I try to keep my contributions relevant, and I think I'm applying a significantly higher standard than mere "words that [I] can then respond to."
AFAIK, that's accurate.
I would say the off-topicness of the hobby horse is not actually the central problem with a charging hobby horse. The central problem would be simply persistently misunderstanding the author.
This is made worse by being framed as a correction, because it's a kind of challenge--a high-salience push for engagement. Which is perfectly fine to make, but IMO you should then be trying to correct the author's actual opinions. In the Tree thread, you respond to written words, which makes sense; but then you are pretty slow to question the background philosophical stance that you've imagined the author to have, which to me seems rude. Like, you can imagine a hostile TV interviewer having a guest on and being like "So why do you think it's ok to kill babies?" and the guest is like "Of course I don't think that, what I'm saying is that 3-week fetus has no neurons, so it's not sentient, so it's not a moral cost to abort" and the interviewer is like "I see. So why don't you value human life?". I mean your behavior is not very bad IMO, not like the TV interview, but it's structurally similar. Does this make any sense?
The off-topicness is relevant for two reasons. First of all, it's an additional annoyance, in that the author "is being dragged in" (whatever this should mean in context) to a topic that's less of interest to them. Second of all, it's relevant because hobby horses are a thing, and they tend to produce [persistent misunderstanding, perhaps framed as corrections], which then tend to also be off-topic since hobby horses tend to be off-topic.
I think "Explicitly confirm authorial intent before criticizing" is not a good practice for an async public forum, because it adds way too much friction to the publication of valuable criticisms. (Confirming intent seems good in syncronous conversations, where it's not as costly for the discussion process to block waiting for the author's Yes/No/IDK.)
That's fair. Let me clarify: I'm not especially saying "ask and then wait". Rather I'm suggesting for example that you state the position you're arguing against; ask "Is that roughly what you think?"; and then continue with your response, maybe saying "If so:" or "Anyway, I'll respond to that position I stated:". You could add "I think so, because you wrote X" if you want. (I think this argues in favor of synchronous convos generally. Personally, I am much nicer in synchronous convos.) I'd also recommend
- Keeping in mind that you might have misunderstood the author's intent/positions, e.g. by imagining a position they don't hold;
- Updating quickly about their positions (of course I don't mean be overcredulous, but.).
I would guess that you in particular put a lot of effort into this, so IDK if there's an update you're supposed to make. But I do think the specific example I used in the OP exhibits the pattern I describe.
Anyway:
Maybe I'd like to zoom out a bit. I'd probably leave this thread to rest, but it's of course fair for you to want to hash out what if anything was objectionable about your comments in the Tree thread.
1Thank you. IDK if it's closer, it's still quite incorrect, but I greatly appreciate the effort.
[Edit: Just to state this: I think Dai was coming from good intentions, e.g. to think about important and interesting things. On reflection: I stand by something being unhelpful about the behavior pattern that I'm claiming I have engaged in, that you have engaged in, and that I claim Dai has engaged in; but also, I don't think it's some egregious transgression; I think I overreacted and I would like figure out how to handle discussion more gracefully and non-antagonistically; I value open thoughtful critical discussion and am grateful when people are interested in discussing things related to my writing. I also sorta meant this OP as being somewhat playful, but also I was annoyed, so it might have been more antagonizing than ideal.]
[Edit 2: I'm going to go through some of the points in more detail, because it seems like I haven't successfully explained the pattern clearly enough yet, so I want to try to make things clearer to Zack. But, I don't want this detailed wall of text to imply that the situation is some big deal; the behavior I'm discussing is not that bad even if you completely buy my perspective; I don't mean to harp on it, I just want to answer Zack's questions.]
Dai is wrong to implicitly ask "Why not just not defer in this case?"
I do not think Dai is wrong to ask that question. I think it's a good and important question.
I don't think the question was super inexplicit. In his first comment, the last sentence was "In other words, if you were going to spend your career on AI x-safety, of course you could have become an expert on these questions first.". I followed up with a response to that.
