with the pain of others.
But we should “reproduce” those beliefs (that such emotional outbursts out to be suppressed). We should not yield to uncontrolled expressions of pain in professional/academic/similar situations.
And it is absolutely not appropriate to expect, or force, people to “sit with the pain of others”. Rely on your family, your friends, your therapist, for such things—but not your coworkers, or your colleagues, or casual acquaintances; that is inconsiderate and selfish.
I have been on the receiving end of such, and I consider “say thank you instead” to be bad advice. The problem is specifically with the “instead” part. There is no reason for “instead”. It should be “in addition to”.
In cases like this one:
I refer to the fat guy statue in a Chinese restaurant as Buddha, and you politely inform me that it’s actually Budai / Hotei. I could apologize for being stupid or I could thank you for making me smarter.
I find that replacing the apology with a “thank you” is offputting. It is good to thank someone for correcting you, but it is improper to do that without acknowledging that you were mistaken before they corrected you. It would be better to thank the other person in addition to… well, not necessarily even apologizing, really, but something like—“ah, my mistake, thank you for the correction”. But merely something like “thank you for the information” seems like a deliberate effort to avoid acknowledging the mistake, and leads one to suspect that you are not being sincere in your response.
Similarly (though less importantly), in a case like this one:
I’m having an absolute garbage day and in the middle of an intellectual discussion with you I start crying. You stop talking, listen to me sympathetically, maybe give me a hug. I could apologize for being a mess or I could thank you for being kind.
It is well to thank your interlocutor for being kind, but I do not see why you shouldn’t also apologize. The two are not mutually exclusive in the least. And avoiding any acknowledgment of the impropriety of your behavior is suspect.
Note, by the way, that combining the apology and the thanks avoids this problem:
When someone asks your pardon or expresses that they feel bad, you’re expected to tell them “it’s okay” or something similar. That means that in my efforts to atone for bothering them, I’ve put another obligation on them — making sure I don’t feel too bad. Thanking them doesn’t do that.[3]
If you say “sorry”, indeed the social script nowadays is to reply with “it’s okay”, which has the problems that the OP describes. But if you say “sorry” and then follow it up with “thanks”, then the other person can reply to the “thanks” (with “you’re welcome”, or some such) and treat the apology as something that requires no response.
(In a case like “I trip and fall, and you help me up. I could apologize for inconveniencing you or I could thank you for helping me.”, the thanks alone is sufficient, because this is such a trivial situation that it really matters very little how you handle it—showing a token degree of acknowledgment, of some sort, is sufficient, and the specifics just don’t make much difference.)
But maybe I am wrong here, and the actual argument is more like: “circumcision is supported by the ScienceTM and this person is an uneducated fool”.
The usual arguments one hears are about cleanliness.
(It’s nonsense, naturally, but that’s the standard response, in my experience.)
The laws of cognition are natural laws. Natural laws cannot possibly “drive towards flourishing” or toward anything else.
Attempting to make the laws of cognition “drive towards flourishing” inevitably breaks them.
XX by Rian Hughes
Recommended, but only the print version. It is absolutely pointless to read it as an ebook—don’t even try. But as a print book it’s really something.
Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie
Outstanding series. Strongly recommended. Classic space opera, philosophical exploration of identity and personhood, excellently written. Some of the best sf I’ve read in a long time.
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
More good old-fashioned space opera. Not quite as satisfying as the previous, but beautifully written. Also recommended.
Silo series by Hugh Howey
I enjoyed several books of this. I think it keeps going? But I have no intention of finding out. I read just enough of this series to have been satisfied with how much of it I have read.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
I absolutely could not stand this book. It seemed like it was written specifically to annoy and disgust the reader. Mission successful, if so—I didn’t even get a quarter of the way through it.
David’s Sling by Marc Stiegler
Mostly of historical interest (it’s mentioned in the Sequences, and it’s somewhat interesting to see what sorts of things people were envisioning, back then, as hoped-for outcomes of successfully developing and spread rationality techniques). Readable enough, but not exceptional, otherwise.
Right, so, that first one is also true of perfectly rational agents, so tells us nothing interesting. (Unless you quantify “they make better decisions when given the truth” as “in expectation” or “on average”, rather than “as events actually turn out”—but in that case I once again doubt the claim as it applies to people you’ve met.)
From my comment above: “small disagreements of opinion may remain, but those can be ironed out on a case-by-case basis through the reasoning and discretion of community leaders (often moderators).”
