Do you have an example in mind? I don’t think there are specific norms besides the standard forum norms. I would say relevant quotes are: “assume good faith”, “don’t mislead”, and “mistakes are expected and fine (please accept corrections, though)”
Why are mistakes within quotations expected and fine? What processes cause good faith mistakes within quotations, particularly when the quote can be copy/pasted rather than typed from paper? (I think typed in quotes should be double checked or else should have a warning.) I was hoping that EA might have high standards about accuracy. I think that’s important rather than seeing an avoidable type of misinformation as merely expected and fine.
Our culture in general holds quotations to a higher than normal standard, partly because misquotes put words in other people’s mouths, so they’re disrespectful and violating, and partly because they’re false and you can just not do it. I was hoping EA, with its focus on rationality, might care more than average, but your response indicates caring less than average.
When a quote can be copy/pasted, what good faith processes result in wording changes? I think a norm should be established against editing quotes or typing paraphrases then knowingly putting quote marks around them. I don’t understand why so many people do it, including book authors, or what they’re thinking or what exactly they’re doing to generate the errors.
I would say relevant quotes are: “assume good faith”, “don’t mislead”, and “mistakes are expected and fine (please accept corrections, though)”
Wait, I was checking the quotes you gave and the third is taken out of context and misleading. It’s the kind of thing that IMO would make a book fail a fact check. The original sentence is:
Misgendering deliberately and/or deadnaming gratuitously is not ok, although mistakes are expected and fine (please accept corrections, though).
It did not say that mistakes are expected and fine in general, it said it specifically about misgendering and deadnaming, so it’s not relevant to my question.
Did you know the text you gave referred to misgendering when you told me it was relevant? Did you read the whole sentence? Did you consider, before using a quote, whether your use fit or conflicted with the original context (as should be a standard step every time)? I don’t understand what’s going on (and I’ve run into this kind of problem for years at my own forums – and made rules against it, and given warnings that people will be banned if they keep doing it, which has reduced it a lot – but I’ve never gotten good answers about why people do it). I understand that using a quote out of context involves more of a judgment call than changing the words does, so it’s somewhat harder to avoid, but this still looks like an avoidable case to me.
This isn’t about mistakes in quotations specifically, but I agree with Lorenzo that “mistakes are expected and fine (please accept corrections, though)” — although taken out of context in this case — is a true norm on the Forum. You can see the same spirit here:
It’s ok to make mistakes (but try to be clear about why you believe what you believe)
Mistakes are normal. Don’t mislead deliberately, though.
(I won’t participate in this thread more, probably, but wanted to endorse this point, as I think it’s important. I might tweak the Guide to norms post to reflect this better in the future.)
Thanks for checking the source! I think it gives a much better feel for norms than my short comment.
It’s the kind of thing that IMO would make a book fail a fact check.
I wouldn’t hold forum comments to the same standard as a book. But mistakes also definitely happen in books, even the best ones.
It did not say that mistakes are expected and fine in general, it said it specifically about misgendering and deadnaming, so it’s not relevant to my question.
I quoted it to give an idea of (my interpretation of) the spirit of the norms, not of the letter. In my experience, that norm applies in general (but I am no expert on EA norms). Basically, my interpretation is: “be kind to fellow humans”, assume we’re all doing our best to do the most good.
From the other comment:
Why are mistakes within quotations expected and fine? What processes cause good faith mistakes within quotations, particularly when the quote can be copy/pasted rather than typed from paper?
I would say because we’re all human, it might be a judgment call to tweak a quote for readability or to fit a character count.
I was hoping EA, with its focus on rationality, might care more than average, but your response indicates caring less than average.
I think that EA cares a lot about correctness and encourages writing corrections and accepting them, but is also very pragmatic and collaborative. I really like that it encourages posting potentially wrong things and getting feedback, it seems to lead to great results.
I quoted it to give an idea of (my interpretation of) the spirit of the norms, not of the letter.
So, in my mind, the number one purpose and requirement of quotes is accuracy. But in your mind, quotation marks can just be used for other things, like giving an idea about a spirit, without worrying much about accuracy? Like, a use of a quotation might not be literally true, but as long as the spirit of what you’re doing seems good and accurate, that’s good enough? I’m trying to understand the norms/values disagreement going on.
I would say because we’re all human, it might be a judgment call to tweak a quote for readability or to fit a character count.
