The Web Browser is Not Your Client (But You Don't Need To Know That)
(Part of a sequence on discussion technology and NNTP. As last time, I should probably emphasize that I am a crank on this subject and do not actually expect anything I recommend to be implemented. Add whatever salt you feel is necessary)1
If there is one thing I hope readers get out of this sequence, it is this: The Web Browser is Not Your Client.
It looks like you have three or four viable clients -- IE, Firefox, Chrome, et al. You don't. You have one. It has a subforum listing with two items at the top of the display; some widgets on the right hand side for user details, RSS feed, meetups; the top-level post display; and below that, replies nested in the usual way.
Changing your browser has the exact same effect on your Less Wrong experience as changing your operating system, i.e. next to none.
For comparison, consider the Less Wrong IRC, where you can tune your experience with a wide range of different software. If you don't like your UX, there are other clients that give a different UX to the same content and community.
That is how the mechanism of discussion used to work, and does not now. Today, your user experience (UX) in a given community is dictated mostly by the admins of that community, and software development is often neither their forte nor something they have time for. I'll often find myself snarkily responding to feature requests with "you know, someone wrote something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it."
Semantic Collapse
What defines a client? More specifically, what defines a discussion client, a Less Wrong client?
The toolchain by which you read LW probably looks something like this; anyone who's read the source please correct me if I'm off:
Browser -> HTTP server -> LW UI application -> Reddit API -> Backend database.
The database stores all the information about users, posts, etc. The API presents subsets of that information in a way that's convenient for a web application to consume (probably JSON objects, though I haven't checked). The UI layer generates a web page layout and content using that information, which is then presented -- in the form of (mostly) HTML -- by the HTTP server layer to your browser. Your browser figures out what color pixels go where.
All of this is a gross oversimplification, obviously.
In some sense, the browser is self-evidently a client: It talks to an http server, receives hypertext, renders it, etc. It's a UI for an HTTP server.
But consider the following problem: Find and display all comments by me that are children of this post, and only those comments, using only browser UI elements, i.e. not the LW-specific page widgets. You cannot -- and I'd be pretty surprised if you could make a browser extension that could do it without resorting to the API, skipping the previous elements in the chain above. For that matter, if you can do it with the existing page widgets, I'd love to know how.
That isn't because the browser is poorly designed; it's because the browser lacks the semantic information to figure out what elements of the page constitute a comment, a post, an author. That information was lost in translation somewhere along the way.
Your browser isn't actually interacting with the discussion. Its role is more akin to an operating system than a client. It doesn't define a UX. It provides a shell, a set of system primitives, and a widget collection that can be used to build a UX. Similarly, HTTP is not the successor to NNTP; the successor is the plethora of APIs, for which HTTP is merely a substrate.
The Discussion Client is the point where semantic metadata is translated into display metadata; where you go from 'I have post A from user B with content C' to 'I have a text string H positioned above visual container P containing text string S.' Or, more concretely, when you go from this:
Author: somebody
Subject: I am right, you are mistaken, he is mindkilled.
Date: timestamp
Content: lorem ipsum nonsensical statement involving plankton....
to this:
<h1>I am right, you are mistaken, he is mindkilled.</h1>
<div><span align=left>somebody</span><span align=right>timestamp</span></div>
<div><p>lorem ipsum nonsensical statement involving plankton....</p></div>
That happens at the web application layer. That's the part that generates the subforum headings, the interface widgets, the display format of the comment tree. That's the part that defines your Less Wrong experience, as a reader, commenter, or writer.
That is your client, not your web browser. If it doesn't suit your needs, if it's missing features you'd like to have, well, you probably take for granted that you're stuck with it.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
Mechanism and Policy
One of the difficulties forming an argument about clients is that the proportion of people who have ever had a choice of clients available for any given service keeps shrinking. I have this mental image of the Average Internet User as having no real concept for this.
Then I think about email. Most people have probably used at least two different clients for email, even if it's just Gmail and their phone's built-in mail app. Or perhaps Outlook, if they're using a company system. And they (I think?) mostly take for granted that if they don't like Outlook they can use something else, or if they don't like their phone's mail app they can install a different one. They assume, correctly, that the content and function of their mail account is not tied to the client application they use to work with it.
(They may make the same assumption about web-based services, on the reasoning that if they don't like IE they can switch to Firefox, or if they don't like Firefox they can switch to Chrome. They are incorrect, because The Web Browser is Not Their Client)
Email does a good job of separating mechanism from policy. Its format is defined in RFC 2822 and its transmission protocol is defined in RFC 5321. Neither defines any conventions for user interfaces. There are good reasons for that from a software-design standpoint, but more relevant to our discussion is that interface conventions change more rapidly than the objects they interface with. Forum features change with the times; but the concepts of a Post, an Author, or a Reply are forever.
The benefit of this separation: If someone sends you mail from Outlook, you don't need to use Outlook to read it. You can use something else -- something that may look and behave entirely differently, in a manner more to your liking.
The comparison: If there is a discussion on Less Wrong, you do need to use the Less Wrong UI to read it. The same goes for, say, Facebook.
I object to this.
Standards as Schelling Points
One could argue that the lack of choice is for lack of interest. Less Wrong, and Reddit on which it is based, has an API. One could write a native client. Reddit does have them.
Let's take a tangent and talk about Reddit. Seems like they might have done something right. They have (I think?) the largest contiguous discussion community on the net today. And they have a published API for talking to it. It's even in use.
The problem with this method is that Reddit's API applies only to Reddit. I say problem, singular, but it's really problem, plural, because it hits users and developers in different ways.
On the user end, it means you can't have a unified user interface across different web forums; other forum servers have entirely different APIs, or none at all.2 It also makes life difficult when you want to move from one forum to another.
On the developer end, something very ugly happens when a content provider defines its own provision mechanism. Yes, you can write a competing client. But your client exists only at the provider's sufferance, subject to their decision not to make incompatible API changes or just pull the plug on you and your users outright. That isn't paranoia; in at least one case, it actually happened. Using an agreed-upon standard limits this sort of misbehavior, although it can still happen in other ways.
NNTP is a standard for discussion, like SMTP is for email. It is defined in RFC 3977 and its data format is defined in RFC 5536. The point of a standard is to ensure lasting interoperability; because it is a standard, it serves as a deliberately-constructed Schelling point, a place where unrelated developers can converge without further coordination.
Expertise is a Bottleneck
If you're trying to build a high-quality community, you want a closed system. Well kept gardens die by pacifism, and it's impossible to fully moderate an open system. But if you're building a communication infrastructure, you want an open system.
In the early Usenet days, this was exactly what existed; NNTP was standardized and open, but Usenet was a de-facto closed community, accessible mostly to academics. Then AOL hooked its customers into the system. The closed community became open, and the Eternal September began.3 I suspect, but can't prove, that this was a partial cause of the flight of discussion from Usenet to closed web forums.
I don't think that was the appropriate response. I think the appropriate response was private NNTP networks or even single servers, not connected to Usenet at large.
Modern web forums throw the open-infrastructure baby out with the open-community bathwater. The result, in our specific case, is that if we want something not provided by the default Less Wrong interface, it must be implemented by Less Wrongers.
I don't think UI implementation is our comparative advantage. In fact I know it isn't, or the Less Wrong UI wouldn't suck so hard. We're pretty big by web-forum standards, but we still contain only a tiny fraction of the Internet's technical expertise.
The situation is even worse among the diaspora; for example, at SSC, if Scott's readers want something new out of the interface, it must be implemented either by Scott himself or his agents. That doesn't scale.
One of the major benefits of a standardized, open infrastructure is that your developer base is no longer limited to a single community. Any software written by any member of any community backed by the same communication standard is yours for the using. Additionally, the developers are competing for the attention of readers, not admins; you can expect the reader-facing feature set to improve accordingly. If readers want different UI functionality, the community admins don't need to be involved at all.
