alex_zag_al comments on LessWrong podcasts - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (96)
1 Length is only good insofar as it adds to meaning. Most length on LessWrong doesn't do that. For example, I can summarize your first point as:
I don't think any important information is lost there. I disagree with your assessment of communication practices on LessWrong.
2 I don't think we should react to differences in tone the way that we do. The fact that our community has different norms depending on whether or not you use certain tones is problematic. We should try to minimize the impact that things like tone have. Substantive issues ought to be a priority and they ought to dominate to the point where things like tone barely matter at all.
3 Disclaimers discourage argumentative clash and take extra time to think of beforehand. Simply putting down a disclaimer allows you to marginalize issues that others might have with your post, it makes relevant criticism superficially appear less relevant. A better practice that we should be cultivated is to simply concede things after those things are pointed out.
4 The mindset of lines of retreat seems to stem from the idea that arguments are soldiers meant to defend your social status. Mental lines of retreat might be good but discursive ones are generally a way of avoiding responsibility.
5 Cross apply my above response to your argument about tone.
You say that they are good social skills. I agree, given the social norms of this site. But I think those social norms are detrimental to cultivating rationality efficiently and so I want to go about changing the social norms of this site.
I don't think so. At best, we've just changed the nature of the game.
EDIT: Upon reflection, this last point is basically the essence of my criticism. We've just changed the game to make it more superficially rational, but that is more resource intensive and it masks the underlying mindsets that are bad instead of actually changing them.
It's a big shift, for people to become unaffected by tone. Even if it was possible for community members to make it, it would be exclusive to outsiders, who would be affected by the tone of the discussions and would have trouble participating. Better just to use a tone that encourages good discussions.
EDIT: Or to put it another way, it's better to make comments in a tone that causes people to respond more intelligently, then to require them to be inhumanly unresponsive to tone.
I agree but also still think that tone is very overemphasized. We should encourage less reaction to tone instead of taking it as inevitable and a reasonable complaint in response to a comment, which is what I think that we currently do.