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Viliam comments on Open Thread April 4 - April 10, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Comments (211)
Who determines what is "necessary"? And, speaking of, who determines what is "nice" and what isn't (besides Santa Claus)?
Is niceness just politeness or do you want to expand it to things like steelmanning?
Jesus, this is an impolite thing to say, but believe me that when I was making the Positivity Thread, I was already thinking "Lumifer will probably be the first one to object against this, and I just hope he won't do it directly in the thread". So, thank you for not doing it directly in the thread.
You know, even in this moment I am not really sure whether you actually have no idea what "nice" means (I assume that just like some people are colorblind, others could be nice-blind), or whether this is just your style of communication. As a consequence I am not sure if trying to explain something to you gives me a chance to be somehow helpful, or whether it means you have successfully made me your plaything (because I have no doubts that whatever I write here, you will be able to find something to attack). I am not interesting in playing verbal games online, and when I suspect someone being too fond of such games, I generally try to reduce my contact with them.
One of the problems with "when I see a weakness, I must attack immediately" style of communication is that is makes it impossible to discuss issues which we cannot sufficiently exactly express yet, such as pretty much anything about human psychology. Then the issues must be left uncommunicated.
As I understand it, both serve a similar goal -- both are strategies to reduce conflicts between people, and make cooperation easier. But they are different strategies, based on different approach. Politeness makes people easy to replace; niceness contributes to long-term personal relationships.
Politeness tries to achieve its goal by reducing personal involvement. The ultimate form of politeness would be a person strictly following the rules of polite behavior and doing nothing else; like a robot with no personality behind it. Different ultimately-polite people would be perfectly replaceably by each other; if you wouldn't see their face, you would probably notice no difference.
The idea is that you could still have a conflict with such people about "you want something, they want something else", but all other sources of conflict would be removed. This is a required skill for a diplomat; and there is a stereotype that Japanese people behave like this.
Niceness assumes that you care about the other person, as a person (not merely as a tool to reach some business agreement). Nice behavior leads to the kind of long-term cooperation where the individuals are not replaceable. The cooperation can grow beyond the context where it started.
Politeness is a good choice when having to deal with many strangers. Niceness is a good choice when trying to build a community.
That's OK, I have thick skin and enough self-reflection capability :-)
The problem is that I have more than one idea :-) "Nice" corresponds to a cluster of meanings -- there is e.g. "pleasant", but there is also "mild", "inoffensive", "bland". I suspect that my own use of the word "nice" is associated with, um, underperformance, I guess? Something could have been great, amazing, wonderful, but it didn't make it, however it managed to avoid being a fail, too, so it's... nice. Damning with faint praise kind of thing.
Here, though, I think you mean things like "don't be an asshole" and "cooperate, praise, support". But when I asked "who determines", the accent was on who (in the spirit of "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything").
No, I don't think so. Incoherence is a weakness, not uncertainty. And in the case of uncertainty, attempts to "harden up" the fuzziness, establish bounds, etc. are not attacks but rather attempts at clarification.
Yes, that's a good way to express it, though I still doubt that ultimately-polite people are all fungible. Politeness is just a form, there is still non-fungible content inside it.
I would describe that as "caring" and I think that's quite different from "being nice to".
Generally, intuition determines. Having to ask questions like "who determines" at all is probably an indicator of the sort of "nice-blindness" Viliam was talking about.
Whether something should be construed as an "attack" is in the eyes of the beholder. If your "attempt at clarification" is perceived by the one you're addressing as an attack, saying "No not really" does nothing to change that underlying perception.
We're talking about establishing a particular norm for LW.
Niceness is a continuous variable and everyone has a certain threshold on that axis (threshold which "intuition determines") below which things are "not nice" and above which things are "nice". The problem, of course, is that everyone has her own and that's no good for a social norm. Some common threshold will have to be established, most likely by those who will take it upon themselves to enforce that norm. Also most likely the common threshold will be very similar to the personal thresholds of the enforcers.
Nope, sorry, I don't buy the "a victim is always right about being a victim" approach.
That depends on whether that person is willing to update on the evidence :-P
Are you perhaps arguing that as long as people don't have a unified formal definition of niceness, nice behavior is not possible? That would seem unlikely.
Even if everyone has a different threshold... well, everyone has their own upvote and downvote buttons, right? So the worst case is that some comments would get upvoted by some users for being nice enough and downvoted by other users for not being nice enough. Doesn't seem that horrible.
And over time, people will adjust to the average. And those who will still find this community unbearably rude or unbearably polite will leave.
In real life, this problem is usually solved by creating subcultures; different groups having different norms. Being too rude will get you ejected from the group. Being too polite may make you leave the group voluntarily. Groups that eject too many people end up have few members. Groups that retain too many rude people end up having mostly rude members.