I would say that the fact that his first comment quoted my statement about "Yudkowsky = best AGI X-derisk strategist", and most of the words were arguing against that, confused the topic. I thought that literal statement was what he wanted to argue against, because he quoted it. Subsequently he did not seem to engage in that specific question, instead starting to develop a different question about different aspects of being a strategic thinker (which is also interesting, but even more off-topic, which is fine, but also confusing).
you think that the reason Dai is wrong to implicitly ask "Why not just not defer in this case?" is because you think that's not relevantly on-topic
I do think it's off-topic, but again, being off-topic is fine. I think it's polite to acknowledge this, e.g. sometimes if I'm responding to something other than one of the main threads of a post I will (or think I ought to even if I don't) say "Nitpick:" or "Off-topic, but:" or "I didn't read the post carefully, just responding to [quote]:". But being maybe mildly impolite in this way is not by itself the issue I have with that thread (though it is one element of the pattern I describe in the OP).
because you think that the implied question falsely presupposes that the post author is not aware of why deference is harmful
Let me venture a description of the events from Dai's perspective. I will write Imaginary!Dai to emphasize that this is not Dai's perspective, but my attempt to guess a plausible-to-me way his experience might have been. [I should maybe have similarly used Straw!Dai in the dialogue in the OP--though I did try to make that somewhat accurate, albeit abstracted and only a subset of the original thread, so I also don't want to imply that I'm not asserting it.]
From Imaginary!Dai's perspective, Imaginary!Dai has a question-blob (perhaps a hobby horse--which is fine/good to have), which is about strategy, and deference, and Yudkowsky being deferred to and over-deferred to, and why did that happen, and what bad effects it had, and how to do strategy well individually and as groups, and so on. So then there's Tsvi's post, and Imaginary!Dai starts some lines of discussion, relating to his question-blob. Tsvi is replying in the thread, and Imaginary!Dai is continuing the discussion. Tsvi's sorta going off on slight-tangents, not quite focusing on the interesting/important things, so Imaginary!Dai is somewhat continuing the interesting lines of discussion, while responding to some of Tsvi's comments in ways that further the interesting parts. Then Tsvi freaks out and bans him.
Ok. So, that would be among my mainline guesses of experiences that Dai was having. I think this possible perspective is empathizable-with, and is mostly fine. It's also unfortunately perfectly compatible with my description of a charging hobby horse. I don't defend and endorse all of my behavior in response, but on the question of whether Dai's behavior had a significant inappropriate pattern, I continue to think yes.
(Whereas I think, and I think that Dai thinks, that the question is relevantly on-topic, because even if everyone in the conversation agrees on the broad outlines of why deference is harmful, they might disagree on the nitty-gritty details of exactly how harmful and exactly why, and litigating the nitty-gritty details of an example that was brought up in the post might help in evaluating the post's thesis.)
I definitely agree that we might (and in fact do) disagree about various details like that, and that this is in general an important topic.
I'm not sure I understand how it's on topic though. The topic of the post is "If you're going to defer, how can you alleviate the problems with that?".
I think it would be on topic to say "We should have been using a different procedure to choose who to defer to" or "We should have been deferring on different questions" or "We should have deferred in a different pattern, e.g. to a larger group of people or with different of us deferring to a wider range of single people". It could also be well on-topic to say "We should have been deferring to someone else", e.g. because Yudkowsky was visibly not the best strategic AGI X-derisk thinker; and so it could be on-topic to discuss "Was Yudkowsky the best AGI X-derisk strategic thinker?" to discuss whether there was a mistaken choice in deferee.
But note that, on that thread, Dai was not AFAICT arguing "We should have deferred to someone else". He was arguing that we should have deferred less overall. (Which IMO is technically off-topic, though of course quite adjacent. Which is fine/good to discuss. In my first reply to him, I did engage on that question.) He sort of kept discussing "Was Yudkowsky the best AGI X-derisk strategic thinker?"--except AFAICT he completely ignored my initial response "But it seems strange to be counting down..." on that topic, so it was unclear to me whether he was trying to discuss that topic with me.
Anyway:
You wrote earlier:
But it really seems like you do have a significant disagreement with Dai about the extent to which deference to Yudkowsky was justified.
Plausibly! I think we both think he was over-deferred to, probably by "a lot". But plausibly we have different "a lot"s.
You even seem to ridicule Dai for this ("And then you're like 'Ha. Why not just not defer?'"). This seems like a real and substantive disagreement, not a hallucination on Dai's part.
On my interpretation, my statements make it pretty clear that I think:
- People in general defer a lot, and this is quite bad (and implicitly therefore they should defer less in total).
- But, people have to defer a lot due to cognitive costs and the complexity of the world (so the solution can't just be "don't defer", or even "don't defer in your field", though it can and IMO should be "strive to un-defer on as many key questions as feasible in your field").
