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Wei_Dai comments on LessWrong podcasts - Less Wrong
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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.
I like to think of possible holes in my arguments before I make them. Sometimes I discover minor holes that don't invalidate the whole argument but do reduce its force. (For example, the argument isn't universally valid but only if XYZ is true, and XYZ seems pretty likely to be true but we can't be sure yet.) Should I not point them out myself? Or are you thinking of some other kinds of disclaimers?
Sometimes these are bad, usually not. It's difficult for me to outline exactly what kind of disclaimers are bad because I think they're bad whenever they do more to prevent the earnest engagement of ideas than to help it, and determining which category specific cases fall in depends a lot on contextual things that I'm having a difficult time describing.
I know it when I see it, basically. It's easier for me to ask you to make recourse to your own experiences than it is for me to describe these kind of situations all by myself. Personally, lots of the time when I'm writing comments on LessWrong I spend about 30 seconds thinking up the points I want to go over, and then a couple minutes figuring out how to communicate that message in such a way that it will actually be persuasive to my audience. I feel like I spend much more time here trying to "dress up" my comments in the jargon of the site than I do actually learning things. I expect that many other people feel similarly or at least empathize with and understand my perspective on this.