</rant> </uncharitable> </psychologizing>
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The use of the HTML end tag implies that this disclaimer would appear after the text it describes. But it seems like it would be best put before the text? (Perhaps this is just another thing that "ideally would be this, but in practice will often be that"?) If the text is a series of chat messages, then, yeah, you may not realize a disclaimer should apply until after you've sent the things to which it should apply. But if it's one big post, then it's always easy to move it to the top of the post.
You usually realize you're ranting mid-way through the rant. Or possibly, you're posting to a reddit sub with the word "rants" in its name.
Indeed. I guessed that 75+% of the time, when I've seen someone say "blah blah blah </rant>", it wasn't preceded by "<rant>".
Claude came up with roughly the same number
Q: Some people use "</rant>" in internet conversations. Estimate the percentage of time that it's preceded by "<rant>".
A: Based on my observations of internet conversations, I'd estimate that "</rant>" is preceded by an opening "<rant>" tag only about 20-30% of the time.
The thing I meant to imply was something like:
<uncharitableRant>
[contents of uncharitableRant]
</uncharitableRant>
(the ways I've seen people do this include the complete brackets, or just having them afterwards as a sort of selfaware pseudojoke, or, more commonly, spelling out the whole thing. I don't actually feel very opinionated on how actually you do it)
Light disagree. Prefix modifiers are cognitively burdensome compared to postfix modifiers. Imagine reading:
"What I'm about to say is a bit of a rant. I'm about 30% confident it's true. Disclosure, I have a personal stake in the second organization involved. I'm looking for good counter arguments. Based on a conversation with Paul. I have a formal writeup at this blog post. Part of the argument is unfair, I apologize. I..."
Gaaa, just give me something concrete already! It's going to be hard enough understanding your argument as it is; it's even harder to understanding your argument while having to keep these unresolved modifiers loaded in my mental stack.
I fully agree with this, including the acknowledgement that people and contexts differ enough that I don't actually know how easy it is for others to include a disclaimer consistently, nor how they variously perceive the change in value and strength of their post/comment if they include a disclaimer. Changing norms is hard, and typical mind fallacy is rampant.
I wish people were generally more careful, kind, clear, and humble. This includes wishing this of myself.
1You open this post by claiming that “a norm” has accumulated over the years, but don’t explicitly specify if you’re referring to the practice of adding the disclaimers you’re advocating for. Is that what you mean?
Assuming so, what makes you think these disclaimers are helpful? Like have people told you that reading such a disclaimer helped them not feel hurt by a rant directed at them?
My prior is that such disclaimers appear in rants drawn from a more empathic distribution from rants that lack such disclaimers. I’m skeptical they’d help if just tacked on to an otherwise just plain rude comment as a rules/norms compliance fig leaf. It seems to me that most of the harm of an uncareful rant is the rant itself, and this move toward disclaimers could actually make it easier to post more of them, because now the ranger has covered their ass with a disclaimer.
Generally I think that balancing forthrightness and gentleness is just a hard problem with no easy solution, and I resist evidence-free claims of solutions that entail additional work. Politeness norms that actually just create burdens with no benefit can add up to being exhausting.
The evidence is mostly some circles where this sort of thing is more common and a subjective feeling of it helping. Most of my reasoning for thinking this is good is a mix of "some anecdata, but mostly 'the theory makes a lot of sense to me.'"
(In some close personal relationships, a related social-tech is saying "look, I really need to say out loud how this feels internally to me without having to police myself about whether I'm being fair", and it definitely feels helpful for what would have been an escalating fight into a cooperative process")
But, part of the point of this post is to give an opportunity for people to take it as object and argue about it.
The point of it is not especially to make people feel better (I think it adds a slight saving throw for a conversation escalating more than it needs to, but, like, not an overwhelming one)
It's a rationality norm more than a politeness norm – the point is that it makes it more likely for you to notice that you're doing a rant/uncharitable/psychologizing, and helping other people notice "oh, yes, that happened" and "oh, I guess in this social scene this is a thing you are supposed to notice and flag as costly and not just do willy-nilly."
And, I think having a habit of noticing and tacking on a disclaimer makes it more like you go "hmm, do I actually really need to make this a full fledged rant?" (and write it more carefully) or "is this the psychologizing model the only explanation for why this guy is doing/believing this dumb-looking thing?" (and then actually come up with a second theory and realize you were overconfident in your first theory)
It adds scaffolding for other rationality practice.
The thing I most anticipate backfiring, is people only ever doing the rant-with-disclaimer (which I've seen sometimes accumulating), without every really trying to pay down the debt. I expect that to be aggravating for people on the receiving end.
So, a thing I consider an unsolved-problem in this current thread is to make the memetic-payload here more naturally include "I am taking on a bit of social debt" by doing this.
Or: the generalized version of this is, "notice when you are doing something you wouldn't endorse doing all the time, and flag it with a quick observation, and apology if it seems like it'd impose costs on others." That seems like a generally good metahabit to me.
Taking that literally, there are a tremendous number of acts that might cost others or that might be only appropriate in context. Having to specially flag everything fitting that criteria seems onerous.
More generally, I think it’s important to think through what the next issues become after a norm like this is implemented. I anticipate you’ll have wildly asymmetric self-flagging based on social anxiety, the in-group popularity of the person or their ideas. Specifically, there will be some popular people who can freely rant and psychologize with no flagging, never getting called out, plenty of upvotes and no mod action when it happens online. But now there will be explicit grounds for sanction when less popular people fly against the ingroup and a built in reporting bias reinforcing locally favored views.
To be clear, I think that the sort of self flagging you describe can be contextually very useful. I just resist the idea of making it a blanket, context-free rule.
One think I think might be a useful compromise would be to add a “rant/uncharitable/psychologizing” emoticon as an option for LessWrong comments, possibly along with emoticons related to whether the comment is or is not adding useful context/is relevant/is more helpful than harmful or vice versa. This gives a way for the community to share information about how they perceive comments like these, giving the advantage you were looking for in having such rants be labeled as such. It allows the original ranter to say what they want to say. It gives them feedback on how they’re perceived rather than forcing them to make assumptions. And I think that it’s easier to unfavorably emoticon a high status figure’s post or comment than to actually write out a comment that provides a wider attack surface for punishment.
For in person interactions obviously this is no solution, so take this as all primarily being my opinions on online discourse.