A Real Web Client
When I wrote the intro to this sequence, the most common thing people insisted on was this: Any system that actually gets used must allow links from the web, and those links must reach a web page.
I completely, if grudgingly, agree. No matter how insightful a post is, if people can't link to it, it will not spread. No matter how interesting a post is, if Google doesn't index it, it doesn't exist.
One way to achieve a common interface to an otherwise-nonstandard forum is to write a gateway program, something that answers NNTP requests and does magic to translate them to whatever the forum understands. This can work and is better than nothing, but I don't like it -- I'll explain why in another post.
Assuming I can suppress my gag reflex for the next few moments, allow me to propose: a web client.
(No, I don't mean write a new browser. The Browser Is Not Your Client.4)
Real NNTP clients use the OS's widget set to build their UI and talk to the discussion board using NNTP. There is no fundamental reason the same cannot be done using the browser's widget set. Google did it. Before them, Deja News did it. Both of them suck, but they suck on the UI level. They are still proof that the concept can work.
I imagine an NNTP-backed site where casual visitors never need to know that's what they're dealing with. They see something very similar to a web forum or a blog, but whatever software today talks to a database on the back end, instead talks to NNTP, which is the canonical source of posts and post metadata. For example, it gets the results of a link to http://lesswrong.com/posts/message_id.html by sending ARTICLE message_id to its upstream NNTP server (which may be hosted on the same system), just as a native client would.
To the drive-by reader, nothing has changed. Except, maybe, one thing. When a regular reader, someone who's been around long enough to care about such things, says "Hey, I want feature X," and our hypothetical web client doesn't have it, I can now answer:
Someone wrote something that does that twenty years ago.
Here is how to get it.
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Meta-meta: This post took about eight hours to research and write, plus two weeks procrastinating. If anyone wants to discuss it in realtime, you can find me on #lesswrong or, if you insist, the LW Slack.↩
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The possibility of "universal clients" that understand multiple APIs is an interesting case, as with Pidgin for IM services. I might talk about those later.↩
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Ironically, despite my nostalgia for Usenet, I was a part of said September; or at least its aftermath.↩
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Okay, that was a little shoehorned in. The important thing is this: What I tell you three times is true.↩
Turning the Technical Crank
A few months ago, Vaniver wrote a really long post speculating about potential futures for Less Wrong, with a focus on the idea that the spread of the Less Wrong diaspora has left the site weak and fragmented. I wasn't here for our high water mark, so I don't really have an informed opinion on what has socially changed since then. But a number of complaints are technical, and as an IT person, I thought I had some useful things to say.
I argued at the time that many of the technical challenges of the diaspora were solved problems, and that the solution was NNTP -- an ancient, yet still extant, discussion protocol. I am something of a crank on the subject and didn't expect much of a reception. I was pleasantly surprised by the 18 karma it generated, and tried to write up a full post arguing the point.
I failed. I was trying to write a manifesto, didn't really know how to do it right, and kept running into a vast inferential distance I couldn't seem to cross. I'm a product of a prior age of the Internet, from before the http prefix assumed its imperial crown; I kept wanting to say things that I knew would make no sense to anyone who came of age this millennium. I got bogged down in irrelevant technical minutia about how to implement features X, Y, and Z. Eventually I decided I was attacking the wrong problem; I was thinking about 'how do I promote NNTP', when really I should have been going after 'what would an ideal discussion platform look like and how does NNTP get us there, if it does?'
So I'm going to go after that first, and work on the inferential distance problem, and then I'm going to talk about NNTP, and see where that goes and what could be done better. I still believe it's the closest thing to a good, available technological schelling point, but it's going to take a lot of words to get there from here, and I might change my mind under persuasive argument. We'll see.
Fortunately, this is Less Wrong, and sequences are a thing here. This is the first post in an intended sequence on mechanisms of discussion. I know it's a bit off the beaten track of Less Wrong subject matter. I posit that it's both relevant to our difficulties and probably more useful and/or interesting than most of what comes through these days. I just took the 2016 survey and it has a couple of sections on the effects of the diaspora, so I'm guessing it's on topic for meta purposes if not for site-subject purposes.
Less Than Ideal Discussion
To solve a problem you must first define it. Looking at the LessWrong 2.0 post, I see the following technical problems, at a minimum; I'll edit this with suggestions from comments.
- Aggregation of posts. Our best authors have formed their own fiefdoms and their work is not terribly visible here. We currently have limited support for this via the sidebar, but that's it.
- Aggregation of comments. You can see diaspora authors in the sidebar, but you can't comment from here.
- Aggregation of community. This sounds like a social problem but it isn't. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to "hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community." Non-prominent individuals can theoretically post here; yet this is the place we are decrying as moribund.
- Incomplete and poor curation. We currently do this via Promoted, badly, and via the diaspora sidebar, also badly.
- Pitiful interface feature set. This is not so much a Less Wrong-specific problem as a 2010s-internet problem; people who inhabit SSC have probably seen me respond to feature complaints with "they had something that did that in the 90s, but nobody uses it." (my own bugbear is searching for comments by author-plus-content).
- Changes are hamstrung by the existing architecture, which gets you volunteer reactions like this one.
I see these meta-technical problems:
- Expertise is scarce. Few people are in a position to technically improve the site, and those that are, have other demands on their time.
- The Trivial Inconvenience Problem limits the scope of proposed changes to those that are not inconvenient to commenters or authors.
- Getting cooperation from diaspora authors is a coordination problem. Are we better than average at handling those? I don't know.
Slightly Less Horrible Discussion
"Solving" community maintenance is a hard problem, but to the extent that pieces of it can be solved technologically, the solution might include these ultra-high-level elements:
- Centralized from the user perspective. A reader should be able to interact with the entire community in one place, and it should be recognizable as a community.
- Decentralized from the author perspective. Diaspora authors seem to like having their own fiefdoms, and the social problem of "all the best posters went elsewhere" can't be solved without their cooperation. Therefore any technical solution must allow for it.
- Proper division of labor. Scott Alexander probably should not have to concern himself with user feature requests; that's not his comparative advantage and I'd rather he spend his time inventing moral cosmologies. I suspect he would prefer the same. The same goes for Eliezer Yudkowski or any of our still-writing-elsewhere folks.
- Really good moderation tools.
- Easy entrance. New users should be able to join the discussion without a lot of hassle. Old authors that want to return should be able to do so and, preferably, bring their existing content with them.
- Easy exit. Authors who don't like the way the community is heading should be able to jump ship -- and, crucially, bring their content with them to their new ship. Conveniently. This is essentially what has happened, except old content is hostage here.
- Separate policy and mechanism within the site architecture. Let this one pass for now if you don't know what it means; it's the first big inferential hurdle I need to cross and I'll be starting soon enough.
As with the previous, I'll update this from the comments if necessary.
Getting There From Here
As I said at the start, I feel on firmer ground talking about technical issues than social ones. But I have to acknowledge one strong social opinion: I believe the greatest factor in Less Wrong's decline is the departure of our best authors for personal blogs. Any plan for revitalization has to provide an improved substitute for a personal blog, because that's where everyone seems to end up going. You need something that looks and behaves like a blog to the author or casual readers, but integrates seamlessly into a community discussion gateway.
I argue that this can be achieved. I argue that the technical challenges are solvable and the inherent coordination problem is also solvable, provided the people involved still have an interest in solving it.
And I argue that it can be done -- and done better than what we have now -- using technology that has existed since the '90s.
I don't argue that this actually will be achieved in anything like the way I think it ought to be. As mentioned up top, I am a crank, and I have no access whatsoever to anybody with any community pull. My odds of pushing through this agenda are basically nil. But we're all about crazy thought experiments, right?
