All of [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien's Comments + Replies

Already footnoted.

I'm for it.

I haven't made up my mind about whether to ask that people not cross-post.  Until such time as I explicitly do (it would be a visible and hard-to-miss request, such as an author's note in several consecutive essays), please consider cross-posting fine.

1 seems both true and obvious to me.

2 seems both true and obvious to me (and we have a rich historical record of many of those people being vindicated as moral development proceeded apace).

3 seems true and correct to me as well.

Our divergence is after 3, in the rough model.  I think that it is waaaaaaay unlikely that a 90% bucket is the right size.  I think that 50+% of people covertly break at least 1 widespread norm, and even if someone talks me out of it I do not expect them to talk me even half of the distance down to 8%.

I think it depends a lot on the norm in question. Having been privileged (by virtue of being confidant to a lot of people from a lot of walks of life) to know about a LOT of harmless-in-my-estimation covert norm-breaking that the average person never gets a whiff of, I think that my money is on 2 being simply false.

Tagging @Ben Pace , @habryka , @Vaniver , @Raemon.  Not as a request for input (I kind of don't actually want any; I have little room left for being told how wrong and bad I am) but more because it feels like not-tagging is a little bit talking behind backs, or something.  They can speak to their own perspective as they choose, or not, as they choose.  I'm going to try to turn my attention away from this thread.

I do not like this comment. The rest of my response below will be somewhat triggered.

EDIT: to be clear, I did not vote in any way on the above comment because it seems bad to do so from a state of triggeredness.

"Um," Harry said. "You... don't think very much of Dumbledore, I take it?"

"I thought..." said the old witch. "Well. Albus Dumbledore was a better wizard than I, a better person than I, in more ways than I can easily count. But the man had his faults."

"Because, um. I mean. Dumbledore knew everything you just said. About my being young and how the Lin

It's less "you probably know a burglar" and more "successful burglaries are probably 10-100x more common than you would think, if you based your prediction solely on visible evidence."

The two that seem most obvious to me: well-behaved psychopaths (i.e. people who have little or no empathetic response but who have learned to follow the social rules anyway, for the sake of headache avoidance) and non-practicing pedophiles (i.e. people who are attracted to children but are zero percent interested in raping anyone) probably really actually are quite common.

No.  I'm disagreeing with Bezzi's claim to have never encountered any trans person and to have no trans people in their extended social network of hundreds or thousands. I don't doubt their self-report re: visibly trans people, but they're unjustified in the conclusion "there just aren't invisible trans people around me in my town."

Are the base rates for actual transition so low that you can have thousands of people in your extended social circle and still never hear of one?

Yes.

Ah, thanks for pointing this out.  There's an unstated assumption: you stumbled across some dark matter, that was basically hidden.

If you have a full-on psychotic break, you're likely going to resemble the caricatured stereotype of a schizophrenic, and get noticed.  But that's not quite the thing I'm trying to gesture at in the OP.

If somebody overhears you talking to your voices in the shower, the voices you've been talking to for decades while remaining a high-functioning individual, they're likely to leap to the conclusion that, since you have ... (read more)

(Also, people keep critically misunderstanding Scott's point.  Scott isn't saying the conservatives don't live around him.  The whole point is that they do live around him and he does pass them on the street and he does go to the same grocery stores and gas stations.  He doesn't knowingly interact with them because of his social bubble, but they are there, just like trans folk are definitely around Bezzi a lot (though I totes grant Bezzi's point that there aren't many visibly transitioning ones).  That's what the phrase "dark matter" is being used to indicate, both in Scott's post and in mine.)

This thread continues to fail to distinguish between "visibly trans" and "non-visibly trans" people, which is depressing since it's, y'know, the point.

Bezzi: you're trying to say that you don't know and have never met any trans people, and you keep doubling down on "I know this because I haven't encountered any of the visible markers of trans people," and I, uh. Encourage you to put 17 and 23 together?

Most trans folk are still not transitioning.

Another way of saying this: slow down and ask yourself "what do I think I know, and why do I think I know it?" an... (read more)

Yes, I have taken commissions in the past (the CFAR handbook rewrite being one, paid for by Lightcone, and Staying Split being another, paid for by an individual). 

I think that there isn't just one bag of people breaking rules, and some number of the marbles in that bag are "for good reasons" and some number "for bad reasons."  I think there are clusters, and types, and certain kinds of rule-breaking are predictive of other kinds of rule-breaking.

