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gjm comments on Open Thread April 4 - April 10, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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".
I don't. (See, two can play at this game.)
Not snarky enough.
Your move :-P
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.
Your wounds are self-inflicted. My preferred discussion style is not binding on anyone and anyway, I'm a believer in the "Things should be as simple as possible but not simpler" maxim. The issue is, rather, balancing making your point clearly and correctly against writing a wall'o'text that no one reads. That's not an easy balance to strike. I often say "It's complicated" and cut off large chunks of discussion space for exactly this reason.
Which was exactly the tradeoff I made in a way you complained about. I dare say you'd have made a different complaint if I'd made the tradeoff a different way.
So if "my wounds" means the fact that I said something that, taken literally, wasn't very informative: yeah, self-inflicted, and I'm not bothered by those particular wounds.
But if it means the fact that I said something that called forth a bit of mockery from an LW regular who likes mocking things: nope, not self-inflicted in any useful sense.
(I wouldn't have used the word "wounds" myself. Far too dramatic.)
[EDITED to add:]
Of course. But the fact that leaving any loophole is liable to result in a dismissive comment from you is ... not binding on anyone, that wouldn't make any sense, but it affects everyone on LW. How much it affects any given person depends on how much they care about getting dismissive comments. It doesn't bother me much, but I bet it bothers some other people more.
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.