I don’t understand. How does being human give one a reason to tweak a quote? Are you saying people tweak quotes on purpose because they like the tweaked version better and lack respect for quotation accuracy? And that seems OK to you? And you think that attitude is widespread? It is so foreign to me, and so clearly irrational to me, that I struggle to comprehend this.
I personally think that the purpose of text is to share information that’s decision-relevant, and everything else is secondary.
Being humans gives a reason for making all sorts of mistakes / imprecise things, I think it’s OK as long as the information is not misleading, otherwise it’s worth sending a (polite) correction.
Thank you for replying several times and sharing your perspective. I appreciate that.
I think this kind of attitude to quotes, and some related widespread attitudes (where intellectual standards could be raised), is lowering the effectiveness of EA as a whole by over 20%. Would anyone like to have a serious discussion about this potential path to dramatically improving EA’s effectiveness?
I don’t understand what’s going on (and I’ve run into this kind of problem for years at my own forums – and made rules against it, and given warnings that people will be banned if they keep doing it, which has reduced it a lot – but I’ve never gotten good answers about why people do it).
I would guess your expectations of how costly it is for people to be as precise as you wish for them to be is miscalibrated, i.e. it’s significantly costlier for people to be as precise as you wish for them to be than you think/how costly it is for you. What do you think?
I think the cost/benefit ratio for this kind of accuracy is very good. The downsides are much, much larger than people realize/admit – it basically turns most of their conversations unproductive and prevents them from having very high quality or true knowledge that isn’t already popular/standard (which leads to e.g. some of EA’s funding priorities being incorrect). Put another way, it’s a blocker for being persuaded of, and learning, many good ideas.
The straightforward costs of accuracy go down a lot with practice and automatization – if people tried, they’d get better at it. Not misquoting isn’t really that hard once you get used to it (e.g. copy/pasting quotes and then refraining from editing them is, in some senses, easy – people fail at that mainly because they are pursuing some other kind of benefit, not because the cost is too high, though there are some details to learn like that Grammarly and spellcheck can be dangerous to accurate quotes). I agree it’s hard initially to change mindsets to e.g. care about accuracy. Lots of ways of being a better thinker are hard initially but I’d expect a rationality-oriented community like this to have some interest in putting effort into better thinker – at least e.g. comparing with other options for improvement.
Also, (unlike most imprecision) misrepresenting what people said is deeply violating. It’s important that people get to choose their own words and speak for themselves. It’s treating someone immorally to put words in their mouth, of your choice not theirs, without their consent. Thinking the words are close enough or similar enough doesn’t make that OK – that’s their judgment call to make, not yours. Assuming they won’t disagree, and that you didn’t make a mistake, shows a lack of humility, fallibilism, tolerance and respect for ideas different than your own, understanding that different cultures and mindsets exist, etc. (E.g., you could think to yourself, before misquoting, that the person you’re going to misquote might be a precise or autistic thinker, rather than being more like you, and then have enough respect for those other types of people not to risk doing something to them that they wouldn’t be OK with. Also if the quote involves any concept that matters a lot to a subculture they’re in but you’re not, then you risk making a change that means a lot to that subculture without realizing what you did.) Immorally treating another human being is another cost to take into account. Misquoting is also especially effective at tricking your audience into forming inaccurate beliefs, because they expect quotes to be accurate, so that’s another cost. Most people don’t actually believe that they have to look up every quote in a primary source themselves before believing it – instead they believe quotes in general are trustworthy. The norm that quotes must be 100% accurate is pretty widespread (and taught in schools) despite violations also being widespread.
There are other important factors, e.g. the social pressure to speak with plausible deniability when trying to climb a social hierarchy is a reason to avoid becoming a precise thinker even if more precise thinking and communicating would be less work on balance (due to e.g. fewer miscommunications). Or the mindset of a precise thinker can make it harder to establish rapport with some imprecise thinkers (so one way to approach that is to dumb yourself down).
Also, lots of people here can code or math, so things like looking at text with character-level precision is a skill they already developed significantly. There are many people in the world who would struggle to put a semi-colon at the end of every line of code, or who would struggle to learn and use markdown formatting rules correctly. Better precision would have larger upfront learning costs for those people. But I don’t think those kind of inabilities are what stops this forum from having higher standards.