But these aren’t small disagreements. They’re big disagreements.
I do not see what is being demonstrated, other than precisely the opposite of the notion that norms sketched out in natural language cannot be followed *en masse *or cannot generate the type of culture that promotes such norms to new users (or users just transitioning from being lurkers to generating content of their own).
The SSC case demonstrates precisely that these particular norms, at least, which were sketched out in natural language, cannot be followed en masse or, really, at all, and that (a) trying to enforce them leads to endless arguments (usually started by someone responding to someone else’s comment by demanding to know whether it was kind or necessary—note that the “true” criterion never led to such acrimony!), and (b) the actual result is a steady degradation of comment (and commenter) quality.
The Less Wrong case demonstrates that the whole criterion is unnecessary. (Discussions like this one also demonstrate some other things, but those are secondary.)
Over what is “necessarily” quantified, here? Do you mean:
“… to imply that something other than telling the truth will necessarily lead to them making worse decisions, in every case where they make any decision”?
or:
“… to imply that something other than telling the truth will necessarily lead to them making worse decisions, in every case where I tell them something other than the truth”?
or:
“… to imply that it is necessarily the case that a policy other than telling them the truth will, in expectation, lead to them making worse decisions on average”?
or something else?
I ask because under the first two interpretations, for example, the claim is true even when dealing with perfectly rational agents. But the third claim seems highly questionable if applied to literally all people whom you have met.
Now, how could you possibly know that?
This is one of the rare occasions in which arguing by definition actually works
You then followed this with several empirical claims (one of which was based not on any concrete evidence but just on speculation based on claimed general patterns). No, sorry, arguing by definition does not work here.
It is not that this word is confused … It is overloaded
Well, words can’t really be confused, can they? But yes, the word “necessary” is overloaded, and some or possibly most or maybe even all of its common usages are also vague enough that people who think they’re talking about the same thing can come up with entirely different operationalizations for it, as I have empirically demonstrated, multiple times.
Whether it is “necessary” for someone to point out that some other person is making a particular error … depends on that particular context
That is not the problem. The problem (or rather—again—one of multiple problems) is that even given a fixed context, people easily can, and do, disagree not only on what “necessary” means in that context, but also on whether any given utterance fits that criterion (on which they disagree), and even on the purpose of having the criterion in the first place. This, again, is given some context.
What matters is whether sufficiently many users understand the ideas well enough to behave according to them in practice
It’s pretty clear that they don’t. I mean, we’ve had how many years of SSC, and now ACX (and, to a lesser extent, also DSL and Less Wrong) to demonstrate this?
But, as mentioned above, the mere existence of a counterexample is not close to sufficient to bring the edifice down, and empirically, your confusions are more revealing about yourself and the way your mind works than they are a signal of underlying problems with the general community understanding of these matters; this would be an instance of improperly Generalizing From One Example.
Sorry, no, this doesn’t work. I linked multiple examples of other people disagreeing on what “necessary” means in any given context, including Scott Alexander, who came up with this criterion in the first place, disagreeing with himself about it, in the course of the original post that laid out the concept of moderating according to this criterion!
This discussion started out with a question about what is ideal, not what is allowed by the rules, or any such thing, so legibility of rules and consistency of moderation—important as those things might be—are not the point here.
“What is allowed by the rules”? What rules? There seems to be a different confusion going on in your paragraph here.
Uh… I think you should maybe reread what I’m responding to, there.
To all that stuff about “consequentialism” and “writing down your bottom line”, I will say only that consequentialism is meaningless without values and preferences. I value honesty. I prefer that others with whom I interact do likewise.
Seen by whom?
Seen by the users of the site, at a general level, and in particular the overwhelming majority of lurkers
Now, how could you possibly know that?
you say almost nothing about the “necessary” criterion
This is incorrect as a factual matter. There are 3 crucial moments where the “necessary” criterion came into play in my explanation of the benefits of these norms:
Given that you didn’t actually make clear that any of those things were about the “necessary” condition (indeed you didn’t even mention the word in any of points #2, #3, or #4 in the grandparent—I did check), I think it’s hardly reasonable to call what I said “incorrect as a factual matter”. But never mind that; you’ve clarified your meaning now, I suppose…
Taking your clarification into account, I will say that I find all three of those points to be some combination of incomprehensible, baffling, and profoundly misguided. (I will elaborate if you like, though the details of these disagreements seem to me to be mostly a tangent.)
