Just a quick note to say thanks for such a thoughtful response! <3
I think you’re doing a great job here modelling discourse norms and I appreciate the substance of your points!
Ngl I was kinda trepidatious opening the forum… but the reasonableness of your reply and warmth of your tone is legit making me smile! (It probably doesn’t hurt that happily we agree more than I realised. :P )
I may well write a litte more substantial response at some point but will likely take a weekend break :)
P.S. Real quick re social media… Things I was thinking about were phrases from fb like “EAs f’d up” and the “fairly shameful initial response”- which I wondered if were stronger than you were expressing here but probably just you saying the same thing. And in this twitter thread you talk about the “cancel mob”—but I think you’re talking there are about a general case. You don’t have to justify yourself on those I’m happy to read it all via the lens of the comments you’ve written on this post.
Aw, that makes me really happy to hear. I’m surprised that it made such a positive difference, and I update that I should do it more!
(The warmth part, not the agreement part. I can’t really control the agreement part, if we disagree then we’re just fucked. 🙃😛)
Re the social media things: yeah, I stand by that stuff, though I basically always expect reasonable people to disagree a lot about exactly how big a fuck-up is, since natural language is so imprecise and there are so many background variables we could disagree on.
I feel a bit weird about the fact that I use such a different tone in different venues, but I think I like this practice for how my brain works, and plan to keep doing it. I definitely talk differently with different friends, and in private vs. public, so I like the idea of making this fact about me relatively obvious in public too.
I don’t want to have such a perfect and consistent public mask/persona that people think my public self exactly matches my private self, since then they might come away deceived about how much to trust (for example) that my tone in a tweet exactly matches the emotions I was feeling when I wrote it.
I want to be honest in my private and public communications, but (even more than that) I want to be meta-honest, in the sense of trying to make it easy for people to model what kind of person I am and what kinds of things I tend to be more candid about, what it might mean if I steer clear of a topic, etc.
Trying too hard to look like I’m an open book who always says what’s on his mind, never self-censors in order to look more polite on the EA Forum, etc. would systematically cause people to have falser beliefs about the delta between “what Rob B said” and “what Rob B is really thinking and feeling right now”. And while I don’t think I owe everyone a full print-out of my stream of consciousness, I do sorta feel like I owe it to people to not deliberately make it sound like I’m more transparent than I am.
This is maybe more of a problem for me than for other people: I’m constantly going on about what a big fan of candor and blurting I am, so I think there’s more risk of people thinking I’m a 100% open book, compared to the risk a typical EA faces.
So, to be clear: I don’t advocate that EAs be 100% open books. And separately, I don’t perfectly live up to my own stated ideals.
Just a quick note to say thanks for such a thoughtful response! <3
I think you’re doing a great job here modelling discourse norms and I appreciate the substance of your points!
Ngl I was kinda trepidatious opening the forum… but the reasonableness of your reply and warmth of your tone is legit making me smile! (It probably doesn’t hurt that happily we agree more than I realised. :P )
I may well write a litte more substantial response at some point but will likely take a weekend break :)
P.S. Real quick re social media… Things I was thinking about were phrases from fb like “EAs f’d up” and the “fairly shameful initial response”- which I wondered if were stronger than you were expressing here but probably just you saying the same thing. And in this twitter thread you talk about the “cancel mob”—but I think you’re talking there are about a general case. You don’t have to justify yourself on those I’m happy to read it all via the lens of the comments you’ve written on this post.
Aw, that makes me really happy to hear. I’m surprised that it made such a positive difference, and I update that I should do it more!
(The warmth part, not the agreement part. I can’t really control the agreement part, if we disagree then we’re just fucked. 🙃😛)
Re the social media things: yeah, I stand by that stuff, though I basically always expect reasonable people to disagree a lot about exactly how big a fuck-up is, since natural language is so imprecise and there are so many background variables we could disagree on.
I feel a bit weird about the fact that I use such a different tone in different venues, but I think I like this practice for how my brain works, and plan to keep doing it. I definitely talk differently with different friends, and in private vs. public, so I like the idea of making this fact about me relatively obvious in public too.
I don’t want to have such a perfect and consistent public mask/persona that people think my public self exactly matches my private self, since then they might come away deceived about how much to trust (for example) that my tone in a tweet exactly matches the emotions I was feeling when I wrote it.
I want to be honest in my private and public communications, but (even more than that) I want to be meta-honest, in the sense of trying to make it easy for people to model what kind of person I am and what kinds of things I tend to be more candid about, what it might mean if I steer clear of a topic, etc.
Trying too hard to look like I’m an open book who always says what’s on his mind, never self-censors in order to look more polite on the EA Forum, etc. would systematically cause people to have falser beliefs about the delta between “what Rob B said” and “what Rob B is really thinking and feeling right now”. And while I don’t think I owe everyone a full print-out of my stream of consciousness, I do sorta feel like I owe it to people to not deliberately make it sound like I’m more transparent than I am.
This is maybe more of a problem for me than for other people: I’m constantly going on about what a big fan of candor and blurting I am, so I think there’s more risk of people thinking I’m a 100% open book, compared to the risk a typical EA faces.
So, to be clear: I don’t advocate that EAs be 100% open books. And separately, I don’t perfectly live up to my own stated ideals.