Your comment is by far the closest to my perspective; and I'd argue, the only healthy approach to online discourse.
I've honestly had a hard time taking this article seriously, because obviously Duncan is being very sincere, but the minset he describes is alien to me, and on some level, it feels like he's arguing that people are broken for not having that mindset (though maybe I'm conflating this article with the facebook post it links).
Duncan sounds like he's waging a permanent war and being mad at people for not treating it like a war, and while I understand the sincerity behind it, it doesn't feel necessary and it scares me. So I appreciate your rebuttal.
Quick note about the Beth Thomas story: from what I got from some quick research, the therapy regimen she was put through wasn't just controversial, it was absolutely harrowing and unsafe, and Beth was one of only two (!!) patients that reported being happy with it. Among the controversies, was the death of 10-yo Candace Newmaker during a "rebirthing" exercise.
I think it's tempting to find a narrative in there, like maybe the attachment therapy was only good for extreme cases and was harmful to people who only needed compassion and verbal therapy, but I think the simpler explanation is that these people had no idea what they were doing, Beth just got lucky, and the average child sexual abuse survivor would have been traumatized by attachment therapy.
I don't think there's a grand lesson here. Helping child abuse survivors is hard.
Hijacking your comment to say this: 3-4 days ago my Curated LessWrong RSS feed blew up with 20 or so posts, most of which don't reach the quality bar I usually expect from curated posts. Any idea why that happened?
I mean I guess on some level it's on me for not just marking them all as read and moving on, but still, when you've got "read all the emails in my inbox" syndrome it's a mildly disruptive experience.
Quick note: you should add alt text to the images so people with screen readers can get the same reading experience from that blog.
One aspect of this I'm curious about is the role of propaganda, and especially russian-bot-style propaganda.
Under the belief cascade model, the goal may not be to make arguments that persuade people, so much as it is to occupy the space, to create a shared reality of "Everyone who comments under this Youtube video agrees that X". That shared reality discourages people from posting contrary opinions, and creates the appearance of unanimity.
I wonder if sociologists have ever tried to test how susceptible propaganda is to cascade dynamics.
No, I think it's a fair question. Show me a non-trivial project coded end-to-end by an AI agent, and I'll believe these claims.
Off-topic, but what the heck is "The Tyranny of the Marginal Spice Jar"?
(according to claude)
I wish people would stop saying this. We shouldn't normalize relying on AI to have opinions for us. These days they can even link their sources! Just look at the sources.
I mean I guess the alternative is that people use Claude without checking and just don't mention it, so I guess I don't have a solution. But at least it would be considered embarrassing in that scenario. We should stay aware that there are better practices that don't require much more effort.
Likewise, Ev put in some innate drives related to novelty and aesthetics, with the idea that people would wind up exploring their local environment. Very sensible! But Ev would probably be surprised that her design is now leading to people “exploring” open-world video game environments while cooped up inside.
I think it's not obvious that Ev's design is failing to work as intended here.
Video games are a form of training. Some games can get pretty wireheady (Cookie Clicker), but many of the most popular, most discussed, most played games are games that exercise some parts of your brain in useful ways. The best-selling game of all times is Minecraft.
Moreover, I wouldn't be surprised if people who played Breath of the Wild were statistically more likely to go hiking afterward.
I think Duncan is being 100% sincere here, and I really don't want to imply he has dishonest ulterior motives. But his article is explicitly pushing for some norms and some ways to interpret discourse that... I don't see as healthy? It's bad for the free flow of ideas to demand that people reading an article be apologetic if they ever disagree in the comments. Obviously we should have politeness norms, people shouldn't insult the author, etc. But if the author says "I think A" and someone says "That's like B" and the author is really upset because obviously A is completely different from B... Then I think that's the author's problem?
Idk, I feel conflicted about this. On some level, saying "Society has a norm that X is acceptable, and if you don't accept X it's your problem" can be very harmful to neurodivergent people (or just people with a different culture) who get hit way harder by X.
But on another level, norms of "You should take responsibility by default for how people will interpret what you say and do, even if that interpretation is completely decoupled from your intent, and even if what you said was the objectively correct truth" is also super harmful to a slice of the population and especially neurodivergent people.
So I don't know what to make of this article. I upvoted it, but I really disagree with it.