wedrifid comments on LessWrong podcasts - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Louie 03 December 2012 08:44AM

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Comment author: wedrifid 20 December 2012 08:48:58AM * 2 points [-]

Be specific. What on earth am I doing that's so disingenuous?

There is not much more specific I can be than systematically quoting sentences and directly making criticisms below the quotes. As such, this insinuation about lack of specificity may be added to the list of disingenuous claims.

Overall, you're hiding behind a mask of rationality and politeness

Polite? You think I'm being polite? Hardly. I seem to be being crude, banal, aggressive and cavalier in my opposition to your influence. Surely any err here on my part would be in the lack of politeness, not a superficial overabundance of the same!

(For this reason if it had been the case that my replies were voted down it would only have been a minor annoyance. I can accept that people could in principle have downvoted me for failing to use the tone of a courtier while arguing against tone-indifference. However if chaosmosis's comments had been significantly upvoted I would have been shocked, appalled and disgusted---believing that the voters had unambiguous and objectively poor judgement. This is in contrast to most situations where social reception of my own contributions impact me more than the reception of whichever person happens to be wrong on the internet that day. In this case it seems that I fully endorse my position and arguments but am actually somewhat ambivalent about my stylistic choices.)

while engaging in egregious instances of the things that I criticize.

Also false. Some of the things that you criticize are actually things that I would probably be well served to have implemented in this case. But sometimes I allow wedrifid to fall short of Machiavellian signalling ideals and be more direct in his expressions of belief and preference than is necessarily optimal for maximizing his status.

Comment author: chaosmosis comment score below threshold [+] (11 children)

Comment author: chaosmosis 20 December 2012 08:57:30AM * -4 points [-]

You're not hiding behind a mask of politeness; I have no idea what I was thinking because that is clearly wrong. I do think you are hiding behind a mask of rationality though. For example, you basically just conceded that you have no ability to provide any form of evidence for your claims that I am being disingenuous, and you then claimed that my asking for you to do so is evidence that I am being disingenuous. That's both contradictory and suspicious.

The question about lack of specificity is not disingenuous because it gets at the important point that I don't think I've done anything disingenuous. Additionally, I'm justified in suspecting your motives, because every time I make a good point you ignore it in your next response and arguments fall by the wayside, but in reality I have made several good reasons already why you are being disingenuous.

Your above comment is a good example, you manage to totally gloss over my obviously true claim that you've strawmanned me repeatedly. You also gloss over the fact that I showed that your beliefs about my intentions are incredibly stupid. You are ignoring any arguments that you find inconvenient, you are not actually engaging me so much as you are utilizing guerilla tactics. You view me as an evil moron, obviously I have no reason to believe that you would actually conduct yourself with some sort of fairness during this exchange. No one else should believe that either, they should definitely be suspicious of you and your motives at the point where all of these arguments indict your credibility and yet are just pushed to the side.

You say that you are allowing yourself to engage in low status signalling. But I think that aggression is actually perceived as high status, and that you would be aware of this, and that you are falsely portraying yourself as nobly enraged so that you garner even more sympathy. Also, your aggression serves to mask your guerilla tactics, which I think is another reason you are using it.

Comment author: thomblake 21 December 2012 05:01:11PM 1 point [-]

you've strawmanned me repeatedly

Translation: "I'm a bad communicator".

Comment author: wedrifid 20 December 2012 09:31:12AM * 1 point [-]

For example, you basically just conceded that you have no ability to provide any form of evidence for your claims that I am being disingenuous

I actually did the opposite that---that the specificity is blatantly obvious---most of sentence in question consisted of a direct link to the most notable examples. Reality and your description thereof do not seem to be terribly well correlated at this point.

You say that you are allowing yourself to engage in low status signalling.

No, I'm not actually. That conclusion would follow if it was assumed that the optimal way to gain and maintain high status was to exclusively and unthinkingly execute what improv sources describe as 'high status behaviors' and behaviors that lower another's status. But this is definitely not the case. My reference was to the behavior of courtiers and to Machiavellian ideals. That dance for power and status is far more nuanced and extensively exploits low status moves as well, taking the most advantage from each situation.

Taking a step back, as I sometimes do, my evaluation of wedrifid's interactions in this thread is that they display acceptable social competency but aren't masterful or shrewd. He took social risks he did not need to and they could easily have backfired on him if the environment was slightly more hostile or most observers were not already themselves disgruntled with the person he engaged in conflict.

But I think that aggression is actually perceived as high status, and that you would be aware of this, and that you are falsely portraying yourself as nobly enraged so that you garner even more sympathy.