This topic is something I've wanted to write about for a long time. Since it's not typical Less Wrong fare, I'll take the karma on this post as a referendum on whether the community would like to see it here.
Assuming there's interest, the sequence will look something like this (subject to reorganization as I go along, since I'm pulling this from some lengthy but horribly disorganized notes; in particular I might swap subsequences 2 and 3):
- Technical Architecture
- Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client
- Specialized Protocols: or, NNTP and its Bastard Children
- Moderation, Personal Gardens, and Public Parks
- Content, Presentation, and the Division of Labor
- The Proper Placement of User Features
- Hard Things that are Suddenly Easy: or, what does client control gain us?
- Your Web Browser Is Still Not Your Client (but you don't need to know that)
- Meta-Technical Conflicts (or, obstacles to adoption)
- Never Bet Against Convenience
- Conflicting Commenter, Author, and Admin Preferences
- Lipstick on the Configuration Pig
- Incremental Implementation and the Coordination Problem.
- Lowering Barriers to Entry and Exit
- Technical and Social Interoperability
- Benefits and Drawbacks of Standards
- Input Formats and Quoting Conventions
- Faking Functionality
- Why Reddit Makes Me Cry
- What NNTP Can't Do
- Implementation of Nonstandard Features
- Some desirable feature #1
- Some desirable feature #2
- ...etc. This subsequence is only necessary if someone actually wants to try and do what I'm arguing for, which I think unlikely.
(Meta-meta: This post was written in Markdown, converted to HTML for posting using Pandoc, and took around four hours to write. I can often be found lurking on #lesswrong or #slatestarcodex on workday afternoons if anyone wants to discuss it, but I don't promise to answer quickly because, well, workday)
[Edited to add: At +10/92% karma I figure continuing is probably worth it. After reading comments I'm going to try to slim it down a lot from the outline above, though. I still want to hit all those points but they probably don't all need a full post's space. Note that I'm not Scott or Eliezer, I write like I bleed, so what I do post will likely be spaced out]
Less Wrong Study Hall - Year Two
The Less Wrong Study Hall is still going, two years after its creation. I'm trying to make last year's survey an annual thing, so I did it again. We've been growing slowly but steadily. According to this year's census, we have 60+ users. By comparison to Yvain's Less Wrong survey, that gives us just under 4% penetration.
For anyone who isn't familiar with the Hall: We're a collection of (mostly) Less Wrong users who gather to work in a video chat room. The idea is not so much to collaborate on projects, as to have visible companions in the effort to get things done. There's a thorough description here, and its description of our efforts is still more or less accurate. The room is hosted by Tinychat, and we work according to the Pomodoro Technique.
I'll briefly reiterate our social norms for anyone who doesn't want to read the whole prior post:
- Say hello and ask for the current time when entering, if needed.
- Don’t talk during pomos.
- Do talk during breaks.
- Talking about work is encouraged.
- Bragging about work is encouraged.
- Don’t turn your mic on.
- But do turn your camera or desktop view on if you want
The tinychat room is here, and the Complice frontend is here. Either will work. The password is 'lw'. The password exists not as a security measure but as a roadblock for random walk-ins.
Aside from our growing population, the most significant change of the last year was malcolmocean succesfully integrating the room into his Complice application. This doesn't give us control of the room, but does give us (by which I mean him) the ability to bolt on features, including a unified pomodoro timer with audible dings. It's achieved fixation remarkably quickly; most of our participants now use it.
Last year's top suggestion box item was better enforcement of pomodoros; break overruns were extremely common. The public timer has rapidly and all-but-completely solved the problem. No technological enforcement was necessary, which surprised me. There was some concern that users who weren't inclined to use Complice would be left in the dark, but that doesn't seem to have happened. I would like to emphasize that if you are joining via Tinychat rather than Complice, it is still okay to explicitly ask for the time. We know that not everyone can see the timer, and we won't bite you.
We do have some challenges to deal with in the upcoming year. Most of them involve our continuing dependence on Tinychat. Our Complice frontend is definitely not Tinychat-approved, and I suspect they will try to step on it if they notice. With our population growing, we have begun to bump against Tinychat's twelve-camera limit. And, of course, as long as we're dependent on Tinychat we can't develop the Hall into a single unified application.
There may be some indication of light at the end of that tunnel; we'll see. In the meantime, we do still have room for growth, and we still welcome new people.
Personal Reflections
As I write this, I find that we have recovered our original Creator from the darkness of non-usage. That made my day.
I actually use the Hall less than I did last year. I changed jobs, and my new schedule leaves me less time alone that I would normally use to join the chat. So, my comments may be less reflective than otherwise.
The numbers say that we are bigger, but it doesn't really feel that way. We have run close to the video limit, but not very often; most of the time that I go (usually on the weekends), there are three to six cameras active. I've talked to a few others about it, and it sounds like the increase may be coming from more users during lower-use times than an increase in peak usage.
I mostly use the Hall for handling personal chores and writing. I occasionally program, but this is one task for which I've found the Hall counterproductive. Pomodoro breaks flush my mental state, screwing up the symbolic juggling that any programmer will be familiar with.
If anyone else has the same problem, but still wants to use the Hall while coding, I suggest ignoring breaks and turning the volume down so that timer dings and people talking doesn't pull you out of hack mode. That's what I do. In the future, it would be nice to have rooms with different pomo periods to accommodate things like this. Right now I don't think we have enough people to fill multiple rooms, but with any luck that will change.
One of the most interesting responses in the survey below came from a former user, who used the comment box to describe why they'd left. They cited a similar issue; they needed help with larger tasks, not the chunkable ones that suit pomodoros best. They also cited cultural fit; apparently they were put off by the silly atmosphere of many of the breaks.
I want to address that specifically, because there was some concern about it last year that did not seem to hold up when the survey asked about it. Here we have someone for whom it really was an issue. So it is, indeed, a real thing. On the other hand, other respondents noted the same elements as a plus, and I myself would be sad to see it go away. I think this is something that we are just going to have to accept as an aspect of our culture that inevitably will not suit everyone.
The respondent in question seemed to agree. That said: Whoever you are, sorry you left us and thank you for telling us why.
2015 Census and Survey Results
Numbers are fun, so here there be numbers. Once again, credit to Yvain for all the questions I pilfered from his Less Wrong survey.
There were 63 respondents, up from last year's 23. I'm unsure how much of that increase is real and how much is a selection effect. This year, the Complice room automatically advertised the survey during breaks, so it's likely a higher percentage of users took it.
Last year I took the Google Forms statistics verbatim, but this year I couldn't do that for Reasons. The script I used to generate these numbers is possibly the worst code I've written in the last decade. As far as I can tell they're still correct, but if anyone notices something obviously wrong, please let me know.
The text of the individual questions can be found here. My comments are in brackets.
