but we had entirely different background assumptions about how one makes a case for said position. There was a near-Kuhnian incommensurability between us.
This is very frustrating and when I realize it is happening, I stop the engagement. In my experience, rationalists are not that different from smart science or philosophy types because we agree on very basic things like the structure of an argument and the probabilistic nature of evidence. But in my experience normal people are very difficult to have productive discussions with. Some glaring things that I notice happening are:
a) Different definitions of evidence. The Bayesian definition of evidence is anything that makes A more likely than not A. But for many people, evidence is anything that would happen given A. For example a conspiracy theorist might say “Well of course they would deny it if were true, this only proves that I’m right”.
b) Aristotelianism: the idea that every statement is either true or false and you can prove statements deductively via reasoning. If you’ve reasoned that something is true, then you’ve proved it so it must be true. Here is a gem from an Aristotelian friend of mine “The people in the US are big, it must be the food and they use growth hormones in livestock, therefore people in the US are big because of growth hormones”.
c) Arguments that aren’t actually arguments. Usually these are either insults or signals of tribal affiliation. For example “Good to know you’re better than everyone else” in response to a critical comment. But insults can be more subtle and they can masquerade as arguments. For example in response to a call for higher taxes someone might say “If you love taxes so much then why aren’t you sending extra money to the treasury?”.
d) Arguments that just have nothing to do with their conclusion. An institute called Heartmath stated this gem (rough paraphrase): “The heart sends more information to the brain than the brain does to the heart therefore the heart is more important that the brain”.
e) Statistical illiteracy. I want to grab a flamethrower every time the following exchange happens:
Salviati: “According to this study people who are X tend to be Y”
Simplicio: “Well I know someone who is X but isn’t Y, so there goes that theory”
f) Logical illiteracy:
Example 1:
Salviati: ” If A then B”
Simplicio: “But A isn’t true therefore your argument is invalid”
Example 2:
Simplicio: “X is A therefore X is B”
Salviati: “Let us apply a proof by contradiction. ‘A implies B’ is false because Y is A, but Y is not B”
Simplicio: “How dare you compare X to Y, they are totally different! Y is only not B because …”
Sorry if the symbolic statements are harder to read, I didn’t want to use too many object level issues.
Arguments that aren’t actually arguments: argument by tribal affiliation was certainly in full force, as well as a certain general condescension bordering on insult.
Statistical illiteracy: in an only minor variant of your hypothetical exchange, I said that very few people are doing too much exercise (tacitly, relative to the number of people who are doing too little), to which someone replied that they had once overtrained to their detriment, as if this disproved my point.
I was also struck by how weird it was that people were nitpicking totally incidental parts of my post, which, even if granted, didn’t actually deduct from the essence of what I was saying. This seemed like a sort of “argument by attrition”, or even just a way of saying “go away; we can tell you’re not one of us.”
A general pattern I’ve noticed: when processing an argument to which they are hostile, people often parse generalizations as unsympathetically as they can. General statements which would ordinarily pass without a second thought are taken as absolutes and then “disproved” by citations of noncentral examples and weird edge cases. I think this is pretty bad faith, and it seems common enough. Do we have a name for it? (I have to stop myself doing it sometimes.)
Social justice, apropos of the name, is largely an exercise in the manipulation of cultural assumptions and categorical boundaries- especially the manipulation of taboos like body weight. We probably shouldn’t expect the habits and standards of the social justice community to be well suited to factual discovery, if only because factual discovery is usually a poor way to convince whole cultures of things.
But the tricky thing about conversation in that style is that disagreement is rarely amicable. In a conversation where external realities are relevant, the ‘winner’ gets social respect and the ‘loser’ gets to learn things, so disagreement can be mutually beneficial happy event. But if external realities are not considered, debate becomes a zero-sum game of social influence. In that case, you start to see tactics pop up that might otherwise feel like ‘bad faith.’ For example, you win if the other person finds debate so unpleasant that they stop vocalizing their disagreement, leaving you free to make assertions unopposed. On a site like Less Wrong, this result is catastrophic- but if your focus is primarily on the spread of social influence, then it can be an acceptable cost (or outright free, if you’re of the postmodernist persuasion).
