I see the central issue—also raised in replies to my tweet—as: if you believe someone’s arguing in bad faith, isn’t it ok to engage non-rationally w them?
I agree the question “isn’t it okay to engage non-rationally w them?” is the central question. I disagree on the first half, though; my main question is: what makes you think the NYT is arguing?
If, say, you put forward your argument for why petitions are bad, and it was broadly ignored, that would be bad; if there were arguments against pseudonyms, and we crushed them rather than responding to them, that would be bad. But this is a place where someone is exercising arbitrary judgment, and presenting petitions is an old and peaceful way of influencing the arbitrary exercise of power.
I think that when Plato goes to the agora and sees someone selling fruit for drachmae, he does not think “it would be unreasonable to settle an argument by paying my interlocutor; is it ok to engage non-rationally with the merchant?” I think when Plato goes to the wrestling ring, he does not think “physical strength does not determine correctness of arguments, is it ok to engage non-rationally with my opponent?”
Now, probably at one point he’s engaged rationally with the questions of whether and how to engage with commerce and sport, and that seems good to me. But the Plato who tries to wrestle with arguments instead of with his body is confused, not heroic.
I think if you disagree with what someone thinks, or plans to do, the rational response is an argument to persuade them that they are wrong. (This is true irrespectively of whether they were, themselves, arguing, and it goes for the fruit-seller, the wrestler, etc. too.)
Of course if what you want is to acquire fruit from someone or defeat them in wrestling—as opposed to showing them that they are wrong—then you should not use argument, but money/force.
This has led me to ponder the following question:
What is the difference between trying to persuade someone that something is the right or best thing for them to do, and trying to incentivize them to do that thing (by payment, or threats, etc.)?
I do believe there is a difference, but I do not have an adequate account of what the difference is.
You’re welcome, and I’m curious to see what you end up thinking here.
I think if you disagree with what someone thinks, or plans to do, the rational response is an argument to persuade them that they are wrong. (This is true irrespectively of whether they were, themselves, arguing, and it goes for the fruit-seller, the wrestler, etc. too.)
As pointed out by Raemon in a sibling comment, here I think we want to start using a more precise word than “rational.” [Up until this point, I think I’ve been using “engage rationally” in a ‘standard’ way instead of in a ‘Less Wrong specific way’.]
I’m going to say the ‘argumentative’ response is an ‘argument to persuade them that they are wrong’, and agree that purely argumentative responses are important for communicative rationality. The thing that’s good about argumentative responses (as opposed to, say, purely persuasive ones) is that they attempt to be weaker when the claims they favor are not true than when they are true; and this helps us sort our beliefs and end up with truer ones.
I think for many disagreements, however, I want to do a thing that doesn’t quite feel like argumentation; I want to appeal to reality. This involves two steps: first, an ‘argument’ over what observations imply about our beliefs, and second, an observation of reality that then shifts our beliefs. The first is an argument, and we do actually have to agree on the relationship between observations and beliefs for the second step to do anything useful. This doesn’t help us establish logical truths, or things that would be true in any world, except indirectly; what it does help us do is establish empirical truths, or things that are true in our world (but could be false in others). Imagine a portal across universes that allows us to communicate with aliens who live under different physics than we do; it would be a tremendous surprise for our mathematicians and their mathematicians to disagree, whereas our chemists and their chemists disagreeing wouldn’t be surprising at all.
I think that the wrestling match falls into this category; if a rival claims “I could out-wrestle Plato”, then while Plato could respond with theories of wrestling and other logic, the quickest path to truth seems to be Plato responding with “let’s settle that question in the ring.” There’s the same two-part structure of “agree on what test bears on the question” and then “actually running the test.” I don’t think buying fruit falls into this category. [“Quickest path to truth” might not be the right criterion, here, but it feels likely to be close.]
Continuing to flesh out this view, besides “appeal to logic” and “appeal to reality” there’s something like “assertion of influence.” This seems like the category that buying fruit falls into; I have some ability to change the external world to be more to my liking, and I trade some of that ability to the merchant for fruit. There seem to be ethical ways to do this (like free commerce) and unethical ways to do this (like stealing), and in particular there seem to be many ways for assertion of influence to choke off good things.