Population
Population Count
| Yes | 60 | 92.31% |
| I used to but don't anymore | 3 | 4.62% |
| No, I'm just here to mess with your statistics | 2 | 3.08 |
[[ People who were here to screw up the stats were left out of the stats. Har. ]]
Survey History
| Yes | 15 | 23.81% |
| No | 48 | 76.19% |
[[ This was an attempt to get an idea of the proportion of users who stick around. 15 of last year's 23 survey takers took this year's survey. ]]
Technology
Web Browser
| Chrome | 45 | 71.43% |
| Firefox | 17 | 26.98% |
| Other | 1 | 1.59% |
[[ This question was intended to provide useful information for developing a TC alternative. What's interesting about this: The best alternative I've found to Tinychat, that we can host ourselves, is called Jitsimeet. It does not support Firefox yet (or rather, Firefox does not yet support the tech it uses, although it's in the pipeline), and so I never put *that* much effort into investigating it. That our users so heavily favor Chrome suggests that it may be worth a second look. ]]
Complice
| Yes | 55 | 87.30% |
| No | 8 | 12.70% |
[[ Almost certainly an overestimate. Complice automatically advertised the survey during breaks, so complice users would have been disproportionately aware of it. ]]
Demographics
Age
| n | 61 |
| mean | 25.20 |
| stdev | 6.86 |
| min | 15 |
| q1 | 22 |
| q2 | 24 |
| q3 | 27 |
| max | 60 |
Country
| United States | 29 | 46.77% |
| Germany | 9 | 14.52% |
| United Kingdom | 7 | 11.29% |
| Canada | 5 | 8.06% |
| Denmark | 2 | 3.23% |
| Poland | 2 | 3.23% |
| Other | 8 | 12.90% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
[[ Last year Germany held a plurality of our users; most of our growth since then has been in the U.S. ]]
Race
| White (non-Hispanic) | 49 | 77.78% |
| Asian (East Asian) | 4 | 6.35% |
| White (Hispanic) | 4 | 6.35% |
| Other | 6 | 9.52% |
[[ Yay, we're not 100% White anymore. Since my script lumps any answer that got exactly one response under "other", I'll note that the six responses here represent one Middle Eastern, two mixed, one Asian (Indian Subcontinent), one Aboriginal, and one "none." ]]
Sex, Gender, Relationships
Sex
| Male | 44 | 69.84% |
| Female | 19 | 30.16% |
Gender
| Male (cisgender) | 40 | 64.52% |
| Female (cisgender) | 15 | 24.19% |
| Other | 7 | 11.29% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
[[ Surprisingly close to balanced, here, especially by comparison to Less Wrong proper. This doesn't match my experience in-room, which is more heavily male; I'm wondering if our female/other participants don't spend as much time in the room as the men, or if they just don't run their cameras as much. (also interesting: Despite transgender options being listed, only one person actually used them. All the other "Others" were write-ins.) ]]
Sexual Orientation
| Heterosexual | 37 | 59.68% |
| Bisexual | 14 | 22.58% |
| Asexual | 5 | 8.06% |
| Heteroflexible | 3 | 4.84% |
| Other | 3 | 4.84% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
[[ I am amused that Heteroflexible escaped the Other ghetto despite not actually being provided as an answer. I'm also not sure why Less Wrong has such an overrepresented bisexual contingent. I noticed that in Yvain's survey and it shows up here, too. ]]
Relationship Style
| Uncertain / no prefrence | 24 | 39.34% |
| Prefer polyamorous | 18 | 29.51% |
| Prefer monogamous | 17 | 27.87% |
| Other | 2 | 3.28% |
| No Answer | 2 | 3.28% |
Number of Current Partners
| 0 | 25 | 42.37% |
| 1 | 25 | 42.37% |
| 2 | 4 | 6.78% |
| 3 | 4 | 6.78% |
| Other | 1 | 1.69% |
| No Answer | 4 | 6.78% |
Relationship Goals
| ...not looking, but open to the possibility | 39 | 62.90% |
| ...and currently looking for more relationship partners | 13 | 20.97% |
| ...and currently not looking for more relationship partners | 10 | 16.13% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
[[ It's funny to compare this to last year's survey, which lacked the "not looking, but open" option. Apparently most people round that up to "looking". ]]
Relationship Status
| Single | 28 | 45.90% |
| Relationship | 20 | 32.79% |
| Married | 9 | 14.75% |
| Other | 4 | 6.56% |
| No Answer | 2 | 3.28% |
Children
| 0 | 55 | 91.67% |
| 1 | 2 | 3.33% |
| 2 | 3 | 5.00% |
| No Answer | 3 | 5.00% |
[[ Not pictured: One user with minus 37 children, which I unilaterally rounded up to zero. ]]
More Children
| Yes | 15 | 24.19% |
| No | 24 | 38.71% |
| Uncertain | 23 | 37.10% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
Work and Education
Work Status
| Student | 38 | 61.29% |
| For-profit work | 11 | 17.74% |
| Self-employed | 3 | 4.84% |
| Unemployed | 3 | 4.84% |
| Homemaking | 2 | 3.23% |
| Academics (on the teaching side) | 2 | 3.23% |
| Other | 3 | 4.84% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
[[ We're as student-centric as ever ]]
Profession
| Computers (practical: IT, programming, etc.) | 17 | 32.69% |
| Mathematics | 5 | 9.62% |
| Biology | 5 | 9.62% |
| Neuroscience | 3 | 5.77% |
| Computers (AI) | 3 | 5.77% |
| Medicine | 3 | 5.77% |
| Physics | 3 | 5.77% |
| Engineering | 3 | 5.77% |
| Statistics | 2 | 3.85% |
| Other "social science" | 2 | 3.85% |
| Philosophy | 2 | 3.85% |
| Other | 4 | 7.69% |
| No Answer | 4 | 7.69% |
Degree
| High School | 13 | 22.03% |
| Bachelor's | 23 | 38.98% |
| Master's | 12 | 20.34% |
| PH D. | 3 | 5.08% |
| MD/JD/other professional degree | 3 | 5.08% |
| None | 5 | 8.47% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.69% |
Less Wrong
Less Wrong Use
| I don't use Less Wrong at all. (skip the rest of this section) | 2 | 3.17% |
| I lurk, but never registered an account. | 9 | 14.29% |
| I've registered an account, but never posted. | 9 | 14.29% |
| I've posted a comment, but never a top-level post. | 18 | 28.57% |
| I've posted in Discussion, but not Main. | 17 | 26.98% |
| I've posted in Main. | 8 | 12.70% |
[[ More Main posters than I ever expected. Do we get status points for this? ]]
Time in LW Community
| n | 61 |
| mean | 3.09 |
| stdev | 1.79 |
| min | 0.15 |
| q1 | 2 |
| q2 | 3 |
| q3 | 4 |
| max | 8 |
Karma Score
| n | 59 |
| mean | 345.41 |
| stdev | 624.84 |
| min | 0 |
| q1 | 0 |
| q2 | 64 |
| q3 | 384 |
| max | 2978 |
Meetups
| No. | 25 | 40.98% |
| Yes, once or a few times. | 23 | 37.70% |
| Yes, regularly. | 13 | 21.31% |
| No Answer | 2 | 3.28% |
Community
| No. | 34 | 55.74% |
| Yes, sometimes. | 11 | 18.03% |
| Yes, all the time. | 16 | 26.23% |
| No Answer | 2 | 3.28% |
Survey (Yvain's)
| Yes. | 38 | 62.30% |
| No | 23 | 37.70% |
| No Answer | 2 | 3.28% |
Less Wrong Study Hall and You
Time in Community (LWSH)
| Less than a month. | 15 | 23.81% |
| 1 - 6 months | 15 | 23.81% |
| 6 - 12 months | 10 | 15.87% |
| 1 - 2 years | 14 | 22.22% |
| Since the beginning (March 2013) | 9 | 14.29% |
[[ We had an influx of newbies after the Complice room was announced; I'm not sure how much that is represented here. ]]
Frequency
| Every day | 7 | 11.11% |
| Several times a week | 13 | 20.63% |
| Once or twice a week | 16 | 25.40% |
| Less than once a week | 5 | 7.94% |