And when you do mention it, you actually shift, unremarked, between several different versions of it
There does not seem to be a natural boundary that carves reality at the joints in a manner that leaves the different formulations in different boxes, *given the particular context at play here (namely, user interactions in an online community). *From a literal perspective, it is virtually never “necessary” for a random internet person to tell you anything, unless for some reason you desperately need emergency help and they are the only ones that can supply you with the requisite information for you.
Yep. That certain is the problem. And therefore, the conclusion is that this concept is hopelessly confused and not possible to usefully apply in practice—right?
As such, “necessary” and “useful” play virtually the same role in this context. “Helpful” does as well, although it blends in part of (but not the entirety) of the “kindness” rubric that we’ve already gone over.
… I guess not.
Look, you certainly can say “I declare that what I mean by ‘necessary’ is ‘helpful’ and/or ‘useful’”. (Of course then you might find yourself having to field the question of whether “helpful” and “useful” are actually the same thing—but never mind that.) The question is, does everyone involved understand this term “necessary” in the same way?
Empirically: no.
except for possibly the last one, where “The topic or board you are looking for appears to be either missing or off limits to you”
Ah, sorry, that’s indeed a restricted forum. Here’s the post, with appropriate redactions:
https://wiki.obormot.net/Temp/QuotedDSLForumPost
They are the result of a changing and flowing communal understanding of ideas that happens organically instead of in a guided or designed manner.
Precisely the problem (well, one of the several problems, anyhow) is that there is not, in fact, a “communal understanding” of these concepts, but rather a whole bunch of different understandings—and given the words and concepts we’re talking about here, there’s no hope of it ever being otherwise.
Internet moderation
This discussion started out with a question about what is ideal, not what is allowed by the rules, or any such thing, so legibility of rules and consistency of moderation—important as those things might be—are not the point here.
To be clear, it wasn’t my intention to suggest that I expected you to clarify, right here in this comment thread, this concept (or concepts) that you’re using. I don’t expect that would be a good use of your time (and it seems like you agree).
My point, rather, was that it’s really not clear (to me, and I expect—based on many concrete instances of experience!—to many others, also) what these words are being used to mean, whether this is a single concept or multiple concepts, what exactly those concepts are, etc. Quite apart from the concrete question “what does that mean”, the fact that I don’t have even any good guesses about the answer (much less anything resembling certainty) makes the concept in question a poor basis for any evaluation with practical consequences!
I broadly agree with you that this feels like a framework that is often given too much weight, but I also get decent mileage out of the version I described in my comment.
I don’t doubt that, but I do want to point out that a set of criteria applied to oneself, and the same set of criteria applied to others, will have very different consequences.
I feel like LW has varied a surprising amount on how much it values something like the “useful”/”relevant”/”important”/”weightiness”/”seriousness” principal component. LW is not a humor site, and there isn’t a ton of frivolous posting, but we do have a lot of culture and people do have fun a bunch. My current take is that LW does care about this dimension more than most other internet forums, but a lot less than basically all professional forums or scientific journals or anything in that reference class.
Part of the problem (not the entirety of it by any means, but a substantial part) is that the claim that these things (‘“useful”/”relevant”/”important”/”weightiness”/”seriousness”’) are somehow one thing is… extremely non-obvious. To me they seem like several different things. I don’t even really know what you mean by any of them (I can make some very general guesses, but who knows if my guesses are even close to what you’ve got in mind?), and I definitely don’t have the first clue how to interpret them as some kind of single thing.
(Really there are so many problems with this whole “kind/true/necessary, pick 2” thing that it seems like if I start listing them, we’ll be here all day. Maybe a big part of the problem is that I’ve never seen it persuasively—or even seriously—defended, and yet it’s routinely cited as if it’s just an uncontroversially good framework. It seems like one of those things that has so much intuitive appeal that most people simply refuse to give it any real thought, no matter how many and how serious are the problems that it is demonstrated to have, because they so strongly don’t want to abandon it. I do not include you among that number, to be clear.)
There is also the reverse question, regarding “why is it okay for a statement to be helpful and kind, if it in fact is not true?” … I suspect you would likely say this is not okay, for reasons of Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies and because of a general feeling that telling the truth is simply more dignified than optimizing for anything else.
