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Viliam comments on Open Thread April 4 - April 10, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (211)
SquirrelInHell asked:
I can imagine a few possible reasons against that; Chesterton fence included. Essentially, the rest of LW act as a filter for some kind of personality. Having rules like "don't downvote anything stupid as long as it is nice and cheerful" could undermine the whole purpose of the website.
What I wanted is probably to have people filtered by X, and then see them doing Y. Because I believe that Y can be more awesome when done with people already filtered by X. Kind of.
Even more generally, when I try using real life as an example, during the day one's mood changes. You have serious moments, and you have silly moments. It would be wrong to remain stuck in one mode forever. On a website, having one fixed set of rules and one culture kinda pushes people to stay in one kind of mood all the time. Which is somewhat unhealthy.
But we would need some way to synchronize the mood changes. In real life this is achieved by the place where you meet, by the current agenda, by nonverbal signals, etc. But on web, we don't even write at the same time. So the only way to synchronize is per thread, I guess. So this is a thread for breaking the general mood.
This is not at all what I mean. I'm suggesting adding a new requirement (be nice) to the existing ones, without relaxing existing standards. Current LW standards are focused on the content, not the presentation - and by adding this fairly simple requirement in the presentation layer I don't think we are changing the range of possible content you can express.
Other points, agreed.
What can be destroyed by truth, should be. It's hard for destruction to be nice.
Disagree. If you genuinely wish to help someone by destroying something by truth, and you fully take into account their subjective experience of the situation, you can be nice while destroying things.
Agreed. People can often hear you better if you take their emotional state into account when communicating with them. For instance, delivering negative feedback in a positive framing helps ensure that people engage with it well and perform better in the future.
People usually go with their non-niceness far beyond what is necessary.
I'm just not sure whether adding niceness to the rules would lead to more niceness, or more meta debates about what is and isn't nice.
Also, the community would have to moderate niceness by voting, and I am not sure about how well this would go either.
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.
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.)
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.
OK, let me propose a clarification of the words we are using for this discussion:
politeness - adhering to a set of widely accepted social norms of communication
being civil - avoiding showing strongly negative emotions, or directly acting to produce such emotions in other people (in most societies, is a part of politeness)
niceness - having positive emotions directed at other people, together with the caring and pleasant behaviour that naturally result from it
So, using the above: LW is not big on politeness, and I fully support this position; LW has being civil in its established norms, and I suggest we keep it; LW norms have nothing on niceness, and I suggest we work to change this.
From experience, it results in better life quality if you call out bulls**ters without being angry inside about it.
No, I've simply tried it both ways myself.
I am sorry, you want to have norms about what kind of emotions I am supposed to be having??
I propose to steelman SquirrelInHell's proposal a little. What if we (for this discussion) define "niceness" to mean not the emotions but the behaviour those emotions typically produce? So being nice to someone means treating them as if you have positive feelings about them.
A norm in favour of that doesn't seem obviously unreasonable.
Yes, pretty much. I know this sounds controversial if you subscribe to a "common sense" understanding of emotions.
But from my point of view, the indignation you expressed in your comment is already a sign that you could benefit from being more aware of your emotions, and managing them consciously to make your life better and more fun.
Now don't misunderstand me - I'm not proposing to have a norm that says everyone needs to be perfect at this. I am merely stipulating a norm that we all try to do better in this respect.
I predict you would be surprised at how malleable your own emotions are, if you are serious about changing them, and you know that you can. I suggest that you set up an easy and quick experiment that goes along the lines of "choose a person I don't like, acknowledge that it's not useful to dislike that person, and then decide to bring my emotions about this person up to neutral".
Oh dear. Beyond the obvious observation that most people could benefit from managing their emotions better, pray tell on which basis did you come to conclusions about my current emotional state and about my ability to control my emotions? I can assure you that reading emotions from the tone of an internet comment is... fraught with dangers.
You are stipulating a norm of an internet forum that we all become better at consciously managing our emotions. Really.
Why would I do that?
The experiment is easy, quick and costs you nothing. So by asking "Why would I do that?" I here more of a "I don't want to listen and you can't make me".
It is true, of course - regarding people's emotions, I can never strong-arm anyone into doing anything.
What I can tell you is why I think disliking people is destructive to epistemic rationality.
Basically, disliking someone makes you see them through the light of the affect heuristic, and makes your thoughts about this person biased in at least a few ways (halo effect, attribution error etc.).
The same could be said to true about liking people, but I found it is not nearly as harmful in this direction, and it is much easier to prevent it from ruining your accuracy.
I hope you see why I consider it a useful skill to be able to stop disliking people (or other things you want to think clearly about). It is a simple and effective method of debiasing.
This is wrong. Your privacy and possibly your personal life can be destroyed by revealing the truth about your personal information and all of your passwords. That doesn't mean your personal life should be destroyed.
You're confusing truth and public disclosure.