I agree, but I'm too busy atm to code it, so I thought this quick take was worth it anyway.

Please include a vote in your annual review comments! Often there are comments with mixed takes, or short comments with positive takes, but I don't know how it shapes up. Is this strong positive only a +4? Is this weakly positive actually a +9? Is this highly mixed review a -1 or a +9? It helps to know for many reasons (for example, does this person think I should be giving a different vote to my current one?).

This isn't literally always the right call, but I think it should probably be considered the default.

+4. This has helped extend my thinking on the toxoplasma of rage, to understanding what causes people to talk about things a lot.

+4. Since reading this I have oriented a bit more toward being wholesome and not cut off parts of me or my mind or my relationships to others in unhealthy ways. My comment on the post from when it was published is a good pointer to the kind of thinking I've been doing more of.

I think this is useful as a meditation on a theme more than a successful articulation (I agree with Habryka's curation notice saying that "it's in some important respects failing at the kind of standard that I normally hold LessWrong posts to"). I wish there was a better post than it, but there isn't, so I'm voting for it.

+4. I just got around to reading this post that I had heard was very good but also a slog. Well, it wasn't much of a slog after all (apparently it's been edited), and it was indeed quite interesting.

I was commenting on another post to a colleague, and I said "It made all the wrong choices, but it did paint a whole picture". I was saying there's a virtue in trying to actually answer ambitious questions. Similarly, here for instance, I don't think I'm sold on the lead/follow as being a stand-in for big/small, or its relationship to dominance/prestige, but it did feel like it was explaining some parts of the world. The parts on culture clashes also felt like gears I will be keeping in mind when meeting other cultures.

Also the diagrams were all great & helpful.

Overall I am pretty confident that this is in the top 50 posts of the year, and I will move my vote to a +9 if I feel concerned that it isn't being given enough attention.

+1. I find both this and the post it is responding to somewhat confusing. I'll jot down my perspective and what's confusing.

My current take is that ITT-passing is most natural when you are trying to coordinate with someone or persuade someone in-particular. When negotiating with political blocs, it is helpful to know what they want and how they are thinking about a problem in order to convince them of a particular outcome you care about; and when you wish to persuade a particular person, it helps to understand their perspective, so that you can walk from that perspective to yours.

I think that steelmanning is best for positions rather than for people. Finding the strongest argument for X and for not-X is a pretty fundamental part of figuring out whether X is true.

It seems to me that Bensinger et al (i.e. along with Yudkowsky/Karnofsky) are pushing back against forces where people pretend to be having dialogue with them, but keep talking past them for whatever reason; they are performing dialogue and not actually doing it. They claim that one of the common things people do instead is describe the version of their position that seems strongest to them instead of engaging with their actual position.

I am willing to believe them that this is a common negative experience of theirs, but it is not great to then say that "finding the strongest argument for a position I don't hold" is "bad".

Anyway, the reason I'm confused is that I don't know which of the two is more 'normal' or 'niche'. They both seem entirely natural in different contexts. Sometimes it's worth trying to understand people's perspectives more, sometimes it's worth just focusing on intellectual reasoning wherever it takes you, and what other people think is simply not relevant.^[1] Which of these situations is more common? That's not currently clear to me.

Probably Zack makes a stronger case than I am for steelmaning being more 'normal', but after having just now quickly re-read the post I could not pass his ITT well enough to state it; I thought it probably worth jotting down my perspective anyway.

1. ^{^}

   Aside: I have a hazy sense that Zack (in this post) seems to undervalue learning to pass the ITT of minds very different from one's own, of finding very different perspectives on the world and coming to understand them. I have found this a fruitful way to see parts of the world I have not seen before (as a pointer, I think it valuable to develop many different shoulder advisors), even while it is the case that most of the time it is best to just talk about how the world works rather than people's perspectives on it.

(I nearly wrote a comment saying it was blatantly wrong. For instance, I think I often write things with the intent to expand the space of things that people feel comfortable saying on LessWrong. But I didn't comment because I felt bad being so agro about one line in a post I hadn't read in case I misunderstood the context.)

I think the answer is either "you don't know enough about the specifics to have actionable advice" or "return to basic principles". I generally think that, had they been open about Altman blatantly lying to the board about things, and that Murati and Sutskever were the leaders of the firing, then I think there would've been (a) less scapegoating and (b) it would've been more likely that Altman would've failed his coup.

But I don't know the details to be confident about actionable advice here.

Most of the people I heard from at the afterparty had not been to Solstice. Several didn't even know what it was. 

Interesting. Could be good to have spaces that are for Solstice-attendees-only, if this were to continue to be the case.

Nothing in stone yet, but we're currently considering running it again within the next 6 months.