Knowingly saying things that are not true is bad, yes. (It might be good sometimes… when communicating with enemies. There’s a reason why the classic thought experiment asks whether you would lie to the Gestapo!) I don’t see any even somewhat plausible justification for doing such things in a discussion on Less Wrong. There is no need to reach for things like “dignity” here… are we really having the “is posting lies on Less Wrong bad, actually? what if it’s good?” discussion?
This deals mostly with white lies or other good-faith actions and comments by users to help others, and it is generally seen as bad to punish thoughtful attempts to be kind (as that predictably reduces the overall level of kindness in the interactions community members have, which is bad as per the discussion above).
Seen by whom? I certainly hope that nobody here on LW thinks that it’s bad to punish “thoughtful attempts to be kind” that involve lying. Do you think that?!
In any case, I can’t help but notice that you spend a lot of time discussing the “kind” criterion, approximately one paragraph (and a rather baffling one, at that) on the “true” criterion, but you say almost nothing about the “necessary” criterion. And when you do mention it, you actually shift, unremarked, between several different versions of it:
necessary/useful
Right away we’ve got confusion. What’s the criterion—“necessary”, or “useful”? Or either? Or both? These are two very different concepts!
necessary/helpful
Now we’ve added “helpful” to the mix. This again is different from both “necessary” and “useful”.
And what do any of these things mean, anyhow? What is “necessary”? What is “useful”? Who decides, and how? (Ditto for “kind”, although that one is at least more obviously vague and prone to subjectivity of interpretation, and enough has been said about that already.)
In any case, I’ve written about this problem before. Nothing’s changed since then. “Don’t post falsehoods” is a good rule (with common-sense elaborations like “if it’s demonstrated that something you thought was true is actually false, post a correction”, etc.). This stuff about “kind”, on the other hand, much less “necessary” (or “useful” or any such thing)… Well, let me put it this way: when anyone can give anything like a coherent, consistent, practically applicable definition of any of these things, then I’ll consider whether it might possibly be a good idea to take them as ideals. (To say nothing of elevating them to rule status—which, at least, Less Wrong has not done. Thankfully.)
Ideally, statements should be at least two of true, necessary/useful, and kind.
Why is that ideal?
This quiz rated the WoW raiding guild that I was a member of as 7% cult. Hmm. Seems a bit excessive?
The biggest contributor to that score was, I assume, the “current leader is also the founder” question, but… that seems like a crazy criterion. So any organization that anyone ever starts is automatically thereby cult-like…?
Whatever is meant by the term “cult” here, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with what most people mean by said term…
aeronautical engineering stopped advancing very suddenly in 1972, and even regressed somewhat
What is this referring to? What happened in 1972…?
Additional recommendations (no YouTube links, sorry—maybe others can find some):
Gentlemen of Fortune (Daneliya)
Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures (Gaidai)
White Sun of the Desert (Vladimir Motyl) … well, this one isn’t technically a comedy, but it’s not entirely serious, either. Plenty of comedic elements, certainly.
Animation:
Town Musicians of Bremen (YouTube links at the TV Tropes link. Bonus: if you’ve seen almost any of Gaidai’s films, you’ll find a certain trio of characters in this one to be quite familiar…)
Karlsson-on-the-Roof (Adaptation of a series of children’s books by Astrid Lindgren)
Trivia: this movie is very loosely based on the Strugatsky brothers’ Monday Begins on Saturday.
Do you have some textual information about what this is about…?
I like that Simplicia isn’t being overconfident here, but is his position
Note that the correct pronoun here should be “her”, because Simplicia is using the feminine form of the patronymic. (I wouldn’t normally make this correction, but in this case I believe that some readers may not be familiar enough with Slavic naming conventions to pick up this textual cue.)
I mean, yes, but having that preference gives them no special advantage relative to not having it.
But of course it does! It grants them a reason to seek to have the preference satisfied, which is an advantage if (a) having the preference satisfied is a sufficiently superior state to not having the preference at all, and (b) conditional on having the preference, satisfaction is sufficiently likely.
(Basically all of this is explained in the previously-linked Vladimir_M comments, so I do encourage you to reread them if you haven’t done so.)
Suppose that I have a gluten intolerance and need to have gluten-free food available. It’s of course true that getting to have gluten-free food is now a distinct advantage to me, compared to a scenario where I couldn’t get gluten-free food. But the fact that I have a gluten intolerance doesn’t make me better off overall. If I get accommodated, then at best I get to the same neutral level of “can eat food without getting terrible symptoms” that everyone else is at. And more realistically, I won’t even get to that zero level but rather will sometimes accidentally eat food with gluten, will miss out on tasty foods I’d enjoy, etc., so it’d be better for me to not have the intolerance.
