All of Hazard's Comments + Replies
Does Jessica's Anti-Normativity post or Ben's Can Crimes be Discussed Literally & Guilt, Shame, Depravity posts make sense to you? If there's specific posts you want to talk about not making sense / not being clear what the point is, I'm down to chat about them.
For anyone curious about what the sPoOkY and mYsTeRiOuS Michael Vassar actually thinks about various shit, many of his friends have blogs and write about what they chat about, and he's also been on several long form podcasts.
https://naturalhazard.xyz/ben_jess_sarah_starter_pack
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1lJY2HJNttkwwmwIn3kyIA?si=em0lqkPaRzeZ-ctQx_hfmA
https://open.spotify.com/episode/01z3WDSIHPDAOuVp1ZYUoN?si=VOtoDpw9T_CahF31WEhZXQ
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2RzlQDSwxGbjloRKqCh1xg?si=XuFZB1CtSt-FbCweHtTnUA
It's a term Scott Alexander coined a few years ago when he was saying Jessica Taylor was crazy for thinking people could have spooky mind powers that let them exert control over others, right before he said Michael has spooky mind powers that lets him exert control over others.
For the record, I associate with Michael, and thus am very spooky. If anyone wants to make sure I'm not around them during an altered state hit me up and we can coordinate.
This post is my current recommendation for practicing getting a felt sense for the range of emotions you can be experiencing.
https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/labelling-feelings
I'm curious if what your describing is similar to what I'm describing in this post. When I was started paying more attention to emotions I'd often feel these impenetrable clouds of grey that I couldn't discern much content from. https://naturalhazard.xyz/then_and_now
I agree that disguising one's self as "someone who cares about X" doesn't require being good at X, at least when you only have short contained contact with them.
I'm trying to emphasize that I don't think Cade has made any progress in learning to "say the right things". I think he has probably learned more individual words that are more frequent in a rationalist context than not (like the word "priors"), but it seems really unlikely that he's gotten any better at even the grammar of rationalist communication.
Like, I'd be mediumly surprised if he, when talki...
I might be misunderstanding, I understood the comment I was responding to as saying that Zack was helping Cade do a better job of disguising himself as someone who cared about good epistemics. Something like "if Zack keeps talking, Cade will learn to the surface level features of a good Convo about epistemology and thus, even if he still doesn't know shit, he'll be able to trick more people into thinking he's someone worth talking to."
In response to that claim, I shared an older interview of Cade to demonstrate that his been exposed to people who talk abou...
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1I agree, except for the last statement. I've found that talking to certain people with bad epistemology about epistemic concepts will, instead of teaching them concepts, teach them a rhetorical trick that (soon afterward) they will try to use against you as a "gotcha" (related)... as a result of them having a soldier mindset and knowing you have a different political opinion.
While I expect most of them won't ever mimic rationalists well, (i) mimicry per se doesn't seem important and (ii) I think there are a small fraction of people (tho not Metz) who do en...
1I can visibly see you training him, via verbal conversation, how to outperform the vast majority of journalists at talking about epistemics.
Metz doesn't seem any better at seeming like he cares about or thinks at all about epistemics than he did in 2021.
Interesting interview. Metz seems extraordinarily incurious about anything Vassar says - like he mentions all sorts of things like Singularity University or Kurzweil or Leverage, which Metz clearly doesn't know much about and are relevant to his stated goals, but Metz is instead fixated on asking about a few things like 'how did X meet Thiel?' 'how did Y meet Thiel?' 'what did Z talk about with Thiel?' 'What did A say to Musk at Puerto Rico?' Like he's not listening to Vassar at all, just running a keyword filter over a few people's names and ignoring anyt...
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6Symbiotic would be a mutually beneficial relationship. What I described is very clearly not that
Yeah, the parasitic dynamic seems to set up the field for the scapegoating backup such that I'd expect to often find the scapegoating move in parasitic ecosystems that have been running their course for a while.
Your comment seems like an expansion on who is the party being fooled and it also points out another purpose for the obfuscation. A defense of pre-truth would be a theory that shows how it's not deceptive and not a way to cover up a conflict. That being said I agree that an investor that plays pre-truth does want founders to lie, and it seems very plausible that they orient to their language game as a "figure it out" initiation ritual.
I'm with you on the deficiency of the signalling frame when talking about human communication and communication more generally. Skyrms and others who developed the signalling frame explicitly tried to avoid having a notion of of intentionality in order to explore questions like "how could the simplest things that still make sense to call 'communication' develop in systems that don't have human level intelligence?", which means the model has a gaping hole when trying to talk about what people do.
I wrote a post about the interplay between the intentional asp...
Not quite what you're looking for, but if you've got a default sense that coordination is hard, Jessica Taylor has a evocatively named post Coordination isn't hard.
