Quick note that the LW team is still processing this thread (different team members had different takes on different aspects of it). Sometime next week I expect us to have something more substantive to say, but it seemed better to take some time away from it to gather our thoughts and get in sync about it.
If I may offer my opinion, it seems to me that this debate was a proxy for a long-term problem, which I would roughly describe as "how much exactness should be the norm on LW?".
When Eliezer was writing the Sequences, it was simple: whatever he considered right, that was the norm. There were articles with numbers and equations, articles that quoted scientific research, articles that expressed personal opinion or preference, and articles with fictional evidence. And because all those articles came from the same person, together they created the style that has attracted many readers.
But, now that it is a community blog, there are people with preference for numbers and equations, and people with preference for personal opinion. It's like they speak different languages. And sometimes they disagree with each other. And when they do, it is difficult to resolve the situation, because each of them expects different norms of... what kind of argument is valid, and what kind of content belongs here.
If we limit ourselves to things we can define and describe exactly, the extreme of that would be merely discussing equations. Because the real world is messy and complicated, and peop...
That was an interesting read, not in terms of reading the discussion of the obvious object level or the meta level, but simply observing the attempts at pretend-rational behavior. Both Said and habryka clearly got triggered and exasperated, probably due to their past experiences in similar situations, yet acted as if they were not. I suspect they didn't even admit their emotional state to themselves, instead taking pride in keeping the conversation "civil". I am not sure whether this approach was productive or counterproductive.
A standard advice in this situation is to take a breather from a discussion whenever you feel that your emotional state is not where you want it to be. Sadly, noticing one's emotional state is not a natural skill, even less so for those with more "logical" mind, which comprise the majority of this forum's participants.
My guess would be that trying to change the norms of discourse to address the passive aggressive yet overtly polite swipes at each other that are the hallmark of this thread is unlikely to be productive, since they do not address the root of the issue: PWE (posting while exasperated). I hope that the LW team spends some time talking about this particular issue, as well.
One hopeful sign is the decision that "it seemed better to take some time away from it to gather our thoughts" and to presumably have the time to cool down and process one's feelings, as well.
What do you mean by ‘authentic’, ‘authenticity’, etc.? I don’t think I’ve seen these terms (as you use them) explained on Less Wrong.
EDIT: … why in the world is this being downvoted?!
I (weakly) downvoted this. It's pretty common for you to ask for clarification on words, phrases or concepts that feel like they have pretty straightforward meanings to me, and I can't remember a single of the (at least a dozen) threads in which you asking questions of that type resulted in a conversation that I thought was worth the time of the author, or was net-positive for my experience on LessWrong.
I have some detailed models of why exactly that's the case that I don't have the time to go into right now, but for now I think I should just downvote threads that I expect to reliably result in wasted effort by both readers and the author, without appreciable gain.
Of course, other people can upvote your comment if they do get value out of the resulting threads.
I think many of your contributions to LessWrong are great, but the specific pattern of "repeatedly ask for definitions of lots of terms, without putting forward a plausible interpretation, and/or a concrete problem with the standard usage of a term" seems quite negative to me (and from my interactions with many authors and commenters, this appears to be a relatively frequent experience).
I wouldn't downvote t
...My experience has been that the usual reason these threads are unproductive, when they are, is simply because the author doesn't have a sensible answer. Unpleasant as it may be for the rest of us, Said is doing us a great service by revealing this fact.
So, I at least partially agree with this, and do indeed think that this is often a valuable service. But my sense is that if the goal of these comments is to reveal ignorance, it just seems better to me to argue for an explicit hypothesis of ignorance, or a mistake in the post.
As is it, these threads conflate between asking questions because the commenter is curious about the answer, and the author being asked to defend themselves from a critique. This is something that would usually be obvious in in-person interactions, but is hard to figure out with just online comments like this. And so a frequent experience that many (probably around a dozen) authors have relayed to me is that they see a comment from Said, interpret it to be someone being genuinely curious about their post, respond with something that is aimed at helping them, but then later on (many comments into the thread) realize that Said was actually asking them to publicly defend their reasoning, which usually tends to require a very different response and that they've just been talking past each other for two hours.
They then often feel that they could have successfully defended their reasoning if they had kn
...if the goal of these comments is to reveal ignorance, it just seems better to me to argue for an explicit hypothesis of ignorance, or a mistake in the post
The goal of my initial comment was exactly what it looked like: to inquire about the meaning of a term (as used, and as intended to be understood, by the author)—nothing more.
