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gjm comments on Open Thread April 4 - April 10, 2016 - Less Wrong
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The problem wasn't that you made a trade-off, the problem was that you failed at it -- you chose the "not wall'o'text" path, but did not make your point clearly and correctly.
It has nothing to do with loopholes. Express your meaning clearly and it will be fine. But if that meaning is a misshapen piece of jelly weakly flopping around, well, I will be tempted to poke it with a stick :-/
Perhaps. Or perhaps (as it seemed to me) there wasn't a way of making my point clearly and correctly without too much wall-o'-text.
Which, it seems to me, it wasn't and you have given no reason to think it was. What you have (quite correctly but, in my view, pointlessly) complained about is that an uncharitably literal reading of what I wrote is very vague. True enough; I think the only way to avoid vagueness and wrongness was more wall-o'-text than I was prepared to waste people's time with.
Of course, the ensuing discussion has produced more text and more timewasting than if I'd just written the long and boring version in the first place. Perhaps what I write will tend further in the wall-o'-text direction in future. If so, it will be wordier and more boring, and the only real benefit will be that it will be a bit less vulnerable to one particular sort of bad-faith objection. I do not think that would be a benefit to LW.
Descending briefly to the object level, let me at this point state the original claim[1] more carefully:
[1] It may be worth an explicit reminder that it wasn't a statement of my opinion but an attempt to indicate what sort of thing someone else had been saying. My elaboration here will be on both dxu's original comment and my sketchy and incomplete summary of what s/he was saying.
Suppose you adopt the approach dxu summarized as "when I see a weakness, I must attack immediately". Then discussions in which someone other than you makes some statement that doesn't have all its details firmly nailed down are liable to feature sniping from you when the other guy makes some such statement. Since actually most discussion, even here, involves plenty of such statements, this doesn't have to happen a very large fraction of the time for it to be quite common.
Such discussions tend not to be much fun for the other party, for several reasons. They may feel personally attacked, which is an unpleasant feeling whether or not any sort of personal attack is actually intended. They may find that they have to devote an order of magnitude more time to the discussion than would be necessary without your bloody-mindedness. They may fear getting a reputation for long-windedness and pedantry, when in fact all they are doing is attempting to forestall your sniping.
(Lots of "They may ..." there. I suggest that maybe half of all people you do it to will find the experience unpleasant; maybe 1/4 of the time when you do it they will find themselves devoting far more time to the discussion than it warrants in itself; maybe 1/4 of people you do it to will for some time afterward feel at least some temptation to write defensively.)
You might argue that such a discussion is worth the unpleasantness because it results in clarifying what the other guy meant (or exposing his fuzzy thinking, if what he meant is not susceptible of clarification). But that may well not be the outcome. Much of the time (probably more than half) the other guy will decline to get into a lengthy and possibly unpleasant argument; in these cases, no clarification ensues, whatever productive discussion you could have had instead is forestalled, and no one wins. When they are willing to engage, there is a danger (let's say, again, p>0.5) that the other guy gets annoyed and defensive -- I am stipulating here that there is no chance at all that you would do such a thing -- and what follows is more ego-fight than useful discussion, and again the loss exceeds the gain. The rest of the time, perhaps you do in fact get a useful clarification; very good, but I suggest that in these cases -- where the other guy did mean something specific, was able to figure out what it was, and was disposed to be helpful -- a less aggressive approach would also have elicited the clarification.
The fact is that almost all discussion outside academic journals (and plenty inside them) involves plenty of statements that don't have all their details firmly nailed down, and that could be sniped at in this fashion. So once this pattern is noticed (which of course it has been, here on LW) -- especially when, as here, the person doing the sniping is very active and clearly has time to do a lot of sniping if he chooses -- many participants (let's say >= 10% of active participants, probably more) will feel some pressure to choose between writing defensively (at the cost of extra effort, increased boredom for their readers, reduced clarity for those not reading with aggressive uncharity, etc.) and getting sniped at unpleasantly. Result: some combination of boring defensive writing, and reduced participation (hence, less interesting stuff on LW).
