I’m answering this obnoxiously posed criticism because I have something interesting to say in response. You could have said “Maybe just persuasion is off-limits to them and not other actions?”
I’ll answer this better criticism by saying, yes, there are other actions besides persuasion. I did not mention it here but this same crowd is afraid of most actions because of “nth order effects”. I think they suffer from serious perfectionism, catastrophizing, and action/inaction distinction and that’s motivating them to see dire problems with all actions.
I’ve had a request to explain why this comment is obnoxious. It’s obnoxious because of the way it’s like grading my paper instead of saying anything important. I thought there was a nugget of a good question in there so I polished it up and answered that. If quilia really cares about where the scout mindset metaphor falls apart they could have probed that instead of just dinging me as they are the referee. This is the exact dynamic I railed about here.
I’m aware it’s considered gauche to do anything but graciously accept and thank someone for even the most pedantic criticism. To thank people for reflexive gotchas is 1) a lie, in my case, and 2) training them to be lazy and shallow and negative in their interactions with me and my writing. I found it very annoying to write something thoughtful and have someone lazily mark it up in red pen without adding anything, thoughts seemingly having terminated after locating the nitpick. I’m not grateful for that, and it’s not a contribution. It’s making this place terrible and needs to be disincentivized.
I agree with your post overall and think that EA can be very pedantic, professorial, and overly averse to persuasion. I am very glad that you wrote this post and believe that EAs should credit more the importance of persuasion (and probably be more susceptible to positive persuasion as against criticism).
However, the title of your post suggested that the scout mindset is valuable only as a servant of persuasion. I think that it is important to note that scout mindset has other valuable applications.
Persuasion is my intervention at PauseAI US—never meant to imply it was the only intervention. Bednets, mentioned in the post, are soldiers that are not persuasion.
For a map (generated by a scout) to have value, you have to be able to do something with it (“doing” here being analogized to soldiers). It doesn’t have to be persuasion, but it also can’t be pure scoutly knowledge-seeking.
I think if your arguments are locally invalid, that is something important about your post. High standards of accuracy and quality are something I value about Less Wrong and EA, and to me part of having high standards is trying to avoid even small mistakes.
Also the comment was phrased very unhelpfully for getting to the bottom of the error, if there was one. The attitude that the poster puts an idea out there and the commenters just shoot it down from afar without even needing to be comprehensible is so counterproductive. It’s treating this like a test instead of a conversation. If it is a test, why is only the poster being tested? The commenters do routinely do an awful job, leaving confusing, discouraging, and rude replies. Why is it only the poster who has to worry about the truth or usefulness of what they say if we’re trying to find the truth? I thought the comment was bad—that’s at least as important to share as what they thought was invalid about my post.
Thank you for sharing, but I’ve read your post and am not convinced (either in this instance or in general). I think it was a fine comment to which you reacted with unwarranted negativity. Or, in short: no, you’re wrong.
(Also, I understand the comment was not phrased helpfully to you, but for my part I felt that it communicated the errors clearly enough that I could understand them easily, and appreciate having the false dichotomy especially pointed out without having to discover it myself).
(Also also, it isn’t only the poster who has to worry about the truth of what they say? It’s everyone? Comments also receive criticism all the time. I don’t think this poster/commenter divide cuts reality at the joints.)
You’re not the worst, quilia, and my frustration goes so much deeper than your comment. Id on’t want to put you on blast. You’re just an example at a time when I have had it with the perverse norms we’ve accepted in this community.
your first reply seemed to be about how i worded the point (you wrote “obnoxiously posed”, and reworded it) rather than pedanticness/irrelevance. i mentally replaced “this is obnoxious” with “this makes me feel annoyed”, which i think is okay to say. i also considered letting you know i’m autistic, which makes me word things differently or more literally[1] or in ways that can seem to have unintended emotional content. (i wonder if that’s what made it feel like “marking it up in red pen”)
onto object-level: what i wrote actually seemed substantive to me, i.e. it really did seem to me that the quote in point 2 was strongly misrepresenting the position the post intended to argue against, so i wouldn’t consider it pedantic. (it could separately be false, of course)
If quila really cares about where the scout mindset metaphor falls apart they could have probed that instead of just dinging me as they are the referee
it did not occur to me that you might endorse the scout/soldier metaphor, and just be using the existence of scout/soldier in ‘scout/soldier mindset’ to bring it up; so yes, if that’s actually the case, it would have been better to notice that and then either not comment on it or probe it as you say. using a metaphor is not invalid.
here’s how i perceived it at the time: ‘scout mindset’ and ‘soldier mindset’ have particular meanings, so whether traditional soldiers are necessary for traditional scouts is a different topic. writing about them instead seemed ‘opportunistic’ in some sense, as if the text was using the terminological overlap to sneak through an argument about one as about the other.
i wonder if this thread could have been mitigated if i were more clear about that in my initial comment. if anyone has advice it is welcome.
here’s how i perceived it at the time: ‘scout mindset’ and ‘soldier mindset’ have particular meanings, so whether traditional soldiers are necessary for traditional scouts is a different topic. writing about them instead seemed ‘opportunistic’ in some sense, as if the text was using the terminological overlap to sneak through an argument about one as about the other.
I mean, no more than when Julia Galef wrote it? Have you read the book? There’s a long discussion of this metaphor and my analysis would totally fit there. Julia says there are important times and places for soldier mindset, but everyone seems to have forgotten this and just remembers scout mindset as “the good one”.
