Love this! Thank you! I love the term âepistolary debatesâ. I have floated using this format with a few people, like David Mathers (who I find fun to talk to, respectful, curious, and full of intellectually stimulating ideas). The EA Forum has the Dialogues feature which is purpose-built for this, but you donât need anything fancy. Substack or any blog or website will allow you to just copy and paste a bunch of emails or Slack/âDiscord messages or whatever.
This format seems to have fallen out of favour, but there was a time on the Internet back in the 2000s when I enjoyed reading email debates like the Edge.org debate on the Anthropic Principle between physicists Leonard Susskind and Lee Smolin. Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan also did an email debate on religion. To me, this format is 100x more interesting than live, verbal debates. I donât really care if someone is good at thinking on the spot and coming up with a clever rejoinder right away. I would much rather they take a day or two to think about it and then respond. Letâs bring back this forgotten format!
I totally agree users also have a responsibility for the culture they create, and not everything can be pinned on the moderators. I think itâs pretty rare, but Iâve experienced at least once an online community where the moderators were trying their best and doing a good job, but the usersâ behaviour became so acrimonious it overwhelmed the moderatorsâ capacity to moderate the community.
Why I think moderators play such a key role is that: on a site like the EA Forum, if there were zero moderation, literally just one person could ruin the whole site for everyone by posting spam, malware links, porn gifs, etc. across the site. The site would become unusable and the users would have to leave. More subtly, 1% or 5% or 10% of users can ruin a site for everyone else if they habitually insult other peopleâs intelligence, or shame or mock or belittle them, or relentlessly make passive-aggressive insults. I think weâre so numb on the Internet, where if someone doesnât use a racial slur or make a threat of violence, we mentally give that a pass. Even though in real life situations, people engaging in that kind of behaviour would often get removed from groups because they ruined it for everyone else.
I wholeheartedly agree on your points about clarity, proportionality, and sticking to the topic/ânot going meta. All this is really well-said. I especially like what you said about staying calm. I like what you said about if one person underreacts to another personâs unfriendliness and stays polite, that can be a form of grace, and a form of grace you can also later show to other people. Per the above, I think where this gets into choppy waters is if one person always acts unfriendly and the other person is always underreacting and staying polite. Thatâs definitely been my experience on the EA Forum, and itâs led to instances where my frustration with someone mounts and mounts and mounts over months and months and months, and I really risk losing my cool and exploding, and potentially even saying something ethically wrong (like a personal insult) that I would painfully regret.
For this reason, I honestly think the ability to just block someone on any platform is so important. You canât always build some kind of neutral, objective case to convince moderators to step in â often these things are personal and really subtle. Itâs not even always about someone doing something objectively wrong. Online, on sites like this, people can corner you and try to talk to you in a way they usually canât in real life. Sometimes you just donât want to talk to someone because they rub you the wrong way for whatever reason. (Maybe youâre always polite and theyâre always rude. Or maybe they just remind you of your ex.) If we force these interactions to happen, thatâs where friction grows and grows and grows until kaboom.
What you said about the feeling of being trapped is tough. On one hand, I definitely feel that sense of being trapped and like I have to respond, even though I can intellectually tell myself that this feeling isnât real and I can just let it go. On the other hand, I would hate to ever make someone else feel like that, and I usually donât feel like other people have to respond to me. If both people feel trapped and like they have to respond, and neither really wants to, well, what a horrible situation. I agree with encouraging a cultural norm where thereâs no obligation to respond and people can just stop replying at any time. (I think I remember adding that disclaimer on the EA Forum least once: feel free to stop responding whenever you like.)
I think an overall atmosphere of warmth, kindness, respect, friendliness, empathy, civility, etc. can help with the trapped feeling. If someone says Iâm stupid (as has happened on the EA Forum), or what I said is stupid (as very recently happened on the EA Forum), I find it a lot harder to let go of, and I want to defend myself. If I get the sense that someone harbours no ill will toward me, then I donât feel that way.