As it happens, Vaniver didn’t have all that much trouble responding to the inquiry[1], and even agreed that an explanation was necessary. So, in the case of this post, all the hand-wringing about my purported comment patterns turned out to be quite unnecessary.
Of course, this is not what has happened in many other cases, as you rightly note. But here’s the thing: if I ask a simple, straightforward question about a post—like “what does [term X] mean?”, or “what are some examples of [described phenomenon Y]?”, that’s not an argument for “an explicit hypothesis of ignorance”, nor a claim of any mistake—it’s just a question! My expectation, in each such case, is that the author easily provides a response, and perhaps (if particularly conscientious) says “thanks for pointing out that this wasn’t clear from the post”, edits the post to include the explanation /
...I sadly don't have the time to respond to all of this, so I will just make the points that I can make quickly:
So, in the case of this post, all the hand-wringing about my purported comment patterns turned out to be quite unnecessary.
To be clear, I think your comment was still net-negative for the thread, and provided little value (in particular in the presence of other commenters who asked the relevant questions in a, from my perspective, much more productive way). So I don't think the hand-wringing was unnecessary, and if it has any chance of resolving the broader pattern, I think it would be a major improvement to LessWrong, since I think that pattern is one of the major reasons people do not participate more on the site (and is literally the single most frequent complaint I receive from authors about trying to write on LessWrong).
A question like “what do you mean by [term X]” is only a critique if you can’t answer it!
What this de-facto means is that there is always an obligation by the author to respond to your comment, or otherwise be interpreted to be ignorant. Many people don't have the time, or find engaging with commenters exhausting, and this creates a default expect
...To be clear, I think your comment was still net-negative for the thread, and provided little value (in particular in the presence of other commenters who asked the relevant questions in a, from my perspective, much more productive way)
I just want to note that my comment wouldn't have come about were it not for Said's.
Again, this is a problem that would easily be resolved by tone-of-voice in the real world, but since we are dealing with text-based communication here, these kinds of confusions can happen again and again.
To be frank, I find your attitude here rather baffling. The only person in this thread who interpreted Said's original comment as an attack seems to have been you. Vaniver had no trouble posting a response, and agreed that an explanation was necessary but missing.
I just want to note that my comment wouldn't have come about were it not for Said's.
That's good to know. I do think if people end up writing better comments in response to Said's comments, then that makes a good difference to me. I would be curious about how Said's comment helped you write your comment, if you have the time, which would help me understand the space of solutions in better.
The only person in this thread who interpreted Said's original comment as an attack seems to have been you.
I am quite confident that is not the case. I don't think anyone else has made it the object of discussion except me, but I can guarantee you that many people reading this thread perceived Said's original question as an attack. This is also evident from the fact that Said's top-level comment received many downvotes, not just from me, even if it is currently at a reasonable karma level (when I downvoted it it was at 2 karma, and an hour later it was at -4, I think).
This is also evident by clone of saturn's comment, which I think clearly suggests that a lack of response to these comments is usually interpreted (by him and others) to be strong evidence of the author being incapable of giving a pro
...My guess would also be that Vaniver perceived the comment as at least somewhat of an attack, though I am not super confident, though he could chime in and give clarification on that.
The history was as follows:
So my view of Said's comment was in the context of nshepperd's comment, at which point I already saw the hole in the post and its shape.
This splits out two different dimensions; the 'attack / benign' dimension and the 'vague / specific' dimension. Of them, I think the latter is more relevant; Said's comment is a request of the form "say more?" and nshepperd's is a criticism of the form "your argument has structure X, but this means it puts all its weight on Y, which can't hold that much weight." The latter is more specific than the former, and I correspondingly found it more useful. [Like, I'm not sure I would have noticed that I also don't define truth from just reading Said's comment, which was quite helpful in figuring out what parts of 'au
...To be clear, I don't interpret a lack of any response as anything other than a sign that the author has a busy life. What I take as strong evidence of the author being incapable of giving a proper response is when there's a back-and-forth in which the author never directly responds to the original question.
That’s not what I’m saying. If someone posts a comment along the lines of “what about X?” and it goes unresponded to by the OP, that is not a point against the original article. Arguments are not soldiers. Leaving an argument undefended is not a surrender of territory to the enemy.
Rather you the reader should consider X, and decide for yourself its relevance.
But my sense is that if the goal of these comments is to reveal ignorance, it just seems better to me to argue for an explicit hypothesis of ignorance, or a mistake in the post.
My sense is the exact opposite. It seems better to act so as to provide concrete evidence of a problem with a post, which stands on its own, than to provide an argument for a problem existing, which can be easily dismissed (ie. show, don't tell). Especially when your epistemic state is that a problem may not exist, as is the case when you ask a clarifying question and are yet to receive the answer!