I think ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ look more like ‘congruent with values X’ or ‘incongruent with values X’ than it does like ‘logically valid’ or ‘logically invalid’. [In this way, it more resembles the category of empirical truth, in which things are ‘congruent with world X’ or ‘incongruent with world X’ as opposed to ‘congruent with all possible worlds’ or not.]
And so we end up with questions that look like “how do we judge what influence is congruent with our values, and what influence in incongruent with our values?”, and further questions upstream like “what do our meta-values imply our values should be?”, and so on.
[There’s much more to say here, but I think I’ll leave it at this for now.]
This seems to me like it’s “action to improve accuracy of target’s map” vs. “action on both map and territory” with the strange case being “action to decrease the accuracy of the target’s map”.
An agent/person is considering whether to take some action. That action will have consequences, and various justifications other than its consequences for taking or not taking the action. The agent/person also has a map, which includes both what they believe those consequences would be, and what other reasons exist for taking or not taking that action and how much weight each of these things should carry.
Suppose we wish to prevent this action from taking place. We have two basic approaches here:
We can act upon their map alone, or we can act upon the territory and use this to change their map.
When we engage in a philosophical or other argument with them, we’re not trying to change what effect the action will have, or change any other considerations. Instead, we are trying to update their map such that they no longer consider the action worthwhile. Perhaps we can get them to adopt new philosophical principles that have this effect. Perhaps we are doing something less abstract, and convincing them that their map of the situation and what actions will cause what consequences is flawed.
When we instead try to incentivize them, we do this by changing the consequences of the action, or altering other considerations (e.g. if someone cares about doing that which is endorsed by some authority, moral or otherwise, without regard to their knowledge or future actions, we could still use that as an incentive). We act upon the territory. We change circumstances such that taking action becomes more expensive, or has undesired consequences. This can include the consequence that we will take actions in response. Alternatively, we can improve the results of not taking action (e.g. bribe them, or promise something, or prevent the bad consequences of inaction by solving the underlying problem, etc etc).
This seems mostly like a clear distinction to me, except there’s a tricky situation where you’re acting upon their map in a way that makes it less rather than more accurate. For example, you might threaten something, but not intend to carry out the threat. Or you might lie about the situation’s details. Did you act to persuade them that the action is not desirable, or did you change their incentives?
One possibility that I’m drawn to is to say there are three things here—persuasion, deception and incentivization. And of course many attempts combine two or three of these.
On the question of what the right action is:
Is the/a petition persuasion, deception or incentivization? In this case, it seems clearly to be persuasion. The mission is not to generate bad consequences and then inform the target of this threat. There are already bad consequences, both to the target and in general, that we are making more visible to the target. Whether or not we should also be doing incentivization in other ways seems like a distinct question. I’ve chosen yes to at least some extent.
Sometimes someone will want to do or not something, and we’ll think they’re making a mistake from their perspective, and persuasion should be possible. Other times, we don’t think they’re making a mistake from their perspective, but still prefer that they change their behavior. We all incentivize people from time to time. It seems quite perverse to think we shouldn’t do this in cases where the person is making a mistake! It seems even crazier to not do this when we see someone doing what we believe is the wrong thing because they see incentives (e.g. money or the ability to get clicks) that are compromising what would otherwise be good ethics.
I would strongly agree with your assertion that philosophical questions—and indeed many other questions—should not be settled via majority vote. But does that mean that when the vote is held one must abstain in protest? Do you also believe philosophers should not vote in elections? It’s not like one can issue disclaimers there.
I also am confused by the assertion that the petition would benefit in some way from a “if after consideration you decide we’re wrong, we’ll support you” clause. It does not seem necessary or wise, before one attempts to persuade another that they are wrong, to agree to support their conclusion if they engage in careful consideration. Even when incentives are aligned.
I also am confused by the assertion that the petition would benefit in some way from a “if after consideration you decide we’re wrong, we’ll support you” clause. It does not seem necessary or wise, before one attempts to persuade another that they are wrong, to agree to support their conclusion if they engage in careful consideration. Even when incentives are aligned.