Thereâs a lot of discourse around the EA Forum on epistemic standards, intellectual standards, standards of argument, standards of evidence, etc. I have my own ideas around this, e.g., I wish that would people would cite more peer-reviewed academic research and fewer forum and blog posts, or I wish people would appeal to private, internal intuition less and try more to present a public, external case that could be persuasive to someone with a different intuition. This is all important. But it isnât enough.
The biggest barrier to good thinking and good discussion is a lack of psychological safety. If you take peopleâs prefrontal cortex offline and put them in their limbic system, their thinking suffers. Their conversation suffers. Itâs sometimes about being calm in the moment and letting anger settle down before replying. But itâs also about other emotions like shame, humiliation, and resentment. These are not about just being calm in the moment but are about bigger cultural issues in any environment. They can only be addressed through systemic change, moderation, probably site design, and, honestly, a lot of it is about work that individuals have to do offline in therapy.
I always feel like Iâm writing too much on the EA Forum, so Iâm sorry if thatâs the case. I could edit this comment down, but then that would take me 2-3x as long as writing it without editing. Thank you for your very helpful, gentle, thoughtful contributions to this thread. I appreciate them a hell of a lot. Iâm very grateful to you.
P.S. I just read your post on the definition of good faith and, oh my god, what a breath of fresh air. Thank you for writing that. At least 3 people have accused me of bad faith on the EA Forum, and in each case itâs felt really hurtful and rude. I thought they were acccusing me of lying about my actual views and pretending to believe something else. Because thatâs the canonical definition of bad faith. It softens the sting a little bit (but not fully) to learn they probably just meant, basically, âI disagree with your argument really hardâ. But I think itâs a terrible idea to take a term that canonically means lying, which 99% of people will interpret as meaning lying, and then just use it as an extra bit of spice to attack someone with when you really disagree with what theyâre saying. (I also think the never clearly defined or explained term âtruthseekingâ is annoying in a similar way. What does it mean? Who can say? In practice, itâs just a bit of spice to really dunk on someone hard.)
On the bad faith/ââtruth seekingâ point, Iâve also noted some issues in the way âtruth seekingâ is used in a previous post, and thinking about this case gave me an idea. It seems like there is a general phenomenon in EA/ârationalist discourse where intent gets obscured or ignored somehow. Perhaps not surprising for intellectual communities that are very into consequentialism?
I think the effect of using the âtruth seekingâ terminology is to confuse multiple possibilities around intent:
Lying: intentional
Insufficient rigor/âevidence/âetc.: can be an unintentional mistake
Callousness about the truth: I think people often feel like even if someone isnât lying, they can demonstrate a disregard for truth that feels like its intentionally misleading
Being âinsufficiently truth seekingâ could refer to any of these, and thus using the phrase fails my principle of clarity. It also becomes strongly subject to motivate reasoning or motte/âbailey dynamics because the meaning can shift among these different meanings.
I feel like something similar has happened here with the whole âhard to dispell misunderstandingsâ thing. Tskeen laterally, it doesnât make a whole lot of sense to soft ban someone for this. Is the implicict message that only easy to dispell misunderstandings are allowed? Surely not. But it makes more sense if you imagine its implicitly standing in for a spectrum of actions based on intention:
Bad faith: intentionally obscuring your real views, often with the goal of making them harder to respond to.
Genuine mistake: unintentional, even of hard to dispell
Game playing: being coy or cagey about what your views really are or in some way deliberately making your position confusing or hard to respond to.
The last one I think is kind of what Said was being accused of in the post referenced above? But IMO its extremely clear that you havenât been doing anything intentionally misleading. I think this is an instance of concerns about âepistemicsâ being used in an unproductive way that creates a lack of clarity around intent.
Oh, you wrote that post on âtruthseekingâ too!! I forgot that!! Another helpful post.
