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Eukryt Wrts Blg — LessWrong

Eukryt Wrts Blg

28th Sep 2019

1 min read

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[-]eukaryote6mo5110

I was honored to be invited again to this year's LessOnline - I really enjoyed the last one. However, I'm going to turn down this invitation as I'm uncomfortable being in the same company of invited author guests as Cremieux.

I didn't know who he was last year, so after hearing concerning murmurs from various places, I looked into his work. Hoo boy. I don't think that being interested in genetic differences between ethnic groups necessarily makes one racist, but I think it's the kind of area where you have to be extraordinarily careful to proceed with caution and compassion and not fall into racist fallacies (coexisting in a terrible cycle with shoddy scholarship). I do not think Cremieux meets this standard of care and compassion.

Also, I get the sense he's generally a jerk to those around him, which is not as big of a deal but is not helping. He reacts to challenges or criticism with insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol.

I don't like what he's about, I think the rationalist community can do better, and I do not want to be a special guest at the same event he's a special guest at.

I hope that LessOnline goes well and that those who do go have a great time, and that my assessment is completely off-base. I mean, I don't think it is, but I hope so.

[-]dynomight6mo8645

> Also, I get the sense he's generally a jerk to those around him, which is not as big of a deal but is not helping. He reacts to challenges or criticism with insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol.

Since some people are questioning this comment, I'll point out this has been my experience. Cremieux (I believe) plagiarized a post I wrote and then reacted with (I believe) "insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol" when I pointed this out.

4tailcalled6mo

I should say I'm not questioning the assertion that he plagiarized you or reacted to your challenge/criticism with insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol. I do dispute the claim that he has a general tendency towards such reactions regardless of context and case.

[-]tcheasdfjkl6mo5323

[epistemic status: have heard a bunch about this from people with strong opinions, have not much read or at all interacted with the guy myself]

I want to note that I suspect that a lot of people in this thread are reasoning from different evidence than each other, in that much of the behavior people object to has happened in places like Discord and alt accounts and such. I don't really have time to fix this state of affairs right now (might try later, idk) but wanted to flag that I think it is true - it's not just that people draw radically different conclusions from the same content (though there might be some of that too).

[-]TheSkeward6mo8010

I am familiar with his behavior on various alts. They paint a different picture than his twitter persona. Most notably, he was a longterm regular on r/theMotte as u/TrannyPornO.

Image and link for proof:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200807025145/https://reddit.com/user/TrannyPornO

While posting under this name, his posts did not seem to me to embody the virtues of rationality. Example:

I'm very curious about Aboriginals. As far as I can tell, they are one of the least intelligent, dullest, and most uncouth groups in the world (edit: average IQ seems to be sub-70, ie, mentally-retarded). They're such dullards that government-sponsored PSAs have to be tailored to them so that they won't sleep in the road and huff petrol. I have examined one administration of the WAIS given to a group of them and I found the test didn't assess them well at all (we probably need new tests and norms for them), but naïvely correcting for bias, this sample of full-grown adults had the cognitive ability of young children. How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population composed of around 3% (and growing) mentally-retarded people whose vote matters just as much as yo

... (read more)

[-]Cheezemansam6mo338

As a moderator of /r/TheMotte (back when it was on Reddit), I recognize that username immediately. He was tempbanned a few times (largely for those sorts of posts), but at the same time he was featured well over a dozen times in the "Quality Contributions" post we had to highlight the most informative/thoughtful posts. Just as a bit of a balanced perspective. Not to defend him entirely, though, I personally view his tantrum after being called out for plagiarism to be quite an indictment on his character, however insightful his blog posts are.

[-]eukaryote6mo*2711

Thanks for sharing this.

Dear people who read this and agreement-downvoted (ETA: wrote this cause above comment was well in the agreement-negatives at the time of writing): Do you think this isn't Cremieux's account, or that the quoted example is an acceptable thing to say, or what?

[-]johnswentworth6mo6349

Meta: I probably won't respond further in this thread, as it has obviously gone demon. But I do think it's worth someone articulating the principle I'd use in cases like this one.

My attitude here is something like "one has to be able to work with moral monsters". Cremieux sometimes says unacceptable things, and that's just not very relevant to whether I'd e.g. attend an event at which he features. This flavor of boycotting seems like it would generally be harmful to one's epistemics to adopt as a policy.

(To be clear, if someone says "I don't want to be at an event at which Cremieux features because I'm worried that third parties will paint me as racist for it", I'd consider that a reasonable concern sometimes. But it's notably a concern which does not route through one's own moral inclinations.)

There are simply too many people out there who are competent and smart and do useful work, but nonetheless have utility functions very different from mine, such that they will sometimes seem monstrous to me. As a practical matter, I need to be able to work with them anyway; otherwise I'm shooting myself in the foot.

7Viliam6mo

Able to... if necessary, yes. Volunteer to, when not necessary... why?

7evhub6mo

Man, I'm a pretty committed utilitarian, but I feel like your ethical framework here seems way more naive consequentialist than I'm willing to be. "Don't collaborate with evil" seems like a very clear Chesterton's fence that I'd very suspicious about removing. I think you should be really, really skeptical if you think you've argued yourself out of it.

[-]habryka6mo6267

Attending an event with someone else is not "collaborating with evil"!

I think people working at frontier companies are causing vastly more harm and are much stronger candidates for being moral monsters than Cremieux is (even given his recent IMO quite dickish behavior). I think it would be quite dumb of me to ban all frontier lab employees from Lightcone events, and my guess is you would agree with this even if you agreed with my beliefs on frontier AI labs.

Many events exist to negotiate and translate between different worldviews and perspectives. LessOnline more so than most. Yes, think about when you are supporting evil, or giving it legitimacy, and it's messy, but especially given your position at a leading frontier lab, I don't think you would consider a blanket position of "don't collaborate with evil" in a way that would extend as far as "attending an event with someone else" as tenable.

8tcheasdfjkl6mo

A possible reason to treat "this guy is racist in ways that both the broader culture and I agree is bad" more harshly than "this guy works on AI capabilities" is something like Be Nice Until You Can Coordinate Meanness - it makes sense to act differently when you're enforcing an existing norm vs. trying to create a new one or just judging someone without engaging with norms. A possible issue with that is that at least some broader-society norms about racism are bad actually and shouldn't be enforced. I think a possible crux here is whether any norms against racism are just and worth enforcing, or whether the whole complex of such norms is unjust. (For myself I take a meta-level stance approximately like yours but I also don't really object to people taking stances more like eukaryote's.)

5Viliam6mo

The "greater evil" may be worse, but the "more legible evil" is easier to coordinate against.

5evhub6mo

To be clear, I'm responding to John's more general ethical stance here of "working with moral monsters", not anything specific about Cremieux. I'm not super interested in the specific situation with Cremieux (though generally it seems bad to me). On the AI lab point, I do think people should generally avoid working for organizations that they think are evil, or at least think really carefully about it before they do it. I do not think Anthropic is evil—in fact I think Anthropic is the main force for good on the present gameboard.

[-]habryka6mo*163

I think John's comment, in the context of this thread, was describing a level of "working with" that was in the reference class of "attending an event with" and less "working for an organization" and the usual commitments and relationship that entails, so extending it to that case feels a bit like a non-sequitur. He explicitly mentioned attending an event as the example of the kind of "working with" he was talking about, so responding to only a non-central case of it feels weird.

It is also otherwise the case that in our social circle, the position of "work for organizations that you think are very bad for the world in order to make it better" is a relatively common take (though in that case I think we two appear be in rough agreement that it's rarely worth it), and I hope you also advocate for it when it's harder to defend.

Given common beliefs about AI companies in our extended social circle, I think it illustrates pretty nicely why extending an attitude about association-policing that extends all the way to "mutual event attendance" would void a huge number of potential trades and opportunities for compromise and surface area to change one's mind, and is a bad idea.