I have a lot more I could say and the issue of raising standards as a path to making EA more effective is one of the few topics I consider high enough priority to try to discuss. Do you want to have a serious conversation about this? If so, I’d start a new topic for it. Also it’s hard to talk about complex topics with people who might stop responding, at any moment, with no explanation. That context makes it hard to decide how much to say, and hard to bring stuff up that might get no resolution or be misunderstood and not clarified.
Hi Elliot, I find this topic interesting but I’ve already spent more time on this thread than I intended to, so unfortunately this will likely be my last comment here. Hope it’s still useful data though.
It sounds like a summary of what you said is that (please feel free to correct) that the benefits of greater precision are much higher than most people think and are needed for learning certain important ideas, the cost of misprecision can be immoral and deeply violating to another person, the costs of learning are lower than they seem in the longterm, particularly for technical people, social incentives can push away from precision in ways that make you a worse thinker, and there are other important issues as well.
In the abstract, I agree to a large extent with all of those except for math or programming skills making textual precision or understanding easier in most relevant situations (I agree for literal copy-pasting, but I think it’s a pretty small part of the issue).
But I don’t think Lorenzo’s quotation use was bad or inaccurate. It was a bit ambiguous whether the quotes were meant to be direct or not, and decreasing the ambiguity would very likely have helped you, but there are also costs to doing so, this seems like an edge case, and it’s unclear to me how much or if to update.
To respond to a different comment of yours:
So, in my mind, the number one purpose and requirement of quotes is accuracy. But in your mind, quotation marks can just be used for other things, like giving an idea about a spirit, without worrying much about accuracy? Like, a use of a quotation might not be literally true, but as long as the spirit of what you’re doing seems good and accurate, that’s good enough? I’m trying to understand the norms/values disagreement going on.
For direct quotes, I agree the number one purpose and requirement is accuracy. But I also think using quotes for conveying the spirit of ideas is useful.
For direct quotes, I agree the number one purpose and requirement is accuracy. But I also think using quotes for conveying the spirit of ideas is useful.
Can’t people either omit quotation marks around paraphrases or, failing that, at least clearly label them as paraphrases? Why does anyone need quotation marks around paraphrases to convey the spirit of ideas? How do quotation marks help convey spirit? And how is any reader supposed to know that the text in quotations mark is not a “direct” quote?
There are standard practices for how to handle these things (bold added):
In writing, an “indirect quotation” is a paraphrase of someone else’s words: It “reports” on what a person said without using the exact words of the speaker. It’s also called “indirect discourse” and “indirect speech.”
An indirect quotation (unlike a direct quotation) is not placed in quotation marks. For example: Dr. King said that he had a dream.
The combination of a direct quotation and an indirect quotation is called a “mixed quotation.” For example: King melodiously praised the “veterans of creative suffering,” urging them to continue the struggle.
Back to sphor:
Hi Elliot, I find this topic interesting but I’ve already spent more time on this thread than I intended to, so unfortunately this will likely be my last comment here. Hope it’s still useful data though.
Would you like to have a serious conversation or debate with me about another topic, or not at all?
Would you like to have a serious conversation or debate with me about another topic, or not at all?
I’m not currently interested in participating in the sort of debate you mean, sorry. For what it’s worth though, I consider our exchanges to have been serious albeit brief and unstructured.
Do you have an example in mind? I don’t think there are specific norms besides the standard forum norms.
I would say relevant quotes are: “assume good faith”, “don’t mislead”, and “mistakes are expected and fine (please accept corrections, though)”
Why are mistakes within quotations expected and fine? What processes cause good faith mistakes within quotations, particularly when the quote can be copy/pasted rather than typed from paper? (I think typed in quotes should be double checked or else should have a warning.) I was hoping that EA might have high standards about accuracy. I think that’s important rather than seeing an avoidable type of misinformation as merely expected and fine.
Our culture in general holds quotations to a higher than normal standard, partly because misquotes put words in other people’s mouths, so they’re disrespectful and violating, and partly because they’re false and you can just not do it. I was hoping EA, with its focus on rationality, might care more than average, but your response indicates caring less than average.
When a quote can be copy/pasted, what good faith processes result in wording changes? I think a norm should be established against editing quotes or typing paraphrases then knowingly putting quote marks around them. I don’t understand why so many people do it, including book authors, or what they’re thinking or what exactly they’re doing to generate the errors.