My general sense is that this is a fairly distinctive quality of social justice communities, so your feeling of alienation may have as much to do with the social justice community as it does with the LW memeplex. A random conversation about fat acceptance with culturally modal people might be a great deal less stressful. But then again, you probably shouldn’t trust somebody else on LW to say that.
Upvoted for being a plausible, fully charitable explanation of Social Justice rhetorical norms, which I had been unthinkingly categorizing as “Dumb/Evil For No Reason” despite the many highly intelligent people involved.
My general sense is that this is a fairly distinctive quality of social justice communities, so your feeling of alienation may have as much to do with the social justice community as it does with the LW memeplex.
I am very curious to what extent this is true, and would appreciate any evidence people have in either direction.
What is the cause of this? Is it just random fluctuation in culture that reinforce themselves? Perhaps I do not notice these problems in non social justice people just because they do not have an issue they care enough about to argue in this way. Perhaps, It is just availability bias as I spend too much time reading things social justice people say. Perhaps it is a function of the fact that the memes they are talking have this idea that they are being oppressed which makes them more fearful of outsiders.
Simplicio: THAT’S NOT TRUE THERE EXISTS AN EXCEPTION YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT IS INVALID
Because we’re talking about being uncharitable, let’s be charitable for a moment. Simplicio, in fact, made the mathematically proper counterargument: he produced a counterexample to a for-all claim. And finding one flaw with a mathematical proof is, in fact, sufficient to disregard the entire thing.
Clearly, though, Simplicio’s argument is horrible and nobody should ever make it. If we check out the errata for Linear Algebra Done Right, we find that Dr. Axler derped some coefficients on page 81. His proof is incorrect, but any reasonable person can easily see how the coefficients were derped and what the correct coefficients were, and it’s a trivial matter to change the proof to a correct proof.
Analogously, the proper response to an argument that’s technically incorrect, but has an obvious correct argument that you know the author was making even if they phrased it poorly, is to replace the incorrect argument with the correct argument, not scream about the incorrect argument. Anyone who does anything differently should have their internet privileges revoked. It’s more than a trivial inconvenience to write (and read) “the overwhelming scientific consensus indicates that, for most individuals, increasing exercise increases lifespan, although there’s a few studies that may suggest the opposite, and there’s a few outliers for whom increased exercise reduces lifespan” instead of “exercise increases lifespan”.
Simplicio: THAT’S NOT TRUE THERE EXISTS AN EXCEPTION YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT IS INVALID
Salviati: Principle of charity, bro
Now, if Simplicio applies principle of charity, then they’ll never make arguments like that again, and we’ve resolved the problem. If they don’t, we discontinue debating with them, and we’ve resolved the problem.
There’s a few failure modes here. We create a new route down which debates about akrasia-fighting devices can be derailed. We give a superweapon to people who we probably shouldn’t trust with one. They may google it and find our community and we won’t be able to keep them out of our walled garden. (I jest. Well, maybe.) But introducing principle of charity to people who have clearly never heard of it feels like it should either improve the quality of discourse or identify places we don’t want to spend any time.
Well, there’s a frustrating sort of ambiguity there: it’s able to pivot between the two in an uncomfortable way which leaves one vulnerable to exploits like the above.
Sure, and it’s also vulnerable to abuse from the other side:
“I have bogosthenia and can’t exercise because my organs will fall out if I do. How should I extend my lifespan?” “You should exercise! Exercise increases lifespan!” ”But my organs!” “Are you saying exercise doesn’t increase lifespan? All these studies say it does!” ”Did they study people with no organs?” “Why are you bringing up organs again? Exercise increases lifespan. If you start telling people it doesn’t, you’re going to be responsible for N unnecessary deaths per year, you quack.” ”… organs?”