5evhub6mo

I agree that attending an event with someone obviously shouldn't count as endorsement/collaboration/etc. Inviting someone to an event seems somewhat closer, though. I'm also not really sure what you're hinting at with "I hope you also advocate for it when it's harder to defend." I assume something about what I think about working at AI labs? I feel like my position on that was fairly clear in my previous comment.

[-]habryka6mo171

Inviting someone to an event seems somewhat closer, though.

Yeah, in this case we are talking about "attending an event where someone you think is evil is invited to attend", which is narrower, but also strikes me as an untenable position (e.g. in the case of the lab case, this would prevent me from attending almost any conference I can think of wanting to attend in the Bay Area, almost all of which routinely invite frontier lab employees as speakers or featured guests).

To be clear, I think it's reasonable to be frustrated with Lightcone if you think we legitimize people who you think will misuse that legitimacy, but IMO refusing to attend any events where an organizer makes that kind of choice seems very intense to me (though of course, if someone was already considering attending an event as being of marginal value, such a thing could push you over the edge, though I think this would produce a different top-level comment).

I'm also not really sure what you're hinting at with "I hope you also advocate for it when it's harder to defend." I assume something about what I think about working at AI labs? I feel like my position on that was fairly clear in my previous comment.

It's mostly ... (read more)

6Arjun Panickssery6mo

For what it's worth I interpreted it as being about Cremieux in particular based on the comment it was directly responding to; probably others also interpreted it that way

5Davidmanheim6mo

You can work with them without inviting them to hang out with your friends. Georgia did not say she was boycotting, nor calling for others not to attend - she explained why she didn't want to be at an event where he was a featured speaker.

[-]localdeity6mo255

When someone criticizes a statement as offensive, bad, or other negative terms besides "false", I ask myself, "Is the statement true or false?" (I tend to ask that about any statement, really, but I think I make a point of doing so in emotionally-charged circumstances.)

He does make word choices like "dullards" and say some things that one could call unnecessarily insulting. But most of it sounds like factual data that he got from reading scientific literature (clicking through to the comment—yup). Is it true or false that there was a set of IQ tests given to aboriginals and the average score was <70? Is it true or false that the (Australian, I assume) government put out a PSA for the purpose of getting aboriginals to not sleep in the road—caused, presumably, by cases of them doing it? (Make a prediction, then google it.)

And if all the above is true, then that seems like a potentially important problem, at least for anyone who cares about the people involved. Are the low IQ test results caused by difficulties in testing people from a very different culture and language, or do they mostly reflect reality? If the latter, what causes it, and... (read more)

[-]tcheasdfjkl6mo1511

(Whether the question is rhetorical or not—I wonder if this is a case where, if you have a negative prior about someone, you'll take an ambiguous signal and decide it's bad, and use that to justify further lowering your opinion of them, whereas someone with a positive prior will do the opposite.)

This does seem likely true. As TheSkeward noted, he has a lot of previous experience with Cremieux that he's drawing from and is informing his view here (which is harder to cite since it was on Discord rather than the public Internet, integrated into conversational contexts, and in many cases now deleted). You could say this is a bias causing him to be uncharitable, but on the other hand it's also a prior with a lot of information integrated into it already which people without that experience don't have. Personally I think you are being so charitable that it slides into outright ignoring evidence just because any given bit of it isn't ironclad proof - which is a really important decoupling skill in situations of disagreement but also will lead you astray if you don't also step back and evaluate the less certain evidence too.

(maybe the "court of public opinion" should stick only to ironclad... (read more)

2Said Achmiz6mo

Suppose that someone has views that I think are “odious”, but which have a totally different political slant (either on the opposite side of the standard political spectrum, or just largely orthogonal) than all this stuff with Cremieux. Should rationalist gatherings shun this person? If not, why not? We can even make this more personal: suppose that you have views that I think are “odious”. Should rationalist gatherings shun you? If not, why not? (I mostly don’t know your political views, and I don’t currently have any reason to think that you should be shunned. But you can easily enough imagine the scenario, I expect.) Presumably you will answer “no” to both questions. But why? You’re giving reasons why you think that Cremieux is “odious”, on the basis of his views and his public comments about his views—just that, not anything else![1] Well, surely I could give reasons why someone (perhaps even you!) is “odious”, on the basis of that person’s views and comments thereon. So why shouldn’t rationalists shun this hypothetical person? Why shouldn’t rationalists shun hypothetical-you? Is it a matter of majoritarianism? We should shun anyone whom the majority of rationalists consider “odious”? (But if so—what is the denominator? Who gets to vote in this referendum?) And if not that—then what? (Note that object-level arguments—“but you see, clearly, this guy really is odious!”—will obviously not suffice.) ---------------------------------------- 1. This is especially hilarious given that there genuinely seem to be good reasons to, if not disinvite the guy, at least to remove him from the featured-speaker list—the plagiarism, and the exceedingly hostile response to the (quite credible) accusation thereof. ↩︎

8tcheasdfjkl6mo

First, I don't think rationalists should shun Cremieux. The only cases I'm aware of where there was a push to get someone actually banned from rationalist stuff and truly "cancelled" are cases of, like, abuse, theft, murder, and I think this is good. I don't think Cremieux should be banned from rationalist events, I don't think people should refuse to read his blog or anything. He has good Twitter threads sometimes. (though after the Dynomight thing I'm a little suspicious of how much of that is his work) What I do think is that his character as a person (which includes the blowup in response to the plagiarism accusation, and also the posts we're talking about here) should inform to what extent we hold him up as an exemplar of how to be. I wish we wouldn't. I am not myself lodging any kind of big protest about this, I am going to LessOnline myself (though not as any sort of featured guest), but it does make me a little less happy about how my community works. Anyway, if someone is, say, a diehard communist who likes to post "kill all landlords" and argue that we need to immediately have a communist revolution and put a lot of people in gulags, that would * (a) be a very different valence from Cremieux's takes * (b) not warrant banning them from rationalist meetups (assuming they're not constantly going on about this at the meetups - if they are, ask them to cut it out and ban them if they won't) * (c) cause me to not want to be friends with them or respect their opinions * (d) cause me to think that if e.g. LessOnline organizers are holding them up as an example of how one should be, they are wrong and have worse judgment than I thought

8Cole Wyeth6mo

I haven’t looked into this, but I’m guessing the IQ results are from some form of language barrier? I think he’s wrong on the facts, but in this case his tone actually matters and is totally unacceptable for anyone who might be viewed as a “community representative.” I think it’s worth being pragmatic (ie not religiously pednantic about accuracy and only accuracy) on this point. If he were just a regular attendee that would be a different story.

3Said Achmiz6mo

Why would Cremieux be viewed as a “community representative”…? And what exactly about his “tone” is “totally unacceptable”…? Both of these claims seem very weird to me.

[-]tcheasdfjkl6mo155

Why would Cremieux be viewed as a “community representative”…?

On less.online, the list of invited guests is titled "SOME WRITINGS WE LOVE" and subtitled "The sites below embody the virtues we are celebrating. Each author below has been offered a free ticket to LessOnline." [emphasis mine]

I guess technically that says his site embodies these virtues, not that he as a person does, but I think that's a pretty hairsplitty distinction.

3Said Achmiz6mo

I don’t get it. How does any of that make someone a “community representative”? Suppose I start a baking forum for people who like to apply careful analysis to baking, and I decide to run an event for “rational baking” aficionados. On the announcement page, I write that I love Christopher Kimball’s writings, that he embodies the virtues that we are celebrating, and that he has been offered a free ticket to LessFondant. Would you conclude from this that Kimball is a “community representative” of my forum for baking nerds…? Seems pretty clear to me that this would be a quite ridiculous conclusion to draw.

3tcheasdfjkl6mo

I think that would be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw! I think we must be understanding the meaning of "community representative" differently.

1Said Achmiz6mo

How can it possibly be a perfect conclusion?? In my scenario, you don’t even know if Christopher Kimball has ever heard of my forum! (Sure, I say that he’s been offered a free ticket, but how do you know whether he’s even gotten the email, or whatever?) Are you suggesting that I might, right now, at this very moment, be a “community representative” of some community that I’ve never heard of, because they put a link to my blog on their event announcement page, and sent me some sort of offer which went straight to my junk mail folder?