One of the things I try to be careful of, as a rationalist, is to note when the "standard definitions" are importing connotations that go beyond the textual meaning of the word. In this case, like Said Achmiz, I've noticed that "authentic" and "authenticity" are often used as applause lights, serving to engender vaguely positive feelings in the mind of the person reading the text, without actually adding any data or predictions.
Specifically, I'm pointing at the following paragraph:
Why should “that which can be destroyed by the truth” be destroyed? Because the truth is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.” Similarly, why should “that which can be destroyed by authenticity” be destroyed? Because authenticity is fundamentally more real and valuable than what it replaces, which must be implemented on a deeper level than “what my current beliefs think.” I don’t mean to pitch ‘radical honesty’ here, or other sorts of excessive openness; authentic relationships include distance and walls and politeness and flexible preferences.
What are "authentic" and "authenticity" doing here? It s
...I think this is a great comment (I strong-upvoted it), and is exactly the type of comment that I wish Said would make, instead of the ones he tends to make. It includes concrete pointers to why the term used appears to be inadequate, it suggests some plausible interpretations of the term as synonymous with "health" and then correctly points out problems with the text, if that interpretation is correct. It then also asks some concrete follow-up questions that Vaniver can engage with to help people more clearly understand what he is pointing at, and that you highlighted as potentially clarifying.
I think from the perspective of an author, I am glad to get a comment like this, and I expect the resulting thread to be much better than if the author had tried to respond to Said's original comment.
It’s pretty common for you to ask for clarification on words, phrases or concepts that feel like they have pretty straightforward meanings to me, and I can’t remember a single of the (at least a dozen) threads in which you asking questions of that type resulted in a conversation that I thought was worth the time of the author, or was net-positive for my experience on LessWrong.
I'm surprised at the examples you give.
What they all have in common is Said asking for clarification on a word or phrase. In 4/5, someone gave a definition that Said either accepted or didn't follow up on. All of these cases seem positive to me. (I can't judge how much time they cost, but one was just a link to a definition, one was quoting wikipedia and the others were fairly brief, so I'd guess not prohibitively much.) In the exception, there was no answer at all; if that's not positive, it's certainly not very negative either. They also have this in common with the specific comment that started this thread.
Two of them have more going on than that, and one of them seems much more like an example of the thing you seem to be pointing at, where much back-and-forth is had, much time is spent, and not much ge
...repeatedly ask for definitions of lots of terms, without putting forward a plausible interpretation, and/or a concrete problem with the standard usage of a term
Is there a “standard usage” of ‘authentic’ or ‘authenticity’? It seems to me that the term is used in a variety of widely different ways, depending on context; and many of those usages are heavily laden with connotations, associations, etc., that encode a variety of value assumptions and aspects of world-view, which one typically cannot decode without knowing the author’s views on many things.
So… I really don’t know what Vaniver meant by this. I don’t even have a “standard usage” I could assume. I don’t have a “plausible interpretation”, either; that’s the whole point of the question! And, notably, it’s exactly the sort of term and usage the meaning of which one cannot infer from context, because it carries the bulk of the context’s meaning.
If asking for a clarification of this sort of thing is downvote-worthy, then I cannot but conclude that I am deeply confused about what Less Wrong is even for.
EDIT: Also, having re-read the comments of mine which you linked to, I find I am confused; the idea that the terms in question
...To be clear, the reference class of asking for clarifications is great, and I think generally quite valuable. But my sense is that you would agree that when someone repeatedly inquires about aspects of posts that seem quite straightforward to you, in a way that results in lots of wasted effort of the author from your perspective (and associated complaints of perceiving to have wasted effort from the author), then it would be appropriate to downvote those comments after a certain number of iterations? In particular if you the question-asker seems to rarely be satisfied with the answers from the author, and as such not even you seem to get value out of the resulting threads.
To give an object-level answer to your question: I am quite confident that if you sit down for 5 minutes, with a timer, and generate potential meanings, you can find a plausible interpretation of what Vaniver meant by "authenticity" in that context, and I would take even odds that your plausible interpretation would hit pretty close to the intended meaning of what Vaniver meant.
I also generally think asking for clarifications is good, but in my experience as an author, it helps a lot for you to give any hint
...But my sense is that you would agree that when someone repeatedly inquires about aspects of posts that seem quite straightforward to you, in a way that results in lots of wasted effort of the author from your perspective (and associated complaints of perceiving to have wasted effort from the author), then it would be appropriate to downvote those comments after a certain number of iterations?