âTruthseekingâ as a term drives me bananas because itâs so vague and ambiguous â I looked really hard and couldnât find any real attempts to define it clearly, if even to define it at all â and pretty much the only way I see the term get used is when someone wants to slam someone else they disagree with. And itâs definitely never clear to me that the person whoâs accused of ânot truthseekingâ is doing anything wrong, or making bad points, or that their views are wrong. It just seems like an argument got heated.
If people say ânot truthseekingâ and they just mean âbad evidence/âbad arguments/âill-informed pointsâ, they should just say that. Ditto for âbad faithâ if thatâs what itâs supposed to mean.
Thank you for seeing me clearly. Itâs a huge relief. I found it super confusing and hurtful when Toby said Iâm not engaging in good faith, that I was snarky when I was really being heartfelt and sincere, and that I was âmotivatedâ to find examples of uncivil behaviour on the EA Forum (?). These all feel like such foreign understandings of my intent. And the throughline between them feels like Toby is telling himself a story about me where Iâm out to cause trouble or something. I donât know. I really canât understand whatâs happening here.
I do feel like Iâm transparent. I donât know why someone would think Iâm sneaking around.
Do you think this is a LessWrong subculture thing? I notice in the LessWrong-o-sphere, thereâs all this emphasis on secrets, game theory, strategizing, signalling, counter-signalling, yada yada. Does that make people feel especially suspicious of each other? Or of âoutsidersâ?
This line from a post by a pseudonymous person involved in the LessWrong community always sticks out in my mind:
I donât really feel like many people in the rationalist community communicate very openly or honestly, even though non-deception is often thought to be one of their core tenets.
Somehow this rings true to me, although I donât know if I can put my finger on why. Maybe itâs because there is such a lack of psychological safety in the LessWrong community, people become cagey and withdraw into themselves in order to self-protect. Just a hunch.
I also wonder about the snarkiness thing. In the LessWrong community, my impression is that like 90%+ of the time (NB: not a rigorously obtained number) people are just faking being nice or polite, or just not even faking it. The âgameâ (as it were) is to say the rudest thing possible in the least polite phrasing you can get away with. Does this make people mistake â outside of that context â genuine niceness or politeness for secret snark?
Love this! Thank you! I love the term âepistolary debatesâ. I have floated using this format with a few people, like David Mathers (who I find fun to talk to, respectful, curious, and full of intellectually stimulating ideas). The EA Forum has the Dialogues feature which is purpose-built for this, but you donât need anything fancy. Substack or any blog or website will allow you to just copy and paste a bunch of emails or Slack/âDiscord messages or whatever.
This format seems to have fallen out of favour, but there was a time on the Internet back in the 2000s when I enjoyed reading email debates like the Edge.org debate on the Anthropic Principle between physicists Leonard Susskind and Lee Smolin. Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan also did an email debate on religion. To me, this format is 100x more interesting than live, verbal debates. I donât really care if someone is good at thinking on the spot and coming up with a clever rejoinder right away. I would much rather they take a day or two to think about it and then respond. Letâs bring back this forgotten format!
I totally agree users also have a responsibility for the culture they create, and not everything can be pinned on the moderators. I think itâs pretty rare, but Iâve experienced at least once an online community where the moderators were trying their best and doing a good job, but the usersâ behaviour became so acrimonious it overwhelmed the moderatorsâ capacity to moderate the community.
Why I think moderators play such a key role is that: on a site like the EA Forum, if there were zero moderation, literally just one person could ruin the whole site for everyone by posting spam, malware links, porn gifs, etc. across the site. The site would become unusable and the users would have to leave. More subtly, 1% or 5% or 10% of users can ruin a site for everyone else if they habitually insult other peopleâs intelligence, or shame or mock or belittle them, or relentlessly make passive-aggressive insults. I think weâre so numb on the Internet, where if someone doesnât use a racial slur or make a threat of violence, we mentally give that a pass. Even though in real life situations, people engaging in that kind of behaviour would often get removed from groups because they ruined it for everyone else.
