Yeah, totally, I wondered the same thing. Am I seeing the tip of the iceberg and the other 90% of the time spent is all behind the scenes? Could totally be possible, but is that really the best way to do things?
I really want to see stricter moderation of online spaces to maintain respect, kindness, and psychological safety, as much as possible. I think this would mean mods often intervening in cases they donāt normally now (not just on the EA Forum, elsewhere too). I want mods to be less hands-off in that way. I think the end result is online spaces would bring more enjoyment, less suffering, and would facilitate more open-minded, curious, creative, stimulating discussions, rather than the amount of arguing to win we see.
But mods making editorial decisions about content from the perspective of what they think is incorrect vs. correct or unreasonable vs. reasonable is dicey territory. Obviously, you just have to ban people posting ChatGPT rants about homeopathy or whatever. But if youāre getting into really subtle and contested ideas about which there is widespread disagreement, then do the users of a site like the EA Forum actually want moderators to make the call about whatās correct and acceptable vs. incorrect and ban-worthy?
Itās particularly relevant to the EA Forum for the reasons you said. Some popular ideas on the EA Forum, most of all that there will soon be an existentially dangerous AGI, are things that, I donāt know, something like 95% or 99% or 99.9% of people disagree with. If you want to convince the skeptics, who are the overwhelming majority, then how is this approach going to work? You say skepticsā ideas are stupid and then ban them. Okayā¦ is thatā¦ scalable?
Moderators have a hard job, I think it canāt be entirely on moderation to drive the culture of a website. A lot of the work has to be on the users. Starting with moderation issues though, I have a couple ideas:
Clarity: I think moderation benefits from simplicity and clarity. It isnāt a good sign when you are taking mod action against someone but canāt really explain why because its too difficult or would take too long. I feel like that indicates that the underlying rules/āprinciples arenāt really clear or simple enough. It is hard for people to adapt to comply with complicated and unclear rules and the road to motivated reasoning is also paved in vague principles that are easily applied differently to different stituations.
Proportionality: This one goes in both directions. I think sometimes it would be better for mods to step in early but with a lighter touch, something like āthis seems to be getting a bit heated/āunproductive, friendly reminder to everyone to keep it civilā. An ounce of prevention and all that.
For what users can do:
Stick to the topic/ādonāt go meta: Stay grounded in the discussion, try not to import assumptions based on previous arguments with people vaguely on the same āsideā as who you are talking to, focus on their arguments. Try to make the discussion more specific rather than more general. Try not to take your argument in a meta direction, donāt talk about what arguments are good in the abstract or focus too much on claiming that the other personās arguments are an example of a general phenonemon, try to respond to their claims specifically.
Try to stay calm: It is common that people feel a bit uncomfortable when faced with strong disagreements, including that the person they are talking to is being unfair or mean in some way. The problem is that if both people go along with this feeling it often leads to a bad place. If one person temporarily lapses into a less friendly tonw but the other person stays calm, sometimes the conversation is salvagable. Try to be that calm person sometimes in hopes that when you are the one who isnāt calm, the person who you are talking to can cover for you a little.
You never have an obligation to respond: I think some of the stress in arguing online comes from a feeling of being trapped, like you will be judged if the person you are talking to gets the last word. We should try to cultivate a culture where it is okay to respond within your own time limitations. If you get the sense the person you are talking to is feeling tapped out, you can openly raise this issue or try to take the peddle off the gas a little.
An idea
I will also take this chance to float an idea Iāve been thinking about recently. Iāve been calling this āepistolary debatesā in my head. The idea is inspired by legal briefs in courts, where the parties submit sequences of written statements that respond to each other.
I think this format, where the ādebatersā write longer form content over an extended period of time would be an improvement in a lot of ways. I imagine this as follows:
Partipants message each other privately to align on a topic and definitions, agreeing in advance on the general parameters of what they would like to discuss, who will write first, and timelines/ālength goals.
First person writes an essay/āāopening statementā laying out there position.
Second person starts writing their response, aiming for a write within a certain time frame (e.g. a week, a month).
First person writes their response to the second personās response.
Repeat as desired.
I think a benefit of this format is that extending the time over which the discussion occurs cuts down on stress and helps people set aside snarkier bits that feel right in the moment but arenāt a good idea on further reflection. It also lets people work a little more on explaining their views more fully and clearly, and potentially cuts down on the conversation wondering off from the main topic.
