This is a fair point. I absolutely do hold as my “daily bread” letting people know when my sense is that they’re wrong or confused, but it becomes trickier when you’re talking about very LARGE topics that represent a large portion of someone’s identity, and I proceed more carefully because of both a) politeness/kindness and b) a greater sense that the other person has probably thought things through.
I don’t have the spoons to reformulate the thought right now, but I think your call-out was correct, and if you take it on yourself to moderately steelman the thing I might have been saying, that’ll be closer to what I was struggling to express. The impulse behind making the statement in the first place was to try to highlight a valuable distinction between pumping against the zeitgeist/having idiosyncratic thoughts, and just being a total jerk. You can and should try to do the former, and you can and should try to avoid the latter. That was my main point.
Here’s what it looks like to me, after a bit of reflection: you’re in a state where you think a certain proposition P has a chance of being true, which it is considered a violation of social norms to assert (a situation that comes up more often than we would like).
In this sort of situation, I don’t think it’s necessarily correct to go around loudly asserting, or even mentioning, P. However, I do think it’s probably correct to avoid taking it upon oneself to enforce the (epistemically-deleterious) social norm upon those weird contrarians who, for whatever reason, do go around proclaiming P. At least leave that to the people who are confident that P is false. Otherwise, you are doing epistemic anti-work, by systematically un-correlating normative group beliefs from reality.
My sense was that you were sort of doing that above: you were seeking to reproach someone for being loudly contrarian in a direction that, from your perspective (according to what you say), may well be the right one. This is against your and your friends’ epistemic interests.
(A friendly reminder, finally, that talk of “being a total jerk” and similar is simply talk about social norms and their enforcement.)
I was not aiming to do “that above.” To the extent that I was/came across that way, I disendorse, and appreciate you providing me the chance to clarify. Your models here sound correct to me in general.
Your comment was perfectly fine, and you don’t need to apologize; see my response to komponisto above for my reasons for saying that. Apologies on my part as there’s a strong chance I’ll be without internet for several days and likely won’t be able to further engage with this topic.
This is a fair point. I absolutely do hold as my “daily bread” letting people know when my sense is that they’re wrong or confused, but it becomes trickier when you’re talking about very LARGE topics that represent a large portion of someone’s identity, and I proceed more carefully because of both a) politeness/kindness and b) a greater sense that the other person has probably thought things through.
I don’t have the spoons to reformulate the thought right now, but I think your call-out was correct, and if you take it on yourself to moderately steelman the thing I might have been saying, that’ll be closer to what I was struggling to express. The impulse behind making the statement in the first place was to try to highlight a valuable distinction between pumping against the zeitgeist/having idiosyncratic thoughts, and just being a total jerk. You can and should try to do the former, and you can and should try to avoid the latter. That was my main point.
Here’s what it looks like to me, after a bit of reflection: you’re in a state where you think a certain proposition P has a chance of being true, which it is considered a violation of social norms to assert (a situation that comes up more often than we would like).
In this sort of situation, I don’t think it’s necessarily correct to go around loudly asserting, or even mentioning, P. However, I do think it’s probably correct to avoid taking it upon oneself to enforce the (epistemically-deleterious) social norm upon those weird contrarians who, for whatever reason, do go around proclaiming P. At least leave that to the people who are confident that P is false. Otherwise, you are doing epistemic anti-work, by systematically un-correlating normative group beliefs from reality.
My sense was that you were sort of doing that above: you were seeking to reproach someone for being loudly contrarian in a direction that, from your perspective (according to what you say), may well be the right one. This is against your and your friends’ epistemic interests.
(A friendly reminder, finally, that talk of “being a total jerk” and similar is simply talk about social norms and their enforcement.)
I was not aiming to do “that above.” To the extent that I was/came across that way, I disendorse, and appreciate you providing me the chance to clarify. Your models here sound correct to me in general.
Your comment was perfectly fine, and you don’t need to apologize; see my response to komponisto above for my reasons for saying that. Apologies on my part as there’s a strong chance I’ll be without internet for several days and likely won’t be able to further engage with this topic.