2River6mo

I actually think that distinction is not very hairsplitty here. One of the most striking things from this whole discussion is that the Cremieux who writes the blog actually does seem very different from the Cremieux who appears on Twitter/X and Reddit and Discord. My exposure to him is primarily through the blog, which I do like, which does not seem to say offensive things about race, which doesn't even seem to have race as a dominant theme. Whereas there do seem to be some more questionable statements and interactions from him on these other platforms.

5Kabir Kumar4mo

That's a pretty standard thing with bigoted bloggers/speakers/intellectuals. Have a popular platform where you say 95% things which are ok/interesting/entertaining. And 5% to 10% poison (bigotry). Then a lead in to something that's 90% ok/interesting/entertaining and 10% to 15% poison (bigotry). Etc. Atrioc explains it pretty well here, with Sam Hyde as an example:

2rsaarelm6mo

Many people have tried very hard to find explanations for the IQ results that are something other than "low intelligence" for decades. If a replicating result that provides such an explanation had been established, it would have been broadly publicized in popular media and even laymen would know about it. Instead, we're being told we are not supposed to look into this topic at all.

5yams6mo

"How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population...?" easy: we already do this. Definitionally, 2 percent of people are <70 IQ. I don't think we would commonly identify this as one of the biggest problems with democracy. I think this demonstrates a failure mode of the 'is it true?' heuristic as a comprehensive methodology for evaluating statements. I can string together true premises (and omit others) to support a much broader range of conclusions than are supported by the actual preponderance of the evidence. (i.e., even if we accept all the premises presented here, the suggestion that letting members of a certain racial group vote is a threat to democracy completely dissolves with the introduction of one additional observation). [for transparency: my actual belief here is that IQ is a very crude implement with results mediated by many non-genetic population-level factors, but I don't think I need to convince you of this in order to update you toward believing the author is engaged in motivated reasoning!]

[-]Said Achmiz6mo1016

Definitionally, 2 percent of people are <70 IQ. I don’t think we would commonly identify this as one of the biggest problems with democracy.

I think that many people would, in fact, identify this (and the more general problem of which it is an extreme example) as one of the biggest problems with democracy!

3yams6mo

What’s the model here?

[-]Zack_M_Davis6mo114

Low-IQ voters can't identify good policies or wise politicians; democracy favors political actors who can successfully propagandize and mobilize the largest number of people, which might not correspond to good governance. A political system with non-democratic elements that offers more formalized control to actors with greater competence or better incentives might be able to choose better policies.

I say "non-democratic elements" because it doesn't have to be a strict binary between perfect democracy and perfect dictatorship. Consider, e.g., how the indirect election of U.S. Senators before the 17th Amendment was originally intended to make the Senate a more deliberative body by insulating it from the public.

(Maybe that's all wrong, but you asked "what's the model", and this is an example model of why someone might be skeptical of democracy for pro-social structural reasons rather than just personally wanting their guy to be dictator.)

6yams6mo

Oh, this is all familiar to me and I have my reservations about democracy (although none of them are race-flavored). The thing I’m curious about is the story that makes the voting habits of 2-3 percent of the population The Problem.

3Viliam6mo

Yep. The fact that 50% of people have IQ 100 or less is much greater problem in elections than the fact that 2-3% of people have IQ 70 or less.

-9tailcalled6mo

-2localdeity6mo

But those people are distributed fairly evenly throughout society. Each one is surrounded by lots of people of >100 IQ, and probably knows at least a few of >115 IQ, etc. Whereas if it's an entire indigenous population, and integration is far from complete, then there are likely whole villages that are almost entirely aboriginal. That's an important difference. One consequence: I expect that, in order to do a good job at various important management roles (managing a power plant, a sewer system, etc.), you basically need a high enough IQ. A hard cutoff is an oversimplification, but, to illustrate, Google results suggest that doctors' average IQ is between 120 and 130, and there might be villages of 1000 people with no one fitting that description. (And even if you think the IQ test results are, say, more reflective of a "Western Quotient"—the ability+willingness to work well with Western ideas and practices—it seems that lots of these jobs require precisely that. Using and maintaining Western machines; negotiating on behalf of the village with mostly-Western cities and higher levels of government; evaluating land development proposals; and so on.) Then, running with the above scenario, either the village doesn't have modern infrastructure, or it has modern infrastructure managed badly, or it has modern infrastructure managed by Westerners. The first two are bad, and the third might be a constant source of ethnic grievances if anyone is unhappy with the arrangement. (Exercise: ask an AI for historical examples of each of the above, and see if they're genuine.) Thus: a problem with democracy. And voting, in particular, might turn the third case into the second case. I didn't call it comprehensive. It's a useful tool, and often the first one I reach for. but not always the only tool. Then your opponent can counter-argue that your statements are true but cherry-picked, or that your argument skips logical steps xyz and those steps are in fact incorrect. I

[-]yams6mo*3130

Then your opponent can counter-argue that your statements are true but cherry-picked, or that your argument skips logical steps xyz and those steps are in fact incorrect. If your opponent instead chooses to say that for you to make those statements is unacceptable behavior, then it's unfortunate that your opposition is failing to represent its side well. As an observer, depending on my purposes and what I think I already know, I have many options, ranging from "evaluating the arguments presented" to "researching the issue myself".

My entire point is that logical steps in the argument are being skipped, because they are, and that the facts are cherrypicked, because they are, and my comment says as much, as well as pointing out a single example (which admits to being non-comprehensive) of an inconvenient (and obvious!) fact left out of the discussion altogether, as a proof of concept, precisely to avoid arguing the object level point (which is irrelevant to whether or not Crimieux's statement has features that might lead one to reasonably dis-prefer being associated with him).

We move into 'this is unacceptable' territory when someone shows themselves to have a habit of for... (read more)

1yams3mo

for posterity, this is a new article on Lasker about a separate reddit account // more narrative details around his various proclaimed positions and identities over time by default I don't put a lot of stock in articles of this kind, and I think this one gets into some weird territory (like shaming him for being kind of a know-it-all teen for some reason?). still, seems good to share for added context.

9eiko.blue6mo

-While this is plausibly true geographically, my understanding is that... most people in the US bubble the people they interact with regularly pretty heavily, such that I'm not sure I would expect this statement to be meaningfully true for a lot of people? How many people over 3-4 standard deviations of IQ away from you do you feel like you interact with at a level where you feel confident that you could steer them away from an effective propaganda campaign / conspiracy theory rabbithole they'd fallen into? I don't think that's a nonzero number for me, and if it is, it's low-single-digits...

[-]River6mo198

His much more recent blog post on national IQs makes the point that a sub-70 IQ is not equivalent to mental retardation, so it seems his views have at least somewhat changed since he wrote this particular comment. https://substack.com/@cremieux/p-153828779

8jimrandomh6mo

Meta: If you present a paragraph like that as evidence of banworthiness and unvirtue, I think you incur an obligation to properly criticize it, or link to criticism of it. It doesn't necessarily have to be much, but it does have to at least include sentence that contradicts something in the quoted passage, which your comment does not have. If you say that something is banworthy but forget to say that it's false, this suggests that truth doesn't matter to you as much as it should.

6Cole Wyeth6mo

This seems wrong in general. If something is obviously false, you don’t have to say that. I don’t actually know which posts resulted in a ban in this case.

[-]cubefox6mo4329

I find this attitude sad. I think his blog is currently clearly one of the best ones on the Internet. Even if you don't agree with some of his positions, I take it to be a deeply anti-rational attitude to try to shun or shame people for saying things that are outside the Overton window. Especially when he has clearly proven on his website that he has highly nuanced takes on various other, less controversial, topics. It reminds me of people trying to shame Scott Alexander for daring to step a little outside the Overton window himself.