I wholeheartedly agree on your points about clarity, proportionality, and sticking to the topic/ânot going meta. All this is really well-said. I especially like what you said about staying calm. I like what you said about if one person underreacts to another personâs unfriendliness and stays polite, that can be a form of grace, and a form of grace you can also later show to other people. Per the above, I think where this gets into choppy waters is if one person always acts unfriendly and the other person is always underreacting and staying polite. Thatâs definitely been my experience on the EA Forum, and itâs led to instances where my frustration with someone mounts and mounts and mounts over months and months and months, and I really risk losing my cool and exploding, and potentially even saying something ethically wrong (like a personal insult) that I would painfully regret.
For this reason, I honestly think the ability to just block someone on any platform is so important. You canât always build some kind of neutral, objective case to convince moderators to step in â often these things are personal and really subtle. Itâs not even always about someone doing something objectively wrong. Online, on sites like this, people can corner you and try to talk to you in a way they usually canât in real life. Sometimes you just donât want to talk to someone because they rub you the wrong way for whatever reason. (Maybe youâre always polite and theyâre always rude. Or maybe they just remind you of your ex.) If we force these interactions to happen, thatâs where friction grows and grows and grows until kaboom.
What you said about the feeling of being trapped is tough. On one hand, I definitely feel that sense of being trapped and like I have to respond, even though I can intellectually tell myself that this feeling isnât real and I can just let it go. On the other hand, I would hate to ever make someone else feel like that, and I usually donât feel like other people have to respond to me. If both people feel trapped and like they have to respond, and neither really wants to, well, what a horrible situation. I agree with encouraging a cultural norm where thereâs no obligation to respond and people can just stop replying at any time. (I think I remember adding that disclaimer on the EA Forum least once: feel free to stop responding whenever you like.)
I think an overall atmosphere of warmth, kindness, respect, friendliness, empathy, civility, etc. can help with the trapped feeling. If someone says Iâm stupid (as has happened on the EA Forum), or what I said is stupid (as very recently happened on the EA Forum), I find it a lot harder to let go of, and I want to defend myself. If I get the sense that someone harbours no ill will toward me, then I donât feel that way.
Thereâs a lot of discourse around the EA Forum on epistemic standards, intellectual standards, standards of argument, standards of evidence, etc. I have my own ideas around this, e.g., I wish that would people would cite more peer-reviewed academic research and fewer forum and blog posts, or I wish people would appeal to private, internal intuition less and try more to present a public, external case that could be persuasive to someone with a different intuition. This is all important. But it isnât enough.
The biggest barrier to good thinking and good discussion is a lack of psychological safety. If you take peopleâs prefrontal cortex offline and put them in their limbic system, their thinking suffers. Their conversation suffers. Itâs sometimes about being calm in the moment and letting anger settle down before replying. But itâs also about other emotions like shame, humiliation, and resentment. These are not about just being calm in the moment but are about bigger cultural issues in any environment. They can only be addressed through systemic change, moderation, probably site design, and, honestly, a lot of it is about work that individuals have to do offline in therapy.
I always feel like Iâm writing too much on the EA Forum, so Iâm sorry if thatâs the case. I could edit this comment down, but then that would take me 2-3x as long as writing it without editing. Thank you for your very helpful, gentle, thoughtful contributions to this thread. I appreciate them a hell of a lot. Iâm very grateful to you.
P.S. I just read your post on the definition of good faith and, oh my god, what a breath of fresh air. Thank you for writing that. At least 3 people have accused me of bad faith on the EA Forum, and in each case itâs felt really hurtful and rude. I thought they were acccusing me of lying about my actual views and pretending to believe something else. Because thatâs the canonical definition of bad faith. It softens the sting a little bit (but not fully) to learn they probably just meant, basically, âI disagree with your argument really hardâ. But I think itâs a terrible idea to take a term that canonically means lying, which 99% of people will interpret as meaning lying, and then just use it as an extra bit of spice to attack someone with when you really disagree with what theyâre saying. (I also think the never clearly defined or explained term âtruthseekingâ is annoying in a similar way. What does it mean? Who can say? In practice, itâs just a bit of spice to really dunk on someone hard.)