I remember at some point finding a giant messy graph that was all of The Sequences and the links between posts. I can't track down the link, anyone remember this and have a lead?
When I was drafting my comment, the original version of the text you first quoted was, "Anyone using this piece to scapegoat needs to ignore the giant upfront paragraph about 'HEY DON'T USE THIS TO SCAPEGOAT' (which people are totally capable of ignoring)", guess I should have left that in there. I don't think it's uncommon to ignore such disclaimers, I do think it actively opposes behaviors and discourse norms I wish to see in the world.
I agree that putting a "I'm not trying to blame anyone" disclaimer can be a pragmatic rhetorical move for someone attemp...
This makes a lot of sense. I can notice ways in which I generally feels more threatened by social invalidation than actual concrete threats of violence.
I'm not sure what writing this comment felt like for you, but from my view it seems like you've noticed a lot of the dynamics about scapegoating and info-suppression fields that Ben and Jessica have blogged about in the past (and occasionally pointed out in the course of these comments, though less clearly). I'm going to highlight a few things.
...I do think that Jessica writing this post will predictably have reputational externalities that I don't like and I think are unjustified.
Broadly, I think that onlookers not paying much attention would have conc
Anyone using this piece to scapegoat needs to ignore the giant upfront paragraph about "HEY, DON'T USE THIS TO SCAPEGOAT"
I think that's literally true, but also they way you wrote this sentence implies that that is unusual or uncommon.
I think that's backwards. If a person was intentionally and deliberately motivated to scapegoat some other person or group, it is an effective rhetorical move to say "I'm not trying to punish them, I just want to talk freely about some harms."
By pretending that you're not attacking the target, you protect yourself somewhat fr...
I appreciate this comment, especially that you noticed the giant upfront paragraph that's relevant to the discussion :)
One note on reputational risk: I think I took reasonable efforts to reduce it, by emailing a draft to people including Anna Salamon beforehand. Anna Salamon added Matt Graves (Vaniver) to the thread, and they both said they'd be happy with me posting after editing (Matt Graves had a couple specific criticisms of the post). I only posted this on LW, not on my blog or Medium. I didn't promote it on Twitter except to retweet someone who wa...
I found many things you shared useful. I also expect that because of your style/tone you'll get down voted :(
Thinking about people I know who've met Vassar, the ones who weren't brought up to go to college* seem to have no problem with him and show no inclination to worship him as a god or freak out about how he's spooky or cultish; to them, he's obviously just a guy with an interesting perspective.
This is very interesting to me! I'd like to hear more about how the two group's behavior looks diff, and also your thoughts on what's the difference that makes the difference, what are the pieces of "being brought up to go to college" that lead to one class of reactions?
The people I know who weren't brought up to go to college have more experience navigating concrete threats and dangers, which can't be avoided through conformity, since the system isn't set up to take care of people like them. They have to know what's going on to survive. This results in an orientation less sensitive to subtle threats of invalidation, and that sees more concrete value in being informed by someone.
In general this means that they're much more comfortable with the kind of confrontation Vassar engages in, than high-class people are.
I have talked to Vassar, while he has a lot of "explicit control over conversations" which could be called charisma, I'd hypothesize that the fallout is actually from his ideas. (The charisma/intelligence making him able to credibly argue those)
My hypothesis is the following: I've met a lot of rationalists + adjacent people. A lot of them care very deeply about EA and AI alignment. In fact, it seems to me to be a core part of a lot of these people's identity ("I'm an EA person, thus I'm a good person doing important work"). Two anecdotes to illustrat...
Talking with Vassar feels very intellectually alive. Maybe, like a high density of insight porn. I imagine that the people Ben talks about wouldn't get much enjoyment out of insight porn either, so that emotional impact isn't there.
There's probably also an element that plenty of people who can normally follow an intellectual conversation can't keep up a conversation with Vassar and then are filled after a conversation with a bunch of different ideas that lack order in their mind. I imagine that sometimes there's an idea overload that prevents people from c...
It's not clear to me what if anything we disagree on.
I agree that personality categories are useful for predicting someone's behavior across time.
I don't think using essences to make predictions is the "wrong thing to do in general" either.
I agree climate can be a useful predictive category for thinking about a region.
My point about taking the wrong thing as a causal variable "leading you to overestimate your ability to make precise causal interventions" is actually very relevant to Duncan's recent post. Many thought experiments are misleading/bogus/...
"People are over sensitive to ostracism because human brains are hardwired to be sensitive to it, because in the ancestral environment it meant death."
Evopsyche seems mostly overkill for explaining why a particular person is strongly attached to social reality.