So, geniune question, what did Dai mean by
By saying that he was the best strategic thinker, it seems like you're trying to justify deferring to him on strategy (why not do that if he is actually the best), while also trying to figure out how to defer "gracefully", whereas I'm questioning whether it made sense to defer to him at all,
The two natural interpretations I can think of are:
- You, Tsvi, by saying he's the best strategist, are justifying that people, instead of un-deferring-to Yudkowsky when they can, should continue deferring to him.
- Insofar as people were deferring, they should have defered not to him at all (but by implication, someone else instead).
I believe I would have ruled out 2, since at that point it did not seem to me that he was putting forth some other candidate as an alternate deferree, preferable to Yudkowsky.
So I interpreted 1, which is why I flew off the handle (which I'm sorry about), given that I'd repeatedly stated that I was not arguing in favor of deferring more than you have to.
(In fact, my actual intentions in bringing up Yudkowsky, was pretty off-hand; right now I think my original intention in even adding the phrase "being the best..." was just to descriptively explain why he was deferred to so much, though I state here that it was for emphasis, which is also plausible.)
Separately, as I mentioned above the question of "how, and how much, are we actually forced to defer" is important and interesting, and maybe technically off-topic or something but a good thread and something I engaged with in my first response.
1So what is this pattern? I'd call it The Charge of Hobby Horse. It's where you ride your hobby horse into battle in the comments, crashing through obstacles such as "the author did not even disagree with me, so there's nothing to actually have a battle about".
Yeah, I'd noticed that impulse in myself before. I'm consciously on the lookout for it, but it's definitely disappointing to run into something that seems like an opportunity to have an argument about your pet topic, only to realize that that opportunity is a mirage.
1
FWIW
- I find the situation saddening, and I would be very sad to see Wei decrease his participation in LW.
- When you banned Wei, I remember thinking that this was an overreaction.
- I think that Wei's current concerns regarding the impact of [the post and the meme it's spreading] on how LW views him or his ideas are an overreaction.
- I.e., I don't think there's much risk of this turning out very bad for Wei regarding how people on LW perceive him or his ideas or something?
- But: Things like that are often said in an attempt to gaslight, which I don't want to do or look like I'm doing. So take it as an observational report rather than judgment (if that makes sense).
- Something like: I believe what I'm saying is true, but I'm not trying to use any normative modality to say that people "should" believe me. (I would like to make a locutionary analogy of the distinction between preferences and bids, but I don't think there are (even locally) established words for this distinction ("report" vs "claim"?).)
- But: Things like that are often said in an attempt to gaslight, which I don't want to do or look like I'm doing. So take it as an observational report rather than judgment (if that makes sense).
- I.e., I don't think there's much risk of this turning out very bad for Wei regarding how people on LW perceive him or his ideas or something?
- The entire thing reminds me a bit of an emotional/discursive amplifying echo chamber, where Alice behaves in a way that causes Bob to react somewhat emotionally to it and then Alice reacts even emotionally'er to Bob's reaction, and the cycle continues for a bit, out of proportion to Alice's original behavior, which could be avoided if any party at some early point unilaterally decided to abandon this emotional thread.
- I liked the charge of the hobby horse post when it came out and considered it valuable.
- I internalized the concept it introduced, but rarely use it in conversations.
- I don't think that's that much evidence regarding Wei's concern that the concept is already out of the box, because I should be expected to be an early concept adopter in cases like this one.
- I think it's possible but unlikely that the concept will turn out to be a non-trivial sort of infohazard ... conceptual hazard? That is, that it will skew people's thinking, giving them a handy label to dismiss people's repeated critiques or whatever as "charging their hobby horses".
- It generally seems to me that, on the one hand, one would wish that moving meta in a discussion would be helpful/healthy. E.g., if you notice some trend in your interlocutor's participation in conversations that is relevant for how you and other people orient to this person's participation in conversations, then identifying the trend should be helpful, either by giving you better heuristics for engagement or by discussing the thing with your interlocutor on a higher level, which then helps you resolve things, or at least for modeling them (and general social/psychological dynamics) better. But what often seems to happen is that people take those sorts of moves as attacks on some deep aspect of their person or something like that (?).
- E.g., I was once in a 3-person conversation involving an increasingly heated factual disagreement between the other two people. At some point, Alice told Bob that [they're gonna use Bob's reaction to what Alice was saying as an example of the dynamic they were having a heated debate about]. This made Bob's attitude toward the conversation even worse.