I think that me not wearing shoes at university is evidence that I might also disdain sports, but not evidence that I might steal.

I think that trying to think in terms of "for bad reasons" and "for good reasons" as two flavors in one bucket is likely to lead one to make wrong updates.  Like, the model is oversimplified and causes fearful swerves.

(In my usage, which may or may not be standard, if something feels like a Bayesian update for each of two different mutually exclusive directions, you sort of cancel out the overlap and then only refer to the net remainder as the thing for which you have Bayesian evidence.  Like, if it independently seems like a 3 update to the west, and a 5 update to the east, when you consider each separately, you say "a Bayesian update of 2 to the east" or similar.)

I think this conversation is failing to reliably distinguish between "being trans" in the sense of experiencing substantial gender dysphoria and/or adopting the self-label trans, and "being trans" in the sense of taking visible steps to socially or medically transition.

I buy Bezzi's self-report that they never see people who have visibly taken steps to transition; there's no reason for Bezzi to be confused about this.

I think people are pushing back because (of the true fact that) many trans people are not taking visible steps to transition, especially in e... (read more)

Hmmmm, I see that Ben is getting some disagreement/pushback below, but I want to stand in defense of part of the thing I understand him to be saying.

(Or rather, I think Ben's bucketing two things and the disagreement is pushing back on the whole bucket when it should be pushing back on the bucket error + one of the things.)

In my culture, we're much better at noticing that X is bad in an absolute sense even if it's overwhelmingly good in context, or net justified, or whatever.  Like, in Duncan culture it's straightforwardly obvious and commonplace to n... (read more)

It is only safe for you to have opinions if the other people don't dislike them?

I think you're trying to set up a really mean dynamic where you get to say mean things about me in public, but if I point out anything frowny about that fact you're like "ah, see, I knew that guy was Bad; he's making it Unsafe for me to say rude stuff about him in the public square."

(Where "Unsafe" means, apparently, "he'll respond with any kind of objection at all."  Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was "I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.")

*shrug

I ... (read more)

@Raemon FYI there isn't internet at our place since ~26h ago so Logan probably hasn't looked at this or any other responses yet.

I've tried for a bit to produce a useful response to the top-level comment and mostly failed, but I did want to note that

"Oh, it sort of didn't occur to me that this analogy might've carried a negative connotation, because when I was negatively gossiping about Duncan behind his back with a bunch of other people who also have an overall negative opinion of him, the analogy was popular!"

is a hell of a take. =/

Claim: this sequence is almost one hundred percent about studying something other than your mind, and what's happening is a confusion between tools and purposes.

At a very coarse/gross level of understanding, the way that we gather information about objects is by hurling other objects at them, and watching the interaction. This is one way to think about light—we throw trillions of tiny photons at an object, and the way they bounce off gives us information about the object (its location, shape, surface properties, etc).

Ditto sound waves, now that I think of ... (read more)

"Let's imagine that these unspecified details, which could be anywhere within a VERY wide range, are specifically such that the original point is ridiculous, in support of concluding that the original point is ridiculous" does not seem like a reasonable move to me.

Separately:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WsvpkCekuxYSkwsuG/overconfidence-is-deceit

… well, then regardless of whether you agree with the author in question about whether or not my comments are good/important/whatever, the fact that he holds this view casts very serious doubt on your thesis. Wouldn’t you agree?

Said is asking Ray, not me, but I strongly disagree.

Point 1 is that a black raven is not strong evidence against white ravens. (Said knows this, I think.)

Point 2 is that a behavior which displeases many authors can still be pleasant or valuable to some authors. (Said knows this, I think.)

Point 3 is that benquo's view on even that sp... (read more)

Strong disagree that I'm describing a deeply dysfunctional gym; I barely described the gym at all and it's way overconfident/projection-y to extrapolate "deeply dysfunctional" from what I said.

There's a difference between "hey, I want to understand the underpinnings of this" and the thing I described, which is hostile to the point of "why are you even here, then?"

Edit: I view the votes on this and the parent comment as indicative of a genuine problem; jimmy above is exhibiting actually bad reasoning (à la representativeness) and the LWers who happen to be hanging around this particular comment thread are, uh, apparently unaware of this fact. Alas.

Just noting that "What specifically did it get wrong?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, and is one I would have (in most cases) been willing to answer, patiently and at length.