ETA: I also agree with your last paragraph that for the specific case of people interested in AI safety/ārelated issue, it is very important to have openness to discussing the topic in a way that isnāt dismissive and takes seriously engages with the arguments, even if you sometimes feel frustrated with how these conversations play out.
Love this! Thank you! I love the term āepistolary debatesā. 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 donāt need anything fancy. Substack or any blog or website will allow you to just copy and paste a bunch of emails or Slack/āDiscord 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 donāt 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. Letās 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 itās pretty rare, but Iāve experienced at least once an online community where the moderators were trying their best and doing a good job, but the usersā behaviour became so acrimonious it overwhelmed the moderatorsā 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 peopleās intelligence, or shame or mock or belittle them, or relentlessly make passive-aggressive insults. I think weāre so numb on the Internet, where if someone doesnāt 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/ānot 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 personās 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. Thatās definitely been my experience on the EA Forum, and itās 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 canāt always build some kind of neutral, objective case to convince moderators to step in ā often these things are personal and really subtle. Itās 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 canāt in real life. Sometimes you just donāt want to talk to someone because they rub you the wrong way for whatever reason. (Maybe youāre always polite and theyāre always rude. Or maybe they just remind you of your ex.) If we force these interactions to happen, thatās 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 isnāt 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 donāt 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 thereās 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 Iām 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 donāt feel that way.
Thereās 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 isnāt enough.
The biggest barrier to good thinking and good discussion is a lack of psychological safety. If you take peopleās prefrontal cortex offline and put them in their limbic system, their thinking suffers. Their conversation suffers. Itās sometimes about being calm in the moment and letting anger settle down before replying. But itās 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 Iām writing too much on the EA Forum, so Iām sorry if thatās 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. Iām 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 itās felt really hurtful and rude. I thought they were acccusing me of lying about my actual views and pretending to believe something else. Because thatās the canonical definition of bad faith. It softens the sting a little bit (but not fully) to learn they probably just meant, basically, āI disagree with your argument really hardā. But I think itās 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 theyāre saying. (I also think the never clearly defined or explained term ātruthseekingā is annoying in a similar way. What does it mean? Who can say? In practice, itās just a bit of spice to really dunk on someone hard.)
On the bad faith/āātruth seekingā point, Iāve also noted some issues in the way ātruth seekingā 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/ārationalist 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 ātruth seekingā terminology is to confuse multiple possibilities around intent:
Lying: intentional
Insufficient rigor/āevidence/āetc.: can be an unintentional mistake
Callousness about the truth: I think people often feel like even if someone isnāt lying, they can demonstrate a disregard for truth that feels like its intentionally misleading
Being āinsufficiently truth seekingā 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/ābailey dynamics because the meaning can shift among these different meanings.
I feel like something similar has happened here with the whole āhard to dispell misunderstandingsā thing. Tskeen laterally, it doesnāt 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 havenāt been doing anything intentionally misleading. I think this is an instance of concerns about āepistemicsā being used in an unproductive way that creates a lack of clarity around intent.
Oh, you wrote that post on ātruthseekingā too!! I forgot that!! Another helpful post.
āTruthseekingā as a term drives me bananas because itās so vague and ambiguous ā I looked really hard and couldnāt find any real attempts to define it clearly, if even to define it at all ā and pretty much the only way I see the term get used is when someone wants to slam someone else they disagree with. And itās definitely never clear to me that the person whoās accused of ānot truthseekingā 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 ānot truthseekingā and they just mean ābad evidence/ābad arguments/āill-informed pointsā, they should just say that. Ditto for ābad faithā if thatās what itās supposed to mean.
Thank you for seeing me clearly. Itās a huge relief. I found it super confusing and hurtful when Toby said Iām not engaging in good faith, that I was snarky when I was really being heartfelt and sincere, and that I was āmotivatedā 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 Iām out to cause trouble or something. I donāt know. I really canāt understand whatās happening here.
I do feel like Iām transparent. I donāt know why someone would think Iām sneaking around.
Do you think this is a LessWrong subculture thing? I notice in the LessWrong-o-sphere, thereās 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 āoutsidersā?
This line from a post by a pseudonymous person involved in the LessWrong community always sticks out in my mind:
I donāt 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 donāt know if I can put my finger on why. Maybe itās 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 āgameā (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 ā outside of that context ā genuine niceness or politeness for secret snark?
