This post seems to be making a few claims, which I think can be evaluated separately:
1) Decoupling norms exist 2) Contextualizing norms exist 3) Decoupling and contextualization norms are useful to think as opposites (either as a dichotomy or spectrum)
(i.e. there are enough people using those norms that it’s a useful way to carve up the discussion-landscape)
There’s a range of “strong” / “weak” versions of these claims – decoupling and/or contextualization might be principled norms that some people explicitly endorse, or they might just be clusters of tendencies people have sometimes.
It’s certainly possible that there’s a “general factor” of contextualizing—that people systematically and non-opportunistically vary in how inferentially distant a related claim has to be in order to not create an implicature that needs to be explicitly canceled if false. But I don’t think it’s obvious, and even if it’s true, I don’t think it’s pedagogically wise to use a politically-motivated appeal-to-consequences as the central case of contextualizing.
And, reading that, I think it may actually the opposite – there is general factor of “decoupling”, not contextualizing. By default people are using language for a bunch of reasons all jumbled together, and it’s a relatively small set of people who have the deliberately-decouple tendency, skill and/or norm, of “checking individual statements to see if they make sense.”
Upon reflection, this is actually more in line with the original Nerst article, which used the terms “Low Decoupling” and “High Decoupling”, which less strongly conveys the idea of “contextualizer” being a coherent thing.
On the other hand, Nerst’s original post does make some claims about Klein being the sort of person (a journalist) who is “definitively a contextualizer, as opposed to just ‘not a decoupler’”, here:
While science and engineering disciplines (and analytic philosophy) are populated by people with a knack for decoupling who learn to take this norm for granted, other intellectual disciplines are not. Instead they’re largely composed of what’s opposite the scientist in the gallery of brainy archetypes: the literary or artistic intellectual.
This crowd doesn’t live in a world where decoupling is standard practice. On the contrary, coupling is what makes what they do work. Novelists, poets, artists and other storytellers like journalists, politicians and PR people rely on thick, rich and ambiguous meanings, associations, implications and allusions to evoke feelings, impressions and ideas in their audience. The words “artistic” and “literary” refers to using idea couplings well to subtly and indirectly push the audience’s meaning-buttons.
To a low-decoupler, high-decouplers’ ability to fence off any threatening implications looks like a lack of empathy for those threatened, while to a high-decoupler the low-decouplers insistence that this isn’t possible looks like naked bias and an inability to think straight. This is what Harris means when he says Klein is biased.
Although they’re interwoven, I think it might be worth distinguishing some subclaims here (not necessarily made by Nerst or Leong, but I think implied and worth thinking about)
There exist a class of general storytelling contextualists
There exist PR-people/politicians/activists who wield contextual practice as a tool or weapon.
There exist “principled contextualizers” who try to evenly come to good judgments that depends on context.
My Epistemic State
Empirical Questions
There’s a set of fairly concrete “empirical” questions here, which are basically “if you do a bunch of factor analysis of discussions, would decoupling and/or contextualization and/or any of the specific contextual-subcategories listed above be major predictive power?”
The experiments you’d run for this might be expensive but not very confusing.
I would currently guess:
“Decoupling factor” definitely exists and is meaningful
Storytelling contextualists exist and are meaningful (though not necessarily especially useful to contrast with decouplers)
PR-ists who wield context as tool/weapon definitely exist (and decoupling is often relevant to their plans, so they have developed tools that allow them to modulate the degree to which decoupling fits into the conversational frame)
I think I could name a few people at least attempting to be “fair, principled contextualists”, at least in some circumstances. I am less confident that this is a real thing because the alternative “secretly they’re just really effective or subtle PR-ists, either intentionally or not” is a pretty viable alternative
Conceptual Question
I have a remaining confusion, which is something like “what exactly is a contextualizer?”. I feel like I have a crisp definition of “decoupling”. I don’t have that for contextualizers. Are the three subcategories listed above really ‘relatives’ or are they just three different groups doing different things? Is it meaningful to put these on a spectrum with decouplers on the other side?
mr-hire suggests:
“How much you and others are willing to think about the consequences of what is said separate from its’ truth value.”