On the contrary, it is not only plausible but very easy to end up in a superior end state in this scenario. Suppose that having gluten-free food provided for you is costly and difficult, and that you can convince or otherwise cause others to expend their resources on providing you with gluten-free food. This is a signal of your social status, clearly visible to anyone who observes such behavioral interactions. And, in turn, there are many, many situations when an even relatively small advantage in social status is more important (by any relevant measure) than an even quite substantial loss in sensory pleasure from food. (I trust that no examples are needed to illustrate this general point.)
In such a case, it would indeed be better for you to have the gluten intolerance than not to have it.
Note that this logic predicts that we should see people who don’t actually have gluten intolerance, to pretend to do so (as any status signal will attract imitators/fakers). And indeed this is precisely what we do see.
Likewise, if someone gets terribly upset about being told “you’re wrong”, then if that’s accommodated, at best they get to the same zero level as everyone who doesn’t get terribly upset about it. And it’s more likely that they won’t get perfectly accommodated, so not only will they gain nothing, but will also need to endure discomfort they wouldn’t need to endure if they didn’t have that sensitivity. So if they don’t already have that pre-existing sensitivity, there’s no incentive for them to develop it.
The above logic applies here too. (And this is definitely, and very comprehensively, treated in the linked discussion thread…)
I do not think that this is the least bit warranted.
Why not? I know plenty of otherwise intelligent, creative etc. people who also have serious mental health problems.
That is not the correct question. The correct question is whether, on average, such people are equally good students to people without such serious mental problems (“such”, note; mental health problems, serious or no, are not monolithic, nor uniform in their effects on academic performance), or better, or worse. (And remember that we are not comparing to general population averages here, but to the population subsets selected for going to college!)
For your assumption to be warranted, it would have to be the case that someone who has a mental breakdown when told that they’re wrong would, if accommodated for that particular disability, be about as good a student on average as… well, the average student. This is highly implausible. (For one thing, remember that mental disorders are highly correlated with one another!)
That’s true. Though if these people have difficulty making accommodations that would make some of their students significantly better off, then that seems to me like evidence that they’re not among the best teachers, and that it might be good to select against them.
On the contrary, it is nothing of the sort. The best teachers are those who are best at teaching, period. Making accommodations for mental illness is, at best, orthogonal to this. If one teacher is better at teaching than another, that’s that.
Also this bit sounds like we are now talking about something like… what university-level policies should be like, and while that’s not an unreasonable direction to be going in, I was originally thinking of this just as a discussion of the choices of this particular teacher. It seems to me like one should first get on the same page about whether his specific decision was good or bad, before trying to consider possible policy implications. (Since it can be that a particular choice made individually is good or bad, but trying to create an institution-wide policy that everyone/no-one should make the same choice has unintended effects; but one can’t talk about the policy-level tradeoffs before first knowing what the effects on the individual level are.)
Sorry, but I do not find this plausible. The quoted original post is very clearly advocating for people to do as he describes himself doing.
What’s more, in such a case, the choices of any particular teacher are, in fact, effectively part of the university’s policies, if they affect other students. We do not know for a fact whether that’s so, but my examples show, I think, that it’s hard for them to avoid doing so.
It’s easy to generate lots of “what ifs”, but a long list of them doesn’t mean they’d be hard to answer in practice. Your first two questions in particular seem to me to have obvious answers—automatically extending the policy to all students only makes sense, but if someone explicitly wants to know if they are wrong or not, then they presumably won’t mind being told if they are.
Ah, and so you demonstrate the point I just made. Now we’ve got a situation where the accommodations granted to one student immediately and substantially degrade the clarity of communication to all the other students. Having made what is allegedly just a personal choice on one teacher’s part, we’ve barely started exploring the consequences and we’re already into “making the learning environment worse for everyone” territory!
On my Facebook wall where I originally shared this post, various people chimed in with their experiences from either teaching or work, and several mentioned that this wouldn’t really come up for them because they had never had a reason to tell anyone “you’re wrong” anyway.
