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Notes -
Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:
I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."
A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.
One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.
(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)
In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.
And they take the black pill.
I hope you'll forgive me for ignoring the main thrust of your post to go off on this tangent, but I've had this rolling around in my head for a while. I hope the rest of you will forgive me for poking fun at things that I'm often guilty of myself.
How to Win Friends and Influence People: the Rationalist Edition
Extreme (emotional) Decoupling. Emotion is weakness, rationality is strength. Utilitarianism and consequentialism are our gods; the more gruesome the morally correct action you're willing to undertake, the greater human good you're able to invoke, the better. Examples: Eliezer 'melt all GPUs' Yudkowsky, Abortion/forced sterilization/[policy harming black people] is eugenic and therefore net good, censorship is worthwhile when you're bearing the lofty weight of future quadrillions of the human pan-galactic human-AI-hybrid diaspora on your shoulders. Humility is for normies and low-status chuds, not you, you beautiful prism of rarefied logic, you.
Long, internally consistent logical chains based on premises with monstrous error bars/uncertainty (see previous points). The longer and harder to follow, the easier it is to obscure and deflect criticism, and the greater your boost in status.
Literature references. Point score is directly correlated with obscurity; actually having read the the work in question is optional. Bonus points for linking SSC pieces, double bonus points if they're from 2016 or earlier.
Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus. IQ is life. Everyone knows that vocabulary size is correlated to IQ, which is correlated to g, which determines your worth as a human being and position in the hierarchy. What better way to give your stock a little bump than to sprinkle in a few five syllable words that fell out of common use somewhere in the 19th century?
Why post a succinct list with references when you can write a 30,000 character multipost that is a struggle to get through? This (1) gives you wriggle room to claim any characterization of your thesis is a strawman and (2) allows you to...
...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read! Remember, the goal is gaining status, not clear communication of ideas or mutually working towards a model of the world. Obscurantism serves the former, brevity will only hurt you. And potentially get you in hot water with the mods.
Complain about the normies in academia, MSM, HR, government, your life, etc vocally and frequently. This communicates that you're smarter than them, and remember, criticism is always easier than defending a thesis or building something worthwhile and thus disproportionately easier for gaining status.
Be kind, don't weakman... I'm a little conflicted because it's presumably healthy for the Motte and adjacent spaces to be introspective and self-critical, but we're still a group, the rules still apply. "Poking fun" is always risky business under the rules anyway, but the criticism you've assembled here barely rises above the level of pure, vapid sneer. Allowing that it also applies ("often") to you doesn't really change the fact that you're essentially framing certain behaviors as low status without effortfully addressing the relative merits of those behaviors. I appreciate that you refrained from literally calling out neckbeards and fedoras, but even so what you've mostly succeeded at here is just textbook nerd-bashing. So, please don't do that.
Strong disagree -- I'd say this is lighthearted enough to even rise to the level of 'kind' (or at least 'not unkind'), but it is surely true and necessary.
I'd definitely rather read this than a bunch of posts about how leftists are a bunch of pussies (even if though I am personally sympathetic to the underlying complaint) -- this is a bad warning.
Yeah, I disagree that it is true, and strongly disagree that it is necessary.
How about neither? Because you know, "leftists are a bunch of pussies" is also something we would moderate.
The post is not quintessentially awful. It didn't get a ban. I expressed my own reservations in the warning. But it drew multiple reports and I felt like it was worth my time to point out that this is not really a good example of people who disagree having a fruitful discussion about that disagreement. This is more like a good example of how to playfully signal to someone that you regard them as low-status. I might even be persuaded that it is "not [at least entirely] unkind," but the rule isn't "be not unkind."
Just downthread of another marginal mod warning currently on the front page, for your reading pleasure:
https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/55391?context=8#context
I thought the policy was "tone over content"? CPAR's tone here is lighthearted and funny (also self-deprecating; "I hope the rest of you will forgive me for poking fun at things that I'm often guilty of myself."), and the content is something we could all take to heart. (ie. "necessary")
There's literally several responses to the effect of 'I feel seen' -- obviously the post is engaging in hyperbole, but most of the points are reformulations of classic complaints about the rational-o-sphere.
I'm disturbed that something that feels like it could be lifted from a c. 2012 Scott-post is attracting reports, and moreso that the correct response is not seen as "screw 'em if they can't take a joke".
I am concerned too, it is blowing my mind that that post was reported enough to get a warning. And yeah, it might not be facts, but it has a lot of truth to it. I wonder if it's hitting some people harder than others? Or maybe it's strategic, a retaliation against raptr or left wingers in general for some slight.
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I'd say the "WEF conspiracies are an IQ test" post crosses the line a lot more than this.
The WEF post spends 7 paragraphs @ 1k words on non-accusatory exposition about the details of the WEF itself and the history of right-wing beliefs about the WEF, limiting the 'attacking people' part to the title and a short 100-word conclusion that makes a valuable strategic point.