Yeah, totally, I wondered the same thing. Am I seeing the tip of the iceberg and the other 90% of the time spent is all behind the scenes? Could totally be possible, but is that really the best way to do things?
I really want to see stricter moderation of online spaces to maintain respect, kindness, and psychological safety, as much as possible. I think this would mean mods often intervening in cases they donāt normally now (not just on the EA Forum, elsewhere too). I want mods to be less hands-off in that way. I think the end result is online spaces would bring more enjoyment, less suffering, and would facilitate more open-minded, curious, creative, stimulating discussions, rather than the amount of arguing to win we see.
But mods making editorial decisions about content from the perspective of what they think is incorrect vs. correct or unreasonable vs. reasonable is dicey territory. Obviously, you just have to ban people posting ChatGPT rants about homeopathy or whatever. But if youāre getting into really subtle and contested ideas about which there is widespread disagreement, then do the users of a site like the EA Forum actually want moderators to make the call about whatās correct and acceptable vs. incorrect and ban-worthy?
Itās particularly relevant to the EA Forum for the reasons you said. Some popular ideas on the EA Forum, most of all that there will soon be an existentially dangerous AGI, are things that, I donāt know, something like 95% or 99% or 99.9% of people disagree with. If you want to convince the skeptics, who are the overwhelming majority, then how is this approach going to work? You say skepticsā ideas are stupid and then ban them. Okayā¦ is thatā¦ scalable?
Here are some random thoughts on the topic.
Moderators have a hard job, I think it canāt be entirely on moderation to drive the culture of a website. A lot of the work has to be on the users. Starting with moderation issues though, I have a couple ideas:
Clarity: I think moderation benefits from simplicity and clarity. It isnāt a good sign when you are taking mod action against someone but canāt really explain why because its too difficult or would take too long. I feel like that indicates that the underlying rules/āprinciples arenāt really clear or simple enough. It is hard for people to adapt to comply with complicated and unclear rules and the road to motivated reasoning is also paved in vague principles that are easily applied differently to different stituations.
Proportionality: This one goes in both directions. I think sometimes it would be better for mods to step in early but with a lighter touch, something like āthis seems to be getting a bit heated/āunproductive, friendly reminder to everyone to keep it civilā. An ounce of prevention and all that.
For what users can do:
Stick to the topic/ādonāt go meta: Stay grounded in the discussion, try not to import assumptions based on previous arguments with people vaguely on the same āsideā as who you are talking to, focus on their arguments. Try to make the discussion more specific rather than more general. Try not to take your argument in a meta direction, donāt talk about what arguments are good in the abstract or focus too much on claiming that the other personās arguments are an example of a general phenonemon, try to respond to their claims specifically.
Try to stay calm: It is common that people feel a bit uncomfortable when faced with strong disagreements, including that the person they are talking to is being unfair or mean in some way. The problem is that if both people go along with this feeling it often leads to a bad place. If one person temporarily lapses into a less friendly tonw but the other person stays calm, sometimes the conversation is salvagable. Try to be that calm person sometimes in hopes that when you are the one who isnāt calm, the person who you are talking to can cover for you a little.
You never have an obligation to respond: I think some of the stress in arguing online comes from a feeling of being trapped, like you will be judged if the person you are talking to gets the last word. We should try to cultivate a culture where it is okay to respond within your own time limitations. If you get the sense the person you are talking to is feeling tapped out, you can openly raise this issue or try to take the peddle off the gas a little.
An idea
I will also take this chance to float an idea Iāve been thinking about recently. Iāve been calling this āepistolary debatesā in my head. The idea is inspired by legal briefs in courts, where the parties submit sequences of written statements that respond to each other.
I think this format, where the ādebatersā write longer form content over an extended period of time would be an improvement in a lot of ways. I imagine this as follows:
Partipants message each other privately to align on a topic and definitions, agreeing in advance on the general parameters of what they would like to discuss, who will write first, and timelines/ālength goals.
First person writes an essay/āāopening statementā laying out there position.
Second person starts writing their response, aiming for a write within a certain time frame (e.g. a week, a month).
First person writes their response to the second personās response.
Repeat as desired.
I think a benefit of this format is that extending the time over which the discussion occurs cuts down on stress and helps people set aside snarkier bits that feel right in the moment but arenāt a good idea on further reflection. It also lets people work a little more on explaining their views more fully and clearly, and potentially cuts down on the conversation wondering off from the main topic.