I think what this does is separate out the “I think you should update your map” message and the “I am shifting your incentives” message. If I think that someone would prefer the strawberry ice cream to the vanilla ice cream, I can simply offer that information to them, or I can advise them to get the strawberry, and make it a test of our friendship whether they follow my advice, rewarding them if they try it and like it, and punishing them in all other cases.
In cases where you simply want to offer information, and not put any ‘undue’ pressure on their decision-making, it seems good to be able to flag that. The broader question is something like “what pressures are undue, and why?”; you could imagine that there are cases where I want to shift the incentives of others, like telling a would-be bicycle thief that I think they would prefer not stealing the bike to stealing it, and part of that is because I would take actions against them if they did.
Probably worth noting that folk on LessWrong may be using the word rationality different than the way it sounds like you’re using the word. (This is fine, but it means we need to be careful that we’re understanding each other right)
1. Epistemic rationality: systematically improving the accuracy of your beliefs.
2. Instrumental rationality: systematically achieving your values.
The first concept is simple enough. When you open your eyes and look at the room around you, you’ll locate your laptop in relation to the table, and you’ll locate a bookcase in relation to the wall. If something goes wrong with your eyes, or your brain, then your mental model might say there’s a bookcase where no bookcase exists, and when you go over to get a book, you’ll be disappointed.
This is what it’s like to have a false belief, a map of the world that doesn’t correspond to the territory. Epistemic rationality is about building accurate maps instead. This correspondence between belief and reality is commonly called “truth,” and I’m happy to call it that.1
Instrumental rationality, on the other hand, is about steering reality—sending the future where you want it to go. It’s the art of choosing actions that lead to outcomes ranked higher in your preferences. I sometimes call this “winning.”,
So rationality is about forming true beliefs and making decisions that help you win.
I’m not sure what your conception of rationality is. I’m somewhat interested, but I think it might be better to just cut closer to the issue: why is good to rely on reasoned arguments rather than petitions?
I think there is such a thing as “communicating well” where “well” picks out internal norms of communication (not, e.g. in such a way as to conduce instrumentally to my interests or to my having truer beliefs—bc it could happen that lying to you serves either of those ends) and that is what I mean by “communicating rationally”
The goals of such communication are what I called (in the tweet thread) “bidirectional likemindedness”—that we think the same thing, but not bc it’s determined in advance that you will think what I (independently) thought or that I will think what you (independently) thought.
So I do think it makes sense to have philosopher societies where the focus is on sharing information in such a way that we jointly converge on the truth (I’m not sure if this is quite the same thing you’re getting at with communicative rationality.). And I think there is benefit to trying to get broader society to adopt more truthseeking styles of communication, which includes more reasoned arguments on the margin.
But, this doesn’t imply that it’s always the right thing to do, when interacting with people who don’t share your truthseeking principles. (for extreme example, I wouldn’t try to give reasoned arguments to someone attacking me on the street)
I have some sense of why communicative rationality is important to you, but not why it should be (overwhelmingly) important to me.
I think there is sometimes benefit to people standing by their principles, to get society to change around them. (i.e. you can be a hero of communicative rationality, maybe even trying to make reasoned arguments to an attacker on the street, to highlight that clear communication is a cause worth dying for). But, this is a supererogatory thing. I wouldn’t want everyone who was interested in philosophy to feel like interest-in-philosophy meant giving up their ability to defend themselves, or give up the ability to communicate in ways that other cultures understand or respect.
That would probably result in fewer people being willing to incorporate philosophy into their life.
My own conception of rationality (note: Vaniver may or may not endorse this) is to be a robust agent – someone who reliably makes good decisions in a variety of circumstances, regardless of how other agents are interacting with me and how the environment might change. This includes clear communication, but also includes knowing how to defend yourself, and credibly communicating when you will defend yourself, and how, so that people can coordinate with you.
My conception of “rationalist hero” is someone who understands when it is the right time to defend “communication via reasoned arguments”, and when is the right to defend other foundational norms (via incentives or whatnot)
I think this is legitimately tricky (part of being a rationalist hero in my book is having the good judgment to know the difference, and it can be hard sometimes). But, right now it seems to me that it’s more important to be incentivizing the Times to not de-anonymize people, rather than to focus on persuading them that it is wrong to do so using reasoned arguments.