I was also struck by how weird it was that people were nitpicking totally incidental parts of my post, which, even if granted, didn’t actually deduct from the essence of what I was saying.
I see this in lots of places where it’s clearly not an argument by attrition. There’s a sizable fraction of people on the Internet who are just over-literal.
I said that very few people are doing too much exercise (tacitly, relative to the number of people who are doing too little), to which someone replied that they had once overtrained to their detriment, as if this disproved my point.
There’s this issue though—what matters is not the fraction of people who exercise too much among the general population, is the fraction of people who exercise too much among the people you’re telling to exercise more to.
It’s a first contact situation. You need to establish basic things first, e.g. “do you recognize this is a sequence of primes,” “is there such a thing as ‘good’ and ‘bad’,” “how do you treat your enemies,” etc.
Simplicio: “Well I know someone who is X but isn’t Y, so there goes that theory”
“Aren’t you afraid of flying after that plane was shot down?” “No; flying is still much safer than driving, even taking terrorist attacks into account.” “But that plane was shot down!!!”
Simplicio: “But A isn’t true therefore your argument is invalid”
Sorry for being nit-picky, but that is partly linguistic illiteracy on Salviati’s part. Natural language conditionals are not assertible if their antecedent is false. Thus, by asserting “If A then B”, he implies that A is possible, with which Simiplicio might reasonably disagree.
Usually in these exchanges the truth value of A is under dispute. But it is nevertheless possible to make arguments with uncertain premises to see if the argument actually succeeds given its premises.
“But A isn’t true” is also a common response to counterfactual conditionals—especially in thought experiments.
Well, sometimes thought-experiments are dirty tricks and merit having their premises dismissed.
“If X, Y, and Z were all true, wouldn’t that mean we should kill all the coders?” “Well, hypothetically, but none of X, Y, and Z are true.” ”Aha! So you concede that there are certain circumstances under which we should kill all the coders!”
My preferred answer being:
“I can’t occupy the epistemic state that you suggest — namely, knowing that X, Y, and Z are true with sufficient confidence to kill all the coders. If I ended up believing X, Y, and Z, it’s more likely that I’d hallucinated the evidence or been fooled than that killing all the coders is actually a good idea. Therefore, regardless of whether X, Y, and Z seem true to me, I can’t conclude that we should kill all the coders.”
But that’s a lot more subtle than the thought-experiment, and probably constitutes fucking tedious in a lot of social contexts. The simplified version “But killing is wrong, and we shouldn’t do wrong things!” is alas not terribly convincing to people who don’t agree with the premise already.
The simplified version “But killing is wrong, and we shouldn’t do wrong things!” is alas not terribly convincing to people who don’t agree with the premise already.
There are other ways of saying it. I think Iain Banks said it pretty well.
The same thing can still happen with a subjunctive conditional, though.
A: If John came to the party, Mary would be happy. (So we could make Mary happy by making John come to the party.)
B: But John isn’t going to the party, no matter what we do. (So your argument is invalid.)
Also, pace George R. R. Martin, the name is still spelled John. Sorry, no offense, I just couldn’t resist. :)
Ah, thanks. I didn’t know that existed as a short form for Jonathan, and inferred that it was merely another instance of his distorting English spelling in names and titles.
Even with such a generic conditional (where t and t’ are, effectively, universally quantified), the response can make sense with the following implied point: So not “B(now+delta’)”, hence we can’t draw any presently relevant conclusions from your statement, so why are you saying this?
It may or may not be appropriate to dispute the relevance of the conditional in this way, depending on the conversational situation.