| It varies | 17 | 26.98% |
| I haven't been here long enough to form a pattern | 5 | 7.94% |
[[ While we have more users, they don't come to the Hall as often. I think this explains why it doesn't feel that much busier even though our population is much higher. ]]
Time in the Hall
| n | 62 |
| mean | 181.18 |
| stdev | 108.62 |
| min | 3 |
| q1 | 120 |
| q2 | 180 |
| q3 | 200 |
| max | 600 |
[[ On the other hand, time-per-visit is pretty much the same. ]]
Usage
| Academic studies | 48 | 76.19% |
| Personal projects | 45 | 71.43% |
| Chores/Paperwork/Necessities | 38 | 60.32% |
| Deliberate practice (e.g. learning guitar) | 15 | 23.81% |
| Work for an employer | 12 | 19.05% |
| Other | 2 | 3.17% |
[[ If those percentages look funny, it's because this question permitted multiple answers. This pair of questions and the next asked for all answers that applied, followed by the most important answer. ]]
Usage 2
| Academic studies | 36 | 57.14% |
| Personal projects | 12 | 19.05% |
| Chores/Paperwork/Necessities | 7 | 11.11% |
| Deliberate practice (e.g. learning guitar) | 2 | 3.17% |
| Work for an employer | 6 | 9.52% |
Draw
| Social reinforcement for working. | 58 | 93.55% |
| Distraction reduction via group pomodoros. | 52 | 83.87% |
| Camera-induced self-consciousness when working. | 39 | 62.90% |
| Social punishment for not working. | 9 | 14.52% |
| Other | 10 | 16.13% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
Draw 2
| Social reinforcement for working. | 27 | 45.00% |
| Distraction reduction via group pomodoros. | 16 | 26.67% |
| Camera-induced self-consciousness when working. | 12 | 20.00% |
| Social punishment for not working. | 2 | 3.33% |
| Other | 3 | 5.00% |
| No Answer | 3 | 5.00% |
[[ The carrot still gets more love than the stick. ]]
Camera
| Yes, always. | 18 | 29.03% |
| Yes, sometimes. | 36 | 58.06% |
| Rarely | 3 | 4.84% |
| Never | 5 | 8.06% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
[[ Camera use is somewhat less frequent, apparently because of people dropping from "always" to "sometimes." That's a bit disappointing. I like seeing five or six faces at once. ]]
Desktop Sharing
| Yes, always. | 2 | 3.23% |
| Yes, sometimes. | 2 | 3.23% |
| Rarely | 5 | 8.06% |
| Never | 53 | 85.48% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
Time Zone
| UTC-08:00 | 6 | 10.00% |
| UTC-07:00 | 2 | 3.33% |
| UTC-06:00 | 2 | 3.33% |
| UTC-05:00 | 19 | 31.67% |
| UTC-04:00 | 3 | 5.00% |
| UTC+00:00 | 6 | 10.00% |
| UTC+01:00 | 15 | 25.00% |
| UTC+02:00 | 2 | 3.33% |
| UTC+08:00 | 2 | 3.33% |
| Other | 3 | 5.00% |
| No Answer | 3 | 5.00% |
[[ Mostly east and west coast U.S., and central Europe. I still need to find a way to take these numbers and the temoral-habits questions and work out what UTC times are most heavily populated. Malcolm, is there any chance Complice could, say, poll the number of active users and graph it over time? It wouldn't be perfect (not everyone uses Complice) but it would probably be pretty close, and it would save me the trouble. ]]
Temporal Habits (Weekdays)
| Mornings (6am-12pm) | 12 | 19.35% |
| Afternoons (12pm-5pm) | 29 | 46.77% |
| Evenings (5pm-10pm) | 37 | 59.68% |
| Late night/very early morning (10pm-6am) | 12 | 19.35% |
| Too variable to say | 14 | 22.58% |
| I don't use the room during the week | 2 | 3.23% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
Temporal Habits (Weekends)
| Mornings (6am-12pm) | 8 | 12.90% |
| Afternoons (12pm-5pm) | 26 | 41.94% |
| Evenings (5pm-10pm) | 26 | 41.94% |
| Late night/very early morning (10pm-6am) | 7 | 11.29% |
| Too variable to say | 27 | 43.55% |
| I don't use the room on weekends | 3 | 4.84% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
Referrals
| Other comments or posts on Less Wrong | 22 | 35.48% |
| The initial announcement | 22 | 35.48% |
| Referred by a friend or partner | 12 | 19.35% |
| Other | 6 | 9.68% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
[[ My favorite "other" referral was someone who checked the URL on tinychat entirely be coincidence, before it was passworded. ]]
Interaction
| Yes, regularly. | 12 | 19.35% |
| Yes, sometimes. | 19 | 30.65% |
| No. | 31 | 50.00% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
Interaction 2
| Yes, regularly. | 7 | 11.29% |
| Yes, sometimes. | 10 | 16.13% |
| I've met a few people in person once or twice. | 11 | 17.74% |
| No. | 34 | 54.84% |
| No Answer | 1 | 1.61% |
Romance
| Yes. | 6 | 9.84% |
| I didn't meet them through the Hall, but they come there now. | 9 | 14.75% |
| No. | 46 | 75.41% |
| No Answer | 2 | 3.28% |
LWSH Efficacy
Base Akrasia
| 1 | 0 | 0.00% |
| 2 | 5 | 8.20% |
| 3 | 6 | 9.84% |
| 4 | 19 | 31.15% |
| 5 | 20 | 32.79% |
| 6 | 10 | 16.39% |
| 7 | 1 | 1.64% |
| No Answer | 2 | 3.28% |
Akratic Impact
| 1 | 6 | 10.00% |
| 2 | 26 | 43.33% |
| 3 | 18 | 30.00% |
| 4 | 7 | 11.67% |
| 5 | 3 | 5.00% |
| 6 | 0 | 0.00% |
| 7 | 0 | 0.00% |
| No Answer | 3 | 5.00% |
Base Hedonia
| 1 | 3 | 4.92% |
| 2 | 7 | 11.48% |
| 3 | 13 | 21.31% |
| 4 | 16 | 26.23% |
| 5 | 15 | 24.59% |
| 6 | 6 | 9.84% |
| 7 | 1 | 1.64% |
| No Answer | 2 | 3.28% |
Hedonic Impact
| 1 | 0 | 0.00% |
| 2 | 1 | 1.67% |
| 3 | 3 | 5.00% |
| 4 | 10 | 16.67% |
| 5 | 23 | 38.33% |
| 6 | 21 | 35.00% |
| 7 | 2 | 3.33% |
| No Answer | 3 | 5.00% |
[[ Eyeballing it, it looks like the Hall removes akradons somewhat more efficiently than it produces hedons. Which is fair given its purpose. ]]
Distractions
| n | 58 |
| mean | 29.29 |
| stdev | 20.57 |
| min | 1 |
| q1 | 15 |
| q2 | 25 |
| q3 | 40 |
| max | 85 |
Distraction Type
| Spontaneous web browsing or other computer use. | 49 | 83.05% |
| Digital interruptions (email or IM) | 39 | 66.10% |
| In-person interruptions (family or friends wanting attention) | 37 | 62.71% |
| People talking or otherwise drawing attention in the Hall during the pomo | 15 | 25.42% |
| Other | 4 | 6.78% |
| No Answer | 4 | 6.78% |
[[ I am optimistic about the "People talking or otherwise drawing attention" number dropping next year, thanks to the unified pomo timer. ]]
Distraction Cause
| Spontaneous web browsing or other computer use. | 34 | 59.65% |
| In-person interruptions (family or friends wanting attention) | 10 | 17.54% |
| Digital interruptions (email or IM) | 9 | 15.79% |
| Other | 4 | 7.02% |
| No Answer | 6 | 10.53% |
Overwork
| n | 59 |
| mean | 30.54 |
| stdev | 27.49 |
| min | 0 |
| q1 | 10 |
| q2 | 20 |
| q3 | 50 |
| max | 100 |
Accomplishments
| Yes | 24 | 41.38% |
| No | 34 | 58.62% |
| No Answer | 5 | 8.62% |
[[ "Yes" answers are down from 65% last year. :-( I'm hoping that's because we have a lot of new users who haven't had time to do anything big yet. ]]
Accomplishment Examples
This was a freeform question. Lots of school related answers; one of our users studied finished their PhD at Oxford. Our HPMoR translator is still translating. Some personal projects, of course (I wrote and published some fanfiction, if I may pimp myself). And the Complice frontend, unsurprisingly, was written during Hall time.