People who did not care what their parents or school-teachers thought of them had a very hard time. "Socialization" as the process of the people around you integrating you (often forcefully) into the local social reality. Unless you meet a minimum bar of socialization, it's very common to be sh...
I greatly appreciate posts that describe when different flavors of self work (or different kinds of problems) don't feel like how one expected. A somewhat reversed example for me, for some years I didn't notice the intense judgement I had within me that would occasionally point at others and myself, largely because I had a particular stereotype of what "being judgemental" looked like. I correctly determined I didn't do the stereotypically judgemental thing, and stopped hunting.
I agree that meeting a person where they are is pretty important. You also seem to spend time with very different people than who I spend time with, and you have a very different reference for "people" and "where they are". This post probably isn't going to be too useful to the people you reference in your hypotheticals. It has been very useful for various people I know, so I'm meeting them where they are :)
You mention that it's useful to have conversations where you try to get on the same page about what you mean when you use certain words (3rd to last pa...
As a shortcut, if you have similar criticisms of A Human's Guide to Words, then we probably do disagree a lot. But if you don't think EY "thinks words aren't useful" then we just have a misunderstanding.
This is awkward because I'm pretty sure I don't believe anything your reply asserts I believe.
To clarify, is it the case that from reading my post you've concluded that I don't think labels/words are useful and that I don't think we need language for complex thought? If that's the case, can you help me understand how you got that?
Some thoughts: the "When" in the title was meant to make this distinct from simply "Arguing Definitions Is Arguing Decisions". Of all arguments about definitions, some unknown about have the qualities I'm pointing at.
When you ment...
I'll file a complaint to this imaginary workplace.
I'm short on actual conversations I can remember the details of, so if you have any that you think make a good example, feel free to share. Examples are some of the most important parts and I don't like it whenever I have to make them up.
I'm reflecting back on this sequence I started two years ago. There's some good stuff in it. I recently made a comic strip that has more of my up to date thoughts on language here. Who knows, maybe I'll come back and synthesize things.
Agreed that there's something missing. I didn't provide much of a model about what emotions are, mostly because I didn't have much of one when I wrote this. It was also the case that for some time I used my lack of a mechanistic model of emotions as an excuse to ignore the ways I was obviously hurting.
In response to Raemon's comment here, I and a few others gave some more concrete thoughts on what negative repercussions are.
I intend to write some follow up posts with what I've learned in the intervening years. One thing I need to expand on is what I actual...
Great post! Would also be interested in reading your distributed systems papers.
Rao made his framework by combining his consulting experience with the TV show The Office. I don't believe he was trying to describe all corporations, which leaves me with the question "How would I determine which workplaces have these dynamics?"
The world he describes doesn't seem incompatible with the corporate world that the book Moral Mazes depicts.
I've not been in the working world long enough to have any data on what's common or normal, and haven't been at my current workplace long enough to have a sense for if it matches Rao's frame (it doesn't seem...
From reading lots of Rao's stuff, I also got the sense that he's writing descriptively, and specifically, he's trying to describe The Office. It'll be truthful to the degree that The Office captures some truths, and to the degree that Rao's own consulting experience fills in the details.
I appreciate you writing this! Describing how exactly a set of ideas fucked with you, how the ideas interlock, and what you think their structure is, is something I'm always glad to see.
Sometimes when I'm writing an email to someone at work, I noticing I'm making various faces, as if to convey the emotion in the sentence I'm writing. It's like... I'm composing a sentence, I'm imagining what I'm trying to express, and I'm imagining that expression, and along with that comes the physical faces and mental stances of the thing I'm expressing. It's like I'm trying to fill in and inhabit some imagined state.
Over the past year I've noticed a similar sort of feeling when I'm thinking about something I could potentially do, and I'm being motivated...
Dope, it was nice to check and see that contrary to what I expect, it's not always being used that way :)
Some idle musings on using naive to convey specific content.
Sometimes I might want to communicate that I think someone's wrong, and I also think they're wrong in a way that's only likely to happen if they lack experience X. Or similar, they are wrong because they haven't had experience X. That's something I can imagine being relevant and something I'd want to communicate. Though I'd specifically want to mention the experience that I think they're lackin...
I generally agree with this post.
And man, that feels kinda naive to me.
Is there something you wanted to communicate here that was more than "that feels wrong/not true"? All usage and explications of "naive" that I've encountered seemed to focus on "the thing here that is bad or shameful is that we experienced people know this and you don't, get with the program".
I liked that you provided a lot of examples!
If the details are available within you, I'd love to hear more about what the experience of noticing these fake values was like. Say for getting A's, I'd hazard a guess that at some point pre-this-revelation you did something like "thinking about why A's matter". What was that like? What was different about that reflection from more recent reflection? Has it been mostly a matter of learning to pay attention and then it's all easy, or have you had to learn what different sorts of motivation/fake-real values feel like, or other?