Wait, I was checking the quotes you gave and the third is taken out of context and misleading. It’s the kind of thing that IMO would make a book fail a fact check. The original sentence is:
It did not say that mistakes are expected and fine in general, it said it specifically about misgendering and deadnaming, so it’s not relevant to my question.
Did you know the text you gave referred to misgendering when you told me it was relevant? Did you read the whole sentence? Did you consider, before using a quote, whether your use fit or conflicted with the original context (as should be a standard step every time)? I don’t understand what’s going on (and I’ve run into this kind of problem for years at my own forums – and made rules against it, and given warnings that people will be banned if they keep doing it, which has reduced it a lot – but I’ve never gotten good answers about why people do it). I understand that using a quote out of context involves more of a judgment call than changing the words does, so it’s somewhat harder to avoid, but this still looks like an avoidable case to me.
This isn’t about mistakes in quotations specifically, but I agree with Lorenzo that “mistakes are expected and fine (please accept corrections, though)” — although taken out of context in this case — is a true norm on the Forum. You can see the same spirit here:
(I won’t participate in this thread more, probably, but wanted to endorse this point, as I think it’s important. I might tweak the Guide to norms post to reflect this better in the future.)
Thanks for checking the source! I think it gives a much better feel for norms than my short comment.
I wouldn’t hold forum comments to the same standard as a book. But mistakes also definitely happen in books, even the best ones.
I quoted it to give an idea of (my interpretation of) the spirit of the norms, not of the letter. In my experience, that norm applies in general (but I am no expert on EA norms).
Basically, my interpretation is: “be kind to fellow humans”, assume we’re all doing our best to do the most good.
From the other comment:
I would say because we’re all human, it might be a judgment call to tweak a quote for readability or to fit a character count.
I think that EA cares a lot about correctness and encourages writing corrections and accepting them, but is also very pragmatic and collaborative. I really like that it encourages posting potentially wrong things and getting feedback, it seems to lead to great results.
So, in my mind, the number one purpose and requirement of quotes is accuracy. But in your mind, quotation marks can just be used for other things, like giving an idea about a spirit, without worrying much about accuracy? Like, a use of a quotation might not be literally true, but as long as the spirit of what you’re doing seems good and accurate, that’s good enough? I’m trying to understand the norms/values disagreement going on.
I don’t understand. How does being human give one a reason to tweak a quote? Are you saying people tweak quotes on purpose because they like the tweaked version better and lack respect for quotation accuracy? And that seems OK to you? And you think that attitude is widespread? It is so foreign to me, and so clearly irrational to me, that I struggle to comprehend this.
I personally think that the purpose of text is to share information that’s decision-relevant, and everything else is secondary.
Being humans gives a reason for making all sorts of mistakes / imprecise things, I think it’s OK as long as the information is not misleading, otherwise it’s worth sending a (polite) correction.
Thank you for replying several times and sharing your perspective. I appreciate that.
I think this kind of attitude to quotes, and some related widespread attitudes (where intellectual standards could be raised), is lowering the effectiveness of EA as a whole by over 20%. Would anyone like to have a serious discussion about this potential path to dramatically improving EA’s effectiveness?
I would guess your expectations of how costly it is for people to be as precise as you wish for them to be is miscalibrated, i.e. it’s significantly costlier for people to be as precise as you wish for them to be than you think/how costly it is for you. What do you think?
I think the cost/benefit ratio for this kind of accuracy is very good. The downsides are much, much larger than people realize/admit – it basically turns most of their conversations unproductive and prevents them from having very high quality or true knowledge that isn’t already popular/standard (which leads to e.g. some of EA’s funding priorities being incorrect). Put another way, it’s a blocker for being persuaded of, and learning, many good ideas.
The straightforward costs of accuracy go down a lot with practice and automatization – if people tried, they’d get better at it. Not misquoting isn’t really that hard once you get used to it (e.g. copy/pasting quotes and then refraining from editing them is, in some senses, easy – people fail at that mainly because they are pursuing some other kind of benefit, not because the cost is too high, though there are some details to learn like that Grammarly and spellcheck can be dangerous to accurate quotes). I agree it’s hard initially to change mindsets to e.g. care about accuracy. Lots of ways of being a better thinker are hard initially but I’d expect a rationality-oriented community like this to have some interest in putting effort into better thinker – at least e.g. comparing with other options for improvement.