In my opinion, true rationalists should exactly not react to such takes with "he said something taboo, let's boycott things where he is involved". If you disagree with him, a better attitude would be to write a post about one of the articles on his website, concretely indicating and rebutting things where you think he is wrong. Only claiming "I do not think Cremieux meets this standard of care and compassion" is so vague of an accusation that I don't know whether you even disagree with anything he said. It sounds like low decoupling and tone policing. I wrote more on rationalist discourse involving taboos here.

[-]Nick_Tarleton6mo*3025

to try to shun or shame people for saying things that are outside the Overton window.

(emphasis mine) Is that what the OP is doing? Certainly not overtly. I fear that this is a fallacy I see all the time in politicized conversations:

X is outside the Overton window
A disapproves of B saying [some particular instance of X]
Therefore A's disapproval must be motivated by X being outside the Overton window

[-]cubefox6mo2812

There is a strong correlation between someone boycotting a person for saying X and X being outside the Overton window. So a causal link is likely. People rarely boycott people for expressing things they disagree with but which are inside the Overton window.

[-]David Hornbein6mo1313

Overtly, OP is trying to shun Cremieux for failing to meet an assumed-widely-agreed "standard of care and compassion". This is obviously based on OP's belief that Cremieux's conduct is unacceptably outside the Overton window, even if they used the word "standard" instead of the word "Overton window". The only point of deploying phrases like "Hoo boy" and "do better" is to appeal to a social consensus. OP isn't being sneaky here or anything, you're just misinterpreting their dialect.

[-]tailcalled6mo1720

Especially when he has clearly proven on his website that he has highly nuanced takes on various other, less controversial, topics. It reminds me of people trying to shame Scott Alexander for daring to step a little outside the Overton window himself.

It may be rational of you to interpolate the quality of one facet of someone's behavior from other facets, or to interpolate from one social controversy to another, but it's certainly not adversarially robust. You can't reasonably expect people not to focus on his narrower behavior in one area.

3eukaryote6mo

I think this is a weird misunderstanding of my issue here. I believe and endorse people saying a lot of things that are outside of the overton window and are taboo in many places. For instance: "Factory farming is immoral." "It's bad when wild animals feel pain." "People should be able to get literally any surgery they want at any time." "Every golf course in large cities should be destroyed and have checkerboarded apartments-and-parks put up over it." My issue is with the specific takes Cremieux has and ways he acts, which are racist, and harmful, and bad.

[-]Said Achmiz6mo1310

It’s hardly unusual to believe that people should be shunned and shamed for saying things that are outside of the Overton window except when those things agree with your own beliefs. (Another way of putting it would be “people should be shunned and shamed for saying things that are outside of the Overton window, and also I think that the Overton window should include my own views”.)

(Obviously tolerance is not actually tolerance if you only tolerate people who agree with you and not people who disagree with you. I mean, come on.)

8eukaryote6mo

I think I see. I mean, I did post this hoping some people might agree with it or decide they agree with it. I mean, I guess my take is "some things outside the Overton window are bad and broader society is correct not to tolerate them."

6Said Achmiz6mo

Well, yes. I expect most people who read your post understood that. This is the standard way of starting a… shall we say, a deliberate movement toward social-consensus judgment, yes? You voice your opinion, which you expect enough people will publicly agree with to make it common knowledge that this view constitutes the judgment of the collective. No doubt most people here will readily agree with you on this. The trouble is that they won’t all agree on just which things those are.

3cubefox6mo

These are more or less controversial, but range from not outside the Overton window at all (saying that factory farming is immoral) to being a little outside. But they are by no means "taboo" in the sense that you would face serious social cost for expressing them. Saying "there are heritable statistical group differences in mean IQ" is on a completely different level. People had their careers ended and reputation ruined because of this. In comparison, saying that golf courses should be replaced with apartments carries almost zero personal risk. I think it is defamatory, bad and counter to the spirit of rationalist discourse to accuse someone of racism when they have put forward an empirical hypothesis including evidence to back it up. The term "racist" has an implication of being merely based on an irrational prejudice, which is clearly not the case for Cremieux.

4dirk6mo

I think it's counter to the spirit of rationalist discourse to ban the hypothesis that someone is racist. Rationalism is about following the evidence wherever it leads, not about keeping people's feelings from being hurt.

[-]Said Achmiz6mo2011

The problem is not simply the accusation of being racist. The problem is the accusation of being racist, in response to an empirical claim, as a substitute for addressing the empirical claim (and with the implication that the accusation constitutes a sufficient reply to the empirical claim).

Suppose that I say “Jews are more greedy than Gentiles; this is established by the following studies”. Now consider the following possible responses:

“You’re an antisemite.”
“You are [ mistaken / lying / wrong / otherwise making a false claim ], which I know because [ the studies have poor methodology / they don’t replicate / the operationalization makes no sense / publication bias / etc. ].”
“You are [ mistaken / lying / wrong / otherwise making a false claim ], but I have no evidence to back up this disagreement, nor can I provide any good reason to reject the evidence you offer; nevertheless, I claim that you are wrong.”
“You are [ mistaken / lying / wrong / otherwise making a false claim ] (which I know because [reasons, as above]); also you’re an antisemite (which I conclude from the fact that you have made this false claim, and other similar evidence).”

Reply #2 is clearly “in the spirit... (read more)

3tcheasdfjkl6mo

“Jews are more greedy than Gentiles; this is established by the following studies” can be blameworthily antisemitic even if the studies do show that this is true on average. Some ways this can be true - * bringing it up where not relevant, e.g. to criticize a Jewish politician * saying it in a way where you're clearly oozing contempt about Jews * making it sound like this is an essential trait of all Jews vs. all non-Jews * bringing it up weirdly often In all these cases it can be appropriate to object to that regardless of the validity of the studies.

3Said Achmiz6mo

Perhaps, perhaps. And do you have any examples of such facts (i.e., true claims) the mentioning of which is sometimes blameworthily racist/antisemitic/etc.? (Presumably “Jews are more greedy than Gentiles” isn’t such a fact. Or is it, do you think? I am not aware of this actually being established by studies, but perhaps I am wrong about this?) I ask, of course, because I am skeptical of this notion that the truth of the claim might be admitted by both sides, with only its “appropriateness” being, by itself, evidence of racial animus. It’s very convenient to be able to declare that “it’s not what you’re saying, it’s how [or when or why or how often] you’re saying it”. One notices that, somehow, those who make such declarations never quite get around to investigating the “what”. It’s never the right time, the right context, etc. (Meanwhile, with claims that are favored by such people, it always seems to be the right time and place and context.) So, what’s an example (better yet, three examples) of such a thing? A true fact, which is sometimes inappropriate to bring up, because doing so would be racist, antisemitic, etc.?

3tcheasdfjkl6mo

Many of the truly radioactive claims I have not really investigated the truth of so cannot give as examples, but this does not mean I claim they are necessarily false either. That said, of things I am pretty confident are true - 1. "Men are stronger than women." -- very true on a population level; typically not relevant to bring up in e.g. a discussion of voting rights; not appropriate to bring up to imply men are better than women 2. "Men are more physically aggressive than women." -- also true on a pouplation level, also not relevant to bring up in e.g. a discussion of voting rights; not appropriate to bring up to imply women are better than men 3. "Being fat is generally bad for your health." -- true, not relevant to bring up e.g. in response to an objection to fat people being bullied or discriminated against, not appropriate to bring up to imply fat people are contemptible 4. "Trans people are likelier to be mentally ill than cis people." -- true, not relevant to bring up e.g. in a discussion of discrimination against trans people, not appropriate to bring up to imply trans people are all delusional/contemptible

3Said Achmiz6mo

And this doesn’t strike you as being at all suspicious? You judge some claims to be “truly radioactive”, and you haven’t even checked whether they are true? (What, do you think that a topic being “truly radioactive” makes it less likely to be relevant to real-world outcomes?) But never mind that, let’s move on. The first three claims you list are either politically anodyne or else have the valence of the dominant political faction. And one basically never sees anyone condemned and targeted for shunning on the basis of having such beliefs. As for the fourth claim—of course it is relevant to bring this up in a discussion of discrimination against trans people! How could it possibly not be? (What, does discrimination against mentally ill people suddenly not exist? Or do you think that no trans person has ever been discriminated against for being mentally ill?) In general, serious mental illness has a pervasive effect on everything about a person’s life. To conclude that someone being mentally ill is not relevant at all to discussion of some major aspect of a person’s life should be quite surprising. And this illustrates the larger point. Discussing “appropriateness” rather than truth is, in almost situations like this, injurious to our truth-seeking efforts. (Deliberately so, of course.)