Aggression is too crude an act to work as a signal at the highest echelons of status. The ideal is to make it seem that everyone does what you want without you having to spend anything but the tiniest application of effort or attention. But more importantly aggression has the chance to backfire. In this case the real risk wedrifid took is that he made himself vulnerable to the will of all onlookers. If he had sufficient enemies looking for an opportunity, if chaosmosis had sufficient allies or if observers all somehow thought chaosmosis behavior and influence attempt was actually beneficial and that wedrifid wasn't making valid points then they had the opportunity to portray wedrifid as a villian and eagerly attack him themselves.

A skilled player doesn't expose themselves to potential social judgement without good cause. They make their moves in such a way that they can't be criticized or when they have completely confidence in their ability to play the crowd. They would make insinuations and leave impressions rather than directly stating "this influence is toxic and should be crushed".

Comment author: chaosmosis comment score below threshold [+] (8 children)

Comment author: [deleted] 21 December 2012 01:22:09AM 5 points [-]

You seem seriously messed up. Because of all this, I think you are a danger to LessWrong, and that your ego will increase existential risk by a significant amount.

Oh, that's just patently ridiculous. Nobody here (with very few exceptions) has any significant effect on existential risk.

Comment author: chaosmosis 21 December 2012 08:24:52AM 0 points [-]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/fr2/lesswrong_podcasts/83ky

Comment author: [deleted] 21 December 2012 04:48:03PM * 0 points [-]

Reasserting that you hold an opinion is not evidence for the truth of that opinion.

Comment author: shminux 21 December 2012 01:27:13AM 3 points [-]

your ego will increase existential risk by a significant amount.

Seriously? You believe that a lone LW regular can significantly affect x-risk?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 December 2012 12:51:37AM 3 points [-]

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can destroy the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Comment author: chaosmosis 21 December 2012 08:24:33AM 2 points [-]

I think that even very small amounts of x-risk increases are significant. I also think that lone LWers have the most impact when they're dealing with things like community attitudes.

Comment author: wedrifid 21 December 2012 12:47:02AM * 1 point [-]

You've conceded that your understanding of my intentions is obviously irrational, that you've utilized strawmen often throughout this discussion, and that you're using guerilla type argumentative tactics against me.

Still lies. I have directly said the opposite of that. Please leave lesswrong and go elsewhere.

and that your ego will increase existential risk by a significant amount.

If nothing else I suppose I am flattered that you believe I'm that relevant, that I have that much power to influence existential outcomes one way or the other. It seems appropriate to harness this kind of absurd lament as if it is a positive exhortation. A challenge consider what difference I could have, to evaluate what Good (whatever that means) my allegedly significant power could be harnessed towards.

If I had to guess, you're just a bully who enjoys bullying whenever they get into a context they can get away with it. You feel powerful when you portray yourself as engaging in the tactics of Machiavelli, or when you remind yourself that you have friends on this website and I don't.

I know you intend nothing more than slander but I am once more prompted to consider just what this information would mean to me were it true. If I was a bully, someone who thrives on abusing power against others and who presumably has been practiced the skills of the bully throughout my life then that would imply a certain skill-set that is valuable in certain contexts. It is a crude, distasteful skillset that I happen to find viscerally abhorrent down to the very core of my being but one that I must nevertheless acknowledge use instrumentally useful to those who use it well. Experience using Machiavellian tactics is even more useful, being far more general and adaptable than competency with petty bullying.

If I were so fundamentally instinctively orientated towards bullying and Machiavellian scheming toward power---and I credit myself with the intellect and resourcefulness to become quite proficient in whatever I'm instinctively driven to do if given three decades of experience---then that would give a very clear indication of just what my comparative advantage would be likely to be. Namely it would mean I should be making use of my natural drives being just one more asshole in a high paying and cutthroat workplace and industry (such as the pharmaceutical industry or something finance related). I would then be able to harness the economic bounty of my exploitation to achieve things I care about.

(As it happens your model of me is wrong so my development history and so comparative advantage is very different to what would be the case in the counterfactual world that operates using your assumption as a premise.)

Comment author: chaosmosis 21 December 2012 01:17:36AM * -2 points [-]

You have repeatedly falsely portrayed my arguments as defending belligerent tone, you've used that as an excuse to curse at me, you've defended an absurd model of my intentions, you've shifted the topic of the discussion over and over again and repeatedly ignored points that you find inconvenient. You have never produced a valid response to these objections, you continue to omit them over and over and to instead redirect the topic onto personal attacks on me.

This is all evidence for my belief that you're portraying your motives here dishonestly. The repeated aggression that you've shown, given the additional fact that there's a complete lack of warrants to support it, is strong evidence for my belief that you enjoy being a jerk. You claim that you would have gone into a different line of work if that were the case, but I think that's only incredibly weak evidence.

It's not as though I should have a low prior on a human being an asshole, even if they're not in finance. It's also not as though I should privilege your assertions as to what a counterfactual world would look like over your actual observable behavior within these comments.

wedrifid comments on LessWrong podcasts - Less Wrong

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