- I internalized the concept it introduced, but rarely use it in conversations.
- It seems to me that a big issue with the discourse around this concept is that, like one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens, also one man's charge of the hobby horse is another man's valuable, if sometimes annoying, reminder that there's this incredibly important and systematically neglected issue related to things being talked about here. (Maybe it's just a convoluted way of saying that the judgments of whether something should be counted as the charge of the hobby horse are very observer-dependent and the disagreements are often rooted in some deep-ish beliefs/values/convictions.)
- Many of the caveats you end up with in this post's conclusion section make the boundary of the concept pretty vague and observer-dependent. As you say, "there are a lot of comments that look kinda similar to a Charge of the Hobby Horse, but that are good".
- E.g., take your and Wei's examples from this very post. To me, both look like reasonable and thoughtful people thinking that ~[AI risk] is ~[the biggest thing ever] and also that people working on this issue seem to be systematically blind/oblivious to a very important thing X. It makes sense for such people to bring up X often and widely in tangentially but significantly (in their judgment) related discursive contexts, regardless of whether some people on the other side of some sort of worldview spectrum judge this as them charging their hoppy horses (unless the latter outweighs the benefits of the former).
- I generally don't recall people on LW being visibly annoyed about you talking about your thing X, and the only two people on LW I noticed being annoyed about Wei's thing X have been you and Richard. (But I'm probably significantly below average when it comes to noticing this, so it should be taken with a grain of salt.)
- I would want to say that there are clearer examples, e.g., people bringing up racism, social justice, the Omnicause, etc., into nearly every single conversation. But, similarly, it looks reasonable from their perspective, and I can disagree with the perspective that makes this behavior reasonable to them, because it is the perspective I find unreasonable.
- Or take anti-abortion activists. Pro-choice people would condemn them for their radicalism/extremism or whatever, but, in a sense, what are they supposed to do if they believe that those people are literally killing little babies?
- There is a partly related phenomenon of people adopting a particular way to view certain things, which makes them unable to adopt/understand alternative ways of viewing those things (and is possibly the case in many of the cases from the last bullet point). But one can do things that look to some like the charge of the hobby horse, without having this issue.
- Maybe the judgment of the [charge of the hobby horse]-adjacent phenomena involves/[should involve] a spectrum of (at least): (1) reasonableness of the position guiding the charge; (2) the relevance of the topic of the charge to the topic of the discussion being charged into, even given the stated beliefs of the charger; (3) some sort of vague psychological virtue stuff, like obnoxiousness, smugness, apparent wanting to feel important / grab the center of attention, etc.[1]
- Low-confidence-speculating, possibly a reasonable way out is some sort of [veil of ignorange-y]/[Schelling fence-y] rule like: We allow those sorts of [charge of the hobby horse]-adjacent behaviors but no more, because if we allow more, then all hell might break loose.
- ^
In case this needs to be said, I don't think any of the three examples discussed in this post involve a significant amount of (3).
1I don't think I should, I think it's better to talk about it. I added a link to your comment before my gloss.
1I think it is sad to move straight to a ban. I don't believe that one always needs to put in a lot of effort before being able to accurately come to the conclusion that a commenter's bad behavior is not going to get better, and you don't owe every commenter (say) a dozen hours of advice and mediation, but I think that for long-time users who have made lots of good contributions, a second chance is a good idea, along with giving a warning with a comment pointer to what they thought was bad.
1My understanding of your position on what? Is it:
- Whether LW should allow unilateral author moderation at all? I've already given up on trying to convince the LW team about this. Are you saying that you want to reopen this issue? Or,
- Whether you endorse the specific kind of moderation that Tsvi did, namely to ban someone without warning, and then try to discuss it afterwards? I don't think I've seen the mods talk about this before, hence I have no understanding of your position and am asking about it for the first time?
1Definitely makes sense to put clearer guidance on how to use various mod powers as an author.
There's an issue where people might treat them differently.
Part of my model here, which probably wouldn't make sense as part of the mod-guidance, is that Wei Dai has been around awhile and has a good track record of generally thoughtful contribution. Also, he's like one of ~20 people who probably will be able to meaningfully contribute to (some of) the topics I think you want to talk about. So, I think it would have made more sense to put more effort into back-and-forth in that case.
1Ok. You're probably right. Seems like a bad result though. But I don't necessarily see a good way to get a better result.
1
Crosspost from my blog.
