The Lizardman and the Black Hat Bobcat
21Viliam
8Screwtape
6Stephen Martin
3Screwtape
6Herbert_W
2Screwtape
4remizidae
2Screwtape
4Said Achmiz
4Screwtape
2Said Achmiz
4Algon
3Jan Betley
-4LVSN
11Screwtape
New Comment
Thank you for doing the epistemic hard work in difficult, potentially high-stakes situations!
Our usual heuristics stop working when the numbers get high. For example, there is a small but nonzero probability that a random mentally ill person will conclude that you are a leader of the worldwide conspiracy against them, and therefore it is necessary to kill you. In normal situations, the probability is small enough that you simply ignore it; you are not going to include this possibility in your decisions about how to live your everyday life.
Then, by your hard work and lots of luck, your project succeeds, and you become a famous person, known by millions of people. Congratulations! Also, a few weeks later, a mentally ill person breaks into your home and murders you. They explain to the police that you were a leader of the worldwide conspiracy against them. The probability of any specific mentally ill person doing this is too small, but once you are known to millions of people, which includes thousands of seriously mentally ill people, the small probabilities can quickly add up.
Every time your organization scales 10x, it exposes itself to yet another magnitude of weirdness. If you have 10 members, one of them will be really annoying. If you have 100 members, one of them will steal something from another member. If you have 1000 members, one of them will rape another member. If you have 10000 members, one of them will murder another member. If you have 100000 members... I don't know what happens at that scale, but it is certainly a horrible thing. The shields of "yes, this is technically possible, but come on, the probability of that happening in real life is extremely small" are falling apart one by one.
Then you have the noise which makes it impossible to figure out things already on the scale of 100 people.
Yep, and also as things scale you just get less information about everyone.
An random local meetup might fit in one room, sometimes splitting into two rooms so it's easier to have multiple conversations. I can have line of sight to everyone at once and hear it if voices start getting raised. With meetups in ten cities, I can at least wave at most attendees, and have had a couple hours of conversation with the organizers. With meetups in a hundred cities, I have only demographic guesses about who the attendees are, and it takes time and effort to get to meet the organizers in a way where I'd notice an "I Eat Puppies" tattoo on their face.
Weirder things can happen, and also you have less bandwidth to notice it.
Edit: There's an essay that's shaped some of my thinking here called Default Blind. I recommend it.
The less believable it is that something which is the subject of a complaint could have happened accidentally, the more you need to hear that complaint repeated to believe it.
In your example of BHB's Ebay page which otherwise has a sterling rating, if he intentionally doesn't send some components with the chair (to save costs or something) and the buyer complains of missing parts, nobody will dismiss that as obviously bogus. Just a screw up.
What about things which are less likely to have happened as an accident?
If BHB sends a chair minus a few components. - Generally believable, probably chalked up to a mistake, but still a (very minor) black mark on BHB's record to any prospective buyers checking them out based on reviews. I think I'd believe this happened with one report.
If BHB sends a cheaper chair model. - Somewhat believable, still likely to be chalked up to a logistical mistake but could also be someone trying to scam a refund. I run an ecommerce site and have had things like this happen to us. The review might or might not be held against BHB buy a prospective buyer (as an example of incompetence they don't want to deal with). I'd probably believe one report but be a little skeptical, two would immediately make it believable.
If BHB sends a pizza. - We're getting into "This report seems bogus" territory now, where the only people who would believe it would be the ones willing to believe BHB might have done it maliciously. I'd probably need to see three reports, otherwise I'd think it was someone making multiple accounts to troll this one seller.
If BHB sends a Bobcat. - A Bobcat is hard to get in the first place, even people willing to entertain the concept of BHB being malicious wouldn't usually believe this report without multiple examples. "That report is obviously a troll." Even if I saw like ten reports, I'd still wonder if this was just 4chan doing some new meme raid or something. It would only be if the authorities took notice and confirmed it or there was some sort of evidence, or if there was a report from someone I knew was trustworthy, that I would really believe it.
