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Furcas comments on A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness - Less Wrong
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It kind of is: I wouldn't want to be mistaken for one of those people.
Also, I wouldn't want anyone to refrain from criticizing me for fear of sounding like a strident jerk.
I have hesitated to criticize you beyond a certain point in the past because you have often come across as mean, and because I expected such criticism to result in that being aimed at me. If you do not want people to hesitate to criticize you, perhaps you should be nice.
You can declare "Crocker's rules" and officially free other debaters from the burden of taking your fragile ego^H^H^Hfeeeeeeeelinggggs into account. [1] [2]
Tolerating 'official' trollishness (the option I proposed in my reply), while extremely effective, is a far more radical policy which should be reserved for blatant errors, obvious bad faith and the like. (It's much better than the default policy, which involves authoritarian warnings followed by adminstrative deletions and bans)
[1] That's the way it works in theory; in practice, declaring Crocker's Rules is all too often seen as a trollish and unpolite strategy. So your orignal post still has some merit.
[2] ETA: It should be noted that declaring Crocker's rules does not entitle you to be mean to other commenters. Most importantly, it does not entitle you to challenge the norm of being generally nice to one another. IMHO, your exchange with Alicorn shows the superiority of CR properly understood over the naïve symmetrist approach.
Alicorn was recommending niceness as a less wrong norm. We all know you're not one of those people and we won't refrain from criticizing your for fear of sounding like a jerk.
I thought she was recommending niceness to LWers and people from "communities similar to ours" no matter where we are.
My own spotless reputation aside, I've noticed that discussion forums where everyone tries to be "nice" tend to degenerate into places where all criticism has to be phrased meekly and thus forthright criticism becomes impossible.
Sometimes, a spade has to be called a spade, and a moron has to be called a moron.
These rules are not of a kind. In the former case, you have something that's indisputably a (shovel|playing card suit) and call it by its name. In the latter case, you likely don't have very solid grounds for identifying a person as a 'moron' (we're talking about Internet exchanges, right?) and the term isn't very well-defined in the first place.
If you're administering early 20th-century IQ tests then you have good reason to be calling people morons; otherwise, no.
A spade has to be called a spade, but when does a moron have to be called a moron?
Either other people are convinced by Moron's arguments, in which case you have to actually address them, and calling them a moron will only stand in the way. Or, no-one is, in which case if you've written off convincing Moron themselves, then there is simply no point in addressing them.
The role that you write for yourself is one I find very appealing - the guy who Tells It Like It Is - but I'm a long way from being convinced that it will maximise our tendency towards accurate conclusions.
In my experience very few people will listen to an argument after the person presenting the argument has called them stupid. When you call somebody a moron, then i expect that you've drastically reduced the chances that this person will listen to you.
In other words, the action of calling someone a moron takes convincing the target off of the table, if you haven't done that already.
My guess is that, when you call you're in a debate and you call your opponent stupid, it's mainly for the benefit of the people who already agree with you; the main purpose is probably designating "which side you're on" rather than convincing anyone who disagrees. This reminds me of the line of retreat idea -- it's easier for people to change their minds if they can do so without calling themselves stupid.
I wonder what effects being imaginary has on how you deal with the simulation hypothesis.
Calling a particular remark or behavior moronic seems sometimes necessary; I fail to see how it is helpful to characterize a person as a moron.
Most of the time this type of insult is false to fact: your interlocutors are not, in fact, mentally retarded, they are merely wrong. Sometimes obstinately wrong, sometimes wrong in ways actively harmful to themselves and others; but experience proves beyond doubt that this happens to people of average and higher intelligence.
Calling someone a moron is designed to provoke them, and signal something to other readers; it serves no useful discursive purpose.
That no one is convinced by Moron's arguments doesn't mean that everyone has realized the true nature of Moron and his arguments. For example, there are many people who accept evolution but who see creationists as reasonable people whom they disagree with, rather than as the deluded ignoramuses that they usually are. Being too nice to idiots and crazies gives the impression that they are merely mistaken, rather than idiotic or crazy.
It's still counterproductive. The trouble is, creationists are not crazy - not in the way that most people you might like to persuade would recognise. Creationism is crazy. Many people have trouble grasping that sane people can believe crazy things - and by calling the people crazy, you blur that understanding. This is in addition to the general bad effects documented in the post from calling people crazy.
The same applies to calling them stupid, only even more so.
I don't think you've understood my comment.
I agree that sane people can believe crazy things, because everyone makes mistakes. The point expressed in the comment you've replied to is that, at least for adults living in the West, creationism is not merely a mistake.
In other words, I'm not saying that creationists are crazy because they believe something that's contradicted by the evidence and is therefore very, very unlikely to be true. I'm saying they're crazy because the thought processes that have kept them from rejecting creationism (after going off to college, say) are profoundly anti-rational. Isn't having profoundly anti-rational thought processes a common definition of insanity?
I guess you could argue that creationists are only crazy in one part of their lives, not in all of it. Well, okay. I might point out that some mafiosi are only evil in one part of their lives, but are perfectly nice people the rest of the time, and yet we still consider them evil.