That depends on the following:
Are the aspects in question of the given posts important, or peripheral? (“What does this term, which seems to be referring to a concept that is at the very core of your argument, mean?” would be an important aspect of a post, for example.)
Are these inquiries routinely answered, straightforwardly and quickly, with clear, sensible answers?
Do the answers consist of things that were already in the post in the first place, or could easily be derived from the post (and/or trivial web searching, perhaps)?
For instance, suppose that, for example, you, repeatedly inquired about, let us say, the statistics used in this or that post on Less Wrong. Let us say that these inquiries were usually not answered—either not at all, or not satisfactorily. And now imagine
...Let us say that these inquiries were usually not answered—either not at all, or not satisfactorily. And now imagine that someone started downvoting these inquiries of yours.
Maybe we should write a post about this kind of conversational dynamic![1]
Alice asks Bob a question. Bob can't answer, either for legitimate or illegitimate[2] reasons, but doesn't want to straightforwardly say, "Sorry, I can't answer that because ..." for fear of losing face in front of the audience, so instead resorts to more opaque stonewalling tactics. Usually, Alice will eventually take a hint and give up. But if she doesn't, we have a high-stakes battle of wills adjudicated by the audience—will Bob be exposed as being phony, or will Alice be derided as a pedant?!
A legitimate reason for not being able to answer might be: the question is an isolated demand for rigor, where Bob doesn't have a rigorous formulation of his point, but thinks the non-rigorous version is good enough and should be conversationally "admissible." ↩︎
Regardless of whether I agree with your claim here (about which you are “quite confident”), I must point out that, in fact, this is not an object-level answer! I still don’t have an answer to my question, in fact!
Sorry, I meant this in the "more object-level than your general commenting patterns" sense. I will note that you asked why your comment was being downvoted, and since I was one of the people who had downvoted it, I figured I would explain. It doesn't seem like the right call for me to go into a response to your original question, given that I am replying to the part of your comment that's about voting patterns.
It would be the simplest thing in the world to simply respond with an explanation of what ‘authentic’/‘authenticity’ means.
No, it isn't the simplest thing in the world, and the implicit assumption that anything that isn't extremely straightforward to explain is assumed to be contendless, or in some sense problematic, is I think a major reason for why the resulting threads tend to reliably go badly.
We have to deal with the reality that sometimes a concept can be pointed at by a bunch of related concepts, in a way that still allows someone to comprehend a b
...Meta: sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel fast. Sometimes to get somewhere interesting you have to travel carefully. I think this disagreement comes up quite a bit in rationalist circles especially because of founder effects: the tension exists in Eliezer's writing as well.
In the tradition of What is Seen and What is Not Seen: Said doesn't see the posts that aren't written because people feel like they would have to write a sequence justifying themselves carefully for the thing they really want to talk about.
I think it is also quite valuable to slow down on aspects of status quo thinking and communicating that are usually quickly glossed over. Indeed, this is the heart of Buddhism. My own frustration isn't with method but that Said seems to choose non central examples often. What's interesting is that in this case authenticity does seem to be pretty central.
Anyway, I'm writing this partially in appreciation for what habryka is trying to communicate here, since it is high effort and in expectation low reward.
Wait a minute. You said that the concept in question (‘authenticity’) has a “pretty straightforward” meaning, to you. (This, allegedly, was the problem with my question: that the term, and concept, I asked about, was straightforward, and its meaning obvious and known, or easily inferred.)
But now you’re saying that it’s not straightforward to explain, and is “pointed at by a bunch of related concepts”, and it’s not “easy or low-effort” to write an explanation—and that this is the problem with my question (that answering it would take too much effort).
So which is it? Is my question too obvious and simple to bother answering it? Or is it too hard and complicated and time-consuming to answer? Or are you suggesting that it could be, somehow, both?
Let me ask you this: do you think I’m the only one who read this post, and thought “Hmm, ‘authentic’? ‘authenticity’? What does he mean by that…?” I mean, I’m no genius, but I’m not stupid, either; if I had trouble understanding what’s meant here, probably at least some others did, too. (Or do you disagree?)
And I’ve read a whole lot of Less Wrong stuff; do you think there might be other readers, who are, perhaps, even less immersed in the whole
...Hmm, so, I think you might have misunderstood my suggestion. My argument was not that in this and other cases standard usage is sufficient. My argument was that in order to actually bridge the inferential gap, it is a massive help to the author and the other commenters, if you point out a concrete problem with a plausible interpretation that comes to mind. I think generating that plausible interpretation takes about 5 minutes, is pretty straightforward, and is something that I would ask you to do.