[Epistemic status: !! 🚨 Drama Alert 🚨 !! discoursepoasting, LWslop]
Case 1: You only get six words
In 2024, the MATS team published a post, originally titled "Talent Needs in Technical AI Safety".
I, a hero, made this comment and elaborated in the ensuing comment thread. The content isn't so important here—basically, I was objecting to a certain framing in the post, which tied into a general issue I had with the broader landscape of people nominally working on decreasing AGI X-risk.
Now, I have not actually read this post. (I kinda skimmed it and read parts.) So I don't actually know what's in it. The post's description of itself, from the introduction:
Well, that sounds like a lot of work, and I believe that they definitely did write about several ideas coming from that work. My comment was not about any of that—which makes sense, given that I didn't read the post—but that did not stop my comment from being the second highest-upvoted comment, and dominating the discussion on that forum.
Is this bad? My comment was fine; I made an important remark, wasn't super disrespectful, clarified that I was talking about a broader phenomenon in the community... And yet, from another perspective, what happened is:
[There might be worse examples of me doing this Pattern, but I didn't immediately find them in the first page or two of my top-voted comments.]
Case 2: Trees may be cool but how should concepts work in general??
When eukaryote wrote a very nice post about trees ("There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)"), Zack_M_Davis had a reply. Follow that link if you want to read the whole thread (not very long). But I'll give an abstracted (and maybe somewhat unfair) paraphrase:
Then eukaryote
claps back and DESTROYS Zack with CLEAR CALM EXPLANATION of why his interaction was KINDA NOT GREAT!!gives a discourse-level response, which I'll quote here almost in full (bolding mine):[Note: Zack was the first association in my head to this pattern—so I was slightly surprised to find that it took a bit of effort to find an example. Some of his other top-voted comments are similarly confrontational, but do not exhibit The Pattern. E.g. here he does something superficially similar—but, even though it's technically off-topic it's close enough, and also he explicitly signposts the slightly-off-topicness, and also it's a useful comment, and I think its main argument doesn't misunderstand anything from the original post. Also Zack apologized to eukaryote. Maybe there are other examples I didn't quickly find.]
Case 3: The Bannination
I wrote a post ("The problem of graceful deference"). Wei Dai made a comment with an ensuing thread. You can read it there; I'll again provide an abstracted gloss (which is not trying to be a comprehensive summary [ETA: Wei states here that "I think it's a significant misrepresentation of my words (that makes me appear more unreasonable than I was)", which I don't agree with.]):
I think this is another clear example of The Pattern. (If you're trying to interpret the full thread: X is "Yudkowsky is the best strategic thinker on AGI X-risk." and Y is something like "People should have been deferring to Yudkowsky as much as they did.".)
[Note: I'm unbanning Wei Dai from commenting on my posts so that he can respond here if he wants. By default I won't reban him. I prefer and would like to support open discourse within a community. But I reserve the normative right to block trolling.]
The Pattern
So what is this pattern? I'd call it The Charge of Hobby Horse. It's where you ride your hobby horse into battle in the comments, crashing through obstacles such as "the author did not even disagree with me, so there's nothing to actually have a battle about". A bit more explicitly:
This comes off as misinterpretation; especially, "mistakenly" reading in a bunch of disagreement that isn't there. But really it's disinterpretation: You're searching for something to argue with, so you can talk about your thing. You're not trying to understand what the author actually thinks, so communication becomes difficult.
Conclusion
Mainly I just want to describe this behavior pattern. And also ask: Please don't fabricate fights just so you get to talk about your thing! That's pretty rude!
It's a bit tough because there are a lot of comments that look kinda similar to a Charging Hobby Horse, but that are good. It's fine to make corrections. It's fine to request for the author to give opinions. It's fine and good to use someone's post as a way of discussing some amorphous diaphanous distributed social pattern that is otherwise hard to point at.
It's fine to say things that are kinda off-topic, though it helps to acknowledge you're doing that. I would say it's even fine to comment on a post that you have not fully read, as long as you say you're doing that. If you're responding to The Broader Discourse, Not This Post Specifically™, then it would be nice to say you're doing that. Also, unless you're pretty sure what the author thinks, it's always good to quickly restate what you think they think, in a sentence or two.
And remember, you always have the option to write about your hobby horse in your own post or other forum. If it is actually relevant to the original post that got you wanting to rant a little, you can link to your separate write-up in a comment on that original post.
Anyway, thanks for your attention on this very something matter.