Thanks for your kind words.
On the bad faith/ââtruth seekingâ point, Iâve also noted some issues in the way âtruth seekingâ is used in a previous post, and thinking about this case gave me an idea. It seems like there is a general phenomenon in EA/ârationalist discourse where intent gets obscured or ignored somehow. Perhaps not surprising for intellectual communities that are very into consequentialism?
I think the effect of using the âtruth seekingâ terminology is to confuse multiple possibilities around intent:
Lying: intentional
Insufficient rigor/âevidence/âetc.: can be an unintentional mistake
Callousness about the truth: I think people often feel like even if someone isnât lying, they can demonstrate a disregard for truth that feels like its intentionally misleading
Being âinsufficiently truth seekingâ could refer to any of these, and thus using the phrase fails my principle of clarity. It also becomes strongly subject to motivate reasoning or motte/âbailey dynamics because the meaning can shift among these different meanings.
I feel like something similar has happened here with the whole âhard to dispell misunderstandingsâ thing. Tskeen laterally, it doesnât make a whole lot of sense to soft ban someone for this. Is the implicict message that only easy to dispell misunderstandings are allowed? Surely not. But it makes more sense if you imagine its implicitly standing in for a spectrum of actions based on intention:
Bad faith: intentionally obscuring your real views, often with the goal of making them harder to respond to.
Genuine mistake: unintentional, even of hard to dispell
Game playing: being coy or cagey about what your views really are or in some way deliberately making your position confusing or hard to respond to.
The last one I think is kind of what Said was being accused of in the post referenced above? But IMO its extremely clear that you havenât been doing anything intentionally misleading. I think this is an instance of concerns about âepistemicsâ being used in an unproductive way that creates a lack of clarity around intent.
Oh, you wrote that post on âtruthseekingâ too!! I forgot that!! Another helpful post.
âTruthseekingâ as a term drives me bananas because itâs so vague and ambiguous â I looked really hard and couldnât find any real attempts to define it clearly, if even to define it at all â and pretty much the only way I see the term get used is when someone wants to slam someone else they disagree with. And itâs definitely never clear to me that the person whoâs accused of ânot truthseekingâ is doing anything wrong, or making bad points, or that their views are wrong. It just seems like an argument got heated.
If people say ânot truthseekingâ and they just mean âbad evidence/âbad arguments/âill-informed pointsâ, they should just say that. Ditto for âbad faithâ if thatâs what itâs supposed to mean.
Thank you for seeing me clearly. Itâs a huge relief. I found it super confusing and hurtful when Toby said Iâm not engaging in good faith, that I was snarky when I was really being heartfelt and sincere, and that I was âmotivatedâ to find examples of uncivil behaviour on the EA Forum (?). These all feel like such foreign understandings of my intent. And the throughline between them feels like Toby is telling himself a story about me where Iâm out to cause trouble or something. I donât know. I really canât understand whatâs happening here.
I do feel like Iâm transparent. I donât know why someone would think Iâm sneaking around.
Do you think this is a LessWrong subculture thing? I notice in the LessWrong-o-sphere, thereâs all this emphasis on secrets, game theory, strategizing, signalling, counter-signalling, yada yada. Does that make people feel especially suspicious of each other? Or of âoutsidersâ?
This line from a post by a pseudonymous person involved in the LessWrong community always sticks out in my mind:
Somehow this rings true to me, although I donât know if I can put my finger on why. Maybe itâs because there is such a lack of psychological safety in the LessWrong community, people become cagey and withdraw into themselves in order to self-protect. Just a hunch.
I also wonder about the snarkiness thing. In the LessWrong community, my impression is that like 90%+ of the time (NB: not a rigorously obtained number) people are just faking being nice or polite, or just not even faking it. The âgameâ (as it were) is to say the rudest thing possible in the least polite phrasing you can get away with. Does this make people mistake â outside of that context â genuine niceness or politeness for secret snark?