This is very frustrating and when I realize it is happening, I stop the engagement. In my experience, rationalists are not that different from smart science or philosophy types because we agree on very basic things like the structure of an argument and the probabilistic nature of evidence. But in my experience normal people are very difficult to have productive discussions with. Some glaring things that I notice happening are:
a) Different definitions of evidence. The Bayesian definition of evidence is anything that makes A more likely than not A. But for many people, evidence is anything that would happen given A. For example a conspiracy theorist might say “Well of course they would deny it if were true, this only proves that I’m right”.
b) Aristotelianism: the idea that every statement is either true or false and you can prove statements deductively via reasoning. If you’ve reasoned that something is true, then you’ve proved it so it must be true. Here is a gem from an Aristotelian friend of mine “The people in the US are big, it must be the food and they use growth hormones in livestock, therefore people in the US are big because of growth hormones”.
c) Arguments that aren’t actually arguments. Usually these are either insults or signals of tribal affiliation. For example “Good to know you’re better than everyone else” in response to a critical comment. But insults can be more subtle and they can masquerade as arguments. For example in response to a call for higher taxes someone might say “If you love taxes so much then why aren’t you sending extra money to the treasury?”.
d) Arguments that just have nothing to do with their conclusion. An institute called Heartmath stated this gem (rough paraphrase): “The heart sends more information to the brain than the brain does to the heart therefore the heart is more important that the brain”.
e) Statistical illiteracy. I want to grab a flamethrower every time the following exchange happens:
Salviati: “According to this study people who are X tend to be Y”
Simplicio: “Well I know someone who is X but isn’t Y, so there goes that theory”
f) Logical illiteracy:
Example 1:
Salviati: ” If A then B”
Simplicio: “But A isn’t true therefore your argument is invalid”
Example 2:
Simplicio: “X is A therefore X is B”
Salviati: “Let us apply a proof by contradiction. ‘A implies B’ is false because Y is A, but Y is not B”
Simplicio: “How dare you compare X to Y, they are totally different! Y is only not B because …”
Sorry if the symbolic statements are harder to read, I didn’t want to use too many object level issues.
Sightings:
Arguments that aren’t actually arguments: argument by tribal affiliation was certainly in full force, as well as a certain general condescension bordering on insult.
Statistical illiteracy: in an only minor variant of your hypothetical exchange, I said that very few people are doing too much exercise (tacitly, relative to the number of people who are doing too little), to which someone replied that they had once overtrained to their detriment, as if this disproved my point.
I was also struck by how weird it was that people were nitpicking totally incidental parts of my post, which, even if granted, didn’t actually deduct from the essence of what I was saying. This seemed like a sort of “argument by attrition”, or even just a way of saying “go away; we can tell you’re not one of us.”
A general pattern I’ve noticed: when processing an argument to which they are hostile, people often parse generalizations as unsympathetically as they can. General statements which would ordinarily pass without a second thought are taken as absolutes and then “disproved” by citations of noncentral examples and weird edge cases. I think this is pretty bad faith, and it seems common enough. Do we have a name for it? (I have to stop myself doing it sometimes.)
Your symbolic arguments made me laugh.
Social justice, apropos of the name, is largely an exercise in the manipulation of cultural assumptions and categorical boundaries- especially the manipulation of taboos like body weight. We probably shouldn’t expect the habits and standards of the social justice community to be well suited to factual discovery, if only because factual discovery is usually a poor way to convince whole cultures of things.
But the tricky thing about conversation in that style is that disagreement is rarely amicable. In a conversation where external realities are relevant, the ‘winner’ gets social respect and the ‘loser’ gets to learn things, so disagreement can be mutually beneficial happy event. But if external realities are not considered, debate becomes a zero-sum game of social influence. In that case, you start to see tactics pop up that might otherwise feel like ‘bad faith.’ For example, you win if the other person finds debate so unpleasant that they stop vocalizing their disagreement, leaving you free to make assertions unopposed. On a site like Less Wrong, this result is catastrophic- but if your focus is primarily on the spread of social influence, then it can be an acceptable cost (or outright free, if you’re of the postmodernist persuasion).