I can see a lot of good philosophy in “fruit seller doesn’t pose an argument, but an option for exchange” and in the trade value of the item not speaking to the items general worth.
In the wrestling ring it coudl be tempting if the reigning champion had stark wrestling opinions to assume he is correct and he might have the attitude that anybody that disagrees with him should try to beat him. Recognising that appeal to the stick is fallacious is beneficial in that you can realise why he could stay wrong if his is is incorrect about where his wrestling prowness comes from.
The greek were known to be annoying and bothering others by challenging their logic and concepts. Rational wrestling might not be the be all end all of wrestling but rationality does wrestling good.
I agree the question “isn’t it okay to engage non-rationally w them?” is the central question. I disagree on the first half, though; my main question is: what makes you think the NYT is arguing?
If, say, you put forward your argument for why petitions are bad, and it was broadly ignored, that would be bad; if there were arguments against pseudonyms, and we crushed them rather than responding to them, that would be bad. But this is a place where someone is exercising arbitrary judgment, and presenting petitions is an old and peaceful way of influencing the arbitrary exercise of power.
I think that when Plato goes to the agora and sees someone selling fruit for drachmae, he does not think “it would be unreasonable to settle an argument by paying my interlocutor; is it ok to engage non-rationally with the merchant?” I think when Plato goes to the wrestling ring, he does not think “physical strength does not determine correctness of arguments, is it ok to engage non-rationally with my opponent?”
Now, probably at one point he’s engaged rationally with the questions of whether and how to engage with commerce and sport, and that seems good to me. But the Plato who tries to wrestle with arguments instead of with his body is confused, not heroic.
I think if you disagree with what someone thinks, or plans to do, the rational response is an argument to persuade them that they are wrong. (This is true irrespectively of whether they were, themselves, arguing, and it goes for the fruit-seller, the wrestler, etc. too.)
Of course if what you want is to acquire fruit from someone or defeat them in wrestling—as opposed to showing them that they are wrong—then you should not use argument, but money/force.
This has led me to ponder the following question:
What is the difference between trying to persuade someone that something is the right or best thing for them to do, and trying to incentivize them to do that thing (by payment, or threats, etc.)?
I do believe there is a difference, but I do not have an adequate account of what the difference is.
Thanks for bringing this problem to my attention.
You’re welcome, and I’m curious to see what you end up thinking here.
As pointed out by Raemon in a sibling comment, here I think we want to start using a more precise word than “rational.” [Up until this point, I think I’ve been using “engage rationally” in a ‘standard’ way instead of in a ‘Less Wrong specific way’.]
I’m going to say the ‘argumentative’ response is an ‘argument to persuade them that they are wrong’, and agree that purely argumentative responses are important for communicative rationality. The thing that’s good about argumentative responses (as opposed to, say, purely persuasive ones) is that they attempt to be weaker when the claims they favor are not true than when they are true; and this helps us sort our beliefs and end up with truer ones.
I think for many disagreements, however, I want to do a thing that doesn’t quite feel like argumentation; I want to appeal to reality. This involves two steps: first, an ‘argument’ over what observations imply about our beliefs, and second, an observation of reality that then shifts our beliefs. The first is an argument, and we do actually have to agree on the relationship between observations and beliefs for the second step to do anything useful. This doesn’t help us establish logical truths, or things that would be true in any world, except indirectly; what it does help us do is establish empirical truths, or things that are true in our world (but could be false in others). Imagine a portal across universes that allows us to communicate with aliens who live under different physics than we do; it would be a tremendous surprise for our mathematicians and their mathematicians to disagree, whereas our chemists and their chemists disagreeing wouldn’t be surprising at all.
I think that the wrestling match falls into this category; if a rival claims “I could out-wrestle Plato”, then while Plato could respond with theories of wrestling and other logic, the quickest path to truth seems to be Plato responding with “let’s settle that question in the ring.” There’s the same two-part structure of “agree on what test bears on the question” and then “actually running the test.” I don’t think buying fruit falls into this category. [“Quickest path to truth” might not be the right criterion, here, but it feels likely to be close.]