However, in order to then actually bridge the gap, significant additional time is likely going to be required in people responding to each other. However, I would argue that how much time is required for that exchange will drastically change depending on how much you as a commenter will have given the author to work with.
This is something that both nshepperd's and quanticle's comments successfully do in this thread.
I should clarify that my substitution of "health" for "authenticity" was meant as an example only. I didn't think that's what Vaniver actually meant. The point I was trying to make is roughly the same one that Said is making: I didn't know know what concept the word "authentic" was pointing at in this case. To me, "authentic", as an adjective, is something that usually applies to things or people, not relationships. An authentic item is one that's of known provenance. An authentic person is one who is generally regarded as being honest and straightforward (i.e. not resorting to clever but technically true arguments). I could guess what an authentic relationship would be, but it would have be a guess, and the further clarification from Vaniver is certainly appreciated.
In general, I do not endorse proposing interpretations and then critiquing them. It's far too easy to put your words in the other person's mouth in those cases. I would actually claim that Said's original query, "What do you mean by authenticity here?" is superior to mine, because it leaves the question open-ended, and allows Vaniver to reply with further details rather than boxing them into a "Yes, I agree"/"No I disagree" set of alternatives.
I think I can take a stab at this; timing myself out of curiosity.
@Said: let me draw an analogy to a fictional online interaction (without implying that comment that started all of this is analogous in *all* relevant ways to the fictional one):
Author Andy: "...a destructive mode of communication."
Commenter Cody: "What do you mean by destructive in that context?"
If Andy had written something like "a tangerine mode of communication," it would be understandable if Cody (and most other readers) had *literally* no referents for "tangerine" which would cause that sentence to parse at all. If Andy had instead written something like "...a mode of communication harms the ability of conversational participants to reach agreement on the definition of terms [x, y, and z]," and Cody asked what "harms" meant in that context, as an outsider, it would be very difficult to understand where the communication had broken down, because "harms" is a widely-used term with referents that map relatively cleanly to the concepts at play, even if it is not the most common use for the term. "Destructive" is a more interesting cas...
Maybe there is a dialectal difference here? Because for me “authentic relationship” is more in the category of “tangerine mode of communication.” It is an applause light that can be used by a speaker to mean whatever they want, with no fixed meaning across contexts and speakers. It’s like calling something “morally good,” which is a meaningless statement unless you also specify the speaker’s morality. To me it stood out as just as obvious that “authentic relationship” was not sufficiently precise a phrase to use and deserved calling out for clarification, and so I was equally dumbfounded at the response Said got for asking the obvious question.
I find it surprising that you find definitions 1,2, 4, and 5 inapplicable. "Authentic" is used three times in the original post, and "authenticity" is used twice. "Authentic" is used as a modifier for "expression", "relationships", and "reaction".
Definition 1a from MW:
worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact
"Conforming to or based on fact" feels very similar to "the map corresponds to the territory".
Performing the substitution: "An expression that is worthy of acceptance or belief, as the expression (map) corresponds to the internal state of the agent that generated it (territory)."
This is not necessarily the most trivial possible leap, but to draw in another analogy... if we consider concept-space to a multidimensional space with connected nodes, the weight of the connection between "authentic" and "honest" is much stronger than between "authentic" and "tangerine". I don't know if you're agreeing with this part of Mark's claim:
It is an applause light that can be used by a speaker to mean whatever they want, wi...
Please don't call it "simply ask", in particular in a framework where you are setting up a lack of response as something that is socially punishable. As a concrete illustration of this effect, T3t did spend an hour trying to explain the relevant concept to you, with basically no apparent success. You asking just the one question above resulted in at least 1.5 hours of effort from me and T3t. Your question was not free, do not treat it as such.
This appears to be the default of what happens when you ask the questions that you are asking, in the way that you are asking them. People spend literally dozens of hours of engaging with you, only to feel like they end up having completely wasted their and your time. The primary thing that you are doing when you are asking things like this, instead yourself contributing interpretative effort to the comment section, is to offload the interpretative labor on others, usually unsuccessfully and with a large multiplier on the actual costs due to misunderstandings, miscommunications and underspecified questions.
The thing you are doing doesn't work. It is not sustainable, and it does not seem to result in any way, shape or form, in you reliabl
...No, it does not clearly demonstrate that. What it demonstrates is that you, and specifically you, do not understand the concept
Also quanticle, also nshepperd, and presumably lurkers who upvoted their comments.
that explaining it to you specifically is difficult.
