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gjm comments on What topics are appropriate for LessWrong? - Less Wrong
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Can you pretty please stop pressing me on this point? It's NOT important to me, like I said, I believe it's marginal to the discussion; I'm not at all interested in sustaining a debate on the rationality of autists and only interested in getting my point across.
Yes, I believe Spock-like people display what looks to me as a kind of irrationality, although doubtlessly to them it looks like super-rationality. That is all.
Can we let it go? Now?
Stop that.
You may or may not have already realized this, but I felt the tautological emphasis was necessary because some people view the humanistic mindset as a bug rather than a feature in human thought. I see the lack of it as a bug rather than a feature.
No, that's not what I think. What I think is that any crowd who requires such limitations in order to be able to have productive conversations is worse than the average human at handling these topics, rather than better than the average human at avoiding flamebait. Because they're not particularly outrageous. That's why I said it makes me sad -- because I have a higher opinion of LessWrongers.
Sure, I'll drop it if you will. (With the brief observation that it's not like you've either expressed any sort of regret for shit-talking autistic people, or given any justification for your doing so. So it's not like I've been going on about a topic that's been resolved.)
Perhaps it is worth making it explicit why I have made an issue of this even though it is NOT important to Dahlen (a weighty consideration, to be sure). There are quite a lot of people on LW who are somewhere on the autistic spectrum (look up a recent annual survey if you want the numbers). The ones I know about appear to me to be just as valuable to LW as other people here. And it seems to me that it is not good practice to use these people as some kind of byword for irrationality, as you have been doing, or to suggest that they are interchangeable with "automatons". Because it's (1) unpleasant for them and (2) bad for LW if those people decide to leave because they're being used as a punching bag.
And nothing in what you've said so far gives any reason to think that you see any problem with that.
... Oh, I see you aren't quite done yet. I'll respond to the rest of what you say, and then I'm done if you are.
You are not, as the saying goes, the boss of me.
Yes, I did understand that you were doing it for emphasis. And I was doing what I did for mockery, because I thought (and still think) what you were emphasizing was silly and unpleasant -- the point at issue was never whether the lack of a skill is the lack of a skill, or whether the lack of a skill is unimportant, or whether there are skills that autistic people (by definition) tend to lack. And also because when I see people making unpleasant comments about autism on LW, either the explicit meaning or the clear subtext is always something like "ha ha, look at these freaks. I'm so much better than they are". (So there was a certain amount of irony in the air when you kindly warned me of the danger of saying things to feel better about oneself.)
So no, I am not going to "stop that". If I see the sort of reprehensible behaviour you've been engaging in in this thread, I reserve the right to reprehend it. And if the person doing it makes no serious attempt either to justify what they're doing or to apologize for it, I reserve the right to do so with gently mockery (which, be it noted, is all I have done).
But you have no evidence that the LW crowd does require such limitations for that very unambitious purpose. Especially as you have indicated that you are including small-talk under the heading of "productive conversations".
I have seen productive conversations of (for instance) politics on LW, many times. It does not appear to me that political discussions on LW, when they happen, are any worse than political discussions in the world at large. This is all perfectly consistent with thinking that LW would do best to avoid political discussions because (1) the risk of descending into flamewars is nonzero and that's a potentially very harmful failure mode, and (2) even a (merely) better-than-average political discussion is usually not actually very productive. (A better-than-average discussion of something underlying politics, like say economics, may be more useful. No one is proposing that those are off-topic.)
It may also be worth noting that the correct point of comparison is not real-world face-to-face political discussions but other political discussions on the internet, because for a variety of reasons the difference in medium makes a difference to the risk of descent into hostility and flamewars and arguments-as-soldiers.
Hi, there. I'm on the autistic spectrum and I'd appreciate it if you'd stop declaring behaviors "reprehensible" on my behalf. As it happens I find your behavior in this thread much more reprehensible then Dahlen's (which I didn't find objectionable at all).
I think a much better approach to dealing with my disability is to adapt to, compensate for, and/or overcome it rather than accuse anyone who brings it up of being "reprehensible".
Hi. Pleased to meet you, but I think you may have misunderstood. I wasn't declaring anything reprehensible on your behalf; I'm sorry to say that I was entirely unaware of your existence. And I wouldn't dream of suggesting that anyone who brings up autism is reprehensible; if you got the impression that I do then I probably failed to be clear enough and I'm sorry about that.
I'm glad that you aren't in any way annoyed, upset, offended, etc., at what Dahlen wrote. I still think s/he shouldn't have written it.