The overall result is -- in dxu's view, as I understand it, and also as it happens in mine -- that your conversational style is bad for LW. It's probably good for you, though: sniping is fun, and is an effective way to pick up karma if you happen to care about that. Chalk up one more victory for Moloch.
In such situations I usually choose to not say anything and let it go.
When both of your options lose, the only way to win is not to play :-)
Since we've been talking about trade-offs, let me point out that there is one here, too. Let's imagine a wonderful world where people like me are absent and everyone is very nice, highly supportive and full of praise. Gold stars for everyone! What kind of writing would you expect to get?
My cynical side says that you will get a whole lot of badly written, unfocused, lazy, vague, incoherent crap. You might well get increased participation because yay praise and hugs for little effort, but thoughtful people would leave, for obvious reasons. That doesn't look like a good outcome.
As usual, balance is important. You want to prune (and disincentivise) crap and you want to promote (and incentivise) interesting, insightful writing. The exact location of the proper balancing point is, of course, debatable :-)
One more thing -- it might be helpful to think of LW as an ecosystem. An ecosystem likes and need diversity. That, in turn, implies that LW needs different kinds of people who will fill different roles. Some people (like me) will snap and bite. Some people will nurture and grow. Some people will dump the minutiae of their daily lives onto LW. Some people will think for a year and then make a single post. Some people are interested in neural nets, some are interested in ponies, some are interested in how to lose weight and pick up girls, and some are interested in how to make sure LW doesn't become an example of Lotka-Volterra equations.
Monocultures are bad, mmkay?
What if, instead of trying to win, you're actually trying to advance the discussion in a meaningful way? Some people aren't here to win verbal sparring matches.
Please keep in mind that no one actually wants that. Some people would just prefer you tone it down. Like, you could, for example, cut down on stuff like this:
Seriously, what purpose does this sort of rhetoric serve? I understand this is your posting style, but if you write stuff like this you don't get to claim your comments aren't "attacks" (EDIT: or "condescending", for that matter).
This... seriously does not follow. I have read comment threads from before you joined LW, as well as comment threads that occurred after you joined but that you simply did not post in. Most of these threads were not, as you put it, "incoherent crap", primarily because there are people on this site who are just as capable of pointing out flaws as you are, but don't do it in such a grating fashion. (Examples of these people include: TheOtherDave, wedrifid, shminux, Vaniver, etc.)
I'll be honest here: I have not seen a single other poster with a rhetorical style even remotely resembling yours. If you're a member of this "ecosystem", you're a species of one.
What are you even arguing, here? That the presence of people like yourself is somehow necessary to keep LW from devolving into a monoculture? If so, I have to disagree--and it's hard to see how you could be arguing anything else.
I didn't define "win" as winning at verbal sparring. If your goal is to advance discussion in a meaningful way and the short version fails at that while the long version is too long, the same reasoning applies.
But I don't wanna! X-) I like expressive, sparkly, prickly, highly saturated, slightly ambiguous language. I can easily produce polite, bland, dry, and technically correct writing, but there is not much fun in that and I'm not writing an academic paper. "Tone it down to beige" -- no, thank you.
I am not talking about myself. I'm talking about the balance between discouraging and promoting in general. I certainly don't claim I'm the only force that's keeping LW from drowning in crap.
There is the classic Shrek's answer to Fiona's outraged "What kind of knight ARE you?"...
But really, are you telling me, on LW, that I'm too weird? :-)
That applying a single standard of expected behaviour to everyone is not a particularly useful approach, but rather a "be careful what you wish for" case.
And what if the short version only fails when the person you're interacting with is more interested in point-scoring than engaging with your actual meaning? So that, e.g., if you say "some people will do X" they'll derail the discussion into a side-argument about how "some" could mean "only one person ever" even though even the most halfhearted application of the principle of charity would make it clear that if you meant "only one person ever" you would have used different words?