4tcheasdfjkl6mo

I mean "radioactive" in a descriptive political sense. I agree that truth claims ought not be radioactive in this sense and it is a bad thing about the political landscape than they are. Yes, trans people can be discriminated against for being mentally ill. What I meant was that if someone says "trans people are often discriminated against and that's bad" you should not respond with "well, trans people are mentally ill, what do you expect" as though (a) that's universally true of trans people (b) that means the discrimination is justified. (Additionally, I claim you could have understood that this was what I meant, by applying a modicum of interpretive labor and using mental motions like "I am confused about why someone would say this, can I try to build a model where it makes sense / pass their ITT internally". My impression is that you are going around spamming attempted gotchas and refusing to engage even the slightest flexibility towards attempting to understand the views of people you think you disagree with; this is pretty annoying and bad for your truthseeking.) Okay first of all, I have spent a fair bit of time in discourse contexts where they're not really anodyne. But more importantly, ...and??? I answered the question you asked (in a tone of confident assumption I would not be able to produce an answer)! I thought maybe you wanted existence proofs of me actually believing that saying a true thing can be bad rather than using that as a smokescreen for some reason, and I provided that even though it was a deeply obnoxious ask? (Actually that would be a weird smokescreen. The type of person who I think you're gesturing at would never want to admit that a radioactive claim might possibly be true and if anything might end up using smokescreens to try to avoid admitting that.)

0Said Achmiz6mo

… yes, obviously. (How else could you have meant it? What did you think I understood you to be saying…?) This is all very good, and yet you still haven’t checked whether said claims are true. So what is this opinion (that “truth claims ought not be radioactive in this sense”, etc.) worth, exactly? Yes, once again, this is just what I assumed that you meant… But that response makes perfect sense! Yes, one should indeed expect that a population with a substantially above-average prevalence of mental illness will experience substantially above-average discrimination. What in the world does it have to do with anything being “justified”…? Nor is there any implication of universality. (So your parenthetical is unjustified; I understood you just fine, as you see. I simply disagree.) To which point it surely is relevant that you (I claim) did not, in fact, produce an answer. (Possibly you disagree. But then that’s the disagreement, right? Whether your answer was, in fact, sufficient to answer the question. You will agree, at least, that there can be disagreement on this point, yes?) I wrote: And your examples reinforce, rather than undermining, this skepticism. You don’t see any connection whatsoever between this description and your comments about how some claims are “radioactive” and you haven’t investigated them?

-1dirk6mo

The claim cubefox made was that eukaryote disliked Cremieux for saying things outside the overton window. By clarifying that she instead disliked Cremieux for being racist (and just generally interpersonally unpleasant) eukaryote was not dodging the point but directly addressing it.

7Said Achmiz6mo

Come now, you are being obtuse. What is the reason why eukaryote claims that Cremieux is racist? It’s his empirical claims, according to eukaryote herself.

0dirk6mo

According to eukaryote herself, it is not the fact that his claims are outside the overton window are not the reason she dislikes them, but rather that they are racist. I don't think I am being obtuse; I think you're pretending the two are synonymous.

2Said Achmiz6mo

…? This reply seems like a non sequitur. How is it at all responsive to what I wrote?

-5cubefox6mo

-3tailcalled6mo

High decoupling is an attempt to enforce anti-irrationalist norms through creating dissociative disorders. It's obviously self-defeating, and combining it with a critique of "tone policing" and taboos causing asymmetric discourse/preventing people from speaking out is brazen hypocrisy.

[-]tailcalled6mo*354

I have repeatedly challenged and criticized Cremieux and he has never reacted with insults, over-the-top defensiveness or vitriol towards me.

(I have certainly heard concerning rumors about him, and I hope those responsible for the community do due diligence in investigating them. But this post feels kind of libelous, like an attempt to assassinate someone's character to suppress discourse about race. People who think LessOnline shouldn't invite racists could address this concern by explaining in more detail what racism is/why it's so terrible and why racist fallacies should be so uncomfortable that one cannot go there, instead of just something that receives a quick rebuttal.)

[-]cubefox6mo123

I find already labelling someone who holds an empirical proposition (which is true or false) as "racist" (which is a highly derogatory term, not a value neutral label) is defamatory. The vague hinting about alleged "rumours" here also seems to just serve to make him appear in a bad light.

[-]tcheasdfjkl6mo104

Huh, I noticed that I have a sort of knee-jerk reaction to "defamatory" which I conjecture is similar to a knee-jerk reaction some others here have about "racist" - something like "while this term has an explicit definition that refers to some stuff I mostly agree is bad, in practice it is so often used as a way to forcibly shut down speech (including some that I agree with) that I do not wish to grant the concept itself legitimacy".

(I think I have this reaction to "defamatory" bc I encounter it mostly as a legal concept, where speech that has been ruled defamatory is to be suppressed (and of course I don't always agree with such rulings). Even though, like, I agree you shouldn't say false bad things about people.)

I think this maybe makes me a little more sympathetic to this kind of knee-jerk reaction about "racist"? I do already think we should often taboo this word in this kind of situation, but also I do think that at least some things best described as "racist" are in fact bad and ought to be avoided.

(Ironically I kind of wish the people with this knee-jerk reaction would do more decoupling and notice when accusations of racism are more like "this person believes something that is quite possibly true but that a social justice person would think is racist, so they should be shunned" and when they are more like "this person is an epistemically sloppy asshole about race, so I wish we wouldn't hold them up as an ideal of how to be". To be fair it can take some work to determine which is true even if you're specifically trying to.)

0tailcalled6mo

Common explicit definitions of "racism" tend to include people who believe in racial differences (especially in socially valued traits, especially if they believe the racial differences are innate), and such beliefs are typical treated as some of the most central evidence of racism conceivable. Objecting to the designation purely on the basis that it is highly derogatory seems intellectually dishonest to me; it would be more honest to object to the derogatory element, for instance by asserting that non-racists are inattentive/delusional/lying. My vague hinting about rumors is supposed to just serve to make him appear in a bad light, because my defense would make him appear in a good light, and I have heard rumors, so I don't want to one-sidedly endorse him. At the same time, calling it "rumors" shows that I don't have it first-hand and that there's a need for a more accurate account than I can give.

[-]cubefox6mo208

I think the following resembles a motte-and-bailey pattern: Bailey: "He is a racist, people may want to explain why racism is terrible." Motte: "Oh I just meant he argued for the empirical proposition that there are heritable statistical group differences in IQ." Accusing someone of racism is a massively different matter from saying that he believes there are heritable group differences in IQ. You can check whether a term is value neutral by whether the accused people apply it to themselves, in this case they clearly do not. The term "racist" usually carries the implication or implicature of an attitude that is merely based on an irrational prejudice, not an empirical hypothesis with reference to a significant amount of statistical and other evidence.

[-]TsviBT6mo3425

The term "racist" usually carries the implication or implicature of an attitude that is merely based on an irrational prejudice, not an empirical hypothesis with reference to a significant amount of statistical and other evidence.

It is also possible that Bob is racist in the sense of successfully working to cause unjust ethnic conflict of some kind, but also Bob only says true things. Bob could selectively emphasize some true propositions and deemphasize others. The richer the area, the more you can pick and choose, and paint a more and more outrage-inducing, one-sided story (cf. Israel/Palestine conflict). If I had to guess, in practice racists do systematically say false things; but a lot of the effect comes from selective emphasis.