I’m not surprised that it’s easy to find any number of anecdotes like this. (Although I was particularly amused by “My academic field is history, if that matters”—oh, I’d say it matters quite a bit!) But what is the use of such things? I can recall plenty of times where my teachers have said “that’s wrong” or “you’re wrong”, where my college professors have said such things, my coworkers to me or to each other, my bosses to me or to my coworkers, and of course I to various people… but what does any of this prove? Only that people’s experience is different…
While not everyone agreed, many people seemed to have the position that avoiding “you’re wrong”-type language is just a net improvement and that they’ve never ran into a situation where one would need to use it (and I think at least some of those people do also work in fields with people on the spectrum). This also matches my own experience, and makes me skeptical of how likely it is for any of your scenarios to turn out to be a problem in practice.
I find this position to be wildly implausible. A net improvement, really? I’m sorry, but this does not pass the smell test… and as I said, I have encountered scenarios similar to those which I have described, many times.
… applying the same policy to all students would likely also make several others feel more comfortable.
This is possible. Does it outweigh the downsides? It seems to me that it can’t even plausibly begin to do so.
In any case, it would seem bad to me if this teacher, in considering whether to grant the request, would conclude that he has to deny it because of some complicated hypothetical scenario that assumed other students reacted in very specific ways. Given that it’s also very plausible that none of that happens and everything goes just fine.
Indeed, the teacher should not deny the request for such a reason. He should deny the request on far more general principles than that, namely that (a) that there are many possible ways for other students to react that would impose serious costs and cause detrimental effects, (b) the very predictable (and not at all hypothetical) effects of granting the request would be bad even aside from any specific reactions on the part of any specific students, and (c) the incentives created by granting the request would be far-reaching and almost universally bad.
(There is also an even more general principle, which is that the default response to any requests that one change one’s behavior in order to mitigate some supposed problem that someone else is having, should be “no”. Of course, in this particular case we have many more specific reasons to respond in the negative, but still this is a solid default, and well worth keeping in mind, because the aforementioned specific reasons exhibit patterns which recur in many other circumstances.)
It is of course possible that some major unexpected cost comes up, but if that happens, he can consider them and then shift his approach accordingly.
Can he? One of the effects of having such requests granted is the creation of precedent, and the shifting of the Overton window. In other words, decisions like this exhibit hysteresis. This is yet another of the many dangers and downsides of granting requests like this: you limit your ability to say “no” in the future, and restrict not only your own future choices, but those of your colleagues, etc.
Grant such a request once, and you will find very quickly that you have incurred an obligation.
(Of course, I am quite sure that the author of the quoted original post is well aware of this, and indeed that this is his explicit goal. But that just gives us another reason to resist such advocacy!)
I have a hard time seeing this as particularly problematic, given the previously mentioned view that saying “you’re wrong” just doesn’t seem to be necessary in general. “Having your brain automatically flinch away from” something sounds bad if you phrase it like that, but part of the process of acquiring any skill is to learn to automatically flinch away from performing the skill in a bad way. Similarly, if there’s little reason to ever say “you’re wrong” while there are good reasons to avoid it, then I see this less as distorting cognition and more as optimizing it (or more specifically optimizing the skill of good communication).
I’m sorry, but this reads to me like naked Dark Arts. Having your brain flinch away from thinking “that’s wrong” when you hear something that is wrong is disastrous—the worst kind of cognitive distortion. We should be doing everything in our power to identify and root out such flinches, not encouraging them!
(This is a somewhat personal topic for me, as I have a close relative who had to drop out of university due to mental health problems and ultimately ended up on an early disability pension when they would have preferred to be working. And things wouldn’t have needed to go very differently for something similar to happen to me.)
That’s unfortunate for your relative, of course, and they have my sympathies. But I don’t think anyone would call it implausible that this person would’ve benefited from being granted accommodations for their difficulties. The question is what this would cost their professors, the other students, society in general, etc.
You could in theory make several arguments here, and you seem to be making some of them—but it’s not clear which and when. You could say:
(a) It would cost the professors / other students / society so little to accommodate your relative that, on altruistic grounds, we should do this, because the benefit to the accommodated person is so great and the total cost is so low.
(b) The professors / other students may pay a non-trivial cost to accommodate your relative, but this is outweighed by the benefit to society from having this person be accommodated, so we should do it (which is to say, we should force any unwilling cost-bearers to bear the cost against their wishes, as a form of redistribution of resources).
(c) The professors, the other students, and society would all benefit from accommodating your relative, so we should obviously do it because it’s good for everyone.
