Prismattic comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

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Comment author: Prismattic 02 January 2012 10:16:26PM 1 point [-]

I care about my status on this site only to the extent that it remains above some minimum required for people not to discount my posts simply because they were written by me.

My interest in this thread is that like Daenerys I think the current norm for discourse is suboptimal, but I think I give greater weight to the possibility of that some of the suboptimal behavior is people defecting by accident; hence the subtle push for occasional recalibration of tone.

Comment author: wedrifid 02 January 2012 10:33:22PM *  4 points [-]

hence the subtle push for occasional recalibration of tone.

There was a subtle push? I must of missed that while I was distracted by the blatant one!

Comment author: Prismattic 02 January 2012 10:38:00PM 1 point [-]

See, it's working!

Comment author: TheOtherDave 02 January 2012 11:32:25PM 3 points [-]

Just to be clear: I'm fine with you pushing for a norm that's optimal for you. Blatantly, if you want to; subtly if you'd rather.

But I don't agree that the norm you're pushing is optimal for me, and I consider either of us pushing for the establishment of norms that we're most comfortable with to be a status-linked social maneuver.

Comment author: Prismattic 03 January 2012 12:02:19AM 0 points [-]

But I don't agree that the norm you're pushing is optimal for me,

Why? (A sincere question, not a rhetorical one)

and I consider either of us pushing for the establishment of norms that we're most comfortable with to be a status-linked social maneuver.

I'm not sure how every post doesn't do this; many posts push to maintain a status-quo, but all posts implicitly favor some set of norms.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 03 January 2012 02:17:22AM 2 points [-]

I agree that pretty much all communication does this, yes. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly.

As to why... because I see the norm you're pushing as something pretty close to the cultural baseline of the "friendly" pole of the American mainstream, which I see as willing to trade off precision and accuracy for getting along. You may even be pushing for something even more "get along" optimized than that.

I mostly don't mind that the rest of my life more or less optimizes for getting along, though I often find it frustrating when it means that certain questions simply can't ever be asked in the first place, and that certain answers can't be believed when they're given because alternative answers are deemed too impolite to say. Still, as I say, I accept it as a fact about my real-life environment. I probably even prefer it, as I acknowledge that optimizing for precision and accuracy at the expense of getting along would be problematic if I could never get away from it, however tired or upset I was.

That said, I value the fact that LW uses a different standard, one that optimizes for accuracy and precision, and therefore efforts to introduce the baseline "get along" standard to LW remove local value for me.

Again, let me stress that I'm not asserting that you ought not make those efforts. If that's what you want, then by all means push for it. If you are successful, LW will become less valuable to me, but you're not under any kind of moral obligation to preserve the value of the Internet to me.

But speaking personally, I'd prefer you didn't insist as you did so that those efforts are actually in my best interests, with the added implication that I can't recognize my interests as well as you can.