> And just, what? What? This is just such a wild thing to say in that context! "[D]eserve to live, or deserve to suffer"? People around here are, like, transhumanists, right? Everyone deserves to live! No one deserves to suffer! Who in particular was arguing that some people don't deserve to live or do deserve to suffer, such that this basic level of mutual respect is in danger of not being achieved? Come on man, you have the ability to understand the context better.  First of all, retaliation clearly has its place. If someone acts in a way that wantonly hurts others, it is the correct choice to inflict some suffering on them, for the sake of setting the right incentives. It is indeed extremely common that from this perspective of fairness and incentives, people "deserve" to suffer. And indeed, maintaining an equilibrium in which the participants do not have outstanding grievances and would take the opportunity to inflict suffering on each other as payback for those past grievances is hard! Much of modern politics, many dysfunctional organizations, and many subcultures are indeed filled with mutual grievances moving things far away from the mutual assumption that it's good to not hurt each other. I think almost any casual glance at Twitter would demonstrate this. That paragraph of my response is about trying to establish that there are obviously limits to how much critical comments need the ability to offend, and so if you want to view things through the lens of status, about how its important to view status as multi-dimensional. It is absolutely not rare for internet discussion to imply the other side deserves to suffer or doesn't deserve to live. There is a dimension of status where being low enough does cause others to try to cause you suffering. It's not even that rare.  The reason why that paragraph is there is to establish how we need to treat status as a multi-dimensional thing. You can't just walk around saying "offense is necessary for good criticism". Some kinds of offense obviously make things worse in-expectation. Other kinds of offense do indeed seem necessary. You are saying the exact same thing in the very next paragraph!  > If I had to guess, it's an implied strong definition of respect that bundles not questioning people's competence or stated intentions with being "treated like a person" (worthy of life and the absence of suffering) No, it's the opposite. That's literally what my first sentence is saying. You cannot and should not treat respect/status as a one-dimensional thing, as the reductio-ad-absurdum in the quoted section shows. If you tried to treat it as a one-dimensional-thing you would need to include the part where people do of course frequently try to actively hurt others. In order to have a fruitful analysis of how status and offense relates to good criticism, you can't just treat the whole thing as one monolith. > And just, what? What? This is just such a wild thing to say in that context! I hope you now understand now how it's not "such a wild thing to say in that context". Indeed, it's approximately the same thing you are saying here. You also hopefully understand how the exasperated tone and hyperbole did not help. ---------------------------------------- > But from the standpoint of the alleged aggressor who doesn't accept that notion of respect, we're not trying to say people should suffer and die. We just mean that opinion X is false, and that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction. You absolutely do not "just mean" those things. Communicating about status is hard and requires active effort to do well at. People get in active conflict with each other all the time. Just two days ago you were quoted by Benquo as saying "intend to fight it with every weapon at my disposal" regarding how you relate to LessWrong moderation, a statement exactly of the kind that does not breed confidence you will not at some point reach for the "try to just inflict suffering on the LessWrong moderators in order to disincentivize them from doing this" option. People get exiled from communities. People get actually really hurt from social conflict. People build their lives around social trust and respect and reputation and frequently would rather die than to lose crucial forms of social standing they care about.  I do not believe your reports about how you claim to limit the range of your status claims, and what you mean by offense. You cannot wish away core dimension of the stakes of social relationships by just asserting you are not affecting them when them being present in the conversation would inconvenience you. You have absolutely called for extremely strong censure and punishment of many people in this community as a result of things they said on the internet. You do not have the trust, nor anything close enough to a track record of accurate communication on this topic, to make it so that when you assert that by "offense" you just mean purely factual claims, people should believe you. Like, man, I am so tired of this. I am so tired of this repeated "oh no, I am absolutely not making any status claims, I am just making factual claims, you moron" game. You don't get to redefine the meaning of words, and you don't get to try to gaslight everyone you interface with about the real stakes of the social engagements they have with you. I thought Wei Dai's comment was good. I responded to it, emphasizing how I think it's an important dimension to think through in these situations.  But indeed, the way you handle the nature of offense and status in comment threads is not to declare defeat, say that "well, seems like we just can't take into account social standing and status in our communication without sacrificing truth-seeking, and then pretend that dimension is never there". You have to actually work with detailed models of what is going on, figure out the incentives for the parties involved, and set up a social environment where good work gets rewarded, harmful actions punished, all while maintaining sufficient ability to talk about the social system itself without everyone trying to gaslight each other about it. It's hard work, it requires continuous steering. It requires hard thinking. It definitely is not solved by just making posts saying "We just mean that opinion X is false, and that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction".  There is no "just" here. In invoking this you are implying some target social relationship to the people who are "perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction". Should they be exiled, rate-limited, punished, forced to apologize or celebrated? Your tone and words will communicate one of those! It's extremely hard and requires active effort to write a comment that is genuinely communicating agnosticism about how they think a social ecosystem should react to people to are "optimizing in an objectionable direction" in a specific instance, and you are clearly not generally trying to do that. Your words reek of judgement of a specific kind. You frequently call for social punishment for people who optimize such! You can't just deny that part of your whole speech and wish it away. There is no "just" here. When you offend, you mean offense of a specific kind, and using clinical language to hide away the nature of that offense, and its implications, is not helping people accurately understand what will happen when they engage with you.