Most creationists (and tasseomancers, spiritual healers, and so forth) are crazy, not just mistaken, and pretending otherwise for the sake of niceness is what's counterproductive, at least in the long run.
In these cases a rationalist has to choose between trying to convert the creationist (extremely unlikely, especially with onlookers) or demonstrating to onlookers that the creationist is an idiot and his views should be ignored. In most situations I would prioritize the latter. In these cases whether to be nice or not just depends on whether or not the on lookers will be okay with it. If they respect you already then being mean and insulting might make a lot of sense. If you are still trying to win the onlookers over being mean could turn them off.
Related: Is arguing for the audience instead of your interlocutor a dark art?
The only way you can reasonably hope to accomplish much by publicly arguing with a creationist is to go for the audience, not the creationist with whom you're arguing. A lot of people don't seem to realize this, and they see arguing with creationists as pointless because the creationist won't be convinced. My experience suggests that you can sway the peanut gallery by making creationists look stupid.
The key to making creationists look stupid in public seems to be remaining calm and ostensibly polite (but making your comments increasingly barbed) while the creationist loses his cool and becomes more and more unhinged, and the audience cringes at the now-obvious lunacy and ignorance. You score points if you can do this without profanity or direct insult, which is surprisingly easy on the internet, where you can look up facts and work on your phrasing. I'm not sure where this fits on the spectrum of niceness; it's not rude, per se, but it's sure ugly.
That would be the fine art of being simultaneously meticulously polite and not at all nice, and is a subtle yet brutally effective way of tilting an audience in your favor completely independently of the soundness of your argument. Being good at reading someone well enough to figure out how to push their buttons without the audience noticing helps, as does having an opponent predisposed to being obnoxious/deranged/etc.
It's worth noting that professional creationists (and other intelligent people out promoting ideologies) tend to be very good at this, because it is effective, and acting angry/rude to them is a good way to "lose" an argument even when correct.
Are we really not capable of being nice and forthright when possible and forthright when we can't be nice?
I'm not sure what you mean. We can always be nice. You could compliment your torturer on his technique until you draw your last breath. When should we stop sacrificing forthrightness for niceness, in your opinion?
Oh, I see what happened. There is an implicature you missed. But you're right, it's kind of confusing. How about this: "Are we really not capable of being nice and forthright when possible and forthright when we can't be both?"
Sorry, I still don't understand.
Do you mean that we should be more generous with true compliments, but not hold back criticism that could hurt our interlocutor's feelings?
You can often give criticism and be nice. We should do that whenever possible. If it isn't possible to share the criticism without being mean then, by all means, be mean. Being nice is a good thing. But it isn't as important as sharing criticism. So don't sacrifice the latter for the former.
Okay, I get it. Thanks for your patience.
I think some people aren't capable of this, actually. I think some people find it extremely difficult to formulate forthright criticism after the "be nice" ethos has been driven into them and the community they're part of.
This hypothesis ("some people find it extremely difficult, etc.") seems awfully vague to me, i.e. hard to disprove.
Can you give an example of a community which comprises such people, who find it difficult to criticize others because "the 'be nice' ethos has been driven into them" ? I find that people in general will criticize others all too easily.
What I suspect - and this may be a legitimate argument against "niceness" - is that it could be slightly too convenient an excuse that someone is being "nice" to avoid criticizing themselves very harshly. As such, I can see how "being nice" could turn out to be a source of bias.
However, it would be easily countered in an individual by adopting an attitude of "be nice to others, unforgiving to myself". This would even be compatible with Crocker's Rules.
The one thing that might worry me (and I worry that I've seen it firsthand) is "niceness" as a favorable breeding ground for group self-validation.
I think we would be better advised to address this directly than to give up on niceness.
I won't deny that this particular attractor exists; that's why I think some degree of trollishness cannot be avoided. It would be enough if a fraction of members voluntarily adopt Crocker's Rules and serve as free targets for vigorous debate. These users would have to be largely uninterested in conventional status, since low status would be integral to their role.
However, we could take this idea to the extreme and award the lowest status to people with the best truth-seeking record and to the people who technically control the site; these people would be the "lowest troll(s)" and 'officially' heckle misguided and dishonest commenters who could not be discouraged by nicer means. The idea is that a ban (as a last resort) could afterwards be considered "fair", since it would be less affected by ostracizing, ingroups/outgroups and other spurious "community" dynamics.
One of the reasons I take the front line against trolls is a sense that no one else would dare to do so. I'm not sure what you're talking about above, but it sounds similar.
No one else has the technical capability to do so. Even with timely downvoting, there is still some air time and responses, and the worst cases so far were taking advantage of that. The situations resolved themselves only after comment-deleting, not after determination that the person is a troll.
I'd be tempted to volunteer, if we decided to go that route, but I don't think I want to (or would be able to, without sacrificing in other areas) devote that kind of energy to the site.
I used to be a member of a forum that basically used that method - one of the moderators had a well-deserved reputation for being very willing to get into fights and not at all concerned with politeness, and she'd generally jump into a given situation after at least one of the other mods had commented on it. It seemed to work very well, and was definitely entertaining and educational. (The forum is here if anyone's curious; I don't remember the name of the mod, and I'm actually not sure she's still there; it's been about 5 or 6 years since I was there.)