Things can get even more muddied if people are unepistemically pushing against arguments that X; then someone might be justified in selectively arguing for X, in order to "balance the scales". That could be an appropriate thing to do if the only problem was that some group was unepistemically pushing against X--you correct the shared knowledge pool by bringing back in specifically the data that isn't explained by the unepistemic consensus. But if X is furthermore some natural part of a [selective-emphasis memeplex aimed at generating political will towards some unjust adversariality], then you look a lot like you're intentionally constructing that memeplex.

(Not implying anything about Cremieux, I'm barely familiar with his work.)

[-]cubefox6mo109

It is also possible that Bob is racist in the sense of successfully working to cause unjust ethnic conflict of some kind, but also Bob only says true things. Bob could selectively emphasize some true propositions and deemphasize others.

Sure, though this is equally possible for the opposite: When Alice is shunning or shaming or cancelling people for expressing or defending a taboo hypothesis, without her explicitly arguing that the hypothesis is false or disfavored by the evidence. In fact, this is usually much easier to do than the former, since defending a taboo hypothesis is attached to a large amount of social and career risk, while attacking a taboo hypothesis is virtually risk-free. Moreover, attacking a taboo hypothesis will likely cause you to get points from virtue signalling.

0tailcalled6mo

This seems like a cope because others could go fill in the missing narrative, so selectively saying stuff shouldn't be a huge issue in general...?

[-]TsviBT6mo1512

Huh? No? Filling in the missing narrative can take a bunch of work, like days or months of study. (What is it even a cope for?)

1tailcalled6mo

It would be a compromise between two factions: people who are hit by the incomplete narrative (whether they are bad actors or not) and centrists who want to maintain authority without getting involved in controversial stuff. Certainly it would be better if the racists weren't selective, and there's a case to be made that centrist authorities should put more work into getting the entire account of what's going on, but that's best achieved by highlighting the need for the opposing side of the story, not by attacking the racists for moving towards a more complete picture.

[-]TsviBT6mo1717

I mean, I'm not familiar with the whole variety of different ways and reasons that people attack other people as "racist". I'm just saying that only saying true statements is not conclusive evidence that you're not a racist, or that you're not having the effect of supporting racist coalitions. I guess this furthermore implies that it can be justified to attack Bob even if Bob only says true statements, assuming it's sometimes justified to attack people for racist action-stances, apart from any propositional statements they make--but yeah, in that case you'd have to attack Bob for something other than "Bob says false statements", e.g. "Bob implicitly argues for false statements via emphasis" or "Bob has bad action-stances".

-4tailcalled6mo

I can buy that often people are specifically opposed to racist bigots, i.e. people who are unreasonably attached to the idea of racial group differences. The essence of being unreasonable is to not be able to be reasoned with, and being reasoned with often involves presenting specific cruxes for discussion. It seems to me that Cremieux tends to do so, and so he is not a racist bigot. I think part of what can get him persecuted for being a racist bigot is that a lot of rationalists follow him and more-or-less endorse (or at least defend) racist stuff without being willing to present cruxes, i.e. his fans are racist bigots. It's hard for people to distinguish a writer from their fans, and I suspect this might be best addressed by writers being more internally oriented towards their fans rather than outwards oriented.

[-]lc6mo*19-8

I think Cremieux is an honest^[1], truthseeking, and intelligent guest speaker, and I would be extraordinarily disappointed in the organizers if they disinvited him. I also have a very high opinion of LessOnline's organizers, so I'm not particularly worried about them cowtowing to attempts to chill speech.

^{^}
(In the sense of e.g. his work output being factually correct, not speaking to his character personally)

-1[anonymous]6mo

are... are you sure you read the post you're responding to? I ask because what you wrote is really bizarre in response to someone saying "I don't like this person and so will not go to X, but I hope that X goes well and everyone has fun".

[-]lc6mo1916

are... are you sure you read the post you're responding to?

We definitely read the same words!

[-]faul_sname6mo1127

Did we read the same OP?

I don't like what he's about, I think the rationalist community can do better, and I do not want to be a special guest at the same event he's a special guest at. I hope that LessOnline goes well and that those who do go have a great time, and that my assessment is completely off-base. I mean, I don't think it is, but I hope so.

This sounds to me like "hint hint I think you guys should disinvite him, and if it goes badly I will say that I told you so".

[-]Elizabeth6mo4141

"I told you so" is correct if you told someone something, they ignore it, and you were right.

I had a good time at LessOnline last year and expect to have a good time this year, but if Cremieux somehow ruins it for me, Eukaryote is absolutely entitled to tell me "I told you so".

-2[anonymous]6mo

I guess you could choose to read it that way, but I'm not sure why you would - seems like an assumption of bad faith that doesn't feel justified to me, especially on LW. Just ask directly if you think the author meant to say that, IMO. Less chance for weird internet grudges that way. :)

[-]faul_sname6mo1118

I guess you could choose to read it that way, but I'm not sure why you would - seems like an assumption of bad faith that doesn't feel justified to me, especially on LW.

Saying "I don't like that you invited this person, and I think you shouldn't have, and I think you should reverse that decision, and it's on you if you ignore my advice and it goes poorly" doesn't seem like it's in bad faith to me. Caving to such bids seems like it would invite more such bids in the future, but I don't think making such bids is particularly norm-breaking.

4Esteemed Estimator6mo

sure This seems a bit speculative to me. If OP didn't believe that would the post have looked any different?

7aphyer6mo

Suppose I tell you that you have a nice house, and it would be a shame if anything happened to it. What do I mean?

2Shankar Sivarajan6mo

In context, I took that to be a threat to try to get the event organizers and attendees "cancelled" as racists unless they capitulated and disinvited him.

[-]Thane Ruthenis6mo*3934

I don't think this is necessarily what eukaryote explicitly intended...

... But I also don't think it particularly matters whether they meant it this way or not. "I dislike this person so I will boycott this event", implemented at scale, is what cancelling is. If a whole bunch of people coordinate to boycott the event unless Alice is blacklisted, that creates a threat-like pressure on event organizers to blacklist Alice if they want to maximize the number of attendees.

If a community wants to avoid such dynamics, then "I will boycott the event if Alice is there, not because I expect Alice to make the event unpleasant, but because I disagree with some of Alice's beliefs and think she should be deplatformed" is something that shouldn't be considered acceptable behavior, at the group-norm level. The intent behind the behavior doesn't matter; the behavior itself is the problem.

And indeed, in the Simulacrum Levels framework, it's not a Simulacrum Level 1 move. It's Simulacrum Level 3-4, fashioning a cudgel out of your social resources and trying to beat the social realities into shape using it.

The acceptable response is IMO starting a discussion regarding Alice's character and openly questioning whether she's the kind of person who deserves to be invited to rationalist events. But not unilaterally setting up a game-theoretic structure that decreases the event's value iff your demands are not met.

5Maxwell Peterson6mo

It’s too bad you feel that way. I wasn’t planning on attending, and probably still won’t, but love Cremieux’s work, and knowing he’ll be there makes me want to go more. I recommend those unfamiliar with his work to view some of his posts on X: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil

4Cole Wyeth6mo

This is getting a lot of pushback but seems pretty overdetermined to me based on the comments.

3Mateusz Bagiński6mo

Do you mean that the concrete evidence of Cremieux's past behavior presented in the comments justifies the OP?

7Cole Wyeth6mo

Yeah it seems sufficient, particularly the Reddit post is highly irresponsible.

2Nina Panickssery6mo

It’s of course reasonable to skip an event because people you don’t like will be there. However, it’s clear that many people have the opposite preference, and wouldn’t want LessOnline attendees or invited guests to have to meet a “standard of care and compassion,” especially one wherever you’re putting it. LessOnline seems to be about collecting people interested in and good at rationality and high-quality writing, not about collecting people interested in care and compassion. For the latter I’d suggest one go to something like EA Global or church…

[-]Mateusz Bagiński6mo*1910

It's clear that many people at least don't mind Cremieux being invited [ETA: as a featured author-guest] to LessOnline, but it's also clear (from this comment thread) that many people do mind Cremieux being invited to LessOnline, and some of them mind it quite strongly.