OP by contrast is peppered with unfair generalizations and jabs all the way through, with no evidence to back it up.
Now, I don't really care about personal attacks or unfairness or jabs, my only issue with chris's post is that it's in large part wrong, but it is much more 'rule-breaking' than rafa's when we weight usefulness with bite. "necessary, true, kind: pick two".
The WEF post literally says "you're dumb for believing this", calls people "an embarrassment", and contains politically coded slurs like "rightoid". Anyone posting anything similar about the Blues would get banned, and I doubt anyone would bother defending it.
This is lighthearted poking fun at people. I don't particularly like it either but nowhere close to the other.
it's (vaguely) "criticism of your team" - "rightoids believing the WEF conspiracies is an embarrasment for us, and makes us less effective / likely to accomplish anything"
It's not. "Rightoids believing WEF conspiracies" are not part of his team, and this place is about discussion, not being effective or accomplishing anything.
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I won't try to defend my post; if people take it as bullying and mean-spirited it's not my place to argue, only knock it off. That being said - I could have written seven paragraphs on each point, but would that have changed the fundamental argument I was trying to make or just obscured it? Was that length beneficial to the WEF post, or could detail have been cut in the interest of clarity and efficiency?
I've read the rationale behind making post length the low-bar to be cleared for many posts, and I even agree with it to an extent. That being said, it's still a kludge and should be treated as such rather than exalted as a terminal value or a virtue. It advantages the verbose and eloquent without improving their arguments, it encourages bad writing habits and degrades the quality of discourse as discussions fragment and people get hung up on minor, non-central points to your argument. The purpose of writing is to entertain or convey information, and while there should be latitude for the former, many trying to do the latter write far too much. In my opinion, for what that's worth.
Say what? You wrote the post man, you know better than anyone else how bullying and mean spirited you meant it to be. You copped a warning for the op because it got a lot of reports apparently - what would you do if it was reported by people who have decided you are a leftist and therefore should be shut up? Would you still knock it off to accommodate them?
I generally believe the onus is on the writer to craft something for their audience to appreciate. If the audience doesn't like it or find it useful, either find a new audience or change your style. Telling them that they're wrong seems to be a bit futile.
I've also just adopted a general heuristic of 'if enough people are telling you you're being an asshole, you're probably being an asshole.' I recognize that can be particularly dangerous and opens you up to manipulation by bad actors, but it also transformed my life in college from unhappy friendless loner to being a relatively popular and successful guy.
But I am impressed that people cared enough to argue with mods on my behalf...
Well, yeah, probably. If the community wanted to be an echo chamber, who am I to say otherwise?
If you are trying to avoid being an asshole, why did you write a snarky list of people's faults?
A member of the community.
Yes, other members of the community defended you. It seems we made a mistake.
This matters a lot to me, because some people around here interpret everything I write in the most mean-spirited way possible, when I haven't tried to be mean spirited on the motte in years. Which doesn't mean I can't be mean spirited by accident of course, but take the phrase "You son of a bitch!" for example - depending on your mood, you might read that as anger. But it isn't necessarily angry, it could be excited - "You (magnificent) son of a bitch!", or it could be dismayed - "You son of a bitch! (I can't believe you've done this)", or so on. But if you are in a mood to read it as anger, it will change the tone of the whole post. That doesn't make everyone who interpreted it in the spirit you meant it wrong though. Nor does it make those who interpreted it as anger right. What makes them right is you then saying that the way you meant it doesn't matter compared to what they think. You gave them that power, and as a result made yourself irrelevant.
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I agree entirely with all of that*, don't mind arbitrarily harsh, short, or slur-filled posts if they are interesting, and as said above only dislike your OP to the extent I materially disagree (rationalists aren't bad because they're willing to do dangerous promethean moral acts, and malaria nets aren't very dangerous or promethean). (* - except specifically cutting detail improving the WEF post, the detail was nice).
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I would say about the same amount, but yeah. Both posts are pretty much just sneering at people.
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Oh. Alright, my apologies.
On the one hand, I too dislike arguing with Mods. On the other hand, I object to people apologizing for greatness. It's a real conundrum.
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I thought your post was funny and didn't seem mean-spirited. I could see how someone would take umbrage, of course. (+2 cents)
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All of his criticisms are on point, though. Those are all bad habits, and they're all endemic, and by framing it as a personal statement, he leaves people free to apply the statements to themselves as they personally consider it appropriate. A lot of posts I've written are obviously guilty of the things he's pointing out, and are the worse for them.
I strongly disagree, as one of the people the post was most obviously aimed at. Cogent criticism is valuable, and this is, in fact, cogent criticism.
Surely you don't actually mean that?
I was a bit hesitant on the mod button, for all the reasons I already mentioned. I recognize that there is some hyperbole there, and some humor, and some self-deprecation, and I always feel a bit schoolmarmish wagging a finger at that sort of thing. But like--
What's the "on point" criticism, here--that we quote Scott too much? What's the "bad habit"--that we don't actually read the books we quote from and talk about? (This seems clearly false!)