Akrasia
Akrasia
| Yes | 21 | 35.00% |
| No | 39 | 65.00% |
| No Answer | 3 | 5.00% |
[[ Down from 50%. I was speaking with Lachouette some time ago, and commented that I thought our community was self-selected for akratic problems; mostly on the grounds that people who didn't need help to fight their own akrasia, wouldn't come here. She said that from her perspective it looked like we were selected for unusually productive people. Does this number mean I win or that I lose? I don't know what percentage of the general public would answer Yes. ]]
Akrasia: Current
| Yes | 5 | 8.33% |
| No | 55 | 91.67% |
| No Answer | 3 | 5.00% |
[[ Very slightly down. ]]
I don't have much to say about the rest of the Akrasia questions, and I'm thinking of dropping these questions next year. At least one person suggested that the survey was too long as it is, and I think I agree. I included this section in year 1 because it was in Yvain's survey at the time, but I'm not sure we're getting any value out of it -- by use or amusement. He doesn't seem to be using it anymore either.
Akrasia: Illness
| None | 28 | 51.85% |
| Depression | 13 | 24.07% |
| ADHD | 5 | 9.26% |
| Autism or autism spectrum disorder | 3 | 5.56% |
| Other | 5 | 9.26% |
| No Answer | 9 | 16.67% |
Akrasia: Medicines 1
| No | 39 | 68.42% |
| Modafinil | 3 | 5.26% |
| Sertraline | 2 | 3.51% |
| Bupropion | 2 | 3.51% |
| Other | 11 | 19.30% |
| No Answer | 6 | 10.53% |
Akrasia: Medicines 1.5
| No | 45 | 83.33% |
| Modafinil | 4 | 7.41% |
| Other | 5 | 9.26% |
| No Answer | 9 | 16.67% |
Akrasia: Medicines 2
| 1 | 6 | 28.57% |
| 2 | 5 | 23.81% |
| 3 | 5 | 23.81% |
| 4 | 3 | 14.29% |
| 5 | 2 | 9.52% |
| No Answer | 42 | 200.00% |
Akrasia: Supplements 1
| No | 23 | 42.59% |
| Vitamin B12 | 3 | 5.56% |
| Melatonin | 2 | 3.70% |
| Vitamin D | 2 | 3.70% |
| Multivitamin | 2 | 3.70% |
| Other | 22 | 40.74% |
| No Answer | 9 | 16.67% |
Akrasia: Supplements 1.5
| No | 43 | 84.31% |
| Modafinil | 2 | 3.92% |
| Other | 6 | 11.76% |
| No Answer | 12 | 23.53% |
Akrasia: Supplements 2
| 2 | 8 | 32.00% |
| 3 | 5 | 20.00% |
| 1 | 4 | 16.00% |
| 5 | 4 | 16.00% |
| 4 | 4 | 16.00% |
| No Answer | 38 | 152.00% |
Akrasia: Therapy 1
| No | 34 | 62.96% |
| CBT | 2 | 3.70% |
| talk therapy | 2 | 3.70% |
| Other | 16 | 29.63% |
| No Answer | 9 | 16.67% |
Akrasia: Therapy 2
| 3 | 9 | 42.86% |
| 2 | 5 | 23.81% |
| 5 | 3 | 14.29% |
| 1 | 2 | 9.52% |
| 4 | 2 | 9.52% |
| No Answer | 42 | 200.00% |
Akrasia: Meditation 1
| No | 22 | 41.51% |
| Mindfulness Meditation | 11 | 20.75% |
| Meditation | 3 | 5.66% |
| Yoga | 2 | 3.77% |
| Other | 15 | 28.30% |
| No Answer | 10 | 18.87% |
Akrasia: Meditation 2
| 2 | 10 | 30.30% |
| 3 | 9 | 27.27% |
| 4 | 8 | 24.24% |
| 1 | 5 | 15.15% |
| Other | 1 | 3.03% |
| No Answer | 30 | 90.91% |
Akrasia: Elsewhat 1
| No | 28 | 54.90% |
| Other | 23 | 45.10% |
| No Answer | 12 | 23.53% |
Akrasia: Elsewhat 2
| 2 | 12 | 50.00% |
| 1 | 9 | 37.50% |
| 3 | 2 | 8.33% |
| Other | 1 | 4.17% |
| No Answer | 39 | 162.50% |
Akrasia: Communication
| Yes | 27 | 49.09% |
| No | 28 | 50.91% |
| No Answer | 8 | 14.55% |
Silliness
Tinychat Hatred
| 1 (Thousand burning suns) | 10 | 19.61% |
| 2 | 10 | 19.61% |
| 3 | 14 | 27.45% |
| 4 | 9 | 17.65% |
| 5 (Emperor Palpatine) | 8 | 15.69% |
| No Answer | 12 | 23.53% |
Tinychat Screams (number of)
Slightly more information than last year: The sum, mean, max, and possibly the standard deviation were all variants of infinity. My favorite answers were e^tau and the first couple hundred digits of Pi without the decimal point.
Stuffies
| No | 18 | 31.03% |
| Yes, but only one | 11 | 18.97% |
| Yes, more than one | 20 | 34.48% |
| Tons | 9 | 15.52% |
| No Answer | 5 | 8.62% |
[[ Stuffies! ]]
Stuffies on Camera
| Yes | 27 | 49.09% |
| No | 28 | 50.91% |
| No Answer | 8 | 14.55% |
Owl (Eris/Terry/Levi)
| Yes | 4 | 7.02% |
| No | 39 | 68.42% |
| I don't know what you're talking about. | 14 | 24.56% |
| No Answer | 6 | 10.53% |
[[ I think something went wrong here, because I know I've seen more than four users with an Eris/Terry/Levi. These are the owl stuffies that some LWSH residents have. They're sort of our de facto mascot. ]]
Owl Aquisition
| Yes | 35 | 62.50% |
| No | 17 | 30.36% |
| I already have one. | 4 | 7.14% |
| No Answer | 7 | 12.50% |
[[ I am amused at the three people who answered "I don't know what you're talking about" to the previous question, but wanted one anyway (you can buy them here if you know how to read Dutch and live somewhere they'll deliver). I'm even more amused by the confused soul who didn't know what the question was talking about but still owned one. ]]
Miscellany
Suggestion/Comment/Question boxes
These were freeform responses. As with last year, the most common requests were "replace Tinychat" and variants of "give us some feature that requires replacing Tinychat." We're getting there, sort of! There was also a demand for more crocodiles, and a love letter from someone who appreciated the existence of the Owl questions.
I was going to complain here about how running surveys like this is a lot more grueling than Yvain makes it look. Then I found something special in the comment box; I don't know who said it but it makes efforts to bring attention to this project seem more than worthwhile. I'll just leave it right here. To all those who show up in the Hall: you are in part responsible for this.
"Joining the Study Hall is probably the literal best thing that happened to me this decade. Thank you to the people who made this place exist."
Mental representation and the is-ought distinction
I'm reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. In appendix B I came across the following comment. Emphasis mine:
Studies of language comprehension indicate that people quickly recode much of what they hear into an abstract representation that no longer distinguishes whether the idea was expressed in an active or in a passive form and no longer discriminates what was actually said from what was implied, presupposed, or implicated (Clark and Clark 1977).
My first thought on seeing this is: holy crap, this explains why people insist on seeing relevance claims in my statements that I didn't put there. If the brain doesn't distinguish statement from implicature, and my conversational partner believes that A implies B when I don't, then of course I'm going to be continually running into situations where people model me as saying and believing B when I actually only said A. At a minimum this will happen any time I discuss any question of seemingly-morally-relevant fact with someone who hasn't trained themselves to make the is-ought distinction. Which is most people.