A friend recently complained to me about this post: he said most people do much nonsense under the heading “belief”, and that this post doesn’t acknowledge this adequately. He might be right! Given his complaint, perhaps I ought to say clearly: 1) I agree — there is indeed a lot of nonsense out there masquerading as sensible/useful cognitive patterns. Some aimed to wirehead or mislead the self; some aimed to deceive others for local benefit; lots of it simple error. 2) I agree also that a fair chunk of nonsense adheres to the term “belief” (and the term “believing in”). This is because there’s a real, useful pattern of possible cognition near our concepts of “belief”, and because nonsense (/lies/self-deception/etc) likes to disguise itself as something real. 3) But — to sort sense from nonsense, we need to understand what the real (useful, might be present in the cogsci books of alien intelligences) pattern is, that is near our “beliefs”. If we don’t: * a) We’ll miss out on a useful way to think. (This is the biggest one.)   * b) The parts of the {real, useful way to think} that fall outside our conception of “beliefs” will be practiced noisily anyway, sometimes; sometimes in a true fashion, sometimes mixed (intentionally or accidentally) with error or locally manipulations. We won’t be able to excise these deceptions easily or fully, because it’ll be kinda clear there’s something to real nearby that our concept of “beliefs” doesn’t do justice to, and so people (including us) will not wish to adhere entirely to our concept of “beliefs” in lieu of the so-called “nonsense” that isn’t entirely nonsense. So it’ll be harder to expel actual error. 4) I’m pretty sure that LessWrong’s traditional concept of “beliefs” as “accurate Bayesian predictions about future events” is only half-right, and that we want the other half too, both for (3a) type reasons, and for (3b) type reasons. * a) “Beliefs” as accurate Bayesian predictions is exactly right for beliefs/predictions about things unaffected by the belief itself — beliefs about tomorrow’s weather, or organic chemistry, or the likely behavior of strangers.   * b) But there’s a different “belief-math” (or “believing-in math”) that’s relevant for coordinating pieces of oneself in order to take a complex action, and for coordinating multiple people so as to run a business or community other collaborative endeavor. I think I lay it out here (roughly — I don’t have all the math), and I think it matters. The old LessWrong Sequences-reading crowd *sort of* knew about this — folks talked about how beliefs about matters directly affected by the beliefs could be self-fulfilling or self-undermining prophecies, and how Bayes-math wasn’t defined around here. But when I read those comments, I thought they were discussing an uninteresting edge case. The idioms by which we organize complex actions (within a person, and between people) are part of the bread and butter of how intelligence works; they are not an uninteresting edge case. Likewise, people talked sometimes (on LW in the past) about they were intentionally holding false beliefs about their start-ups’ success odds; and they were advised not to be clever, and some commenters dissented from this advice. But IMO the “believing in” concept lets us distinguish: * (i) the useful thing such CEOs were up to (holding a target, in detail, that they and others can coordinate action around); * (ii) how to do this without having or requesting false predictions at the same time; and * (iii) how sometimes such action on the part of CEOs/etc is basically “lying” (and “demanding lies”), in the sense that it is designed to extract more work/investment/etc from “allies” than said allies would volunteer if they understood the process generating the CEOs behavior (and demand that their team members are similarly deceptive/extractive). And sometimes it’s not. And there are principles for telling the difference. All of which is sort of to say that I think this model of “believing in” has substance we can use for the normal human business of planning actions together, and isn’t merely propaganda to mislead people into thinking human thinking bugs are less buggy than they are. Also I think it’s as true to the normal English usage of “believing in”  as the historical LW usage of “belief” is to the normal English usage of “belief”.

Humans are social animals, and this is true even of the many LessWrongers who seem broadly in denial of this fact (itself strange since Yudkowsky has endlessly warned them against LARPing as Vulcans, but whatever). The problem Duncan Sabien was getting at was basically the emotional effects of dealing with smug, snarky critics. Being smug and snarky is a gesture of dominance, and indeed, is motivated by status-seeking (again, despite the opinion of many snarkers who seem to be in denial of this fact). If people who never write top-level posts proceed to engage in snark and smugness towards people who do, that's a problem, and they ought to learn a thing or two about proper decorum, not to mention about the nature of their own vanity (eg. by reading Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky) Moreover, since top-level contributions ought to be rewarded with a certain social status, what those snarky critics are doing is an act of subversion. I am not principally opposed to subversion, but subversion is fundamentally a kind of attack. This is why I can understand the "Killing Socrates" perspective, but without approving of it: Socrates was subverting something that genuinely merited subversion. But it is perfectly natural that people who are being attacked by subversives will be quite put off by it. Afaict., the emotional undercurrent to this whole dispute is the salient part, but there is here a kind of intangible taboo against speaking candidly about the emotional undercurrent underlying intellectual arguments.