The fact that we have our own status games is interesting, and worth talking about. And there are surely times and places to enjoy an amusing roast. But a lot of the stuff in this list is not actually bad, and most of the rest is unobjectionable if stripped of the pejoration and mockery. To treat e.g. complex vocabulary as a signal of low status is textbook anti-intellectualism. Yes, some people use big words strictly to appear smart, but treating people that way without further evidence requires an uncharitable take on their motives. Writing lengthy posts is frequently mocked in many places on the internet, but some problems are complex and demand extended reflection--assuming you want to do more than make a joke at someone else's expense. While many of the attitudes called out in this post are indeed counterproductive or otherwise objectionable, most of the behaviors are not in themselves problematic, particularly given a charitable interpretation of the writer's intent. If we're going to criticize such behaviors, we should do it in a thoughtful way--not by resorting to mockery that seems crafted to shame others away from effortful participation and thoughtful discussion.
It's not very fair if it's taken as a generalization about what we're doing here. It's absolutely on point as a description of how we do it wrong – not the only failure mode of this community, especially after the move, when we've gained some cocksure low-effort right-wingers, but the most prevalent one among the old guard. I agree 100% with @FCfromSSC that this list is a self-improvement opportunity for me.
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Which is itself a problem with rationalists. In order to properly deal with people, you need to be able to conclude bad faith, and you need to be able to do this based on less than 100% clear evidence, because false negatives are as damaging as false positives. This is where quokkas come from--rationalists refusing to realistically consider the possibility that someone is acting in bad faith. We say "be charitable" because a lot of people aren't charitable enough, but there are also people who are too charitable and should ignore that advice (and it's hard to aim advice at only the people who need it.)
And here, it's not even just about bad faith. When someone uses big words that aren't needed for his point, he may be acting in bad faith, or he may just be bad at communicating. But even if he's an honest person who's just bad at communicating, he's still bad at it; it's not behavior we want to emulate, and it still deserves criticizing. If doing things poorly is low status, then yes, this is low status--communicating poorly is something we want to avoid.
Quokka is "rationalist who doesn't question progressive ideas like universal love and tolerance, gender and race equality, .....", not "rationalist who argues with trolls because they might be good faith". Having extended arguments with bad faith trolls doesn't really hurt you beyond wasting small amounts of time, whereas earnestly believing in universal love and sacrifice-for-all-humans-equally means your fortune or life is spent helping Open Philanthropy buy malaria nets instead of some other worthier cause.
edit: I might be wrong about the use of the term quokka, but still pretty sure 'arguing with bad faith trolls' isn't particularly bad.
A quokka is a creature that doesn't realize that people might want to hurt it. The metaphor from there is fairly direct.
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You love this... hard-to-pin-down pattern of reasoning, and I don't love to have to keep asking you not do it. Nevertheless here we go again.
The explicit definition of quokka as a mental archetype is the guy who does not account for bad faith of other parties. It's not about wasting time on trolls on anonymous forums, per se. But it absolutely is about a robust mode of engagement with bad actors.
Here's the original thread by 0x49fa98. Here are the most relevant parts:
I think Bostromgate is a good illustration.
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It's both, actually. I've seen the latter argued numerous times by right-wingers, specifically about right-wing trolls.
Right-wingers arguing that rationalists ... shouldn't listen to right-wing trolls?
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I can and do. I assure you that my next effort-post will be better if, before I post it, I compare it to that list and edit accordingly.
That here, too, one's reference game being on-point can cover for a startling lack of engagement with the concepts behind those references. Further, that style trumping substance is always a danger, and one way it happens is by cribbing from better authors to provide gravitas to an argument that it cannot generate under its own power. There are a number of writers here who possess above-average rhetorical style, but style is not truth, and forgetting that is a constant danger for all of us.
...I see it exactly flipped. The behaviors are not in and of themselves problematic, but when combined with a poor attitude or mindset, they're counterproductive and objectionable. And while it might be uncharitable to accuse individual posters, noting the problem in aggregate seems like a reasonable way to express what is, at the end of the day, a complaint about general atmosphere. General atmosphere matters here; our rules are drafted explicitly to protect it, and changes for the worse are worth noting and pointing out.
Yes--but with kindness, and charity.
Insofar as general atmosphere matters here, "you should be ashamed of your vocabulary, verbosity, and valuing of intellect over emotion" is not a vibe that should be cultivated.
If your vocabulary is being used poorly--and excessive wordiness is using it poorly--you should be ashamed of it, at least to the extent that you should be ashamed of doing things badly at all.
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All I can say is that I did not read it as a general condemnation of those traits, and still don't. It probably helps that I have been very clearly guilty of several of these, and agree that they are problems, so it strikes me as less an attack and more just necessary truth delivered with some humor.
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