I think it'd be fair to read the first paragraph of my post as implicitly setting my hopes for this post as "explaining it to Said." (In the second paragraph I say I'm not going to fully explain Circling, but if the core analogy that I'm trying to make is missing a crucial detail, that seems quite relevant.)
In a different recent post, I explicitly set my bar as "I ~80% expect this to seem like nonsense." I don't know how much of that post seemed like nonsense to Said, but I'd guess 'a lot', and nevertheless he left a detailed comment that struck me as a solid example of "yes, and" or "this fuzzy thing seems like it rhymes with the fuzzy thing you said."
Also quanticle, also nshepperd, and presumably lurkers who upvoted their comments.
Hmm, I am not sure of this. I agree that both quanticle and nshepperd shared Said's original question about the meaning of authenticity, but my guess is that they would not share his assessment that the explanation that has been provided by T3t above is completely inadequate or basically provides no further clarification of the pattern at hand, nor do I expect them to agree with Said's assessment after multiple rounds back and forth with you on the topic of authenticity.
The usual pattern of Said's comments as I experience them has been (and I think this would be reasonably straightforward to verify):
enough authors and users have experienced those follow-up discussions that the problems have backpropagated into a broader aversion to questions like Said's top-level question
Just want to provide one data point: that I agree with this.
I have not personally had many back-and-forths with Said, but I've read enough of them to have built up a sense of frustration with Said's communication style.
I find that he sometimes makes good points, but they're often (usually?) wrapped in a style that I personally find unpleasant.
I'm not sure if I can quickly or exhaustively describe what the problem is -- it's not that the comments are rude, per se. He's not calling people names or anything so blatant as that. But there's an attitude that I perceive in them, combined with a set of rhetorical moves that to me seem like bad form.
Maybe a term for the attitude / rhetorical move that I find frustrating would be: "weaponized bafflement". Said often expresses that he has no idea what someone could mean by something, or is totally shocked that someone could think two things are similar (e.g. grouping both reading the sequences and attending CFAR as ration...
I find myself thinking: if you’re so consistently unable to guess what people might mean, or why people might think something, maybe the problem is (at least some of the time) with your imagination.
Who cares who "the problem" is with? Text is supposed to be understood. The thing that attracted me to the Sequences to begin with was sensible, comprehensible and coherent explanations of complex concepts. Are we giving up on this? Or are people who value clear language and want to avoid misunderstandings (and may even be, dare I say, neuroatypical) no longer part of the target group, but instead someone to be suspicious of?
The Sequences exist to provide a canon of shared information and terminology to reference. If you can't explain something without referencing a term that is evidently not shared by everyone, and that you don't just not bother to define but react with hostility when pressed on, then ... frankly, I don't think that behavior is in keeping with the spirit of this blog.
Let me restate my core claims:
1) I think "I am having trouble understanding what you mean, the best guess I can come up with is X." is far more conducive to getting to clarity than "I have no idea what you mean." even when X feels quite unlikely to be what the person actually meant.
I am not asking the reader to read the mind of the author. I am asking them to generate at least one hypothesis about what the author might mean.
Do not forget the lesson of the Double Illusion of Transparency -- just as the author will think they have communicated clearly when they have not, someone asking a question will also think the question is clear when it has not in fact been understood.
2) Asking for clarification as a form of criticism is bad form (or at lease is a move that should be used sparingly).
Perhaps you suspect the author's thoughts are muddled and that shining the light of clarification on what they've written will expose this fact. You can say, "What do you mean by X?" And perhaps you will catch them in an error.
However, doing this all the time is annoying! Especially if it's unclear to the author whether you in fact are trying to work towar...
I think this once again presupposes a lot of unestablished consensus: for one, that it's trivial for people to generate hypotheses for undefined words, that this is a worthwhile skill to begin with, and that this is a proper approach to begin with. I don't think that a post author should get to impose this level of ideological conformance onto a commenter, and it weirds me out how much the people on this site now seem to be agreeing that Said deserves censure for (verbosely and repeatedly) disagreeing with this position.
And then it seems to be doing a lot of high-distance inference from presuming a "typical" mindset on Said's part and figuring out a lot of implications as to what they were doing, which is exactly the thing that Said wanted to avoid by not guessing a definition? Thus kind of proving their point?
More importantly, I at least consider providing hypotheses as to a definition as obviously supererogatory. If you don't know the meaning of a word in a text, then the meaning may be either obvious or obscured; the risk you take by asking is wasting somebody's time for no reason. But I consider it far from shown that giving a hypothesis shortens this time at all, and more importantly, there is none such Schelling point established and thus it seems a stretch of propriety to demand it as if it was an agreed upon convention. Certainly the work to establish it as a convention should be done before the readership breaks out the mass downvotes; I mean seriously- what the fuck, LessWrong?