My general sense is that this is a fairly distinctive quality of social justice communities, so your feeling of alienation may have as much to do with the social justice community as it does with the LW memeplex. A random conversation about fat acceptance with culturally modal people might be a great deal less stressful. But then again, you probably shouldn’t trust somebody else on LW to say that.
(I upvoted Simplicio and Salviati, by the way.)
Upvoted for being a plausible, fully charitable explanation of Social Justice rhetorical norms, which I had been unthinkingly categorizing as “Dumb/Evil For No Reason” despite the many highly intelligent people involved.
I am very curious to what extent this is true, and would appreciate any evidence people have in either direction.
What is the cause of this? Is it just random fluctuation in culture that reinforce themselves? Perhaps I do not notice these problems in non social justice people just because they do not have an issue they care enough about to argue in this way. Perhaps, It is just availability bias as I spend too much time reading things social justice people say. Perhaps it is a function of the fact that the memes they are talking have this idea that they are being oppressed which makes them more fearful of outsiders.
I’d call it being uncharitable. Extremely so, in this case.
Salviati: blah blah blah Exercise increases lifespan blah blah blah
Simplicio: THAT’S NOT TRUE THERE EXISTS AN EXCEPTION YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT IS INVALID
Because we’re talking about being uncharitable, let’s be charitable for a moment. Simplicio, in fact, made the mathematically proper counterargument: he produced a counterexample to a for-all claim. And finding one flaw with a mathematical proof is, in fact, sufficient to disregard the entire thing.
Clearly, though, Simplicio’s argument is horrible and nobody should ever make it. If we check out the errata for Linear Algebra Done Right, we find that Dr. Axler derped some coefficients on page 81. His proof is incorrect, but any reasonable person can easily see how the coefficients were derped and what the correct coefficients were, and it’s a trivial matter to change the proof to a correct proof.
Analogously, the proper response to an argument that’s technically incorrect, but has an obvious correct argument that you know the author was making even if they phrased it poorly, is to replace the incorrect argument with the correct argument, not scream about the incorrect argument. Anyone who does anything differently should have their internet privileges revoked. It’s more than a trivial inconvenience to write (and read) “the overwhelming scientific consensus indicates that, for most individuals, increasing exercise increases lifespan, although there’s a few studies that may suggest the opposite, and there’s a few outliers for whom increased exercise reduces lifespan” instead of “exercise increases lifespan”.
So, now our argument looks like
Salviati: blah blah blah Exercise increases lifespan blah blah blah
Simplicio: THAT’S NOT TRUE THERE EXISTS AN EXCEPTION YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT IS INVALID
Salviati: Principle of charity, bro
Now, if Simplicio applies principle of charity, then they’ll never make arguments like that again, and we’ve resolved the problem. If they don’t, we discontinue debating with them, and we’ve resolved the problem.
There’s a few failure modes here. We create a new route down which debates about akrasia-fighting devices can be derailed. We give a superweapon to people who we probably shouldn’t trust with one. They may google it and find our community and we won’t be able to keep them out of our walled garden. (I jest. Well, maybe.) But introducing principle of charity to people who have clearly never heard of it feels like it should either improve the quality of discourse or identify places we don’t want to spend any time.
In regular English, “exercise increases lifespan” doesn’t mean ‘all exercise increases lifespan’ any more than “ducks lay eggs” means ‘all ducks [including males] lay eggs’.
Well, there’s a frustrating sort of ambiguity there: it’s able to pivot between the two in an uncomfortable way which leaves one vulnerable to exploits like the above.
Sure, and it’s also vulnerable to abuse from the other side:
“I have bogosthenia and can’t exercise because my organs will fall out if I do. How should I extend my lifespan?”
“You should exercise! Exercise increases lifespan!”
”But my organs!”
“Are you saying exercise doesn’t increase lifespan? All these studies say it does!”
”Did they study people with no organs?”