But no one here is suggesting that you (or anyone else who doesn't want to) should be doing that.
There are plenty of LW participants whose writing is immediately recognizable as theirs, and not bland and boring and beige. Only two are immediately recognizable on account of their dismissiveness and rudeness to others. You are one; the other ... well, let's just say that he goes by many names.
The point here is not that you are "too weird". Weird is fine. The point is that it is possible to be weird without being obnoxious.
The above is harsher than I'd like to be. I consider your contributions overall a clear net benefit to LW, and your karma strongly suggests that others do too (unless of course LW is stuffed with your sockpuppets, but I'm guessing not). But they would be a bigger and clearer net benefit if you were to turn the dismissive sniping down one notch; and no, doing so would not make LW a monoculture. But it might be marginally less fun for you, and if that's all you care about then there's not much anyone else can do about it.
That's importantly ambiguous. Interpretation one: "we shouldn't expect everyone here to behave exactly the same way". Perfectly true and perfectly irrelevant; no one is expecting that. Interpretation two: "there's no norm we should expect of everyone here". Perfectly ridiculous; there are plenty of expectations applied to everyone, on LW and everywhere else.
We expect people not to reply with total non sequiturs (unless doing so in some particular case is hilarious or something). We expect people not to issue death threats. We expect people not to use LW to spam advertisements for their penis enlargement pills. We expect people to post in English unless there is a special reason not to. All these, and plenty more that I'm sure you can come up with yourself, are part of a "single standard of expected behaviour", which is not at all the same thing as a monoculture; and there's nothing wrong with that.
Where is the button for awarding Reddit Gold? Because I need it right now.
This is exactly what I mean by talking about "passive agressivity" on LW. There are already enough genuine misunderstandings, so we don't need to create another layer of difficulty by trying to score some meaningless points.
But there is the danger that becoming less obnoxious would be the first step on the slippery slope leading to braindead conformity and posting kitten videos...
Don't worry, no one here would go that far.
Well, if you believe that I don't see why do you bother with various versions at all. If you think the person you're talking to is uninterested in your actual meaning, why, go find someone who is.
Sniping, yes, dismissive, no. The ultimate dismissal is just ignoring a post or a person. And my snarking on LW is already turned down a notch or two. But, generally speaking, I'm not great at creating a helpful and supportive atmosphere, but quite good at taking things apart (that was part of the point of mentioning an ecosystem). If someone is attached to the thing I took apart, some unhappiness is unavoidable.
I generally don't. In this particular discussion, I am beginning to wonder. (But the point at which I began to wonder was after I wrote what I did, which I suppose is the answer to "why do you bother with various versions at all". Also, there are other readers.)
And -- I repeat myself, but why not? -- I think taking things apart is a valuable service, and the voting on your comments suggests that other LW participants agree. I just think LW would be improved a little if you were slightly nicer about it.
(Which, for the avoidance of doubt, does not mean any of the following: "You must be brainwashed to be just like everyone else." "Now, children, why can't we just all get along?" "Let's all sing Kumbaya and everything will be fairies and unicorns and rainbows.")
At this point in the conversation I have to ask: Do either of you actually expect to change anybody's minds?
Very reasonable question, albeit awkward to answer because making predictions about other people is kinda rude and kinda creepy.
I certainly don't expect Lumifer to stop enjoying being snarky at people on LW. Neither do I expect him to make a radical shift from doing whatever he finds amusing to some kind of optimization of everyone's net utility. But I do think it's possible that he will make a small update to his estimate of how other people react to his snarky dismissals, and that there will be a small corresponding change in behaviour. That would, in my judgement, make LW a marginally better place.
I also hope that some people who are upvoting snarky dismissiveness may become slightly less inclined to do so. I don't at all begrudge Lumifer his upvotes, but I think he's often getting them for the wrong comments. More to the point, I think an environment where snarky dismissiveness gets lots of upvotes will encourage other people to move in the snarkily dismissive direction, which I think would be bad for LW.