The next thought my brain jumped to: This process might explain the failure to make the is-ought distinction in the first place. That seems like much more of a leap, though. I looked up the Clark and Clark cite. Unfortunately it's a fairly long book that I'm not entirely sure I want to wade through. Has anyone else read it? Can someone offer more details about exactly what findings Kahneman is referencing?
2015 Less Wrong Study Hall census is open.
I forgot about it until after were were past the Hall's birthday, so the survey is late this year and won't run for as long. Nevertheless, for those of you that use the Less Wrong Study Hall, here is this year's census:
It will close on April 7th and I'll post the results a few weeks after that. I'll be advertising it during breaks in the Hall; I encourage others to do the same to maximize turnout.
The Hostile Arguer
“Your instinct is to talk your way out of the situation, but that is an instinct born of prior interactions with reasonable people of good faith, and inapplicable to this interaction…” – Ken White
One of the Less Wrong Study Hall denizens has been having a bit of an issue recently. He became an atheist some time ago. His family was in denial about it for a while, but in recent days they have 1. stopped with the denial bit, and 2. been less than understanding about it. In the course of discussing the issue during break, this line jumped out at me:
“I can defend my views fine enough, just not to my parents.”
And I thought: Well, of course you can’t, because they’re not interested in your views. At all.
I never had to deal with the Religion Argument with my parents, but I did spend my fair share of time failing to argumentatively defend myself. I think I have some useful things to say to those younger and less the-hell-out-of-the-house than me.
A clever arguer is someone that has already decided on their conclusion and is making the best case they possibly can for it. A clever arguer is not necessarily interested in what you currently believe; they are arguing for proposition A and against proposition B. But there is a specific sort of clever arguer, one that I have difficulty defining explicitly but can characterize fairly easily. I call it, as of today, the Hostile Arguer.
It looks something like this:
When your theist parents ask you, “What? Why would you believe that?! We should talk about this,” they do not actually want to know why you believe anything, despite the form of the question. There is no genuine curiosity there. They are instead looking for ammunition. Which, if they are cleverer arguers than you, you are likely to provide. Unless you are epistemically perfect, you believe things that you cannot, on demand, come up with an explicit defense for. Even important things.
In accepting that the onus is solely on you to defend your position – which is what you are implicitly doing, in engaging the question – you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. That is the real point of the question: to bait you into an argument that your interlocutor knows you will lose, whereupon they will expect you to acknowledge defeat and toe the line they define.
Someone in the chat compared this to politics, which makes sense, but I don’t think it’s the best comparison. Politicians usually meet each other as equals. So do debate teams. This is more like a cop asking a suspect where they were on the night of X, or an employer asking a job candidate how much they made at their last job. Answering can hurt you, but can never help you. The question is inherently a trap.
The central characteristic of a hostile arguer is the insincere question. “Why do you believe there is/isn’t a God?” may be genuine curiosity from an impartial friend, or righteous fury from a zealous authority, even though the words themselves are the same. What separates them is the response to answers. The curious friend updates their model of you with your answers; the Hostile Arguer instead updates their battle plan.[1]
So, what do you do about it?
Advice often fails to generalize, so take this with a grain of salt. It seems to me that argument in this sense has at least some of the characteristics of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Cooperation represents the pursuit of mutual understanding; defection represents the pursuit of victory in debate. Once you are aware that they are defecting, cooperating in return is highly non-optimal. On the other hand, mutual defection – a flamewar online, perhaps, or a big fight in real life in which neither party learns much of anything except how to be pissed off – kind of sucks, too. Especially if you have reason to care, on a personal level, about your opponent. If they’re family, you probably do.
It seems to me that getting out of the game is the way to go, if you can do it.
Never try to defend a proposition against a hostile arguer.[2] They do not care. Your best arguments will fall on deaf ears. Your worst will be picked apart by people who are much better at this than you. Your insecurities will be exploited. If they have direct power over you, it will be abused.
This is especially true for parents, where obstinate disagreement can be viewed as disrespect, and where their power over you is close to absolute. I’m sort of of the opinion that all parents should be considered epistemically hostile until one moves out, as a practical application of the SNAFU Principle. If you find yourself wanting to acknowledge defeat in order to avoid imminent punishment, this is what is going on.
If you have some disagreement important enough for this advice to be relevant, you probably genuinely care about what you believe, and you probably genuinely want to be understood. On some level, you want the other party to “see things your way.” So my second piece of advice is this: Accept that they won’t, and especially accept that it will not happen as a result of anything you say in an argument. If you must explain yourself, write a blog or something and point them to it a few years later. If it’s a religious argument, maybe write the Atheist Sequences. Or the Theist Sequences, if that’s your bent. But don’t let them make you defend yourself on the spot.
The previous point, incidentally, was my personal failure through most of my teenage years (although my difficulties stemmed from school, not religion). I really want to be understood, and I really approach discussion as a search for mutual understanding rather than an attempt at persuasion, by default. I expect most here do the same, which is one reason I feel so at home here. The failure mode I’m warning against is adopting this approach with people who will not respect it and will, in fact, punish your use of it.[3]
It takes two to have an argument, so don’t be the second party, ever, and they will eventually get tired of talking to a wall. You are not morally obliged to justify yourself to people who have pre-judged your justifications. You are not morally obliged to convince the unconvinceable. Silence is always an option. “No comment” also works well, if repeated enough times.
There is the possibility that the other party is able and willing to punish you for refusing to engage. Aside from promoting them from “treat as Hostile Arguer” to “treat as hostile, period”, I’m not sure what to do about this. Someone in the Hall suggested supplying random, irrelevant justifications, as requiring minimal cognitive load while still subverting the argument. I’m not certain how well that will work. It sounds plausible, but I suspect that if someone is running the algorithm “punish all responses that are not ‘yes, I agree and I am sorry and I will do or believe as you say’”, then you’re probably screwed (and should get out sooner rather than later if at all possible).
None of the above advice implies that you are right and they are wrong. You may still be incorrect on whatever factual matter the argument is about. The point I’m trying to make is that, in arguments of this form, the argument is not really about correctness. So if you care about correctness, don’t have it.
Above all, remember this: Tapping out is not just for Less Wrong.
(thanks to all LWSH people who offered suggestions on this post)
After reading the comments and thinking some more about this, I think I need to revise my position a bit. I’m really talking about three different characteristics here:
- People who have already made up their mind.
- People who are personally invested in making you believe as they do.
- People who have power over you.
For all three together, I think my advice still holds. MrMind puts it very concisely in the comments. In the absence of 3, though, JoshuaZ notes some good reasons one might argue anyway; to which I think one ought to add everything mentioned under the Fifth Virtue of Argument.
But one thing that ought not to be added to it is the hope of convincing the other party – either of your position, or of the proposition that you are not stupid or insane for holding it. These are cases where you are personally invested in what they believe, and all I can really say is “don’t do that; it will hurt.” Even if you are correct, you will fail for the reasons given above and more besides. It’s very much a case of Just Lose Hope Already.
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I’m using religious authorities harshing on atheists as the example here because that was the immediate cause of this post, but atheists take caution: If you’re asking someone “why do you believe in God?” with the primary intent of cutting their answer down, you’re guilty of this, too. ↩
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Someone commenting on a draft of this post asked how to tell when you’re dealing with a Hostile Arguer. This is the sort of micro-social question that I’m not very good at and probably shouldn’t opine on. Suggestions requested in the comments. ↩
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It occurs to me that the Gay Talk might have a lot in common with this as well. For those who’ve been on the wrong side of that: Did that also feel like a mismatched battle, with you trying to be understood, and them trying to break you down? ↩
Less Wrong Study Hall - Year 1 Retrospective
Some time back, a small group of Less Wrongers collected in a video chatroom to work on…things. We’ve been at it for exactly one year as of today, and it seems like a good time to see what’s come of it.[1] So here is what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and a few thoughts on where we’re going. At the end is a survey taken of the LWSH, partly to be compared to Less Wrong proper, but mostly for fun. If you like what you see here, come join us. The password is “lw”.