Does it feel like there were any "pre-requisites" for being able to notice the difference?
Previously when I'd encountered the distinction between synthetic and analytic thought (as philosophers used them), I didn't quite get it. Yesterday I started reading Kant's Prolegomena and have a new appreciation for the idea. I used to imagine that "doing the analytic method" meant looking at definitions.
I didn't imagine the idea actually being applied to concepts in one's head. I imagined the process being applied to a word. And it seemed clear to me that you're never going to gain much insight or wisdom from investigation a words definition and g...
I think this diary is a good idea, interested to see how it goes!
That certainly would have made a cool diary :)
I totally agree that the dude's critique didn't have much substance. That example, and several others, are all things were now I can see and feel the lack of substance. It was very real then though. In writing this I tried to emphasize that aspect, the way there wasn't much putting things in context, the way that by strategy for dealing with people made it very hard to go "k, jelly person critiquing with no substance".
Glad a part related!
Yeah, the particular self-narrative one has probably does a lot of the shaping of everything else. The messages from others that I attend to would be a bit different from you.
I'm trying to find a post (maybe a comment?) from the past few years. The idea was, say you have 8 descriptive labels. These labels could correspond to clusters in thing-space. Or they could correspond to axis. I think it was about types of mathematicians.
I'm trying to remember the book's take, something like "humor is to suss out what norms you do and don't approve of"?
Rao offhandedly mentions that the Clueless are useful to put blame on when there's a "reorg". That didn't mean much to me until I read the first few chapters of Moral Mazes, where it went through several detailed examples of the politics of a reorg.
I'm the author, writing a review/reflection.
I wrote this post mainly to express myself and make more real my understanding of my own situation. The summer of 2019 I was doing a lot of exploration on how I felt and experience the world, and also I was doing lots of detective work trying to understand "how I got to now."
The most valuable thing it adds is a detailed example of what it feels like to mishandle advice about emotions from the inside. This was prompted by the fact that younger me "already knew" about dealing with his emotions, and I wanted to writ...
I'm pondering this again. I expect, though I have not double checked, that the studied cases of pressure to find repressed memories leading to fake memories are mostly ones that involve, well, another person pressuring you. How often does this happen if you sit alone in your room and try it? Skilled assistant would almost certainly be better than an unskilled assistant, though I don't know how it compares to DIY, if you add the complication of "can you tell if someone is skilled or not?"
Would be interested if anyone's got info about DIY investigations.
I plan to blog more about how I understand some of these trigger states and how it relates to trauma. I do think there's a decent amount of written work, not sure how "canonical", but I've read some great stuff that from sources I'm surprised I haven't heard more hype about. The most useful stuff I've read so far is the first three chapters of this book. It has hugely sharpened my thinking.
I agree that a lot of trauma discourse on our chunk of twitter is more for used on the personal experience/transformation side, and doesn't let itself well to bigger Theory of Change type scheming.
The way I see "Politics is the Mind Killer" get used, it feels like the natural extension is "Trying to do anything that involves high stakes or involves interacting with the outside world or even just coordinating a lot of our own Is The Mind Killer".
From this angle, a commitment to prevent things from getting "too political" to "avoid everyone becoming angry idiots" is also a commitment to not having an impact.
I really like how jessica re-frames things in this comment. The whole comment is interesting, here's a snippet:
...Basically, if the issue is adversar
The original post was mostly about not UNNECESSARILY introducing politics or using it as examples, when your main topic wasn't about politics in the first place. They are bad topics to study rationality on.
They are good topics to USE rationality on, both to dissolve questions and to understand your communication goals.
They are ... varied and nuanced in applicability ... topics to discuss on LessWrong. Generally, there are better forums to use when politics is the main point and rationality is a tool for those goals. And gene...
Your linked comment was very useful. To those who didn't click, here's a relevant snippet:
...It seems like Simulacrum Levels were aiming to explore two related concepts:
- How people's models/interactions diverge over time from an original concept (where that concept is gradually replaced by exaggerations, lies, and social games, which eventually bear little or not referent to the original)
- How people relate to object level truth, as a whole, vs social reality
The first concept makes sense to call "simulacrum", and the second one I think ends up making more sense
Okay, you made me realize I've been wrong about Michael. Your comment is the single most credible instance I've seen of him causing acute psychosis in an individual. Well, I guess it's more the idea of Michael (and Ben), because no one who reads the linked blog posts or listens to the linked podcasts could mistakenly think your comments had anything to do with their content. I mean, it's possible a casual observer might mistake your earlier characterization of their content as, "isn't this just saying people can sometimes be hypocrites?" as merely gar... (read more)