That I was unwilling in that specific case is an artifact of the history of Zack being quick to aggressively misunderstand that specific essay, in ways that I considered excessively rude (and which Zack has also publicly retracted).

Given that public retraction, I'm considering going back and in fact answering the "what specifically" question, as I normally would have at the... (read more)

Cranks ask questions of people they think are wrong, in order to try and expose the weaknesses in their arguments. They signal aloofness, because their priority is on being seen as an authority who deserves similar or higher status (at least on the issue at hand) as the person they're addressing. They already expect the author they're questioning is fundamentally confused, and so they don't waste their own time trying to figure out what the author might have meant. The author, and the audience, are lucky to have the crank's attention, since they're obvious

Just noting as a "for what it's worth"

(b/c I don't think my personal opinion on this is super important or should be particularly cruxy for very many other people)

that I accept, largely endorse, and overall feel fairly treated by the above (including the week suspension that preceded it).

Spending my last remaining comment here.

I join Ray and Gwern in noting that asking for examples is generically good (and that I've never felt or argued to the contrary). Since my stance on this was called into question, I elaborated:

If one starts out looking to collect and categorize evidence of their conversational partner not doing their fair share of the labor, then a bunch of comments that just say "Examples?" would go into the pile. But just encountering a handful of comments that just say "Examples?" would not be enough to send a reasonable person to

I generally agree with the above and expect to be fine with most of the specific versions of any of the three bulleted solutions that I can actually imagine being implemented.

I note re:

It'd be cruxy for me if more high-contributing-users actively supported the sort of moderation regime Duncan-in-particular seems to want.

... that (in line with the thesis of my most recent post) I strongly predict that a decent chunk of the high-contributing users who LW has already lost would've been less likely to leave and would be more likely to return with marginal move... (read more)

Does that influence 

To be honest, I think I have to take this exchange as further evidence that Duncan is operating in bad faith. (Within this particular conflict, not necessarily in general.)

in any way?

Four days' later edit: guess not. :/

I agree that escalating to arbitrary levels of nuance makes communication infeasible, and that you can and should only highlight the relevant and necessary distinctions.

I think "someone just outright said I'd repeatedly said stuff I hadn't" falls above the line, though.

Yeah. One is small, and the other is tiny. The actual comment that the anonymous person is mocking/castigating said:

I note (while acknowledging that this is a small and subtle distinction, but claiming that it is an important one nonetheless) that I said that I now categorize Said as a liar, which is an importantly and intentionally weaker claim than Said is a liar, i.e. "everyone should be able to see that he's a liar" or "if you don't think he's a liar you are definitely wrong."

(This is me in the past behaving in line with the points I just made under Sa

(I suppose seeing posts actually cited outside the LessWrong community would be a better/more-objective measure of "something demonstrably good is happening, not potentially just circle-jerky". I'm interested in tracking that although it seems trickier)

In order from "slightly outside of LessWrong" to "very far outside of LessWrong," I refactored the CFAR handbook against (mild) internal resistance from CFAR and it was received well, I semi-regularly get paid four or low-five figures to teach people rationality, I've been invited to speak at 4+ EA Globals a... (read more)

You also need to accept that other factors beyond word choice play into how your words will be perceived: claiming this distinction is of tremendous importance lands differently in the context of this giant adversarial escalation-spiral than it would in an alternate reality where you were writing a calm and collected post and had never gotten into a big argument with Said

Er. I very explicitly did not claim that it was a distinction of tremendous importance. I was just objecting to the anonymous person's putting them in the same bucket. 

In my opinion,

...while acting as though somehow that would have been less offensive if they had only added "I suspect" to the latter half of that sentence as well. Raise your hand if you think that "I suspect that you won't like this idea, because I suspect that you have the emotional maturity of a child" is less offensive because it now represents an unambiguously true statement of an opinion rather than being misconstrued as a fact.

✋

The thing that makes LW meaningfully different from the rest of the internet is people bothering to pay attention to meaningful distincti... (read more)

A meta point that is outside of the scope of the object level disagreement/is a tangent:

Once again you miss a (the?) key point.

“What are some examples?” does not constitute “calling out a flaw”—unless there should be examples but aren’t. Otherwise, it’s an innocuous question, and a helpful prompt.

I note that the following exchange recently took place:

Said: [multiple links to him just saying "Examples?"]