“Why are you bringing up organs again? Exercise increases lifespan. If you start telling people it doesn’t, you’re going to be responsible for N unnecessary deaths per year, you quack.”
”… organs?”
Totally right.
I see this in lots of places where it’s clearly not an argument by attrition. There’s a sizable fraction of people on the Internet who are just over-literal.
There’s this issue though—what matters is not the fraction of people who exercise too much among the general population, is the fraction of people who exercise too much among the people you’re telling to exercise more to.
Not even that. It’s the fraction of people who have known someone who thought they exercised too much at least once in their lives.
It’s a first contact situation. You need to establish basic things first, e.g. “do you recognize this is a sequence of primes,” “is there such a thing as ‘good’ and ‘bad’,” “how do you treat your enemies,” etc.
“Aren’t you afraid of flying after that plane was shot down?” “No; flying is still much safer than driving, even taking terrorist attacks into account.” “But that plane was shot down!!!”
Sorry for being nit-picky, but that is partly linguistic illiteracy on Salviati’s part. Natural language conditionals are not assertible if their antecedent is false. Thus, by asserting “If A then B”, he implies that A is possible, with which Simiplicio might reasonably disagree.
Usually in these exchanges the truth value of A is under dispute. But it is nevertheless possible to make arguments with uncertain premises to see if the argument actually succeeds given its premises.
“But A isn’t true” is also a common response to counterfactual conditionals—especially in thought experiments.
Well, sometimes thought-experiments are dirty tricks and merit having their premises dismissed.
“If X, Y, and Z were all true, wouldn’t that mean we should kill all the coders?”
“Well, hypothetically, but none of X, Y, and Z are true.”
”Aha! So you concede that there are certain circumstances under which we should kill all the coders!”
My preferred answer being:
“I can’t occupy the epistemic state that you suggest — namely, knowing that X, Y, and Z are true with sufficient confidence to kill all the coders. If I ended up believing X, Y, and Z, it’s more likely that I’d hallucinated the evidence or been fooled than that killing all the coders is actually a good idea. Therefore, regardless of whether X, Y, and Z seem true to me, I can’t conclude that we should kill all the coders.”
But that’s a lot more subtle than the thought-experiment, and probably constitutes fucking tedious in a lot of social contexts. The simplified version “But killing is wrong, and we shouldn’t do wrong things!” is alas not terribly convincing to people who don’t agree with the premise already.
There are other ways of saying it. I think Iain Banks said it pretty well.
Can you give a quick example with the blanks filled in? I’m interested, but I’m not sure I follow.
A: If John comes to the party, Mary will be happy. (So there is a chance that Mary will be happy.)
B: But John isn’t going to the party. (So your argument is invalid.)
That’s what the subjunctive is for. If A had said “If Jon came to the party, Mary would be happy”, …
The same thing can still happen with a subjunctive conditional, though.
A: If John came to the party, Mary would be happy. (So we could make Mary happy by making John come to the party.) B: But John isn’t going to the party, no matter what we do. (So your argument is invalid.)
Also, pace George R. R. Martin, the name is still spelled John. Sorry, no offense, I just couldn’t resist. :)
Jon—short for Jonathan—was a perfectly good name long before George R R Martin.
Ah, thanks. I didn’t know that existed as a short form for Jonathan, and inferred that it was merely another instance of his distorting English spelling in names and titles.
It depends why Salvati is bringing it up.
“If X(t), then A(t+delta). If A(t’) then B(t’+delta’).”
“But, not A(now)!”
Even with such a generic conditional (where t and t’ are, effectively, universally quantified), the response can make sense with the following implied point: So not “B(now+delta’)”, hence we can’t draw any presently relevant conclusions from your statement, so why are you saying this?
It may or may not be appropriate to dispute the relevance of the conditional in this way, depending on the conversational situation.
Let me rephrase that with more words:
“If we do X, then A will happen. If A happens, then B happens.”
“But A isn’t happening.”