Vaniver privately suggested to me that I may want to offer some commentary on what I could’ve done in this situation in order for it to have gone better, which I thought was a good and reasonable suggestion. I’ll do that in this comment, using Vaniver’s summary of the situation as a springboard of sorts.
In this comment, Said describes as bad “various proposed norms of interaction such as “don’t ask people for examples of their claims” and so on”, without specifically identifying Duncan as proposing that norm (tho I think it’s heavily implied).
Then gjm objects to that characterization as a straw man.
So, first of all, yes, I was clearly referring to Duncan. (I didn’t expect that to be obscure to anyone who’d bother to read that subthread in the first place, and indeed—so far as I can tell—it was not. If anyone had been confused, they would presumably have asked “what do you mean?”, and then I’d have linked what I mean—which is pretty close to what happened anyway. This part, in any case, is not the problem.)
The obvious problem here is that “don’t ask people for examples of their claims”—taken literally—is, indeed, a strawman.
The question is, whose problem (to solve) is it?
There are a few possible responses to this (which are not mutually exclusive).
On the one hand, if I want people to know what I mean, and instead of saying what I mean, I say something which is only approximately what I mean, and people assume that I meant what I said, and respond to it—well, whose fault is that, but mine?
Certainly one could make protestations along the lines of “haven’t you people ever heard of [ hyperbole / colloquialisms / writing off the cuff and expecting that readers will infer from surrounding context / whatever ]”, but such things are always suspect. (And even if one insists that there’s nothing un-virtuous about any particular instance of any one of those rhetorical or conversational patterns, nevertheless it would be a bit rich to get huffy about people taking words literally on Less Wrong, of all places.)
So, in one sense, the whole problem would’ve been avoided if I’d taken pains to write as precisely as I usually try to do. Since I didn’t do that, and could have, the fault would seem to be mine; case closed.
But that account doesn’t quite work.
For one thing, if someone says something you think is wrong, and you say “seems wrong to me actually”, and they reply “actually I meant this other thing”—well, that seems to me to be a normal and reasonable sort of exchange; this is how understanding is reached. I made a claim; gjm responded that it seemed like a strawman; I responded with a clarification.
Note that here I definitely made a mistake; what I should’ve included in that comment, but left out, was a clear and unambiguous statement along the lines of:
“Yes, taken literally, ‘don’t ask people for examples of their claims’ would of course be a strawman. I thought that the intended reading would be clear, but I definitely see the potential for literal (mis-)reading, sorry. To clarify:”
The rest of that comment would then have proceeded as written. I don’t think that it much needs amendment. In particular, the second paragraph (which, as Vaniver notes, does much of the work) gives a concise and clear statement of the claim which I was originally (and, at first, sloppily) alluding to. I stand by that clarified claim, and have seen nothing that would dissuade me from it.
Importantly, however, we can see that Duncan objects, quite strenuously, even to this clarified and narrowed form of what I said!
(As I note in this comment, it was not until after essentially the whole discussion had already taken place that Duncan edited his reply to my latter comment to explicitly disclaim the view that I ascribed to him. For the duration of that whole long comment exchange, it very much seemed to me that Duncan was not objecting because I was ascribing to him a belief he does not hold, but rather because he had not said outright that he held such a belief… but, of course, I never claimed that he had!)
So even if that clarified comment had come first (having not, therefore, needed any acknowledgment of previous sloppiness), there seems to be little reason to believe that Duncan would not have taken umbrage at it.
Despite that, failing to include that explicit acknowledgement was an error. Regardless of whether it can be said to be responsible for the ensuing heated back-and-forth (I lean toward “probably not”), this omission was very much a failure of “local validity” on my part, and for that there is no one to blame but me.
Of the rest of the discussion thread, there is little that needs to be said. (As Vaniver notes, some of my subsequent comments both clarify my claims further and also provide evidence for them.)
Vaniver privately suggested to me that I may want to offer some commentary on what I could’ve done in this situation in order for it to have gone better, which I thought was a good and reasonable suggestion. I’ll do that in this comment, using Vaniver’s summary of the situation as a springboard of sorts.
So, first of all, yes, I was clearly referring to Duncan. (I didn’t expect that to be obscure to anyone who’d bother to read that subthread in the first place, and indeed—so far as I can tell—it was not. If anyone had been confused, they would presumably have asked “what do you mean?”, and then I’d have linked what I mean—which is pretty close to what happened anyway. This part, in any case, is not the problem.)
The obvious problem here is that “don’t ask people for examples of their claims”—taken literally—is, indeed, a strawman.
The question is, whose problem (to solve) is it?
There are a few possible responses to this (which are not mutually exclusive).
On the one hand, if I want people to know what I mean, and instead of saying what I mean, I say something which is only approximately what I mean, and people assume that I meant what I said, and respond to it—well, whose fault is that, but mine?
Certainly one could make protestations along the lines of “haven’t you people ever heard of [ hyperbole / colloquialisms / writing off the cuff and expecting that readers will infer from surrounding context / whatever ]”, but such things are always suspect. (And even if one insists that there’s nothing un-virtuous about any particular instance of any one of those rhetorical or conversational patterns, nevertheless it would be a bit rich to get huffy about people taking words literally on Less Wrong, of all places.)
So, in one sense, the whole problem would’ve been avoided if I’d taken pains to write as precisely as I usually try to do. Since I didn’t do that, and could have, the fault would seem to be mine; case closed.
But that account doesn’t quite work.
For one thing, if someone says something you think is wrong, and you say “seems wrong to me actually”, and they reply “actually I meant this other thing”—well, that seems to me to be a normal and reasonable sort of exchange; this is how understanding is reached. I made a claim; gjm responded that it seemed like a strawman; I responded with a clarification.
Note that here I definitely made a mistake; what I should’ve included in that comment, but left out, was a clear and unambiguous statement along the lines of:
“Yes, taken literally, ‘don’t ask people for examples of their claims’ would of course be a strawman. I thought that the intended reading would be clear, but I definitely see the potential for literal (mis-)reading, sorry. To clarify:”
The rest of that comment would then have proceeded as written. I don’t think that it much needs amendment. In particular, the second paragraph (which, as Vaniver notes, does much of the work) gives a concise and clear statement of the claim which I was originally (and, at first, sloppily) alluding to. I stand by that clarified claim, and have seen nothing that would dissuade me from it.
Importantly, however, we can see that Duncan objects, quite strenuously, even to this clarified and narrowed form of what I said!
(As I note in this comment, it was not until after essentially the whole discussion had already taken place that Duncan edited his reply to my latter comment to explicitly disclaim the view that I ascribed to him. For the duration of that whole long comment exchange, it very much seemed to me that Duncan was not objecting because I was ascribing to him a belief he does not hold, but rather because he had not said outright that he held such a belief… but, of course, I never claimed that he had!)
So even if that clarified comment had come first (having not, therefore, needed any acknowledgment of previous sloppiness), there seems to be little reason to believe that Duncan would not have taken umbrage at it.
Despite that, failing to include that explicit acknowledgement was an error. Regardless of whether it can be said to be responsible for the ensuing heated back-and-forth (I lean toward “probably not”), this omission was very much a failure of “local validity” on my part, and for that there is no one to blame but me.
Of the rest of the discussion thread, there is little that needs to be said. (As Vaniver notes, some of my subsequent comments both clarify my claims further and also provide evidence for them.)