However, on the topic of words in particular, I do think that simply asking, "What does X mean?" is usually not the best path forward.
Consider three cases:
For which of these cases does it make sense to just write, "What do you mean by X?"
1) For case 1, it seems most respectful of others' time to just google the term. If that answers your question, consider also leaving a comment saying, "For others who weren't familiar with X, it means ..."
2) For case 2, I'd recommend saying that you've looked it up and the definitions don't seem to match. Otherwise you might just get one of the standard definitions back when someone replies to your comment and still be confused. Also this lets others know that you're extending them the courtesy recommended in case 1.
3) For case 3, I think it depends on the specific case, and how non-standard the usage is.
3A) If y...
I remind readers to review the “Taboo your words” posts of the Human’s Guide to Words sequence. Asking for the meaning of words, even common words, is a rationalist’s truth finding technique. It’s not something to be persecuted.
Said is doing something similar, so I see it as a valuable contribution.
I appreciate hearing this counterpoint.
I wish there was a way to get the benefit of Said's pointed questioning w/o readers like me being so frustrated by the style. I suspect that relatively subtle tweaks to the style could make a big difference. But I'm not exactly sure how to get there from here.
For now all I can think of is to note that some users, like Wei Dai, ask lots of pointed and clarifying questions and never provoke in me the same kind of frustration that many of Said's comments do.
Why should Said be the one to change, though? Maybe relatively subtle tweaks to your reading style could make a big difference.
A "surprised bafflement" tone is often seen as a social attack because it's perceived as implying, "You should know this already, therefore I'm surprised that you don't, therefore I should have higher status than you." But that's not the only possible narrative. What happens if you reframe your reaction as, "He's surprised, but surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis—the fact that he's so cluelessly self-centered as to not be able to predict what other people know means that I should have higher status"?
Why should Said be the one to change, though?
Good question. When there are conflicts over norms, it's not obvious how to resolve them in general. I suppose the easy, though less preferred, solution would be some kind of appeal to the will of the majority, or to an authority. The harder, but better, way would be an appeal to a deeper set of shared norms. I'm not sure how tractable that is in this case though.
What happens if you reframe your reaction as, "He's surprised, but surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis—the fact that he's so cluelessly self-centered as to not be able to predict what other people know means that I should have higher status"?
This is in fact often my reaction. But I will note that neither social attacks nor the writings of clueless self-centered people are particularly fun to read. (Especially not when it seems to be both.)
That may be stating it overly harshly. I do think Said is an intelligent person and often has good points to make. And I find it valuable to learn that others are getting a lot of value from his comments.
The signal to noise (not exactly the right term) ratio has not seemed particularly favorable to me though. But perhaps there's yet some different reframing that I could do to be less frustrated (in addition to whatever changes Said might make).
Why should we have one set of norms at all? Should we really be driving towards cultural unity? Isn't it okay for there to be subsets of people who drive differently? Just learn to ignore what you don't find useful.
Maybe a term for the attitude / rhetorical move that I find frustrating would be: "weaponized bafflement". Said often expresses that he has no idea what someone could mean by something, or is totally shocked that someone could think two things are similar (e.g. grouping both reading the sequences and attending CFAR as rationality training), when to me it seems pretty easy to at least generate some hypotheses about what they might mean or why they might think something.
To me this particular move is part of a broader pattern used by Said and a few other common posters on here of using the Socratic method to make their point, which is frequently time consuming, annoying to answer, and IMO a bad tool for finding the truth.
Whenever I detect someone using the Socratic method in the comment section of my posts I ask them to more directly make their point, and in fact may add it to my author commenting guidelines.
my guess is that they would not share his assessment that the explanation that has been provided by T3t above is completely inadequate
This worries me because of double illusion of transparency concerns. That is, one frame we could have here is that Said is virtuously refusing to pretend to understand anything he doesn't understand. Suppose the version of "authentic" that is necessary to make this post work is actually quite detailed and nuanced, in ways that T3t's guess don't quite get at; then it seems like T3t and I might mistakenly believe that communication has taken place when it actually hasn't, whereas Said and I will have no such illusions.
If there are problems with this situation, I think they come from differing people having different expectations of how bad it is to not have communicated something to Said, and I think we fix that by aligning those expectations.