(d) The professors / other students / society may pay a non-trivial cost to accommodate your relative, but we should do it anyway, because… something. (Social justice?)
Argument (d) seems hard to justify morally. Argument (c) is very implausible empirically. Argument (b) also seems hard to justify morally, but perhaps marginally less so than (d). Argument (a) also seems implausible empirically, as I’ve already discussed.
So my view is that it’s bad to take an “ignore/deny” type approach because the selective effects have an overall negative composition on both the student body of that particular school, as well as on the composition of society in general.
How can this be true? Why is it better to have the student body contain students who have this sort of mental disability, than to not have the student body contain such students?
I have described some of the costs and negative effects of such a thing. But here you seem to be saying not merely that the costs and negative effects are very low, but that actually there are benefits? What could they be…?
Meanwhile I’m more focused on the people who wouldn’t have an incentive to make these kinds of requests, if not for the fact that their trauma makes it excessively costly for them to not have their requests accommodated. It’s not even the case that, as your link to the Vladimir_M comment implies, that they have developed this as an unconscious strategy for getting something that makes them better off. Having this problem just makes them worse off.
I am not sure why you say this. Why do you say that such people can’t be getting something that makes them better off? If they successfully get their preferences (a.k.a. “needs”, etc.) acknowledged and accommodated, that is a distinct advantage relative to the base case where they are just a regular person with no special needs! This seems very obvious!
If such people make requests that are low-cost for us to grant, while very costly for them if we do not grant them, that has the consequence of making it significantly costlier and harder for them to graduate. And even if they do manage to graduate, it may make it significantly harder for them to overcome their problems later in life. So then one selective effect is that the school as a whole loses people who would otherwise have been good students. But also on a broader level, society as a whole suffers as these people become increasingly worse off and less capable of contributing, when a more accommodating policy could have allowed them to thrive.
This seems to be making the assumption that such people (on average) “would otherwise have been good students”. I do not think that this is the least bit warranted.
Additionally, this perspective suffers from the problem of “the seen vs. the unseen”. The student who needs such an accommodation is taking the place of the student who doesn’t. Which of them is more likely to be a good student generally, and to contribute to society later? I think it’s clear that it’s the latter.
Casting such accommodations as improvements in the expected social benefit provided by the university is just not remotely plausible.
You’re thinking about the selective view in a way that focuses on people who have the incentive to make these kinds of requests.
Sorry, but I think you’re somewhat misunderstanding me. The incentive to make such requests is one part of the selective view. But it’s not the only part. “What will the student body be like if we [ do / don’t ] adopt a policy of granting such accommodations” is a question that can coherently be asked (and which has a non-trivial answer) even if we totally set aside questions of incentives!
Okay. In that case I’m not sure why you say that my commentary is dismissing the selective ways of looking at the issue. When I wrote it, the two options I had in mind were “agree to the request” or “deny/ignore the request”. (I mean, I did “dismiss” the selective ways in the sense that I thought they’d be a bad way of dealing with the issue, but I interpret you to have meant “dismiss” in the sense of “not consider at all”.)
Because you talk quite a bit about what will or will not fix this student’s problem, whether it is easy or hard for this student to “get over it”, how long it would take for this student to fix the problem, what this student’s experience is like, etc., etc. (Likewise the author of the quoted original post.)
These concerns all belong to a corrective view. From a selective view, all of them are irrelevant. What is relevant instead is questions like: supposing that we adopt a policy of granting such requests, what will the student body (likewise: the class, the results of the course, etc.) be like? If we adopt a policy of not granting such requests, what will said things be like? And so on.
So, you say that you thought that selective ways would be a bad way of dealing with the issue. Well, that’s a perfectly coherent view. But it needs to be argued for, not just left as a totally unstated background assumption.
But in this particular case, at least her teacher seemed to think that it was, if not literally costless, then a very small cost.
I would not conclude this from the quoted post. I would conclude only that this person found it prudent or desirable to make a Facebook post that claimed such things. While there is surely a correlation between these two things, it is not nearly strong enough to allow us to treat them as identical.
(And, in this particular case, the post is strongly performative in tone, further weakening said correlation.)
And if I was in his position, I think it would be a very negligible cost for me to implement. Remembering to use different language would take a little bit of effort at first, but then become automatic very quickly.