A Brief History of the Hall
I think the first inspiration was Eliezer looking for someone to sit with him while he worked, to help with productivity and akrasia. Shannon Friedman answered the call and it seemed to be effective. She suggested a similar coworking scheme to one of her clients, Mqrius, to help him with akratic issues surrounding his thesis. She posted on Less Wrong about it, with the intent of connecting him and possibly others who wanted to co-work in a similar fashion. Tsakinis, in the comments, took the idea a step further, and created a Tinychat video chatroom for group working. It was titled the Less Wrong Study Hall. The theory is that it will help us actually do the work, instead of, say, reading tvtropes when we should be studying. It turned out to be a decent Schelling point, enough to form a regular group and occasionally attract new people. It’s grown slowly but steadily.
Tinychat’s software sucks, and there have been a couple of efforts to replace it. Mqrius looked into OpenMeetings, but it didn’t work out. Yours truly took a crack at programming a LWSH Google Hangout, but it ran aground on technical difficulties. Meanwhile the tinychat room continued to work, and despite nobody actually liking it, it’s done the job well enough.
Tinychat is publicly available, and there have been occasional issues with the public along the way. A few people took up modding, but it was still a nuisance. Eventually a password was placed on the room, which mostly shut down the problem. We did have one guy straight out guess the password, which was a…peculiar experience. He was notably not all there, but somehow still scrupulously polite, and left when asked. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen on the Internet before.
A year after the Hall opened, we have about twenty to twenty-five regulars, with an unknown number of occasional users. We’re still well within Dunbar’s number, so everybody knows everybody else and new users integrate quickly. We’ve developed a reasonably firm set of social norms to guide our work, in spite of not having direct technical control nor clear leaders.
Continuity in Uploading
I don't acknowledge an upload as "me" in any meaningful sense of the term; if I copied my brain to a computer and then my body was destroyed, I still think of that as death and would try to avoid it.
A thought struck me a few minutes ago that seems like it might get around that, though. Suppose that rather than copying my brain, I adjoined it to some external computer in a kind of reverse-Ebborian act; electrically connecting my synapses to a big block of computrons that I can consciously perform I/O to. Over the course of life and improved tech, that block expands until, as a percentage, most of my thought processes are going on in the machine-part of me. Eventually my meat brain dies -- but the silicon part of me lives on. I think I would probably still consider that "me" in a meaningful sense. Intuitively I feel like I should treat it as the equivalent of minor brain damage.
Obviously, one could shorten the period of dual-life arbitrarily and I can't point to a specific line where expanded-then-contracted-consciousness turns into copying-then-death. The line that immediately comes to mind is "whenever I start to feel like the technological expansion of my mind is no longer an external module, but the main component," but that feels like unjustified punting.
I'm curious what other people think, particularly those that share my position on destructive uploads.
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Edited to add:
Finding interesting communities
Being in an area where the most awesome people are is not asking to "lose the game" it is being in an environment that cultivates greatness.
It made me think of the recent post in Main on How to Build a Community. And reflect a bit on how, while I've lived pretty much exclusively online for the last ten years, the lack of meatspace social contact is finally beginning to annoy me. So here's a question for the group: Not how does one build a community, but where and how does one find existing communities that are worth joining? And what are some examples? Not counting LW itself and its tributaries.
A few things I've tried or will try, in no particular order:
Mensa. Didn't work out terribly well, largely because I seemed to have very little in common with anyone else there. Apparently intelligence alone is an insufficient filter.
Geek conventions. (e.g. Dragoncon) I'm a giant flaming unrepentant geek, so I get the feeling of being among my own kind, and selecting for passion seems to work better than selecting for intelligence insofar as finding interesting people goes. The sheer size of the crowd makes getting at the people who are actually doing awesome things difficult, though.
Makerspaces. For those that haven't heard the term, these are a sort of shared lab for private individuals. I actually became aware of these through item 2. Seems promising and it's the next thing I intend to look into, within the next few weeks. Unfortunately the nearest established one, like the nearest LW meetup, is downtown through murdertraffic; a 2-3 hour round trip.
I suspect, but have no significant evidence, that universities containing graduate schools would also be a good bet. But I'm long out of college (I dropped out, for irrelevant reasons) and have no wish (or money, or time) to go back. I occasionally apply for jobs at the closest such place to me, but haven't had a hit yet and I'm unsure I would want to move downtown anyway. I do get the impression that many here are undergrads or graduate students, so opinions on whether that route may be worth pursuing are welcome.
Beyond that? I don't know. There don't seem to be many communities that both select for being awesome and are accessible to anyone who cares to be awesome. I've found that social reinforcement for doing cool stuff helps a lot. I don't like that fact very much, but I had better find a way to use it.
Claiming Connotations
I was chasing links a few days ago and ran into Disputing Definitions from the sequences (again), and was thinking about the idea of having definition-argument participants expand their definition of a word to dissolve the dispute. And I thought, I've tried it a couple of times, and I don't think it has ever actually worked.
I think something else is going on here: People arguing about the "true" definition of a word are trying to lay social claim to its connotations by dictating its denotation.
Consider an atheist gay-rights supporter and a Christian gay-rights opponent. The former says "homosexuality is not immoral" the latter says "homosexuality is immoral."
Expand on "immoral." Perhaps the atheist considers an act immoral if it harms someone else without their consent, while the Christian considers an act immoral if it goes against the teachings of the Bible.
The expanded forms look like:
A: "Homosexuality does not harm anyone without their consent.
B: "Homosexuality goes against the teachings of the Bible.
The atheist is unlikely to disagree with B; Leviticus 18:22 is pretty straightforward. He won't *care* that homosexuality is against biblical teachings, but he won't disagree that it does. The Christian may disagree with A, but assume for the sake of argument that he doesn't.
It would seem the factual disagreement has been dissolved; they aren't actually contradicting each other, they are making *entirely orthogonal statements.*
Present the above analysis to both sides, though, and I suspect that instead of acknowledging the dissolution, they would fall to arguing over the *correct* definition of the *label* "immoral." Even after the expansion is presented. This has happened to me a couple of times.
Question: If they're not arguing about the biblical status or harm status of homosexuality, and they acknowledge that they mean entirely different things by the label "immoral," what are they actually contesting when they argue the proper denotation of that label?
This seems to me to be the reversed version of sneaking in connotations. For that someone applies a word to a case for which it is denotationally true but connotation-ally questionable, as when referring to Martin Luther King, Jr as a criminal.
Arging over definitions, though, strikes me as trying to *lay claim* to connotations rather than sneak them in. If you can dictate the denotation of a commonly-used but disputed word, then you succeed in applying its connotations to all cases that match that denotation. "Homosexuality is a larommi act" does not have the same impact as "Homosexuality is an immoral act," even if the two words are given the same literal definition.
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Compare a destructive upload to non-destructive. Copy my mind to a machine non-destructively, and I still identify with meat-me. You could let machine-me run for a day, or a week, or a year, and only then kill off meat-me. I don't like that option and would be confused by someone who did. Destructive uploads feel like the limit of that case, where the time interval approaches zero and I am killed and copied in the same moment. As with the case outlined above, I don't see a crossed line where it stops being death and starts being transition.
An expand-contract with interval zero is effectively a destructive upload. So is a copy-kill with interval zero. So the two appear to be mirror images, with a discontinuity at the limit. Approach destructive uploads from the copy-then-kill side, and it feels clearly like death. Approach them from the expand-then-contract side, and it feels like continuous identity. Yet at the limit between them they turn into the same operation.