1Basically agreed.
Though also relevant is the degree of maliciousness required and what the subject might get out of it. In the "bobcat instead of office chair" example, this is pretty willful willingness to cause physical harm and the sender doesn't really get anything out of it other than sadistic kicks and making the world much weirder. If the sender sent a much cheaper chair model, there's a less weird motivation (they keep the change) and there's less extra work involved.
Upvoted for the addition to our collective and to my personal vocabulary. I've encountered a small number of people who fit this pattern (different context; almost certainly nobody you know) and it's helpful to have a memorable cognitive handle for it.
This post feels like it may have been written in response to some specific interpersonal drama. If it was, then I'd like to make it clear that I have absolutely no idea what it was and therefore no opinion on it. I just think this is a useful concept in general.
I do have one minor nitpick:
...and three people complain of deeply unpleasant experiences with one of the organizers.
It's not clear to me whether, in this example, all three complaints are about the same organizer. It seems like they probably are, from context, but this could be written more clearly.
This post feels like it may have been written in response to some specific interpersonal drama. If it was, then I'd like to make it clear that I have absolutely no idea what it was and therefore no opinion on it. I just think this is a useful concept in general.
Thumbs up, I appreciate knowing it lands even for people with no idea of the specific cases.
Other than the murder thing, I'm talking about something I've seen more than once. Like I said in the post, part of what I'm supposed to do for ACX meetups is handle complaints, which creates some unusual selection effects around what I see.
I do have one minor nitpick:
I think that's a reasonable nitpick and I've updated it to be a bit clearer, thanks for the pointer!
This post feels to me weirdly bloodless. As if there were no way to make decisions other than Verifiable Documented Evidence. And only accepting Verifiable Documented Evidence is a great way to allow predators to keep getting away with it.
I understand this is written from the perspective of a meetup czar who does not & cannot attend most meetups, but in an ideal world the solution would be:
Czar becomes aware of a potential problem
Czar visits the area, talks to people
Czar makes a decision
You only need Verifiable Documented Evidence if no one actually has the power to make a decision based on intuitive knowledge.
In a sense, Scott and I have the power to make decisions based on whatever kind and level of knowledge we want. I could go to Scott and say something like hey, I've got a bad vibe here, zero Verifiable Documented Evidence but it's an intuition, lets permanently and publicly ban this person. Or skip going to Scott- I think I only loop him in on ~10% of conflicts I'm aware of.
How much do you trust my intuition? How much do I trust it?
I trust local ACX organizers a lot. If someone comes to me and says the local ACX organizer banned them from the local meetup, I generally nod and say yep I endorse the local organizer being able to do that.[1] Locals don't get to ban people from other cities but they usually don't need to.
I often do talk to people. I travel where I can[2], but I also talk by videocall to lots of people in the ACX community to expand the range. Written complaints in a feedback form that I have permission to share do make for a lovely essay example, and they do come up, but videocall talks and in-person conversations feed into this. I take notes on many of both largely as my own memory aid, usually on paper in a stack of index cards. But every piece of information is evidence, so I'll start with (uncertain, with wide error bars) intuitions on one or two sentence entries in an application form and build from there.
Bloodlessness is somewhere between a target and a necessary side effect of the way I'm discussing and dissecting the components of handling conflict here and in a lot of posts I've made on the subject lately. I could write the bloody versions, but I feel those drafts show too much fury to be generally useful to others.
- ^
I have to my memory overruled the local organizer exactly once, and in hindsight I think that was a mistake; not because I later came to agree with the local organizer (though I eventually more or less did) but because I think that's an important power to have in the hands of the person actually doing the ground level work.
- ^
Mostly not to investigate complaints, though I've had that as one of multiple goals once or twice.
If I see an Amazon / eBay / etc. review page with a bunch of reviews that say “instead of office chair, package contained bobcat”, my immediate assumption will be that a competitor of the seller has paid for a bunch of bad reviews.