Which sounds like a plausibly good definition, that maybe applies to all three of the subcategories. But I feel like it’s not quite the natural definition for each individual subcategory. (Rather, it’s something a bit downstream of each category definition)
“Jumbled” vs “Contextual”
“High decoupling” and “low decoupling” are still pretty confusing terms, even if you get rid of any notion of “low decoupling” being a cogent thing. It occured to me, writing this review, that you might replace the word “contextual” with “jumbled”.
Contextual implies some degree of principled norms. Jumbled points more towards “the person is using language for a random mishmash of strategies all thrown together.” (Politicians might sometimes be best described as “jumbled”, and sometimes as “principled” [but, not necessarily good principles, i.e. ‘I will deliberately say whatever causes my party to win’]).
I really don’t like the term jumbled as some people would likely object much more to being labelled as jumbled than as a contextualiser. The rest of this comment makes some good points, but sometimes less is more. I do want to edit this article, but I think I’ll mostly engage with Zack’s points and reread the article.
The OP comment was optimizing for “improving my understanding of the domain” more than direct advice of how to change the post.
(I’m not necessarily expecting the points and confusions there to resolve within the next month – it’s possible that you’ll reflect on it a bit and then figure out a slightly different orientation to the post, that distills the various concepts into a new form. Another possible outcome is that you leave the post as-is for now, and then in another year or two after mulling things over someone writers a new post doing a somewhat different thing, that becomes the new referent. Or, it might just turn out that my current epistemic state wasn’t that useful. Or other things)
Re: “Jumbled”
I think there’s sort of a two-step process that goes into naming things (ironically, or appropriate, which map directly onto the post) – first figuring out “okay what actually is this phenomenon, and what name most accurately describes it?” and then, separately, “okay, what sort of names are going to reliably going to make people angry and distract from the original topic if you apply it to people, and are there alternative names that cleave closely to the truth?”
(my process for generating names in that risk offending is something like a multi-step Babble and Prune, where I generate names aiming to satisfice on “a good explanation of the true phenomenon” and “not likely to be unnecessarily distracting”, until I have a name that satisfies both criteria)
I haven’t tried generating a maximally good name for Jumbled yet since I wasn’t sure this was even carving reality the right way.
But, like, it’s not an accident that ‘jumbled’ is more likely to offend people than ‘contextualized’. I do, in fact, think worse of people who have jumbled communication than deliberately contextualized communication. (compare “Virtue Signalling”, which is an important term but is basically an insult except among people who have some kind of principled understanding that “Yup, it turns out some of the things I do had unflattering motives and I’ve come to endorse that, or endorse my current [low] degree of prioritizing changing it.”)
I am a conversation consequentialist and think it’s best to find ways of politely pointing out unflattering things about people in ways that don’t make them defensive. But, it might be that the correct carving of reality includes some unflattering descriptions of people and maybe the best you can do is minimize distraction-damage.
This post seems to be making a few claims, which I think can be evaluated separately:
1) Decoupling norms exist
2) Contextualizing norms exist
3) Decoupling and contextualization norms are useful to think as opposites (either as a dichotomy or spectrum)
(i.e. there are enough people using those norms that it’s a useful way to carve up the discussion-landscape)
There’s a range of “strong” / “weak” versions of these claims – decoupling and/or contextualization might be principled norms that some people explicitly endorse, or they might just be clusters of tendencies people have sometimes.
In the comments of his response post, Zack Davis noted:
And, reading that, I think it may actually the opposite – there is general factor of “decoupling”, not contextualizing. By default people are using language for a bunch of reasons all jumbled together, and it’s a relatively small set of people who have the deliberately-decouple tendency, skill and/or norm, of “checking individual statements to see if they make sense.”
Upon reflection, this is actually more in line with the original Nerst article, which used the terms “Low Decoupling” and “High Decoupling”, which less strongly conveys the idea of “contextualizer” being a coherent thing.
On the other hand, Nerst’s original post does make some claims about Klein being the sort of person (a journalist) who is “definitively a contextualizer, as opposed to just ‘not a decoupler’”, here:
Although they’re interwoven, I think it might be worth distinguishing some subclaims here (not necessarily made by Nerst or Leong, but I think implied and worth thinking about)
There exist a class of general storytelling contextualists
There exist PR-people/politicians/activists who wield contextual practice as a tool or weapon.