The usual pattern of Said's comments as I experience them has been (and I think this would be reasonably straightforward to verify)
This lines up with a model where Said is being especially rigorous when it comes to dependencies, and the audience isn't, and the audience has some random scattering of dependencies wh
...T3t's explanations seem quite useless to me. The procedure they describe seems highly unlikely to reach anything like a correct interpretation of anything, being basically a random walk in concept space.
It's hard to see what "I don't understand what you meant by X, also here's a set of completely wrong definitions I arrived at by free association starting at X" could possibly add over "I don't understand what you meant by X", apart from wasting everyone's time redirecting attention onto a priori wrong interpretations.
I'm also somewhat alarmed to see people on this site advocating the sort of reasoning by superficial analogy we see here:
“Conforming to or based on fact” feels very similar to “the map corresponds to the territory”.
Performing the substitution: “An expression that is worthy of acceptance or belief, as the expression (map) corresponds to the internal state of the agent that generated it (territory).”
So, overall, I'm not very impressed, no.
I was not describing the process I use to interpret novel linguistic compositions such as "authentic relationship" - my brain does that under the hood, automatically, in a process that is fairly opaque to me; despite that, the results are sufficiently accurate that I don't spend hours trying to resolve minutiae, even in highly complex technical domains.
I was attempting to use an analogy with word embeddings in multi-dimensional space to explain why the way you approach information-gathering has asymmetrical costs. I can't come up with another analogy, because your response is totally non-informative with respect to how/why/where my first analogy failed to land. Did you notice that you didn't even tell me whether you're familiar with the concepts used? I have literally zero bytes of information with which to attempt to generate a more targeted analogy.
Would it not be easy for him simply to say that?
This doesn't really seem material to the point I was trying to discuss, but (I imagine) it's because there can be a trade-off between density and precision when trying to convey information. (And, also, how is he supposed to know which parts of ...
Let's try: "Authenticity" is an opposite of "pretending".
There are situations where it is useful to pretend to have thoughts or feelings, to manipulate other people's perception of us. This can be relatively straightforward, such as signaling loyalty to a group by displaying positive emotions to things associated with the group, and negative emotions to enemies of the group. Or more complicated, such trying to appear harmless in order to deceive opponents, or pretending to be irrational about something as a way to signal credible precommitment.
As a first approximation, "authenticity" means communicating one's thoughts and feelings as one feels them, without adding the thoughts and feeling made up for strategic purposes.
This is complicated by the fact that humans are not perfect liars; they do not have a separate brain module for truth and another brain module for deception. Sometimes deception is best achieved by self-deception, which raise the question what "authenticity" means for a self-deceiving person. But going further, self-deception is also often imperfect, and requires some kind of active maintenance, for example noticing thoughts that contradict the projected image, and removing them. In this case, "authenticity" also includes abandoning the maintenance, and acknowledging the heretical thoughts.
I looked for definitions of the word "authentic", but that only turned up synonyms like "genuine", and the meaning it has in speaking of the authenticity of an antique (i.e. it is what someone is selling it as).
So I searched for /authentic relationships/, which turned up a whole world of fluff and reversible advice.
About the least fluffy but informative thing in the first page of Google results was this. But I am not sure there is any more to this than in a horoscope. Can those who know what they mean by "authenticity" rate that description of it?
If I pick up a mathematics textbook and leaf through it, I can easily determine where I and it are relative to each other on the map of mathematical knowledge. I will know if I'm already familiar with what it covers, or am slightly acquainted, or would have to do a lot of other study to get to where it starts from. But with the cited link and all the others, I cannot really tell. And it is the same with descriptions of Circling.
BTW, something which puts me off "Circling" is the name. It suggests to me the image of a pack of wolves circling their prey. Or "self-criticism sessions" in th...
This comment of mine (also available on my user page) seems to have disappeared completely in the move. I'm unsure if other comments and subthreads dissappeared.
I also apologize for breaking a lot of the comment-permalinks in that thread
It looks like the post comment-counter is also broken. (The header for this post says "4 comments".)
A lot of the discussion on this post ended up being about LessWrong norms. I've moved that particular thread over to the comments here, and left a comment there pointing over here.
(Some of those comments, including the initial one, were object-level relevant to this post. I apologize for moving all of them indiscriminately. Our comment-moving-features are a bit janky and it's easier to move an entire thread than individual subthreads. I also apologize for breaking a lot of the comment-permalinks in that thread, and we'll look into fixing those. Meanwhile, you can actually still hover-over the comments in question on LW to see a preview of the comment, and you can also copy the comment-hash from the link and apply it to the new post to get a working link)