Ok. Assume, for a moment, that Lumifer is judicious about when to be snarkily dismissive - that is, he is snarkily dismissive when he thinks it is the appropriate response.
In that case, would it be fair to say that the issue you take is not necessarily with his snarky dismissiveness, but rather his skipping the intermediate mental steps in explaining why somebody is wrong? That is, he is making leaps of logic that the audience can't necessarily follow? (This might explain some of the upvotes, as well; they're not upvoting his snarkiness, but his dismissal of something they also dismiss for similar reasons which nobody ever conveys to those who don't know what those reasons are.)
In that case, instead of engaging him on a tone argument, it might be more productive to suggest he is losing some of his audience, who he could otherwise convince, by dismissing things without apparent cause.
There's probably a competing needs access issue here; Lumifer's commentary might be useful to a subset of people, while harmful (or at least non-useful) to another subset of people. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate the usefulness of his commentary to the subset of people to whom his commentary is helpful, but rather to expand the usefulness of his commentary to those who don't already know what his objections imply/what his true objections are.
(As for making predictions of people - you don't improve your models of other people by never making predictions.)
Maybe that's part of the problem sometimes. But no, I don't think it's the main problem. In my own interactions with Lumifer, I am much more often annoyed by rudeness than by incomprehension. And my impression of his interaction with others is that they're mostly the same.
(I do from time to time find Lumifer's comments unhelpfully terse and seek clarification. But I don't find those annoying in the same way as I do the snarky dismissals.)
I would say that, conditional on Lumifer's snarky dismissiveness being "judicious" in the sense you describe, the objection I sometimes have is that he is incorrect in thinking it "the correct response".
Of course. But you don't need to make the predictions out loud in public, and often it's a bad idea to -- e.g., because of the "monkey brain jerking around" issue Lumifer mentioned: talking about what someone else is going to do in the future on account of what you've said is apt to feel like a status manoeuvre; there are other reasons too.
I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, I'm defending my right to have a mind which doesn't exactly conform to other people's notions of what it should be :-/
Evidently, my mind has a snarky module which can easily be swapped for the cooperate-bot module (you'll usually find it labeled "anti-Moloch" or "something something charitable") and that's a minor surgery, I'll be out of the clinic in no time. And then I'll be allowed into the rainbows-and-unicorns land where everyone shall live happily ever after.
I think you're both having different arguments than you think you are. Illusion of transparency, and all that.
I suspect Gjm's true argument is something along the lines of "Lumifer has a tendency to dismiss people's positions without explanation." But instead he is making a tone argument, because he is noticing his reaction to your style of commentary rather than the nature of your style of commentary.
Which is not to say your dismissals are wrong, but it often requires a lot of reading between the lines, when reading your comments, to figure out what your reasons actually are. And if somebody isn't familiar with the specific argument you're implicitly referencing with your "snarky one-liners", they may fail to be able to understand what your objection actually is. Gjm is also very uncomfortable guessing at people's motivations/reasons (he considers it rude), so you two have an even wider communication gap.
Human interactions are complicated, there are usually multiple factors at play. It is true that from gjm's point of view I sometimes dismiss people's positions "arbitrarily". But it is also true that my style breaks the rules of the polite society in gjm's corner of the world and that makes him less comfortable. Plus there are status signals involved and the monkey brain is, of course, jerking around in response to them.
That's a fair point.
Not guessing, but publicly stating. I am pretty sure that he -- like all people -- builds models of people in his head all the time. But bringing out these models into the open is too direct and explicit: gentlemen do not do that.
It would be interesting to speculate on how "LW would be a slightly better place if you were one notch less snarky" seems to have turned into "you want to change the workings of my brain to make me exactly what you think it should be, and you think that doing so would make everyone happy", but I am much too polite to do so and will merely remark that no, of course I was not taking exception to the form or content of your mind; only (mildly) to some of your actions.