Now, if it turned out that, say, 95% of LW readers on the autistic spectrum are perfectly happy with what Dahlen wrote, that really would make a difference to my opinion of it. (I'd then be curious as to whether Dahlen was just lucky, or whether s/he is better than I am at predicting autistic people.) But for now, all I know is that one person who says they're autistic[1] says they don't have a problem with what Dahlen wrote, and that one probably different person about whom I know nothing upvoted that comment. Which isn't nothing, of course, but it falls some way short of being enough evidence to change my mind right now.
[1] For the avoidance of doubt, I think it's hugely unlikely that you're lying. I'm just being careful to distinguish things I know from things I don't.
Unless you take a survey, you won't get a remotely representative sample, but as one of the more activist/SJW-like autistic LW readers, I found the comparison annoying, although not really offensive, because it didn't seem like Dahlen was trying to reference actual autists. To steal and modify Yudkowsky's favorite Davidson quote, if you assert that autistics have below-average rationality, are childish, and are Spock-like, then you do not make any assertions, true or false, referencing autistic people. Rather, you're just using a stereotype as a reference point for talking about some other category.
Noted. Thanks.
Trying to extract an apology out of a person through harassment 1) has SJW written all over it; 2) begets nothing resembling, in substance, an actual apology (after all, you haven't made the person change their mind), more like capitulation or an admission of weakness. This is the last possible instance when you are going to see me apologizing. Might as well not chase me into the afterlife for it. Downvote if you will and leave me be.
As long as you're engaging in an interaction with me, I have the full right to state what kind of behaviour towards me I will or will not tolerate, so don't put it as if I were bossing you around. My terms of discussion include a friendly tone and lack of sarcasm, insults, or other markers of dislike or hostility. I see those as a milder form of declaration of enmity, and instead of continuing a hostile discussion endlessly I'd rather just walk away. Talk is for friends and allies, actual and potential. For enemies there are fisticuffs, sabotage, or blissful ignorance of each other's existence.
(In case that point was left unclear, there are ways of expressing a disagreement with me or making me a reproach that don't look like the beginning of a long mutual dislike. They just don't resemble your approach here.)
Well it kind of was the point for me.
Yes. And I will not provide any. Because as it happens I don't believe that. It seemed to me that FrameBenignly believed that in his OP, and my whole point all along has been that no, I don't think that LW belongs to the category of crowds that require those limitations, and if I am wrong and it does, then I think that's a sad state of affairs.
I have one more reply of yours somewhere that I think I need to address, because it looks like I wasn't communicating something very clearly. After that, the next reply of mine to you is going to be to a cordial tone comment, or there won't be one at all.
[Most of this is meta-discussion. At the end of your comment you said something that wasn't. If anyone else is actually reading this, they're probably more interested in the non-meta. They should look ahead for the next comment in square brackets.]
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. Obviously you are under no sort of obligation to apologize when criticized. But if your reaction is that you
then it seems reasonable to point out what's going on.
Harassment? Everything I have written in this discussion has been in direct response to something you wrote. I have not threatened you or insulted you. I seriously can't imagine what I have done that a reasonable person would describe as harassment.
If that's what I pattern-match to in your brain, I'm not sure there's much I can do about it. (I am with SJWs in so far as they stick up for groups that tend to get treated badly; I am against them in so far as they end up abusing other groups, treat everything as tribal warfare, and/or employ blatantly stupid arguments in doing so. Make of that what you will.)
Good grief. I criticized something you wrote. I responded to your responses to the criticism. When you said you don't like being criticized and asked me to stop, I said "I'll stop if you will" and happened to mention that you had neither justified nor retracted what you said. That's all.
It appears that you will not tolerate (1) criticism and/or (2) not being given the last word merely because you would prefer it. You might want to rethink that.
I think your enmity-detectors are oversensitive, and I think that given how this discussion began you've got quite a nerve complaining that someone isn't being friendly enough towards you. To put it explicitly: I do not in any way regard you as an enemy (though I am wondering whether I should given your remarks about enmity here), I see no reason whatever why we should not be allies in the future, but I strongly disagree with some things you have been saying in this discussion and how you have been saying them. That's all.
[Non-meta here:]
OK. That's better than the impression I got from the way you began:
which was (at least to my reading) all about the cognitive failures one could infer from requiring those limitations.
(If your argument was intended to be "We'd only need those limitations if we had Bad Characteristic X, but obviously we don't, so we don't need the limitations" -- with the second half of the argument so obvious as not even to need stating -- then I submit that it was a mistake to choose for Bad Characteristic X something that (1) LW documentedly exhibits a way-above-average rate of and (2) LW folks have more than once been attacked for in the past.)