Me: [in a style I would not usually use but with content that is not far from my actual belief] I'm sorry, how do any of those (except possibly 4) satisfy a... (read more)

As for using words in a nonstandard way, I hardly think that you’re one to make such an accusation!

I think the best response to this is one of Said's own comments:

I have (it would seem) a reputation for making certain sorts of comments, which are of course not intended as “attacks” of any sort (social, personal, etc.), but which are sometimes perceived as such—and which perception, in my view, reflects quite poorly on those who thus perceive said comments.

I am not optimizing particularly hard for Said not feeling criticized but also treating my comment abo... (read more)

Said, above, is saying a bunch of things, many of which I agree with, as if they are contra my position or my previous claims.

He can't pass my ITT (not that I've asked him to), which means that he doesn't understand the thing he's trying to disagree with, which means that his disagreement is not actually pointing at my position; the things he finds ridiculous and offensive are cardboard cutouts of his own construction. More detail on that over here.

Thanks.

I note (while acknowledging that this is a small and subtle distinction, but claiming that it is an important one nonetheless) that I said that I now categorize Said as a liar, which is an importantly and intentionally weaker claim than Said is a liar, i.e. "everyone should be able to see that he's a liar" or "if you don't think he's a liar you are definitely wrong."

(This is me in the past behaving in line with the points I just made under Said's comment, about not confusing [how things seem to me] with [how they are] or [how they do or should seem ... (read more)

But sir, you impugn my and my site's honor

This is fair, and I apologize; in that line I was speaking from despair and not particularly tracking Truth.

A [less straightforwardly wrong and unfair] phrasing would have been something like "this is not a Japanese tea garden; it is a British cottage garden."

I note for any other readers that Said is evincing a confusion somewhere in the neighborhood of the Second Guideline and the typical mind fallacy.

In particular, it's false that I "write and act as though I did hold that belief," in the sense that a supermajority of those polled would check "true" on a true-false question about it, after reading through (say) two of my essays and a couple dozen of my comments.

("That belief" = "Duncan has, I think, made it very clear that that a comment that just says 'what are some examples of this claim?' is, in his view, ... (read more)

Strong upvote, strong agree.  In particular:

But is every down/up voter sufficiently skilled, discerning and trustworthy? Is there any bar they have to cross to wield this power?

LW has tried to solve this with weighted voting power, and that has made a difference; I think vote totals here are meaningfully better than on Reddit, for instance.

But there are just so many people with vote strength 1 or 2 or 3, and it's very easy for a popular (but really bad by the standards of rationality) comment to drown out an actually good one.

I think a reasonable reader could come away from that comment of gjm's uncertain whether or not Said simply saying "examples?" would count as an example.

...

I should also note here that I don't think you have explicitly staked out that you think Said just saying "examples?" is bad (like, you didn't here, which was the obvious place to), I am inferring that from various things you've written (and, tho this source is more suspect and so has less influence, ways other people have reacted to Said before).

To clarify:

If one starts out looking to collect and categ... (read more)

No, it's relevant context, especially given that you're saying in the above ~[and I judge people for it].

(To be clear, I didn't think that the comment I quoted was about me. Added a small edit to make that clearer.)

I have (it would seem) a reputation for making certain sorts of comments, which are of course not intended as “attacks” of any sort (social, personal, etc.), but which are sometimes perceived as such—and which perception, in my view, reflects quite poorly on those who thus perceive said comments.

Just a small note that "Said interpreting someone as [interpreting Said's comment as an attack]" is, in my own personal experience, not particularly correlated with [that person in fact having interpreted Said's comment as an attack].

Said has, in the past, seemed t... (read more)

Oliver proposed an alternative wording and I affirmed that I'd still bet on his wording.  I was figuring I shouldn't try to run a second poll myself because of priming/poisoning the well but I'm happy for someone else to go and get data.  

In the response I would have wanted to see, Duncan would have clearly and correctly pointed to that difference. He is in favor of people asking for examples [combined with other efforts to cross the gap], does it himself, gives examples himself, and so on. The unsaid [without anything else] part is load-bearing and thus inappropriate to leave out or merely hint at. [Or, alternatively, using "ask people for examples" to refer to comments that do only that, as opposed to the conversational move which can be included or not in a comment with other moves.]

I ag... (read more)

(I intended to convey with "by the way" that I did not think I had (yet) responded to the full substance of your comment/that I was doing something of an aside.)