What is your incredulity here aiming to accomplish?
I genuinely feel incredulous and am trying to express what I’m actually thinking in clear language? I mean, it’s also totally going to be the case that the underlying generator of “genuinely felt incredulity” is no doubt going to be some sort of subconscious monkey-politics status move designed by evolution to make myself look good at the expense of others. It’s important to notice that! But the mere fact of having noticed that doesn’t make the feeling go away, and given that the feeling is there, it’s probably going to leak into my writing. I could expend more effort doing a complicated System-2 political calculation that tries to simulate you and strategically compute what words I should say in order to have the desired effect on you. But not only is that more work than saying what I’m actually thinking in clear language, I also expect it to result in worse writing. Use the native architecture!
I mean, if it’ll help, we can construct a narrative in which my emotion of incredulity that was designed by evolution to make me look good, actually makes me look bad in local social reality? That’s a win-win Pareto improvement: I don’t have to mutilate my natural writing style in the name of so-called “cooperative” norms, and you don’t have to let my monkey-politics brain get away with “winning” the interaction.
How about this? Incredulity is, definitionally, a failed prediction. The fact that I felt incredulous means that my monkey status instincts are systematically distorting my anticipations about the world, making me delusionally perceive things as “obvious” exactly when they’re things that I coincidentally happened to already know, and not because of their actual degree-of-obviousness as operationalized by what fraction of others know them. (And conversely, I’ll delusionally perceive things as “nonobvious” exactly when I coincidentally happened to not-know them.)
(Slaps forehead)Hello, Megan! Ten years into this “rationality” business, and here I am still making rookie mistakes like this! How dumb can I get?
I think you should prioritize learning to simulate other minds a bit
Thanks, this is a good suggestion! I probably am below average at avoiding the typical mind fallacy. You should totally feel superior to me on this account!
I think there are separate worthwhile skills of “focus on learning empathy/modeling and let clear language flow from that”, and also “writing skills exist that are separate from epistemics” (such as brevity, which I think actually factors in here a bit)
Something that may not have been clear from my past discussion is that when I say “this could have been written in a way that was less triggering”, or something, I’m not (usually) meaning that to be a harsh criticism. Just, the sort of thing that you should say ‘ah, that makes sense. I will work on that’ for the future.
Just, the sort of thing that you should say ‘ah, that makes sense. I will work on that’ for the future.
It’s actually not clear to me that I should work on that. As a professional hazard of my other career, I’m pretty used to people trying to use “You would be more persuasive if you were nicer” as an attempted silencing tactic; if I just believed everyone who told me that, I would never get anything done.
I genuinely feel incredulous and am trying to express what I’m actually thinking in clear language? I mean, it’s also totally going to be the case that the underlying generator of “genuinely felt incredulity” is no doubt going to be some sort of subconscious monkey-politics status move designed by evolution to make myself look good at the expense of others. It’s important to notice that! But the mere fact of having noticed that doesn’t make the feeling go away, and given that the feeling is there, it’s probably going to leak into my writing. I could expend more effort doing a complicated System-2 political calculation that tries to simulate you and strategically compute what words I should say in order to have the desired effect on you. But not only is that more work than saying what I’m actually thinking in clear language, I also expect it to result in worse writing. Use the native architecture!
I mean, if it’ll help, we can construct a narrative in which my emotion of incredulity that was designed by evolution to make me look good, actually makes me look bad in local social reality? That’s a win-win Pareto improvement: I don’t have to mutilate my natural writing style in the name of so-called “cooperative” norms, and you don’t have to let my monkey-politics brain get away with “winning” the interaction.
How about this? Incredulity is, definitionally, a failed prediction. The fact that I felt incredulous means that my monkey status instincts are systematically distorting my anticipations about the world, making me delusionally perceive things as “obvious” exactly when they’re things that I coincidentally happened to already know, and not because of their actual degree-of-obviousness as operationalized by what fraction of others know them. (And conversely, I’ll delusionally perceive things as “nonobvious” exactly when I coincidentally happened to not-know them.)
(Slaps forehead) Hello, Megan! Ten years into this “rationality” business, and here I am still making rookie mistakes like this! How dumb can I get?
Thanks, this is a good suggestion! I probably am below average at avoiding the typical mind fallacy. You should totally feel superior to me on this account!
I think there are separate worthwhile skills of “focus on learning empathy/modeling and let clear language flow from that”, and also “writing skills exist that are separate from epistemics” (such as brevity, which I think actually factors in here a bit)
Something that may not have been clear from my past discussion is that when I say “this could have been written in a way that was less triggering”, or something, I’m not (usually) meaning that to be a harsh criticism. Just, the sort of thing that you should say ‘ah, that makes sense. I will work on that’ for the future.
It’s actually not clear to me that I should work on that. As a professional hazard of my other career, I’m pretty used to people trying to use “You would be more persuasive if you were nicer” as an attempted silencing tactic; if I just believed everyone who told me that, I would never get anything done.