This sort of thing happens regularly.
More generally, given a heuristic that you would apply to a situation, ask: who can profit by exploiting that heuristic. If such people exist, then assume that they are already exploiting your heuristic.
The task, then, is to determine whether bobcatters are more or less common than unscrupulous sellers who would pay for fake reviews that accuse their competitors of being bobcatters.
Thus also in social situations.
Determining and comparing respective base rates is not trivial, but without assuming that adversarial optimization exists, you will predictably fail to get the right answer, quite often. (Increasingly often, in fact, due to incentives.)
Somewhat agreed.
I'm trying to point at something loosely in this vicinity in section V, about hunting in packs - replace "one of them has three good friends" with "one of them paid three people" - where sometimes a bunch of negative reports are happening because someone is making up or deeply exaggerating accusations and routing them to you through different sources. I don't know that it's my first assumption; I currently think "Erin is mailing metaphorical bobcats to a small number of people" happens more often than "Frank is coordinating a bunch of fake or exaggerated accusations about Erin." I do think the latter happens sometimes though.
Conservation of expected evidence, if I see an Amazon review page with reviews saying "instead of office chair, package contained bobcat" my odds they're sending bobcats did go up at least somewhat. How much depends on things like how outlandish the actual accusation is and how coordinated the reviews look.
I strongly agree that adversarial optimization exists and is an important factor in these kinds of social situations. I've been thinking about and writing about social conflict a lot lately in large part because the sometimes adversarial nature of it makes this harder in many ways than most parts of running good meetups. Many (most?) problems you can fix and they stay fixed, and if you're stuck you can ask the people around you. That doesn't work as well for social conflict.
Conservation of expected evidence, if I see an Amazon review page with reviews saying “instead of office chair, package contained bobcat” my odds they’re sending bobcats did go up at least somewhat.
Yes, of course. But your odds that it’s a competitor’s plot should also go up—and will end up higher by far. (This is one of the myriad examples of what Jaynes called the “resurrection of dead hypotheses”.)
That said, “nice to most people but terrible to a few” is an archetype that exists.
Honestly, this is close to my default expectation. I don't expect everyone to be terrible to a few people, but I do expect there to be some class of people I'd be nice to that they'd be pretty nasty towards.
Strong downvoted for not just saying what you're really thinking to the person you have a criticism about which is almost definitely wrong.
Still I guess there should be a word for being mean to one or a few guys in particular against one's stated principles without an objectively justifying explanation. I would like it to be something else. Especially because your example does not involve predictable scapegoat targeting to match the way that this phenomenon happens in real life.
3I'm going to note I'm having a little trouble parsing your sentences here.
Strong downvoted for not just saying what you're really thinking to the person you have a criticism about which is almost definitely wrong.
I think the thing you're saying is that you downvoted because you think instead of writing this essay, I should have told a specific person that I think they're being some kind of jerk (mailing metaphorical bobcats) to a small number of people while being nice to the majority of people. Further, that I'm incorrect about how bad the jerkishness is. Is that close?
Downvote as you will. But I'm trying to talk about a pattern I've noticed across multiple people, and I'm trying to share a tool because I can't be in every ACX meetup in the world. I want local organizers to be able to notice this faster.
Also, speaking directly to the person I have a criticism about isn't always enough. Imagine Bob is at a meetup and is nice to nine other attendees, but punches the tenth in the face in a way only me and the victim can see. The victim leaves, never to return, and I tell Bob not to do that again. Next week, there's Bob, the nine from last time, and a newcomer. Bob punches the newcomer in the face where only me and the newcomer can see, the newcomer leaves, and I ban Bob. This is the situation I'm talking about in part IV but more-so because I saw the punching myself, and I'm still going to have to explain to the nine regulars why I banned someone who was only ever nice to them.
(I believe targeting dynamics do happen sometimes - see part V where I at least touch on this - but I also think the basic pattern of “nice to most people but terrible to a few” does happen sometimes.)