Also, (unlike most imprecision) misrepresenting what people said is deeply violating. It’s important that people get to choose their own words and speak for themselves. It’s treating someone immorally to put words in their mouth, of your choice not theirs, without their consent. Thinking the words are close enough or similar enough doesn’t make that OK – that’s their judgment call to make, not yours. Assuming they won’t disagree, and that you didn’t make a mistake, shows a lack of humility, fallibilism, tolerance and respect for ideas different than your own, understanding that different cultures and mindsets exist, etc. (E.g., you could think to yourself, before misquoting, that the person you’re going to misquote might be a precise or autistic thinker, rather than being more like you, and then have enough respect for those other types of people not to risk doing something to them that they wouldn’t be OK with. Also if the quote involves any concept that matters a lot to a subculture they’re in but you’re not, then you risk making a change that means a lot to that subculture without realizing what you did.) Immorally treating another human being is another cost to take into account. Misquoting is also especially effective at tricking your audience into forming inaccurate beliefs, because they expect quotes to be accurate, so that’s another cost. Most people don’t actually believe that they have to look up every quote in a primary source themselves before believing it – instead they believe quotes in general are trustworthy. The norm that quotes must be 100% accurate is pretty widespread (and taught in schools) despite violations also being widespread.
There are other important factors, e.g. the social pressure to speak with plausible deniability when trying to climb a social hierarchy is a reason to avoid becoming a precise thinker even if more precise thinking and communicating would be less work on balance (due to e.g. fewer miscommunications). Or the mindset of a precise thinker can make it harder to establish rapport with some imprecise thinkers (so one way to approach that is to dumb yourself down).
Also, lots of people here can code or math, so things like looking at text with character-level precision is a skill they already developed significantly. There are many people in the world who would struggle to put a semi-colon at the end of every line of code, or who would struggle to learn and use markdown formatting rules correctly. Better precision would have larger upfront learning costs for those people. But I don’t think those kind of inabilities are what stops this forum from having higher standards.
I have a lot more I could say and the issue of raising standards as a path to making EA more effective is one of the few topics I consider high enough priority to try to discuss. Do you want to have a serious conversation about this? If so, I’d start a new topic for it. Also it’s hard to talk about complex topics with people who might stop responding, at any moment, with no explanation. That context makes it hard to decide how much to say, and hard to bring stuff up that might get no resolution or be misunderstood and not clarified.
Hi Elliot, I find this topic interesting but I’ve already spent more time on this thread than I intended to, so unfortunately this will likely be my last comment here. Hope it’s still useful data though.
It sounds like a summary of what you said is that (please feel free to correct) that the benefits of greater precision are much higher than most people think and are needed for learning certain important ideas, the cost of misprecision can be immoral and deeply violating to another person, the costs of learning are lower than they seem in the longterm, particularly for technical people, social incentives can push away from precision in ways that make you a worse thinker, and there are other important issues as well.
In the abstract, I agree to a large extent with all of those except for math or programming skills making textual precision or understanding easier in most relevant situations (I agree for literal copy-pasting, but I think it’s a pretty small part of the issue).
But I don’t think Lorenzo’s quotation use was bad or inaccurate. It was a bit ambiguous whether the quotes were meant to be direct or not, and decreasing the ambiguity would very likely have helped you, but there are also costs to doing so, this seems like an edge case, and it’s unclear to me how much or if to update.
To respond to a different comment of yours:
For direct quotes, I agree the number one purpose and requirement is accuracy. But I also think using quotes for conveying the spirit of ideas is useful.
Can’t people either omit quotation marks around paraphrases or, failing that, at least clearly label them as paraphrases? Why does anyone need quotation marks around paraphrases to convey the spirit of ideas? How do quotation marks help convey spirit? And how is any reader supposed to know that the text in quotations mark is not a “direct” quote?
There are standard practices for how to handle these things (bold added):
https://www.thoughtco.com/indirect-quotation-writing-1691163
Back to sphor:
Would you like to have a serious conversation or debate with me about another topic, or not at all?
Hi Elliot, this is just a quick reply.
I’m not currently interested in participating in the sort of debate you mean, sorry. For what it’s worth though, I consider our exchanges to have been serious albeit brief and unstructured.
Relevant: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gL7y22tFLKaTKaZt5/debate-about-biased-methodology-or-corentin-biteau-and?commentId=iFinowJ2XGWM6gidM