This is a (potential) reason to reconsider the invitation and/or explicitize some norms/standards that prospective LessOnline invitees are expected to meet.

[-]tcheasdfjkl6mo2010

Small ~nitpick/clarification: in my understanding, at issue is Crémieux being a featured guest at LessOnline, rather than being allowed to attend LessOnline; "invited to" is ambiguous between the two.

5Mateusz Bagiński6mo

It is ambiguous, but it's hinting more strongly towards being a featured author guest because "normal/usual/vanilla guests" are not Being Invited by the organizers to attend the conference in the sense in which this word is typically used in this context. But fair, I'll ETA-clarify.

8Manya6mo

I don't think "if discussing issues that have caused tremendous amounts of real world pain, you gotta avoid being contemptuous of the groups that were hurt" is a standard of care and compassion that is incompatible with rationality and high-quality writing. And not having any standard at all is flatly unworkable, and indeed not, actually, how the community actually functions.

[-]Richard_Ngo6mo4231

Approximately every contentious issue has caused tremendous amounts of real-world pain. Therefore the choice of which issues to police contempt about becomes a de facto political standard.

[-]Nina Panickssery6mo15-1

I am not saying care and compassion is incompatible with rationality and high-quality writing.
Yes, perhaps it’s reasonable to require some standard, but personally I think there’s a place for events where that standard is as or more permissive than it is at LessOnline. This is my subjective opinion and preference, but I would not be surprised if many LessWrong readers shared it.

0lesswronguser1236mo

I am an outsider to this, but now you have made me curious, my first impression with Cremieux online has been genetic differences is only a part of his work, and as per less.online he hasn't yet accepted the invitation? is the likelihood of him accepting it that high to make this call? or is the value of potentially having him overwhelming negative in your view?

[-]eukaryote6mo162

Eh, he was there last year, I figure he might well go again. If I happen to hear that he's definitively not attending this year (or, idk, if he ends up attending as a regular guest and not an Invited Author Guest, I take less umbrage with that) I'd love to go.

[-]Elizabeth6mo1910

There was some talk of disinviting him for plagiarism

-1Said Achmiz6mo

I strongly disagree with this. I think that this is a pernicious view, and a terrible approach to scholarship of any sort. (This comment is entirely orthogonal to any questions of any individual’s character, to be clear.)

-3Dmitriy6mo

"I'm uncomfortable being in the same company of invited author guests as Cremieux... I do not want to be a special guest at the same event he's a special guest at." Reading between the lines, it seems the crux might be that you don't want to risk the reputational consequences of being featured alongside Cremieux as an Invited Author? (correct me if I'm wrong!) If that's the case, would you attend if the organizers removed your handle from the public list of invitees? Or would you still not want to attend as a regular guest as long as he's distinguished as an Invited Author?

9Viliam6mo

To use the exact words from the website, "The sites below embody the virtues we are celebrating.", that kinda implies that OP and Cremieux embody the same virtues.

-3ErioirE6mo

I was an observer for the conversations that (I suspect) contributed to your opinion here. My perspective is that it seems in large part differences in communication style preferences, rather than object-level disagreements. He seems to enjoy the catharsis of being able to emphatically state positions that are non-politically correct in general discourse, which is a sentiment I understand. I don't recall him responding with anything I would classify as insults or vitriol, though those are to some degree subjective. One person's insult is another's friendly banter, and I suspect he didn't realize you took as the former what he had meant as the latter. Would I be correct if I summarized your opinion as "He doesn't treat controversial topics with enough tact and diplomacy" rather than specific factual or epistemic disagreements? If his presence is the only thing stopping you from wanting to go, why not reach out to him? I suspect you'd be able to amicably smooth things over. A related idea: For LessOnline would it be useful to start a norm where if a debate becomes excessively charged any participant could ask for it to be put on hold so that a time can be set aside to productively discuss it in a more structured setting? (i.e. with an impartial moderator mutually agreed upon.)

1[comment deleted]6mo

[-]eukaryote6y299

Here's something I believe: You should be trying really hard to write your LessWrong posts in such a way that normal people can read them.

By normal, I mean "people who are not immersed in LessWrong culture or jargon." This is most people. I get that you have to use jargon sometimes. (Technical AI safety people: I do not understand your math, but keep up the good fight.) Or if your post is referring to another post, or is part of a series, then it doesn't have to stand alone. (But maybe the series should stand alone?)

Obviously if you only want your post to be accessible to LWers, ignore this. But do you really want that?

If your post provides value to many people on LW, it will probably provide value to people off LW. And making it accessible suddenly means it can be linked and referred to in many other contexts.
Your post might be the first time someone new to the site sees particular terms.
Even if the jargon is decipherable or the piece doesn't rely on the jargon, it still looks weird, and people don't like reading things where they don't know the words. It signals "this is not for me" and can make them feel dumb for not getting it.
(Listen, I was once in a conversation with a r

... (read more)

9leggi6y

Thanks for writing this. This is me. A creature from another time and space. I read about a website about rationality and got excited about potentially finding a group of people who think rationally. There's a lot of interesting stuff here on LW but could be more accessible. More formatting for ease of scanning allows readers to start picking up the important points. There's a lot of unnecessary words used - I wonder how much editing (pruning?) is done. The habit of giving something a few days to settle then re-reading it before publishing? New perspectives would be useful for a lot of questions/discussions that I see here.

8ChristianKl6y

There are two reasons for jargon. (1) Developing rationality@LW as it's own paradigma by reusing other concepts from LessWrong. No field of science can stand on it's own without creating it's own terms and seeing how those terms interact with another. (2) Defensibly against being able to be quoted in a bad way. Charles Murray succeeded in writing "The Bell Curve" in a way, where almost nobody who criticizes the book quotes it because he took care with all the sentence to write nothing that can easily taken out of context. Given the amount of criticism the book got that's a quite impressive feat. Unfortunately, in many controversial topics it's helpful to write as defensibly or even Straussian. Depending on the goal of a particular post (1) or (2) sometimes matter and at other times it's worthwhile to write for a wider audience.

4Chris_Leong6y

One problem is that completely avoiding jargon limits your ability to build up to more complex ideas

3quanticle6y

I think there is a happy medium in between having zero jargon (and limiting yourself to the style of Simple English Wikipedia) and having so much jargon that your ideas are impenetrable to anyone without a Ph.D in the field. I would also note that not all jargon is created equal. Sometimes a new word is necessary as shorthand to encapsulate a complex topic. However, before we create the word, we should know what the topic is, and have a short, clear definition for the topic. All too often, I see people creating words for topics where there isn't a short, clear definition. I would argue that jargon created without a clear, shared, explicit definition hurts the ability to build complex ideas even more so than not having jargon at all. It is only because of this form of jargon that we need to have the practice of tabooing words.

1Pattern6y

Category Theory Without The Baggage seems relevant.

1eukaryote6y

Yeah, building on more complex ideas - that you really need to read something else to understand - seems like a fine reason to use jargon.

4Said Achmiz6y

There are often very, very good reasons not to want this, and indeed to want the very opposite of this. In fact, I think that the default should be to not want any given post to be linked, and to spread, far and wide. I do wholeheartedly endorse this, however.

3eukaryote6y

Say more?

[-]Said Achmiz6y101

Several reasons.

The most important one is: the further an idea spreads, the more likely it is to be misinterpreted and distorted, and discussed elsewhere in the misinterpreted/distorted form; and the more this happens, the more likely it will be that anyone discussing the idea here has, in their mind, a corrupted form of it (both because of contamination in the minds of Less Wrong commenters from the corrupted form of the idea they read/hear in discussions elsewhere, and because of immigration of people, into Less Wrong discussions, who have first heard relevant ideas elsewhere and have them in a corrupted form). This can, if common, be seriously damaging to our ability to handle any ideas of any subtlety or complexity over even short periods of time.

