All of plct's Comments + Replies

plct50
Note that he says if you tell them you're not playing, they respond "It sure looks like you're playing, you're not punching me back." Which I think (at least, unless you can call in Reasonable Authority Figure and have them be punished appropriately without becoming a pariah, but actually even then) makes it a moral obligation to punch them. As hard as you can. Right in the face. And ideally then walk away, silently.

My intuition is that that's neither the moral obligation, nor an effective way to resolve the issue - I would gu... (read more)

Zvi100

Agreed that you shouldn't escalate violence in response to violence - punching them back roughly 10% less hard than they punched you (since aiming at this will make you get it right) is the right response at that point. The not-playing-around sucker punch is the response to their statement that you not punching them back is you playing the game.

plct10

Yeah, this makes sense now, thanks for the clarification.

(As a post-mortem of my thought process: I think I failed to make the connection that the second part of the segment was referring the previous article as doing the thing. Perhaps I was thinking of i, ii, iii as being things you learned about demon threads, and so the point about article writing was a round peg for a square hole.)

plct10

I agree that in general people can differ pretty substantially in terms of preferences and interactions in a way that makes golden rule style simulations ineffective.

e.g. I seem to prefer different topics of small talk than some people I know, so if they ask me to, say, go into details about random excerpts of my day at work I get a bit annoyed whereas if I ask them mirror questions they feel comfortable and cared for. So both of us put the other off by doing a golden rule simulation, and we've had to come up with an actual model of the individual to in or... (read more)

plct80

I disagree - that sort of things makes me feel like it's less likely to be worth it to be put in substantial effort to do good, legible criticism whereas my younger self, more inclined to trolling (a habit I try to avoid, these days), smells blood in the water.

I don't know if you would have considered my criticism to be good or bad (although there's a substantial chance you never saw it), but good criticism is a lot of work and therefore probably much easier to chill.

plct60

My understanding is that the way occupancy laws tend to work (and from what I've heard of california, although I do not live there) is that even if someone is not on the lease and not paying and unwelcome, your legal options for removing them are extremely limited and involve a substantial waiting period.

plct10

I would appreciate an elaboration or restatement of "ii. Avoid bundling normative claims with descriptive claims." - I felt like I was understanding what you were saying but then "My point was more like: Arguing on the internet about the relative status of things is not effective altruism" felt like a nonsequitur, so I suspect I was misunderstanding the entire section.

5Raemon
Ah. I had been making a two-step claim: 1. Arguing on the internet is about the relative status of groups is not effective altruism. 2. People should be doing effective altruism. The rest of the original Demon Thread post was (mostly) trying to be a fairly objective description of how internet threads can go bad and why it might not be the best use of your time given your goals, but I was also sneaking in assumptions about what goals you should have. Not sure if that clarifies it?
plct10

I personally find conversations in person to be much more efficient and positive valence, such that if I talk to someone occasionally in real life and often on the internet I tend to save topics I think will be relatively important / high value for in person discussion.

In contrast I find internet conversation is often more conducive to fishing for high value ideas, since there's so much more input.

This isn't to say that high value conversations can't happen on the internet or that that style might not be sufficient for some people, but I don... (read more)

plct10

fyi the jeff kaufman link is broken. Apologies if this has already been pointed out, I searched the page for kaufman and didn't see anything else.

2Raemon
Thanks! Should be fixed now.