drethelin comments on LessWrong podcasts - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 05 December 2012 08:23:09AM *  10 points [-]

People make verbose and lengthy comments instead of short and simple ones. People always speak in a certain type of tone, signalling that they are smart but also that they are Reasonable and they are listening to the points of their opponents. People lace their comments with subtle disclaimers and possible lines of retreat. People take care to use an apologetic tone.

I'm not sure what the problem with any of these is.

  • Longer comments help reduce the effects of a large inferential distance: on the occasion that my comments tend towards the long, it's because I've noticed that short comments on similar topics tend to not be understood by people. A short comment implies that the person it was directed to could have realized it themselves, they just hadn't put all the pieces together; a long comment also supplies some missing pieces. Given that a good comment is useful not just to the person you're talking with, but everyone else on the site as well, it's generally better to supply more pieces and maximize the extent to which the comment is useful. Of course, you can go overboard with this, but I don't think the comments on LW are excessively long.
  • Everyone speaking in a standardized tone that lets others know they're reasonable and following community norms is good, as it reduces the probability of conflict.
  • People lacing their comments with subtle disclaimers is good epistemic hygiene that avoids communicating misinformation.
  • People lacing their comments with possible lines of retreat is also good, for the reasons Eliezer expressed in his original post about lines of retreat.
  • People taking care to use an apologetic tone, see my previous comment about tone.

In other words, what you call wasteful signaling, I'd call good rationality habits (or even good social skills). You say

Individual people (no, no one specific) just need to relax and to be less personally involved in the site or in the things they say and the arguments that they make.

But it's exactly things like leaving lines of retreat and using a polite tone that allows them to be less personally involved and not get caught up in things like having to "defeat" their "opponent".

Comment author: chaosmosis 06 December 2012 06:25:15AM *  0 points [-]

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:

Long comments make arguments clearer and make communication faster. Good communication is good, within certain limits, and I think most comments fall within those limits.

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.

But it's exactly things like leaving lines of retreat and using a polite tone that allows them to be less personally involved and not get caught up in things like having to "defeat" their "opponent".

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.

Comment author: drethelin 20 December 2012 08:55:45AM -1 points [-]

I'd just like to say that your complaints about length are pretty funny in their ironic stupidity.

Comment author: chaosmosis 20 December 2012 09:10:46AM *  0 points [-]

I said that length was useful insofar as it added to communication. Was I particularly inefficient? I don't think so. As is, it's somewhat ironic, but I think only superficially so because there isn't any real clash between what I claim as ideal and what I engage in (because, again, I think I was efficient). And there's not stupidly there at all, or at least none that I see. You'll need to go into more detail here.

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