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Optimal rudeness
On LessWrong, we often get cross, and then rude, with each other. Sometimes, someone then observes this rudeness is counterproductive.
Is it?
As a general rule, emotional responses are winning strategies (at least for your genes). That's why you have those emotions.
Granted, insulting someone during your rebuttal of their argument makes it less likely that they will see your point. But it appears to be an effective tactic when carrying on an argument in public.
It's my impression that on LessWrong, a comment or a post written with a certain amount of disdain is more-likely to get voted up than a completely objective comment. A good way to obtain upvotes, if that is your goal, is to make other readers wish to identify with you and disassociate themselves from whomever you're arguing against. A great many up-voted comments, including some of my own, suggest, subtly or not subtly, with or without evidence, that the person being responded to is ignorant or stupid.
The correct amount of derision appears be slight, and to depend on status. Someone with more status should be more rude. Retaliations against rudeness may really be retaliations for an attempt to claim high status.
What's the optimal response if someone says something especially rude to you? Is a polite or a rude response to a rude comment more likely to be upvoted/downvoted? Not ideally, but in reality. I think, in general, when dealing with humans, responding to skillful rudeness, and especially humorous rudeness, with politeness, is a losing strategy.
My expectation is that rudeness is a better strategy for poor and unpopular arguments than for good or popular ones, because rudeness adds noise. The lower a comment's expected karma, the ruder it should be.
You jerk.
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Comments (50)
At least on LW, I think the more controversial a submission is, the less the poster can afford to be rude. It seems to me that rudeness is generally a Karma loser here. I've even seen Eliezer downvoted hard for rudeness.
Rudeness can still be a useful strategy for shutting down low-status people, however.
Karma winning strategies include adding footnotes or lots of links (even if they are low-quality or tangential). If you go to the trouble of adding an unnecessary graph or two, that helps as well.
Optimal rudeness is the amount that is enjoyable to your supporters (people who dislike who you're responding to or what they said) without swamping the message. Too many insults leave you little chance of convincing someone that they are wrong (if that's your goal) or becomes obviously an attack more than a rebuttal and at least in Lesswrong will get you less status/respect. "too few" insults is when you accord too much respect to people who are badly wrong or to statements that are badly wrong. There are things it's better not to waste time on and it's actually better for the forums to insult them, because it discourages them being taken seriously or being mentioned repeatedly.
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Total so far: 3 rude comments, 7 up-votes. 2 polite replies, 2 down-votes. Humorous rude comment scored especially high.
I think emotional tone of almost any sort gets downvoted. Except for a lofty disdain. That's often approved of. Perhaps it's not the disdain that's approved of, but the idea, and the disdain is just indulged in when the writer is confident of a mass of approval.
Me, I think emotional tone conveys information, and I find the arid emotional atmosphere unsatisfying. Worse, I find the lofty disdain usually unwarranted and thereby rather grating.
As a counter to my own claims I did get upvoted a good deal on a post with a restrained but definite peculiar emotional tone - a bit of an odd mood. I expected the post to be downvoted, so I clearly have some work on my calibration.
I agree that lofty disdain tends to be rewarded with karma points on this board. Also, rudeness when you are in the minority is a karma loser. I prefer to think of karma points on this board as measuring a person's covariance with the group opinion. So, if you find the group opinion optimal, you should try to maximize karma points.
I'm planning on stating a personal policy of posting that I intend to follow on a different board. Basically, I will refrain from using pejoratives, or 'one-off' pejoratives. However, stating facts are always in-bounds, no matter how unflattering they are to some. An example of a 'one-off' pejorative is to call someone's argument 'nonsense'; the implication being that the person is nonsensical. It's in the vein of Crocker's Rules, but slightly different.