There exist “principled contextualizers” who try to evenly come to good judgments that depends on context.
My Epistemic State
Empirical Questions
There’s a set of fairly concrete “empirical” questions here, which are basically “if you do a bunch of factor analysis of discussions, would decoupling and/or contextualization and/or any of the specific contextual-subcategories listed above be major predictive power?”
The experiments you’d run for this might be expensive but not very confusing.
I would currently guess:
“Decoupling factor” definitely exists and is meaningful
Storytelling contextualists exist and are meaningful (though not necessarily especially useful to contrast with decouplers)
PR-ists who wield context as tool/weapon definitely exist (and decoupling is often relevant to their plans, so they have developed tools that allow them to modulate the degree to which decoupling fits into the conversational frame)
I think I could name a few people at least attempting to be “fair, principled contextualists”, at least in some circumstances. I am less confident that this is a real thing because the alternative “secretly they’re just really effective or subtle PR-ists, either intentionally or not” is a pretty viable alternative
Conceptual Question
I have a remaining confusion, which is something like “what exactly is a contextualizer?”. I feel like I have a crisp definition of “decoupling”. I don’t have that for contextualizers. Are the three subcategories listed above really ‘relatives’ or are they just three different groups doing different things? Is it meaningful to put these on a spectrum with decouplers on the other side?
mr-hire suggests:
Which sounds like a plausibly good definition, that maybe applies to all three of the subcategories. But I feel like it’s not quite the natural definition for each individual subcategory. (Rather, it’s something a bit downstream of each category definition)
“Jumbled” vs “Contextual”
“High decoupling” and “low decoupling” are still pretty confusing terms, even if you get rid of any notion of “low decoupling” being a cogent thing. It occured to me, writing this review, that you might replace the word “contextual” with “jumbled”.
Contextual implies some degree of principled norms. Jumbled points more towards “the person is using language for a random mishmash of strategies all thrown together.” (Politicians might sometimes be best described as “jumbled”, and sometimes as “principled” [but, not necessarily good principles, i.e. ‘I will deliberately say whatever causes my party to win’]).
...
That’s what I got for now.
I really don’t like the term jumbled as some people would likely object much more to being labelled as jumbled than as a contextualiser. The rest of this comment makes some good points, but sometimes less is more. I do want to edit this article, but I think I’ll mostly engage with Zack’s points and reread the article.
The OP comment was optimizing for “improving my understanding of the domain” more than direct advice of how to change the post.
(I’m not necessarily expecting the points and confusions there to resolve within the next month – it’s possible that you’ll reflect on it a bit and then figure out a slightly different orientation to the post, that distills the various concepts into a new form. Another possible outcome is that you leave the post as-is for now, and then in another year or two after mulling things over someone writers a new post doing a somewhat different thing, that becomes the new referent. Or, it might just turn out that my current epistemic state wasn’t that useful. Or other things)
Re: “Jumbled”
I think there’s sort of a two-step process that goes into naming things (ironically, or appropriate, which map directly onto the post) – first figuring out “okay what actually is this phenomenon, and what name most accurately describes it?” and then, separately, “okay, what sort of names are going to reliably going to make people angry and distract from the original topic if you apply it to people, and are there alternative names that cleave closely to the truth?”
(my process for generating names in that risk offending is something like a multi-step Babble and Prune, where I generate names aiming to satisfice on “a good explanation of the true phenomenon” and “not likely to be unnecessarily distracting”, until I have a name that satisfies both criteria)
I haven’t tried generating a maximally good name for Jumbled yet since I wasn’t sure this was even carving reality the right way.
But, like, it’s not an accident that ‘jumbled’ is more likely to offend people than ‘contextualized’. I do, in fact, think worse of people who have jumbled communication than deliberately contextualized communication. (compare “Virtue Signalling”, which is an important term but is basically an insult except among people who have some kind of principled understanding that “Yup, it turns out some of the things I do had unflattering motives and I’ve come to endorse that, or endorse my current [low] degree of prioritizing changing it.”)
I am a conversation consequentialist and think it’s best to find ways of politely pointing out unflattering things about people in ways that don’t make them defensive. But, it might be that the correct carving of reality includes some unflattering descriptions of people and maybe the best you can do is minimize distraction-damage.