It would be a nice experiment to have a website that would support this "organic" grouping of people; where LW wouldn't be one group, but rather an ecosystem of groups. But I'm afraid we are unlikely to ever see this happen. So we are stuck with having LW as one group.
In real life, sometimes the ejecting of rude members from the group is done by a local boss (a formal owner of the place, or a high-status member of the group), but sometimes the group splits "organically" -- some people stop talking to some other people, and after some time we see that what was originally one group now became two groups. It could be interesting to try modelling this by a web platform. (Mere blocking is not enough, because in the group other people see when X is ignoring Y. Also, avoiding someone in real life is not a binary decision.) But I am not expecting to see this in near future.
No, not at all. I'm arguing that there will be behaviour about which people will not be able to agree whether it's nice or not.
Why unlikely? There are at many ways to move in this direction, for example the establishment of LW subreddits which will develop their own, possibly different, cultural norms. For another example, killfile equivalents or some sufficiently flexible tagging system will allow people to define their own personal "groupings of people" all of which could coexist on LW.
And some of them will downvote it, and some of them will upvote it.
I suspect that mere "moves in this direction" will not be enough. May improve things, but not enough.
My reasoning is roughly this:
People have complex social instints, finely tuned by evolution. Sometimes we coordinate in groups by using small signals, such as face expressions, body posture, tone of voice, looking away or otherwise not paying attention when someone is speaking, sitting closer to some people and further away from others, etc. Some of these actions include plausible deniability; for example one can signal boredom with a debate by looking away, but when confronted, they can verbally deny being bored. This mechanism allows different intensity of interaction.
When using a web interface, most of these options are missing; sometimes replaced by crude approximations that fail in some important aspect. (For example, what is the equivalent of "looking away when someone keeps debating stuff you consider super boring"? Merely not reading and not participating in the discussion is too invisible: you don't have feedback about who is reading and who is skipping which comments. Downvoting feels too aggressive; it is more like shouting "shut up".) Another important aspect is that in real life most kinds of reactions are simple, so if they require some inconvenient action online, it's not the same thing.
It is these situations where our instinct offers us a real-life solution, but there is no sufficiently corresponding action in the web forum, that make online discussions develop in many frustrating ways that wouldn't happen in real life. (Also other dissimilarities, e.g. creating sockpuppets, etc.)
This is why I think it would be an interesting project to develop a web interface that would allows us to act as closely to our instinctive social behavior as possible. The hypothesis is that it would make the discussions much less frustrating for many participants. But crude approximations will not work, precisely because they are crude.
(I am not saying that our social interactions in real life are the best possible mode of communication. There is a space for improvement. I am saying that we are unable to get even there.)
Not enough for what?
You seem to want, basically, video conferencing. Or, if you prefer a more future-y way of doing that, telepresence in virtual reality.
You are taking a very one-sided view. Online discussions are not just hobbled and maimed discussions in person -- they have disadvantages, but they also have a lot of advantages. They are different and that makes them occupy a different, useful niche in the panoply of ways humans communicate.
Sometimes you want to talk in person, but sometimes you don't and email or chat are the preferred way.
Because we don't want to go there.
I don't think that LW is one group in any meaningful sense. There's this website. There's Slack. There's IRC. There's the facebook group. There are local meetups with often have their own mailing list.
There are also various diaspora groups that don't exist under the LW brand.
I think there are two distinct ways to think of niceness.
One is that being nice is about doing things motivated by positive emotions like compassion and gratitude. The other is that being nice is about conforming to a list of social standards, not picking fights and avoiding confrontation.
I think the first version of niceness is very valuable. On the other hand the second version leads to supressed emotions, passive-aggressiveness and anxiousness. In the first model people hug each other while in the second model people often avoid physical contact.
At the community camp where most people run around with free hug and crockers rule stickers, the first kind of niceness is valued while the second kind isn't.
I'm in favor of moving this website to having more of the first kind of niceness, but I get weary when you start talking about politness with is mostly associated with the second type of niceness.
This is perfectly true. However, our current ways of communication also lead to supressed emotions, passive-aggressiveness and anxiousness.
I don't think we have much passive-aggressiveness on LW. People here are usually pretty direct.
I'm pretty sure dxu wasn't appealing to that. Just saying that different people will have different ideas about whether any given thing is an attack. (And then, more specifically, that a hardnosed "object to anything that looks wrong" conversational style will, whatever the intentions of the person doing it, likely upset some of the people it's done to and thereby make it less likely, not more likely, that mutual understanding will be achieved.)
I'm pretty sure dxu wasn't talking about different people in general, but specifically meant that the one on the receiving end of the maybe-an-attack has the right to declare it an attack or not. See the following dxu's sentence.
