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wedrifid comments on Selecting optimal group projects and roles - Less Wrong
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Comments (28)
Where? And was it systematically rejected or accepted as a reasonable general conclusion?
This does not sound like something that would be accepted by the lesswrong community (including PUA advocates) as anything but plainly false. I expect instances of this claim to be significantly subzero in votes.
Links would be useful.
I think reading charitably leads to a less plausible but still not too unlikely somewhat legitimate purpose served by the examples as they are written.
Saying what the most extreme thing was that has been expressed without being totally shouted down sets an outer bound for what is considered normal, and adjusting inward from that would give a decent approximation of the most important thing we want to know: what mainstream LW thinks.
Nonetheless, it is bad form if so, as it is an attempt to use the dark art of the anchoring bias by starting from the most extreme thing not shouted down.
Likewise, but some posts are "hot topics" garnering many pluses and minuses - I've had a few and noticed that. Others conservatively plod along, never worth an upvote. It would be good to know not just the net vote but the numbers in each direction, knowing the net vote would be very important but it wouldn't tell us all we want to know. A position enthusiastically supported by a large minority and opposed by a slightly larger majority is still mainstream.
The next step is clearly links, to judge what exactly we are talking about. Are we keeping slaves to pick our cotton, or are we failing to study the etymology of each word we use to ensure it has a non-racist history before we utter it? Or, where in the middle of those two extremes are we, approximately?
Is that even the case here? I haven't seen the claims in question made at all, whether downvoted or not. I refrained from replying with "I don't believe you" out of politeness and because I know that I don't have an exhaustive and perfectly indexed database of all lesswrong comments stored in my brain. All I can know is that the claims are blatant straw men to the extent that they are presented as memes actually present in lesswrong culture. So I predict with some confidence that even if they do actually exist in comments that they are treated as trolling.
I'm likewise handicapped, so I have just googled "site:lesswrong.com cusithbell pua", as I thought it likely that the claim, upon being seen, would be responded to.
This was something CuSithBell did see and not construct as a straw man, but it is something someone else constructed as an interpretation of what she read.
An OP said:
The heavily upvoted reply:
1) PUA stuff is hardly the only example out there of "explicit awareness of social reality".
2) It's quite telling that the implication of the post is that "women don't like explicit awareness of social reality", rather than the (more accurate) "women don't like PUA".
The post linked to includes:
The commenter later says:
I'm going to temporarily limit my editorialization to the framing of the quotations due to time constraints.
There was a third alternative: someone else interpreted quite uncharitably, it is arguable whether that interpretation identified the most likely implication of an actual comment, and unarguable that fairly probable benign interpretations exist, but the cited claim did in fact play a prominent role in the discussion and is certainly not CuSithBell's straw man.
CuSith responding as though such claims were made here is something that is in my mental database. It is the claims themselves that I hadn't seen.
(That's not a third alternative in any false-dichotamy sense - it's a subset of "not existing". I do agree that it is worth mentioning and making more distinct!)
This seems likely and it is also something I consider a real problem. The commenter that you left nameless is no doubt well meaning, as is CuSith. Yet via "interpretation" mentioned by the unnamed then some added overgeneralizations by CuSith we end up with a rather brutal false accusation directed at lesswrongians. That's just not-ok. Even though it is not malicious or even dishonest (beyond typical creative exaggeration) it is negligent and a harsh enough misrepresentation that it could legitimately be considered offensive.
A lot of conflict could be avoided if allegations about beliefs and expressions thereof were backed up by links or citations. Then we could actually tackle any remaining offensive beliefs or misconceptions rather than getting worked up over Chineese Whipsers! (Is that term considered politically incorrect yet or is China too 'outgroup' to have gained careful-word-use privileges? If I used the variant 'broken telephone' would people still understand the meaning?)
One stopgap solution would be to have a standardized response for accusations like that.
"You accused but did not provide evidence, which does not show supporting evidence does not exist, though it is evidence supporting evidence does not exist, so your unsubstantiated argument makes me think your position less likely to be true than I had originally."
YABDNPE
I think we need to think seriously about how to think about interpretations. Right now, I think most people (I might be projecting) try to first figure out what was most likely meant, and then adjust that a bit as their duty of reading others charitably, and take the output of that as their tentative interpretation.
I think we should break it down. We should automatically produce a most charitable interpretation we can think of, as well as a distinct estimate of the most likely original intent, and we should be well-calibrated to accurately estimate the chance that the circumstance has an explanation unlike any we're thinking of. As important features of interpreting charitably, we need to 1) bear in mind that others' charitable readings are according to different value sets than ours and 2) bear in mind our imaginations that are attempting to come up with most charitable interpretations with is limited.
An example of 1) would be for the woman who sued the airline over its flight attendant using a variant on a popular nursery rhyme that has an original racist, if obscure, version. For me, judging favorably means seriously considering how she might not believe a word of the philosophy underlying her case, and just have made it in an attempt to get money. For others, my saying this might sound indicting - how dare you accuse her of dishonesty and greed! To me, actually believing she had been wronged would be more unflattering.. This is very important if we try to foster a community of charitable interpretation by perhaps addressing others' possible non-charitable interpretation but not accusing others of poor interpretation..
I think it corrects for why political correctness can become a lost purpose: to ensure we don't wrongly think unduly badly of others, a system of criticizing people who appear to do so is put in place that encourages us to call out people when a plausible, if perhaps unintended, interpretation of their words is that they judge people unfairly.
The solution of judging others favorably can't survive as a meme by slapping down other modes of interpretation, if it tries it will be subverted, so it will take positive good will and praise, not condemnation, to spread it.
Item 2) deals with unknown unknowns, the argument from ignorance we tell ourselves. Smart people who are used to being right are vulnerable to not seriously realizing they might be wrong, or that though they can't think of how something could be, it actually is.
To correct for that, I propose this.
Something somewhat similar to "This post, for instance, comes off as hostile and dismissive, not a message from someone who is sympathetic to the concerns expressed or willing to examine the matter under discussion. That's probably not your intent?" could be an ideal. It might be productive if people were used to beginning certain posts with: here is what I think is the most likely interpretation, although this is not an accusation, because I also think other interpretations are fairly plausible given the context, how I usually agree with you, etc.
I discuss this in greater depth in this reply. I hope this clarifies my position! I don't believe that LW-majority-position is misogynistic, self-serving nihilism (probably something more along the lines of happy-fun-times-nihilism). I do think that some of these topics can be dangerous-like-politics, and that this danger manifests as I describe in the other post.
This thread illustrates my point.