Why I plan to do this:
I think that people engaged in internet discussions should be given the benefit of the doubt that they sincerely believe what they are saying (without evidence to the contrary). So, it's overly harsh to go off on someone on the internet because their opinion differs from yours. If you wouldn't behave that way IRL, you shouldn't on the internet either. Also, if people know you will be sticking to the facts, they will be less inclined to engage in distracting flames.
This is purely a tactical decision, as I have presented an alternative hypothesis to a dogma that is cherished on that board, and plan to expand on that. Thus, I am in the minority. So, I won't follow this policy because I believe I am nicer or better than others, but rather out of intelligent self-interest. So, I will be turning the other cheek, but I hope to use that to my advantage later.
I would agree with you if you said "group norms" rather than "group opinion". While there are some opinions on LW that function as group norms, the bulk of the norms here are instead procedural.
It's a nearly universal pattern with groups of humans that the more you follow the group's norms, the more highly the group thinks of you.
Is that why the top voted post in Main is one by an outspoken critic? If the above were true, if this forum didn't also reward group-contrarian ideas as long as they were well presented, how could LW purport to be about rationality? It's quite the devastating statement that karma is based mostly on "agrees/disagrees with me"/tribal lines.
Is that intended to be an argument? Notice that it is not.
I think the top-voted post you're referring to (link does not work) is by the GiveWell evaluator. Besides writing a good post, he was an outsider with high status paying attention to LW, and Eliezer and everyone supporting SIAI desperately wanted to impress him and make him feel like he was being taken seriously. Not an admittable datapoint.
You're ugly. Well, maybe, I don't really know. But are personal "facts" such as that in bounds?
I would call that an opinion. A pejorative one.
Also not likely to be relevant to any serious discussion I would ever have on the internet.
I haven't compiled any data relating rudeness to karma, and thus only have my imperfect recollection of prior comments to draw on, but I can certainly see your point here. I doubt, however, that an unpopular opinion or argument would benefit from rudeness if the post is initially well formed. I would expect rudeness to amplify polarization, thereby benefiting popular arguments and high status posters, and politeness to mitigate it. Would you be willing to provide me with some examples for or against this expectation from your observations?
It's better if you look for your own examples, as my providing examples would just provide more fuel for gwern (above), who until this post I had no idea disliked me.
I think of rudeness in LW discussions as a signal. Broadly speaking, LW commenters are rude when they think they are dealing with a stupid argument, and/or an argument that fails to follow the established rules of rationality. The implication is that they can't be bothered writing a more detached response, and (since rudeness is more likely to drive users off the site) that they would not want to see similar comments in the future.
It strikes me as a useful signal; sometimes more useful than karma points, which can be affected by factional or 'political' considerations. This might be one reason why Crocker's Rules tend to be relatively popular here at LessWrong.
Nonetheless, it might be worthwhile to try and challenge the social norm where users with more status can afford to be more rude. In my view, it would be interesting if some users with high rationality skills were willing to be expressly low status users, or "resident trolls". Their role would include debating with especially irrational, politically-motivated or trollish newcomers. Rudeness on their part would be expressly encouraged; due to their low status, it would hopefully not be seen as threatening the social standing of other LW users.
Ideally, users with the technical ability to delete comments here (most obviously Eliezer) would also take on the low-status, "resident troll" role. This would ensure that such technical measures are only used a last resort, if any attempts at discouraging unproductive commenters by social means failed.
Hmm. I'm not sure we want more monkeymind posts, which seems to be a desired goal of your proposed policy.
Do you mean this? Honestly, I think such users are a crystal-clear example of the rare instance when technical restrictions are justified. While I don't think karma scores should be the sole criteria of this, the fact that this user has been allowed to reach a score of -513 is quite striking.
I think I don't understand your proposal.
You want high rationality people to be rude to irrational or trollish newcomers? Given that the function of the newcomer-behavior is probably attention, I'm not sure we should positively reinforce the behavior if we don't want it.
And I don't see how we can cause high-rationality people to be low status, or why we would want to? (It isn't like newcomers have much idea who is high status or low status).