The main reasons I didn't use that title were that the piece I'm responding to doesn't (Lack of social grace is also not always epistemic virtue! Sometimes it's pure unforced error!)

IUUC, the "Epistemic" in the title of LoSGiaEV is intended as the qualifier - LoSG isn't an unqualified virute. In the first 3 paragraphs LoSGiaEV lays out what it means by that qualifier. I feel like LoSGiaLoS would be improved if it engaged more with the nuances.

I assume you mean "having the potential to become disastrous; at a point of crisis"

Yes

"Hey moron there's a car coming" is worse than "There's a car coming" right?

Yes, but both are worse than just shouting "CAR". Being shouted at feels bad, along with the implications that you weren't being careful enough / are a bad driver / are stupid for not looking. When I was younger I was in a car with someone who I respected who was texting as they drove. I saw a car coming but was initially socially nervous and tried to politely get their attention. This didn't work and in the end I had to shout at them. They felt pretty bad about it but it worked.

Or take expressing disapproving comments or judgements; I've often seen people give feedback that only points out one or two flaws with no further commentary. I later learned that the person giving feedback loved most of the piece. 

I think this should mainly be orthogonal to social grace. In my initial comment I deliberately put in the bits I agreed with, not because I wanted to be socially gracious but because I wanted to accurately portray what I thought. 

There's a great scene where a scientist is in a room full of people congratulating themselves on the Chernobyl disaster being not that big a deal and being well in hand, and stands up to say things are not fine.

Unfortunately I can't view the video because it's copyright blocked. It sounds like a good example of when being socially gracious is useful. 

My counterpoint would be to consider what culture led to the scientist having to waste his time on multiple explanations. Should a less socially adept scientist have been ignored? 

In pushing the culture of LessWrong we should be wary of such problems. My personal feeling is that LessWrong at the moment is in about the right place on the "Gracious" vs "Honest" pareto front for a given social skill level.

Tying this in with the car example, my wife and I have an agreement when one of us driving. If the passenger sees something dangerous that they think the driver might not have seen, they're allowed to shout this with no concern for social grace and the driver should not take this as a personal slight.

I feel like I agree with almost everything that is said here, while finding myself concerned about the overall feeling of the post and the effect on LW if applied as is.

I think this stems from the title which isn’t quite what the article argues for. 

I think that the article persuasively argues that:

1. The play off between social grace and honesty can change with skill at social grace
2. With high social grace skill the cost of being socially graceful is lower than you might think
3. In many circumstances being socially graceful is worth it

This doesn’t quite add up to Lack of Social Grace is a Lack of Skill.

This is especially true in critical situations. If I acknowledge that being socially graceful creates even a slight loss of honesty/accuracy then this could have very large costs if the implication of the decision is critical enough. 

If LW conversations are intended to be more often about critical situations then we should hope that our conversations are closer to the bottom right of our own Pareto front than the top left.

I think without specifically acknowledging this and with the title as it is the post could easily end up pointing people in the wrong direction.

One of my favourite LW post types is “something that I had a vague sense of being identified and fleshed out”

This is a great example of that.

In my experience, people thinking badly about me isn’t upstream of the social punishment of losing resources, people thinking badly of me IS the social punishment.

Evolutionarily speaking I would guess that worrying about what people think of me is important in order to allow me to get resources but my emotions are implemented on the social level, not the resource level.

(E.g. I don’t know any LWers IRL and will get very little resource from them but it would still feel bad if people had a bad opinion of me)

The Co-Op’s purchase of Somerfield (£1.57b) would seem like an interesting case study - why did they decide to go ahead with this? Did it actually benefit staff in the long run?

Yeah, I think that clarifies my thoughts - IMO using the word purpose is not ok in these other perspectives unless you actually mean a person had that purpose. it brings in connotations that someone has this purpose for which we then assign moral blame when the real question may be competence. And then, when there is moral blame, separating that from a competence issue is harder.

Much better IMO to say “this system isn’t achieving its purpose” than to say “this system has this other purpose” unless that’s what you mean - you are claiming that some designer(s) have this other purpose.

I’m not familiar specifically with HSR but my guess is that there are multiple purposes from multiple people. Some designers have the purpose to improve transport links, some want a big project to make their name and some want a jobs program. Systems can have multiple purposes and trying to narrow it down to a single one oversimplifies things.

I don’t think this works for general systems. For POSIWID the purpose of a car is to to get you for A to B. I don’t think POSIWIR returns a result - cars aren’t rewarded.

Having said that, I do think it’s much more interesting than POSIWID and, for human systems, more likely to yield sensible answers.

My take would be that purpose comes from conscious minds - the purpose of a system is what the designer intends. This is true even if the designer is rubbish at their job and their system doesn’t achieve the purpose they intend. When we don’t know what the designer intends we try to work it out by looking at what the system does or what it rewards.

This declares by fiat that non-engineered systems have no purpose but I think I’m ok with that. The purpose of a rabbit is not to make baby rabbits - rabbits just are. Saying rabbits have a purpose is to anthropomorphise evolution.

Quick note that I can't open the webpage via my institution (same issue on multiple browsers). Their restrictions can be quite annoying and get triggered alot. I can view it myself easily enough on phone but if you want this to get out beware trivial inconveniences and all that...

Firefox message is below.

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to ifanyonebuildsit.com. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s).

Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP

• The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
• Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.

Do dragon unbelievers accept this stance? My impression is that dragon agnosticism would often be considered almost as bad as dragon belief.

I’m confused as to how the fits in with UK politics. I don’t think the minority party has any kind of veto?

I guess we have the House of Lords but this doesn’t really have a veto (at least not long term) and the House of Commons and House of Lords aren’t always or even usually controlled by different factions.