And, of course, there is the obvious right of everyone to have her own opinion, but I'm reading dxu as saying that the opinion of the originator of the maybe-an-attack is... "less equal" than the opinion of the target.
That's a rather weak claim. Most everything is likely to upset some people.
dxu, would you care to weigh in?
The options I had, writing that sentence, were: obviously-too-strong claim; obviously-too-weak claim; absurdly fussily qualified and quantified claim. None of them was perfect, so I chose the one that looked least bad to me.
Sure. What I meant was that presumably, "attacks" are considered damaging for a reason--namely, that they make discussion more unpleasant. This "unpleasantness", however, is a subjective matter, and whether a particular remark generates an unpleasant feeling is entirely up to (the brain of) the "target", as it were. So I suppose my reply to Lumifer would be something along the lines of
If we're talking about effects on the victim ("victim" is not the word I would have used, by the way), as a matter of causal fact, then yes, in fact, it is. You could try to argue, of course, that the "victim" overreacted and shouldn't have felt attacked by that remark, but the fact of the matter is that he/she did in fact feel attacked.
Of course, just because someone feels attacked doesn't mean you did something wrong when addressing them--it's entirely possible, for example, that the person in question really is overly sensitive, and that a large fraction of people would not have taken umbrage to your remark. This possibility grows markedly less likely, however, when several users independently claim to find a particular poster's comments unpleasant as a whole.
I should also point out that comments, especially long comments, take some effort to write. When confronted with such a comment, I've noticed that Lumifer generally does not address the entirety of the comment, instead selectively quoting several sentences from various points in the comment and then snarking at those. When someone does this, it feels (at least to me) as if they're not actually taking the other poster seriously; if I put a lot of effort into a post and write several paragraphs for you to read and then your reply consists of one-liner responses that are more condescending than informative, it feels as though the effort I'm putting into the discussion is not being reciprocated, which makes me less likely to continue the discussion.
EDIT: An example of the above would be Lumifer's reply to your (gjm's) comment, which simply reads:
Snarky one-liner? Check. Does not actually address the main point? Check. More condescending than informative? Check. This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about, and it was found in the immediate next comment in the chain. You don't even have to look for this sort of thing from Lumifer; that's how often it happens.
There is a reason for that. Addressing the entirety of the comment usually requires that your answer be longer than the comment you're replying to. That leads to large walls'o'text of fisking very very quickly and the whole thing implodes shortly afterwards.
In my experience to keep a manageable conversation going for more than a couple of rounds you need to severely prune the topics and keep the whole thing on a (possibly meandering) track. Of course both sides can/should do this: I don't expect that every point I raised will be addressed in the reply. As to snarking, well... :-)
Re EDIT:
I like snarky one-liners.
Nope. It actually addresses the main point of the post it's replying to.
Not condescending. Snarky (see above). Condescending would have been "Don't worry your pretty little head about it".
That's good evidence that your sentence has problems :-)
Maybe, but it looks to me more like good evidence that some things don't fit nicely into soundbites. LW has traditionally been one of the better places around for discussing such things. Making it less so is, I think, another drawback of your preferred discussion style.
In retrospect, reading this thread is hilarious to me since I have been so inactive a user as to not have built up a model of any of the users who have been active since late 2011. You could argue that I have a poor or no theory of mind, but it is still fun attempting to construct temporary models for everyone based solely on the contents of this thread (I have no time to read the previous five years backlog).
Personally I think that there should be a lower limit of lesswrong culture/rationality in each post regardless of it's niceness content, and have a preference towards nicer posts, though (and this next sentence will turn a lot of people against me) making the forum too accessible will encourage Endless September effects worse than what the community on this site is currently buckling under.
It doesn't have to be a trade-off between rationality and politeness. Maybe we could downvote both comments that are stupid and comments that are rude. (Polite but not smart comments could be ignored, and only insightful non-rude comments upvoted.)
I wonder who downvoted you.
I'd argue for more strict dealing of downvote moderation, a higher waterline, if you like; noninsightful posts get downvoted (and otherwise ignored, or if specifically wrong, corrected) and impolite posts also get down-voted and responded to with an explanation. Explanatory responses might need to be encouraged more, in order to permit the author to know why exactly their post is being downvoted, but I'm wary of encouraging the lesswrong community to become more of a politeness before reason community than it already has, and so many other communities out there have.
I treat up/downvoting not as a carrot or a stick, but as a message. Accordingly, I either downvote or reply, not both (with rare exceptions).
Basically, if I bother to reply, there is no need for an up/downvote since I've sent a better message.
As an aside, I don't think that tinkering with voting will solve any of LW's problems.
Same, unfortunately, I consider this site to be a mostly sunk ship, as previously stated, I've been mostly inactive since 2011, and I never really posted here anyway.