= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
dxu comments on Open Thread April 4 - April 10, 2016 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (211)
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 find it rude when people don't make eye contact. It made New England an interesting place for me to live. Was I wrong to try to make eye contact, or were they wrong to avoid it? And whose mores should win in a place where both cultures coincide?
Do you regard being predictable as being a low-status signal, and do you think society at large shares this view?
Not necessarily either, of course, but in practice it's probably easier for you to learn that New Englanders may avoid eye contact even if they are friendly than for half the population of New England to change their habits.
I think most of us are inclined to treat being manipulable as a low-status signal, and being predictable manipulable even more so. This is why, if you want to encourage someone to change their behaviour, it is often more effective to talk about it with them in private.
(In this case, the discussion was already going on in public when I first saw it.)
You miss my point. Rudeness is culturally contextual. You're insisting, here, that your social mores take precedent. It's entirely possible they're the majority mores, but Lumifer's overall positive karma should be taken as evidence against that.
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.
On the last point there, Lumifer is right and OrphanWilde wrong: I don't consider it in any way improper to build mental models of other people, and so far as I can tell I understand Lumifer's one-liners as well as anyone else does. (Which is not to say I always understand them correctly; but if not then his wounds are, as he might put it, self-inflicted.)
The other half of Lumifer's commentary, attempting to explain what I dislike about his posting style, is so far as I can tell quite badly wrong, but I don't think it would be productive to argue it further. (It very rarely is after one party has decided to go full Bulver on the other.)
You should notice now that what he was interpreting you as saying isn't what you were intending to convey, as demonstrated by the fact that you felt a need to clarify; likewise, by the fact that you didn't notice what his argument was actually about, you were likewise not getting what he was trying to communicate.
Your wounds here are, as Lumifer might put it, self-inflicted. And accusing the other party of going "full Bulver" isn't exactly conducive to the sort of respectful discussion you claim to want to reify here, which is really just a subset of the overall tone of discussion. You called Lumifer out, and, by my reckoning, have more or less admitted that the thread was at least in part a response to him and his style of commentary. More, for somebody who considers it incredibly rude and status-gamey to make predictions about people, your first response to Lumifer was a post-hoc prediction that he'd be the one to respond. Given that you regard such behavior as a status play, I can't help but interpret this entire bloody discussion in that framework. [ETA: Correction: It was Villiam who did the above.]
You're playing at being the mature, responsible person, telling somebody who is ill-behaved that their behavior is problematic. But you're not actually being a mature, responsible person here, as evidenced by the fact that you chose to insert a parting shot in your "I don't want to argue about this anymore."
If you don't want to argue about it anymore, stop bloody arguing, and ignore the need to inject attacks in your closing statement.
What makes you think I didn't notice what Lumifer's argument was actually about?
I suggest that your assessment of that is strongly coloured by your completely incorrect characterization of the rest of the thread. You've already issued one correction -- indeed, my first response to Lumifer was not the post-hoc prediction you said it was (which would indeed have been inconsistent with my stated opinions). Here are some more. I didn't call Lumifer out; dxu did, my entry to the thread was an attempt to correct a misunderstanding. Given that I didn't start the thread, I'm not sure how I could possibly "admit that the thread was" anything.
I explained why I don't want to argue about it any more. I'm not sure exactly what you consider immature or irresponsible about that.
Logical fallacy: ad hominem tu quoque.
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.