All of Stuart Johnson's Comments + Replies

Wow that was a fascinating read, thank you for linking that. Most interesting to me was the separation of self-perfectionism from social perfectionism as a clinical concern. I've never felt social perfectionism, and ironically almost all of the trouble I got myself into as a child was from actively rebelling against social expectations. I'm glad to hear that this is also considered different in the literature.

I don't really know, the best I can offer is sort of vaguely gesturing at LessWrong's moderation vector and pointing in a direction.

LW's rules go for a very soft, very subjective approach to definitions and rule enforcement. In essence, anything the moderators feel is against the LW ethos is against the rules here. That's the right approach to take in an environment where the biggest threat to good content is bad content. Hacker News also takes this approach and it works well - it keeps HN protected against non-hackers.

ChangeMyView is somewhat under threat... (read more)

I spent several years moderating r/changemyview on Reddit which also has this rule. Having removed at least hundreds of comments that break it, I think the worst thing about it is that it rewards aloofness and punishes sincerity. That's acceptable to trade off to prevent the rise of very sincere flame wars, but it elevates people pretending to be wise at the expense of those with more experience who likely have more deeply held but also informed opinions about the subject matter. This was easily the most common moderation frustration expressed by users.

You convince me of outcome, but not of comparative capacity:

1. Drug addictivity has upper limit - the % of people who take it once that become addicted to it, and the % of people who successfully quit. It caps at 100% and 0% respectively. Fentanyl probably isn't too far off that cap.
2. Without AI, more addictive opioids than fentanyl will probably be discovered at some point. How much higher is the capacity for creating addictiveness?

I think the important value here is not the assets changing hands as part of the exchange, but rather the value each party stands to gain from the exchange. Both parties are aligned that shaking hands on the current terms is acceptable to them, but they will both lie about that fact if they think it helps them move towards C or D. 

Or to put it another way, in your frame I don't think any kind of collaboration can ever be in anyone's interests unless you are aligned in Every Single Thing.

If I save a drowning person, in a mercenary way it is preferable ... (read more)

I feel like this post just slapped me in the face violently with a wet fish. I'm still reeling from the impact and trying to figure out how I feel about it.

I think it has a lot more to do with status quo preservation than truthseeking. If I'm Martha Corey living in Salem, I'm obviously not going to support the continued investigations into the witching activities of my neighbours and husband, and the last reason for that being the case is fear of the exposed truth that I've been casting hexes on the townsfolk all this time.

I think a much simpler explanation is that continued debate increases the chances I'm put on trial, and I'd much rather have the status quo of not debating whether I'm a witch preserved. If... (read more)

In almost all cases, the buyer will grossly exaggerate the degree to which values are not aligned in the hopes of driving the seller down in price. In most cases, the buyer has voluntarily engaged the seller (or even if they haven't, if they consider the deal worth negotiating then there must be some alignment of values). 

Even if I think the price is already acceptable to me, I will still haggle insincerely because of the prospect of an even better deal.

Great post, I enjoyed it.

1. Regarding the insincere friendship - insincere enmity relationship, I think a very simple example of this I see all the time is a negotiating relationship between a seller and a buyer. The seller insincerely states that he thinks their values are aligned and for that reason it's in your interests to buy, and the buyer insincerely states that he doesn't think values are aligned (even if they are) because they want a lower price.
2. Regarding free speech, I think there's a missed complication in how the relationship plays out between con

Commenting before voting as requested.

After reading this several times, I think the point being made here can broadly be summed up as:

Capitalism is bad because it relies on self-interest (why?), and the size of the bad is measured by the amount of people involved in it (why?). Helping people means they're more likely to both reproduce and be grateful to capitalism in a way that makes them want to preserve the status quo, ergo we ought not help people, because if we do, we will create more capitalist sycophants. 

If I've misunderstood you, then it's bec... (read more)

My bet is that conversational agents get buy-in in the early days because of Skeuomorphism, but eventually are phased out in favour of more efficient interaction styles.

I think most of the best posts on this website about the dark arts are deep analyses of one particular rhetorical trick and the effect it has on a discussion. For example, Setting the Zero Point or The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? are both discussions about hypothesis privilege that rely on unstated premises. I think reading these made me earnestly better at recognising and responding to Dark Arts in the real world. Frame Control and its response, Tabooing "Frame Control" are also excellent reads in my opinion.

Breaking my usual lurking habit to explain my downvote. I travel around a lot and compete in various debating competitions, so this topic is close to my heart. I read this as an attempt to raise the epistemic water level.

It is acknowledged but I still find that this post veers wildly off-topic about half way through and extraneously bashes Ramaswarmy in a way I'm not sure is constructive.

The 2nd points harks on something valid which also irks me, but I think Scott beat you to the punch. Even that given though, I don't think any of these things as given are... (read more)

Perhaps poorly phrased. I was trying to hint at Isolated Demands For Rigor to skeptically dismiss all evidence. This post was inspired by someone I used to work with who amongst other things would talk about "fundamental issues" and "the big picture" in a vague way as rhetorical devices to discard certain pieces of evidence.

I guess an ending where I throw my hands up and say "oh no my reasoning" was simultaneously the most likely and the most beneficial outcome to finally wading in to throw up a post of my own. Critique is fair enough, and it would seem that least to some degree I have in fact missed the point.

I still think there's something here beyond just privileging a hypothesis and Orwell's complaint about double negation as euphemism. Perhaps the real thrust I was trying to make here was that double negation makes it harder to notice that you've privileged a hypothesis.... (read more)

I am always impressed by how much insight LW users can cram into a small number of words. One angle I feel has been underdiscussed on LW is effective rhetorical devices for dealing with people who are very good at using the dark arts. This post was inspired by my experience with an old colleague with whom we many times had the exact conversation in the green-purple example. 

I somehow missed Setting the Zero Point, and it's extremely thorough, but I wish it were more like Proving Too Much - advice on how to convince an audience that rationality is valu... (read more)