For one thing, cognitive costs of alterations like this vary across individuals. Some may find such adjustments as easy as you describe them being for you; others will not. Instituting a policy of making, and requiring, such adjustments, selects against the latter sort of individual. (There’s that selective view again!)
Some of my best teachers, instructors, professors, etc. have seemed very much like the latter sort. I find this unlikely to be coincidence.
For another thing, some obvious questions we could ask would be: ok, so you’re going to not ever tell this student that she’s wrong. Are you also not going to tell the other students that they’re wrong? What if they ask you “so, am I wrong about this?”, or “so, is this wrong?”? What if they ask you “so, what so-and-so just said—that’s wrong, isn’t it?” You might be tempted to describe various evasions which you could use, but now suppose that another student is (again, to take just one possible example) on the autism spectrum, and has a difficult time understanding euphemisms, indirection, etc.? Suppose that they’re not a native speaker? Suppose that they’re on the spectrum and they’re not a native speaker?
(It took me barely a minute to come up with this example. And it’s far from being unrealistic—I can tell you that from personal experience! How many other such “competing access needs” scenarios are induced by granting this one “almost costless” accommodation?)
What if one of the other students tells this student that she’s wrong? Must you now police the speech of your students for this particular linguistic landmine, in addition to your own speech?
What if someone of your students are (like the professors described earlier) the sorts of people who find it difficult to “adjust” their language in this manner?
In short, it is very easy to say that making some adjustment would be nearly costless. It is quite another thing to actually consider all the costs. This is doubly so because there are considerable incentives (!) to make such claims.
And I haven’t even gotten to the distortionary effect on your own cognition, from not just avoiding such straightforward constructions as “you’re wrong” (and similar), but automatically avoiding them! Perhaps one could make an argument that having your brain automatically flinch away from responding to a clearly wrong statement with “that’s wrong” is not as bad as it sounds… but that certainly wouldn’t be the way I’d bet.
(I’m again assuming that the request can be incorporated while still delivering all of the teaching and grading etc. essentially unchanged. If it was the case that she couldn’t easily be corrected on mistakes in assignments or something similar, that would substantially change my position.)
Well, that’s certainly an assumption, yes…
I agree. I did not mean to argue for a blanket policy of granting all requested accommodations, nor did I interpret the original poster to be arguing for that.
I believe that you did not mean to argue for such a blanket policy, but I do not believe for a moment that the original poster wasn’t.
Would the selective approach in this case be something like “ignore the request and let them drop out if they can’t handle that”, or something else?
Yep. (Of course “ignore” can be finessed, but you’ve certainly got the gist of it.)
(I will also note that the strategy is “ignore the request”; “let them drop out if they can’t handle that” sneaks in a model of the consequences. It is not an entirely unreasonable model, but it’s certainly not the only plausible one. We should be very wary of privileging one possibility in such cases.)
I agree that there are definite incentive problems to take into account. However in this specific case, where the cost of accommodation is basically zero (just using slightly different language), I don’t think they’re an issue.
I strongly disagree with your evaluation of the cost, and am surprised to see you make such a claim. Surely you must know that “just” using (“slightly”) different language is far from costless?
As for incentives, you pay lip service to them, but I don’t think you are taking them at all seriously. Assume the cost of one accommodation to be “basically zero”. It does not follow from this that the expected total cost of all requested accommodations, conditional on the policy of “grant requested accommodations” being instituted, will be “basically zero”, or even “less than astronomical”. (Indeed, we can observe that such an optimistic prediction turns out to be manifestly false.)
(Quite often, the second-order consequences, the effects of incentive gradients, etc., are the downsides of some proposed policy. Saying “but incentives aside…” is the equivalent of the proverbial “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”.)
On the “student with a trauma history” thing:
The commentary (both the quote of the original, and your own) seems to entirely dismiss the possibility of selective ways of looking at the issue, opting to only consider corrective approaches (which indeed are unlikely to work) and (in a rather one-sided way) structural approaches. This seems to me to be a huge blind spot.
My own view is that the analysis given in the original source is extremely bad, and the approach described therein creates horrible incentives, in ways well understood. The world absolutely is worse because the student in question declares a need for accommodation, and gets it.
Ignoring selective dynamics prevents you from seeing how these negative consequences could be possible even in principle (never mind whether they occur true in practice). Seems bad.
I also use Brave and it is fine. I am not sure what makes it “the Firefox of Chromiums”, but I don’t have any particular complaints about it, anyhow.