Urgency without cruelty totally exists; think of pulling a child back from running in the street and shouting “No!” You don’t want to hurt the kid, you’re 100% uninterested in labeling him “bad”, you just *need him to stop right now*.
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Defensiveness and insecurity basically do harm by distracting attention and wasting time. Each individual instance doesn’t delay dealing with the issue that long, but they add up.
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It’s not that it’s “not okay” to have feelings about “feeling judged.” (“ok” isn’t a primordial thing anyway!) It’s that whatever someone was being “judgy” about might be an *actual issue that still matters* and changing the topic to feelings makes us forget the object level.
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(Or all that might be irrelevant! Sometimes people are being mean/gossipy/judgy just cause they wanna, and there is no object level problem. If you only pay attention to tone and not content, though, you’ll never know the difference.)
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*Not* being defensive or full of “motivated cognition” or relitigating the same fights over and over can be scary in a new way because you’re covering brand new territory. It’s like a TV show that covers too much plot per episode; you worry they’ll run out of plot!
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If you’re *not* pattern-marching each other’s positions to dumber, less nuanced ones, the two of you will rapidly start to diverge from the rest of society; you’ll become high-context, illegible, hard for most people who don’t know you to understand.
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I’m not really sure what to do about that one. I’ve always had a sense that it’s nicer/more cooperative to be easy to understand. After all, we all were newbies once at anything we’re expert in today. It feels *weird* to have thoughts I don’t expect to be able to explain.
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If you ask yourself “is this conversation producing information?” (Like, literally Shannon information) you’d be surprised how much optimization is going on all the time to *avoid* producing too much information.
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This is in Finite and Infinite Games too. People mostly don’t want to go in directions that might have surprising or undefined outcomes.
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Anxiety about “are you judging me?” is one of many, many tactics to bring attention back to a familiar social game so it won’t go off into some uncharted wilderness.
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You know “wilderness” is nearby when it feels — not acutely bad, but “are you sure we should be doing this? this is getting kind of bizarre. this would have some weird implications.”
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I don’t know what happens if you try leaning *into* the directions that take you to new places, rather than away from them; if you don’t try to slow down the “plot clock.” Maybe the inhibition is there for good reason! Here There Be Dragons.
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But, like, the creation of quantum physics theory would be an example of people going “well we *could* model it that way, but it would take us to some weird places” and then *not stopping* and going to the weird places.
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And quantum physics (and the Bomb) is both an example of a great human achievement and a top candidate for the thing that will ultimately destroy human life. So...beware I guess?
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EA is a great example of this. When a bunch of idealistic people try to ascertain how to do the most good, they come up with weird shit. “Actually no charities are good.” “Destroy the rainforests.” “Wirehead chickens.” “AI safety.” It’s never, like, “give to United Way.”
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Different people of course have different values for what’s good, but once you start trying to *optimize* them you leave the mainstream fast. Ecologists think in terms of saving ecosystems, not cute polar bears. Development economists think about institutions and infrastructure.
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You either get “arcane, abstract, boring” (legal details! administrative policy! spreadsheets and models!) or you get “bizarre supervillain shit” (gene drives! carbon capture! brain uploads!)
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Honest inquiry rarely leads to “just do a nice normal thing that you probably felt like you ought to do before but you never got around to.”
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If you just want your “inquiry” to reinforce what you already think, you had better put a lot of guardrails on it so it doesn’t spit out weird shit. Being scope sensitive at all leads to weird proposals.
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This doesn’t just apply to ethical questions. The way to literally make the most money is not gonna be the same as “do the most prestigious and glamorous thing that everyone associates with rich people.”
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The way to answer a scientific question is not gonna be the same as “do what proves to the world you’re the smartest and have mastered the trickiest techniques.”
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This comes back to judgment again; if you’re trying to achieve a goal you’re gonna get judged. And you’re gonna have to think about what if anything the judgment *means* or *refers to*, not just the experience of hearing it.
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Does the feedback *in fact* tell you that you should change your plan in real life? Why is the person giving that feedback? What does that tell you about the world?
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Back to judging people; I believe doing bad things is common. “So and so has this common character flaw” is not an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
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It doesn’t make sense to ostracize or punish the vast, vast majority of people you suspect of having character flaws.
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It also doesn’t make sense to flip the bozo bit on people just because you think they have a blind spot.
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I generally believe in being very very slow to conclude you have nothing to learn from someone. But also being quick to expect that almost everyone engage in behavior & thought patterns that harm themselves and others.
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“I can’t believe you’re accusing this lovely person of having self-flattering biases!” Well, it would be extraordinary if she didn’t!
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“Mistake vs conflict theory” is a false dichotomy. The most typical way people do harm is through subconscious motivation. There is optimization power steering towards the outcome you don’t like; but the person doesn’t have conscious control or insight into that process.
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Most people are usually wrong when we guess at others’ subconscious motivations; but it’s not a conspiracy theory or paranoia to believe most people have some disturbing subconscious motivations.
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Some particular examples: it’s not an extraordinary claim to say someone has racial, gender, or class biases towards siding with the higher-status groups in their society. Almost all people do to some degree.
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