Continuing to flesh out this view, besides “appeal to logic” and “appeal to reality” there’s something like “assertion of influence.” This seems like the category that buying fruit falls into; I have some ability to change the external world to be more to my liking, and I trade some of that ability to the merchant for fruit. There seem to be ethical ways to do this (like free commerce) and unethical ways to do this (like stealing), and in particular there seem to be many ways for assertion of influence to choke off good things.
I think ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ look more like ‘congruent with values X’ or ‘incongruent with values X’ than it does like ‘logically valid’ or ‘logically invalid’. [In this way, it more resembles the category of empirical truth, in which things are ‘congruent with world X’ or ‘incongruent with world X’ as opposed to ‘congruent with all possible worlds’ or not.]
And so we end up with questions that look like “how do we judge what influence is congruent with our values, and what influence in incongruent with our values?”, and further questions upstream like “what do our meta-values imply our values should be?”, and so on.
[There’s much more to say here, but I think I’ll leave it at this for now.]
Let’s give that account a shot.
This seems to me like it’s “action to improve accuracy of target’s map” vs. “action on both map and territory” with the strange case being “action to decrease the accuracy of the target’s map”.
An agent/person is considering whether to take some action. That action will have consequences, and various justifications other than its consequences for taking or not taking the action. The agent/person also has a map, which includes both what they believe those consequences would be, and what other reasons exist for taking or not taking that action and how much weight each of these things should carry.
Suppose we wish to prevent this action from taking place. We have two basic approaches here:
We can act upon their map alone, or we can act upon the territory and use this to change their map.
When we engage in a philosophical or other argument with them, we’re not trying to change what effect the action will have, or change any other considerations. Instead, we are trying to update their map such that they no longer consider the action worthwhile. Perhaps we can get them to adopt new philosophical principles that have this effect. Perhaps we are doing something less abstract, and convincing them that their map of the situation and what actions will cause what consequences is flawed.
When we instead try to incentivize them, we do this by changing the consequences of the action, or altering other considerations (e.g. if someone cares about doing that which is endorsed by some authority, moral or otherwise, without regard to their knowledge or future actions, we could still use that as an incentive). We act upon the territory. We change circumstances such that taking action becomes more expensive, or has undesired consequences. This can include the consequence that we will take actions in response. Alternatively, we can improve the results of not taking action (e.g. bribe them, or promise something, or prevent the bad consequences of inaction by solving the underlying problem, etc etc).
This seems mostly like a clear distinction to me, except there’s a tricky situation where you’re acting upon their map in a way that makes it less rather than more accurate. For example, you might threaten something, but not intend to carry out the threat. Or you might lie about the situation’s details. Did you act to persuade them that the action is not desirable, or did you change their incentives?
One possibility that I’m drawn to is to say there are three things here—persuasion, deception and incentivization. And of course many attempts combine two or three of these.
On the question of what the right action is:
Is the/a petition persuasion, deception or incentivization? In this case, it seems clearly to be persuasion. The mission is not to generate bad consequences and then inform the target of this threat. There are already bad consequences, both to the target and in general, that we are making more visible to the target. Whether or not we should also be doing incentivization in other ways seems like a distinct question. I’ve chosen yes to at least some extent.
Sometimes someone will want to do or not something, and we’ll think they’re making a mistake from their perspective, and persuasion should be possible. Other times, we don’t think they’re making a mistake from their perspective, but still prefer that they change their behavior. We all incentivize people from time to time. It seems quite perverse to think we shouldn’t do this in cases where the person is making a mistake! It seems even crazier to not do this when we see someone doing what we believe is the wrong thing because they see incentives (e.g. money or the ability to get clicks) that are compromising what would otherwise be good ethics.
I would strongly agree with your assertion that philosophical questions—and indeed many other questions—should not be settled via majority vote. But does that mean that when the vote is held one must abstain in protest? Do you also believe philosophers should not vote in elections? It’s not like one can issue disclaimers there.
I also am confused by the assertion that the petition would benefit in some way from a “if after consideration you decide we’re wrong, we’ll support you” clause. It does not seem necessary or wise, before one attempts to persuade another that they are wrong, to agree to support their conclusion if they engage in careful consideration. Even when incentives are aligned.