I’m answering this obnoxiously posed criticism because I have something interesting to say in response. You could have said “Maybe just persuasion is off-limits to them and not other actions?”
I’ll answer this better criticism by saying, yes, there are other actions besides persuasion. I did not mention it here but this same crowd is afraid of most actions because of “nth order effects”. I think they suffer from serious perfectionism, catastrophizing, and action/inaction distinction and that’s motivating them to see dire problems with all actions.
I’ve had a request to explain why this comment is obnoxious. It’s obnoxious because of the way it’s like grading my paper instead of saying anything important. I thought there was a nugget of a good question in there so I polished it up and answered that. If quilia really cares about where the scout mindset metaphor falls apart they could have probed that instead of just dinging me as they are the referee. This is the exact dynamic I railed about here.
I’m aware it’s considered gauche to do anything but graciously accept and thank someone for even the most pedantic criticism. To thank people for reflexive gotchas is 1) a lie, in my case, and 2) training them to be lazy and shallow and negative in their interactions with me and my writing. I found it very annoying to write something thoughtful and have someone lazily mark it up in red pen without adding anything, thoughts seemingly having terminated after locating the nitpick. I’m not grateful for that, and it’s not a contribution. It’s making this place terrible and needs to be disincentivized.
I agree with your post overall and think that EA can be very pedantic, professorial, and overly averse to persuasion. I am very glad that you wrote this post and believe that EAs should credit more the importance of persuasion (and probably be more susceptible to positive persuasion as against criticism).
However, the title of your post suggested that the scout mindset is valuable only as a servant of persuasion. I think that it is important to note that scout mindset has other valuable applications.
Persuasion is my intervention at PauseAI US—never meant to imply it was the only intervention. Bednets, mentioned in the post, are soldiers that are not persuasion.
For a map (generated by a scout) to have value, you have to be able to do something with it (“doing” here being analogized to soldiers). It doesn’t have to be persuasion, but it also can’t be pure scoutly knowledge-seeking.
I think if your arguments are locally invalid, that is something important about your post. High standards of accuracy and quality are something I value about Less Wrong and EA, and to me part of having high standards is trying to avoid even small mistakes.
You’re wrong. It sounds good naively to say this but it’s destructive in practice. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tuSQBGgnoxvsXwXJ3/criticism-is-sanctified-in-ea-but-like-any-intervention
Also the comment was phrased very unhelpfully for getting to the bottom of the error, if there was one. The attitude that the poster puts an idea out there and the commenters just shoot it down from afar without even needing to be comprehensible is so counterproductive. It’s treating this like a test instead of a conversation. If it is a test, why is only the poster being tested? The commenters do routinely do an awful job, leaving confusing, discouraging, and rude replies. Why is it only the poster who has to worry about the truth or usefulness of what they say if we’re trying to find the truth? I thought the comment was bad—that’s at least as important to share as what they thought was invalid about my post.
Thank you for sharing, but I’ve read your post and am not convinced (either in this instance or in general). I think it was a fine comment to which you reacted with unwarranted negativity. Or, in short: no, you’re wrong.
(Also, I understand the comment was not phrased helpfully to you, but for my part I felt that it communicated the errors clearly enough that I could understand them easily, and appreciate having the false dichotomy especially pointed out without having to discover it myself).
(Also also, it isn’t only the poster who has to worry about the truth of what they say? It’s everyone? Comments also receive criticism all the time. I don’t think this poster/commenter divide cuts reality at the joints.)
You’re not the worst, quilia, and my frustration goes so much deeper than your comment. Id on’t want to put you on blast. You’re just an example at a time when I have had it with the perverse norms we’ve accepted in this community.
i’m not bothered by your comments.
your first reply seemed to be about how i worded the point (you wrote “obnoxiously posed”, and reworded it) rather than pedanticness/irrelevance. i mentally replaced “this is obnoxious” with “this makes me feel annoyed”, which i think is okay to say. i also considered letting you know i’m autistic, which makes me word things differently or more literally[1] or in ways that can seem to have unintended emotional content. (i wonder if that’s what made it feel like “marking it up in red pen”)
onto object-level: what i wrote actually seemed substantive to me, i.e. it really did seem to me that the quote in point 2 was strongly misrepresenting the position the post intended to argue against, so i wouldn’t consider it pedantic. (it could separately be false, of course)
it did not occur to me that you might endorse the scout/soldier metaphor, and just be using the existence of scout/soldier in ‘scout/soldier mindset’ to bring it up; so yes, if that’s actually the case, it would have been better to notice that and then either not comment on it or probe it as you say. using a metaphor is not invalid.
here’s how i perceived it at the time: ‘scout mindset’ and ‘soldier mindset’ have particular meanings, so whether traditional soldiers are necessary for traditional scouts is a different topic. writing about them instead seemed ‘opportunistic’ in some sense, as if the text was using the terminological overlap to sneak through an argument about one as about the other.
i wonder if this thread could have been mitigated if i were more clear about that in my initial comment. if anyone has advice it is welcome.
maybe ‘more structured like the thought is structured internally’
I mean, no more than when Julia Galef wrote it? Have you read the book? There’s a long discussion of this metaphor and my analysis would totally fit there. Julia says there are important times and places for soldier mindset, but everyone seems to have forgotten this and just remembers scout mindset as “the good one”.