ETA: I also agree with your last paragraph that for the specific case of people interested in AI safety/ārelated issue, it is very important to have openness to discussing the topic in a way that isnāt dismissive and takes seriously engages with the arguments, even if you sometimes feel frustrated with how these conversations play out.
Love this! Thank you! I love the term āepistolary debatesā. 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 donāt need anything fancy. Substack or any blog or website will allow you to just copy and paste a bunch of emails or Slack/āDiscord 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 donāt 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. Letās 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 itās pretty rare, but Iāve experienced at least once an online community where the moderators were trying their best and doing a good job, but the usersā behaviour became so acrimonious it overwhelmed the moderatorsā 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 peopleās intelligence, or shame or mock or belittle them, or relentlessly make passive-aggressive insults. I think weāre so numb on the Internet, where if someone doesnāt 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/ānot 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 personās 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. Thatās definitely been my experience on the EA Forum, and itās 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 canāt always build some kind of neutral, objective case to convince moderators to step in ā often these things are personal and really subtle. Itās 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 canāt in real life. Sometimes you just donāt want to talk to someone because they rub you the wrong way for whatever reason. (Maybe youāre always polite and theyāre always rude. Or maybe they just remind you of your ex.) If we force these interactions to happen, thatās 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 isnāt 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 donāt 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 thereās 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 Iām 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 donāt feel that way.
Thereās 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 isnāt enough.
The biggest barrier to good thinking and good discussion is a lack of psychological safety. If you take peopleās prefrontal cortex offline and put them in their limbic system, their thinking suffers. Their conversation suffers. Itās sometimes about being calm in the moment and letting anger settle down before replying. But itās 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 Iām writing too much on the EA Forum, so Iām sorry if thatās 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. Iām 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 itās felt really hurtful and rude. I thought they were acccusing me of lying about my actual views and pretending to believe something else. Because thatās the canonical definition of bad faith. It softens the sting a little bit (but not fully) to learn they probably just meant, basically, āI disagree with your argument really hardā. But I think itās 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 theyāre saying. (I also think the never clearly defined or explained term ātruthseekingā is annoying in a similar way. What does it mean? Who can say? In practice, itās just a bit of spice to really dunk on someone hard.)
Thanks for your kind words.
On the bad faith/āātruth seekingā point, Iāve also noted some issues in the way ātruth seekingā 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/ārationalist 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 ātruth seekingā terminology is to confuse multiple possibilities around intent:
Lying: intentional
Insufficient rigor/āevidence/āetc.: can be an unintentional mistake
Callousness about the truth: I think people often feel like even if someone isnāt lying, they can demonstrate a disregard for truth that feels like its intentionally misleading
Being āinsufficiently truth seekingā 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/ābailey dynamics because the meaning can shift among these different meanings.
I feel like something similar has happened here with the whole āhard to dispell misunderstandingsā thing. Tskeen laterally, it doesnāt 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 havenāt been doing anything intentionally misleading. I think this is an instance of concerns about āepistemicsā being used in an unproductive way that creates a lack of clarity around intent.
Oh, you wrote that post on ātruthseekingā too!! I forgot that!! Another helpful post.
āTruthseekingā as a term drives me bananas because itās so vague and ambiguous ā I looked really hard and couldnāt find any real attempts to define it clearly, if even to define it at all ā and pretty much the only way I see the term get used is when someone wants to slam someone else they disagree with. And itās definitely never clear to me that the person whoās accused of ānot truthseekingā 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 ānot truthseekingā and they just mean ābad evidence/ābad arguments/āill-informed pointsā, they should just say that. Ditto for ābad faithā if thatās what itās supposed to mean.
Thank you for seeing me clearly. Itās a huge relief. I found it super confusing and hurtful when Toby said Iām not engaging in good faith, that I was snarky when I was really being heartfelt and sincere, and that I was āmotivatedā 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 Iām out to cause trouble or something. I donāt know. I really canāt understand whatās happening here.
I do feel like Iām transparent. I donāt know why someone would think Iām sneaking around.
Do you think this is a LessWrong subculture thing? I notice in the LessWrong-o-sphere, thereās 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 āoutsidersā?
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 donāt know if I can put my finger on why. Maybe itās 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 āgameā (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 ā outside of that context ā genuine niceness or politeness for secret snark?