A quick comment on just this part:
I think what this does is separate out the “I think you should update your map” message and the “I am shifting your incentives” message. If I think that someone would prefer the strawberry ice cream to the vanilla ice cream, I can simply offer that information to them, or I can advise them to get the strawberry, and make it a test of our friendship whether they follow my advice, rewarding them if they try it and like it, and punishing them in all other cases.
In cases where you simply want to offer information, and not put any ‘undue’ pressure on their decision-making, it seems good to be able to flag that. The broader question is something like “what pressures are undue, and why?”; you could imagine that there are cases where I want to shift the incentives of others, like telling a would-be bicycle thief that I think they would prefer not stealing the bike to stealing it, and part of that is because I would take actions against them if they did.
Probably worth noting that folk on LessWrong may be using the word rationality different than the way it sounds like you’re using the word. (This is fine, but it means we need to be careful that we’re understanding each other right)
The post What Do We Mean By Rationality is a bit old but still roughly captures what most LW-folk mean by the word:
I’m not sure what your conception of rationality is. I’m somewhat interested, but I think it might be better to just cut closer to the issue: why is good to rely on reasoned arguments rather than petitions?
Yes, good point, thanks for the request for clarification.
I think there is a third kind of rationality, called “communicative rationality”
See this tweet: https://twitter.com/AgnesCallard/status/1276531044024451073?s=20
(and also my replies to questions therein)
I think there is such a thing as “communicating well” where “well” picks out internal norms of communication (not, e.g. in such a way as to conduce instrumentally to my interests or to my having truer beliefs—bc it could happen that lying to you serves either of those ends) and that is what I mean by “communicating rationally”
The goals of such communication are what I called (in the tweet thread) “bidirectional likemindedness”—that we think the same thing, but not bc it’s determined in advance that you will think what I (independently) thought or that I will think what you (independently) thought.
So I do think it makes sense to have philosopher societies where the focus is on sharing information in such a way that we jointly converge on the truth (I’m not sure if this is quite the same thing you’re getting at with communicative rationality.). And I think there is benefit to trying to get broader society to adopt more truthseeking styles of communication, which includes more reasoned arguments on the margin.
But, this doesn’t imply that it’s always the right thing to do, when interacting with people who don’t share your truthseeking principles. (for extreme example, I wouldn’t try to give reasoned arguments to someone attacking me on the street)
I have some sense of why communicative rationality is important to you, but not why it should be (overwhelmingly) important to me.
I think there is sometimes benefit to people standing by their principles, to get society to change around them. (i.e. you can be a hero of communicative rationality, maybe even trying to make reasoned arguments to an attacker on the street, to highlight that clear communication is a cause worth dying for). But, this is a supererogatory thing. I wouldn’t want everyone who was interested in philosophy to feel like interest-in-philosophy meant giving up their ability to defend themselves, or give up the ability to communicate in ways that other cultures understand or respect.
That would probably result in fewer people being willing to incorporate philosophy into their life.
My own conception of rationality (note: Vaniver may or may not endorse this) is to be a robust agent – someone who reliably makes good decisions in a variety of circumstances, regardless of how other agents are interacting with me and how the environment might change. This includes clear communication, but also includes knowing how to defend yourself, and credibly communicating when you will defend yourself, and how, so that people can coordinate with you.
My conception of “rationalist hero” is someone who understands when it is the right time to defend “communication via reasoned arguments”, and when is the right to defend other foundational norms (via incentives or whatnot)
I think this is legitimately tricky (part of being a rationalist hero in my book is having the good judgment to know the difference, and it can be hard sometimes). But, right now it seems to me that it’s more important to be incentivizing the Times to not de-anonymize people, rather than to focus on persuading them that it is wrong to do so using reasoned arguments.
I can see a lot of good philosophy in “fruit seller doesn’t pose an argument, but an option for exchange” and in the trade value of the item not speaking to the items general worth.
In the wrestling ring it coudl be tempting if the reigning champion had stark wrestling opinions to assume he is correct and he might have the attitude that anybody that disagrees with him should try to beat him. Recognising that appeal to the stick is fallacious is beneficial in that you can realise why he could stay wrong if his is is incorrect about where his wrestling prowness comes from.
The greek were known to be annoying and bothering others by challenging their logic and concepts. Rational wrestling might not be the be all end all of wrestling but rationality does wrestling good.