Another very important reason is the chilling effects on discussions here due to pressure from society-wide norms. (Many obvious current examples, here; no need to enumerate, I think.) This means that the more widely we can expect any given post or discussion to spread, the less we are able to discuss ideas even slightly outside the Overton window. (The higher shock levels become entirely out of reach, for example.)

Finally, commonplace wide dissemination of discussions here are a strong disincentive for commenters here to use their real names (due to not wanting to be exposed so widely), to speak plainly and honestly about their views on many things, and—in the case of many commenters—to participate entirely.

7Matt Goldenberg6y

It feels quite suboptimal to have a public forum that's indexed on google, and at the same time be trying to deliberately keep the riffraff out by being obtuse. If you want to not worry about what people will think, while being able to use your full name, you should use a private forum. Not understanding what Moloch means won't stop an employer from not hiring you for considering heterdox views. On a public forum, where anyone could stumble on a link from google, I think eukaryote's thoughts are quite important.

3Said Achmiz6y

I didn’t advocate being obtuse. I only said that by default, we probably do not (and/or ought not) want a post to be disseminated widely. What is the best way of accomplishing this, is a separate matter.

4Matt Goldenberg6y

My point was that if that's a thing you want, you probably do not want a public site like LW. The thing you want is a different thing than what LW is.

4Said Achmiz6y

I don’t think I agree. Or, to be more precise, I agree denotationally but object connotationally: indeed, the thing I want is a different thing than what Less Wrong is, but it’s not clear to me that it’s a different thing than what Less Wrong easily could be. To take a simple example of an axis of variation: it is entirely possible to have a public forum which is not indexed by Google. A more complicated example: there is a difference between obtuseness and lack of deliberate, positive effort to minimize inferential distance to outsiders. I do not advocate the former… but whether to endorse the latter is a trickier question (not least because interpreting the latter is a tricky matter on its own).

6eukaryote6y

I think I agree with mr-hire that this doesn't seem right to me. The site is already public and will turn up when people search your name - or your blog name, in my case - or the idea you're trying to explain. I don't especially care whether people use their real names or pseudonyms here. If people feel uncomfortable making their work more accessible under their real names, they can use a pseudonym. I suppose there's a perceived difference in professionalism or skin in the game (am I characterizing the motive correctly?), but we're all here for the ideas anyways, right?

1Said Achmiz6y

The “real name” issue is only one part of one of the points I made. Even if you reject that part entirely, what do you say to the rest? This is not a realistic view, but, again, I am content to let it slide. By no means is it the whole or even most of the reasons for my view.

2leggi6y

Interesting to see the differences in thoughts about purpose of LW and what users want. Is there a need for the differentiation between posts that are looking for a wide audience and those that want to remain contained to a small group?

1Pattern6y

Differentiation could also be used to enable a more organized effort to make material more reachable to a wider audience. (Like wikipedia versus simple wikipedia.)

[-]eukaryote6y217

I don't like taking complicated variable-probability-based bets. I like "bet you a dollar" or "bet you a drink". I don't like "I'll sell you a $20 bid at 70% odds" or whatever. This is because:

A) I don't really understand the betting payoffs. I do think I have a good internal sense of probabilities, and am well-calibrated. That said, the payoffs are often confusing, and I don't have an internal sense linking "I get 35 dollars if you're right and you give me 10 dollars if I'm not" or whatever, to those probabilities. It seems like a sensible policy that if you're not sure how the structure of a bet works, you shouldn't take it. (Especially if someone else is proposing it.)

B) It's obfuscating the fact that different people value money differently. I'm poorer than most software engineers. Obviously two people are likely to be affected differently by a straightforward $5 bet, but the point of betting is kind of to tie your belief to palpable rewards, and varying amounts of money muddy the waters more.

(Some people do bets like this where you are betting on really small amounts, like 70 cents to another person's 30 cents or whatever. This seems silly to me because the whole point of bett

... (read more)

3rossry6y

(continued, to address a different point) B and C seem like arguments against "simple" (i.e., even-odds) bets as well as weird (e.g., "70% probability") bets, except for C's "like bets where I'm surer...about what's going on", which is addressed by A (sibling comment). Your point about differences in wealth causing different people to have different thresholds for meaningfulness is valid, though I've found that it matters much less than you'd expect in practice. It turns out that people making upwards of $100k/yr still do not feel good about opening up their wallet you give you $3. In fact, it feels so bad that if you do it more than a few times in a row, you really feel the need to examine your own calibration, which is exactly the success condition. I've found that the small ritual of exchanging pieces of paper just carries significantly more weight than would be implied by their relation to my total savings. (For this, it's surprisingly important to exchange actual pieces of paper; electronic payments make the whole thing less real, ruining the whole point.) Finally, it's hard to argue with someone's utility function, but I think that some rationalists get this one badly wrong by failing to actually multiply real numbers. For example, if you make a $10 bet (as defined in my sibling comment) every day for a year at the true probabilities, the standard decision of your profit/loss on the year is <$200, or $200/365 per day, which seems like a very small annual cost to practice being better calibrated and evaluate just how well-calibrated you are.

3rossry6y

Hi! I've done a fair amount of betting beliefs for fun and calibration over the years; I think most of these issues are solvable. A is a solved problem. The formulation that I (and my local social group) prefer goes like "The buyer pays $X*P% to the seller. The seller pays $X to the buyer if the event comes true." The precise payoffs aren't the important part, so long as they correspond to quoted probabilities in the correct way (and agreed sizes in a reasonable way). So this convention makes the probability you're discussing an explicit part of the bet terms, so people can discuss probabilities instead of confusing themselves with payoffs (and gives a clear upper bound for possible losses). Then you can work out exact payoffs later, after the bet resolves. (As a worked example, if you thought a probability was less than 70% and wanted to bet about $20 with me, if you "sold $20 at 70%" in the above convention, you'd either win $2070%=$14 or lose $20-($2070%)=$6. But it's even easier to see that you selling a liability of $20p(happens) for $2070% is good for you if you think p(happens)<70%.) You've right that odds are a terrible convention for betting on probabilities unless you're trying to hide the actual numbers from your counterparties (which is the norm in retail sports betting).

[-]eukaryote5y19-2

I have a proposal.

Nobody affiliated with LessWrong is allowed to use the word "signalling" for the next six months.

If you want to write something about signalling, you have to use the word "communication" instead. You can then use other words to clarify what you mean, as long as none of them are "signalling".

I think this will lead to more clarity and a better site culture. Thanks for coming to my talk.

2DirectedEvolution5y

I think that what "signalling" does that "communication" does not is when we use it to analyze how specific actions convey meaning. For example, there's a rich literature on flirting, in which scientists try to break down how various physical postures and gestures interact with things like laughter to signal attraction or aversion. "Communication" tends to imply a conscious, explicit, primarily verbal way of getting information across. "Signalling" tends to imply a subconscious, implicit, and primarily nonverbal way of getting information across. I think what we need isn't so much a taboo on these terms as a clarification of what the difference is between them.

2Chris_Leong5y

I don't suppose you could provide a specific example of when you think this would improve the conversation?

2Dagon5y

I like this attempt at meta-signaling! Good luck on making your signals more effective by preventing people from noticing that aspect of things.

[-]eukaryote5y92

Inspired by the failures of WebMD as outlined here, because this was a problem WebMD characteristically failed to help me solve.

In the spirit of writing up one's findings, and in the off-chance this is useful to someone, here is a research-based but totally uncited list of indications that a sudden musculoskeletal injury is a break rather than a sprain or the like:

If there's a visible deformity, e.g. "something is not where it should be". This is a big indication that you need to go to a doctor, whereas if you don't have this you only maybe need medi

... (read more)

5ChristianKl5y

It's worth noting that the two aren't the only possibilities. Torn muscles and ligaments matter as well. Inflamation is another important possibilty concern.

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