It feels like you keep repeating the 101 arguments and I want to say “I get them, I really get them, you’re boring me”—can you instead engage with why I think we can’t use “but I’m saying true things” as free license to say anything in way whatsoever? That this doesn’t get you a space where people discuss truth freely.
I think some of the problem here is that important parts of the way you framed this stuff seemed as though you really didn’t get it—by the Gricean maxim of relevance—even if you verbally affirmed it. Your framing didn’t distinguish between “don’t say things through the side channels of your speech” and “don’t criticize other participants.” You provided a set of examples that skipped over the only difficult case entirely. The only example you gave of criticizing the motives of a potential party to the conversation was gratuitous insults.
(The conversational move I want to recommend to you here is something like, “You keep saying X. It sort of seems like you think that I believe not-X. I’d rather you directly characterized what you think I’m getting wrong, and why, instead of arguing on the assumption that I believe something silly.” If you don’t explicitly invite this, people are going to be inhibited about claiming that you believe something silly, and arguing to you that you believe it, since it’s generally rude to “put words in other people’s mouths” and people get unhelpfully defensive about that pretty reliably, so it’s natural to try to let you save face by skipping over the unpleasantness there.)
I think there’s also a big disagreement about how frequently someone’s motivations are interfering with their ability to get the right answer, or how frequently we should bring up something like this. It seems like you’re thinking of that as something like the “nuclear option,” which will of course be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also prevents anything like a rationality forum from working, given how much bias comes from trying to get the wrong answer.
Then there’s also a problem where it’s a huge amount of additional work to separate out side channel content into explicit content reliably. Your response to Zack’s “What? Why?” seemed to imply that it was contentless aggression it would be costless to remove. It was in fact combative, and an explicit formulation would have been better, but it’s a lot of extra work to turn that sort of tone into content reliably, and most people—including most people on this forum—don’t know how to do it. It’s fine to ask for extra work, but it’s objectionable to do so while either implying that this is a free action, or ignoring the asymmetric burdens such requests impose.
[Attempt to engage with your comment substantively]
(The conversational move I want to recommend to you here is something like, “You keep saying X. It sort of seems like you think that I believe not-X. I’d rather you directly characterized what you think I’m getting wrong, and why, instead of arguing on the assumption that I believe something silly.” If you don’t explicitly invite this, people are going to be inhibited about claiming that you believe something silly, and arguing to you that you believe it, since it’s generally rude to “put words in other people’s mouths” and people get unhelpfully defensive about that pretty reliably, so it’s natural to try to let you save face by skipping over the unpleasantness there.)
Yeah, I think that’s a good recommendation and it’s helpful to hear it. I think it’s really excellent if someone says “I think you’re saying X which seems silly to me, can you clarify what you really mean?” In Double-Cruxes, that is ideal and my inner sim says it goes down well with everyone I’m used to talking with. Though seems quite plausible others don’t share that and I should be more proactive + know that I need to be careful in how I going about doing this move. Here I felt very offended/insulted by what seemed like I thought the view being confidently assigned to me, which I let mindkill me. :(
I think there’s also a big disagreement about how frequently someone’s motivations are interfering with their ability to get the right answer, or how frequently we should bring up something like this.
I’m not sure how to measure, but my confidence interval feels wide on this. I think there probably isn’t any big disagreement here between us here.
It seems like you’re thinking of that as something like the “nuclear option,” which will of course be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also prevents anything like a rationality forum from working, given how much bias comes from trying to get the wrong answer.
If this means “talking about someone’s motivations for saying things”, I agree with you that that is very important for a rationality space to be able to do that. I don’t see it as a nuclear option, not by far. I’d hope often that people would respond very well to it “You know what? You’re right and I’m really you mentioned it. :)”
I have more thoughts on my exchange with Zack, though I’d want to discuss them if it really made sense to, and carefully. I think we have some real disagreements about it.
This response makes me think we’ve been paying attention to different parts of the picture. I haven’t been focused the “can you criticize other participants and their motives” part of the picture (to me the answer is yes but I’m going to being paying attention your motives). My attention has been on which parts of speech it is legitimate to call out.
My examples were of ways side channels can be used to append additional information to a side message. I gave an example of this being done “positively” (admittedly over the top), “negatively”, and “not at all”. Those examples weren’t about illustrating all legitimate and illegitimate behavior—only that concerning side channels. (And like, if you want to impugn someone’s motives in a side channel—maybe that’s okay, so long as they’re allowed to point it out and disengage from interacting with you because of it even they suspect your motives.)
I think there’s also a big disagreement about how frequently someone’s motivations are interfering with their ability to get the right answer, or how frequently we should bring up something like this. It seems like you’re thinking of that as something like the “nuclear option,” which will of course be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also prevents anything like a rationality forum from working, given how much bias comes from trying to get the wrong answer.
I pretty much haven’t been thinking about the question of “criticizing motives” being okay or not throughout this conversation. It seemed besides the point—because I assumed that, in essence, was okay and I thought my statements indicated I believed that.
I’d venture that if this was the concern, why not ask me directly “how and when do you think it’s okay to criticize motives?” before assuming I needed a moral lecturin’. Also seems like a bad inference to say it seemed “I really didn’t get it” because I didn’t address something head on the way you were thinking about it. Again, maybe that wasn’t the point I was addressing. The response also didn’t make this clear. It wasn’t “it’s really important to be able to criticize people” (I would have said “yes, it is”), instead it was “how dare you trade off truth for other things.” ← not that specific.
On the subject of motives though, a major concern of mine is that half the time (or more) when people are being “unpleasant” in their communication, it’s not born of truth-seeking motive, it’s because it’s a way to play human political games. To exert power, to win. My concern is that given the prevalence of that motive, it’d be bad to render people defenseless and say “you can never call people out for how they’re speaking to you,” you must play this game where others are trying to make you look dumb, etc., it would bad of you to object to this. I think it’s virtuous (though not mandatory) to show people that you’re not playing political games if they’re not interested in that.
You want to be able to call people out on bad motives for their reasoning/conclusions.
I want to be able to call people out on how they act towards others when I suspect their motives for being aggressive/demeaning/condescending. (Or more, I want people to able to object and disengage if they wish. I want moderators to able to step in when it’s egregious, but this already the case.)
Then there’s also a problem where it’s a huge amount of additional work to separate out side channel content into explicit content reliably. Your response to Zack’s “What? Why?” seemed to imply that it was contentless aggression it would be costless to remove. It was in fact combative, and an explicit formulation would have been better, but it’s a lot of extra work to turn that sort of tone into content reliably, and most people—including most people on this forum—don’t know how to do it. It’s fine to ask for extra work, but it’s objectionable to do so while either implying that this is a free action, or ignoring the asymmetric burdens such requests impose.
I think I am incredulous that 1) it is that much work, 2) that the burden doesn’t actually fall to others to do it. But I won’t argue for those positions now. Seems like a long debate, even if it’s important to get to.
I’m not sure why you think I was implying it was costless (I don’t think I’d ever argue it was costless). I asked him not to do it when talking to me, that I wasn’t up for it. He said he didn’t know how, I tried to demonstrate (not claiming this would be costless for him to do), merely showing what I was seeking—showing that the changes seemed small. I did assume that anyone who was so skilful at communicating in one particular way could also see how to not communicate that one particular way, but I can see maybe one can get stuck only knowing how to use one style.
My attention has been on which parts of speech it is legitimate to call out.
Do you think anyone in this conversation has an opinion on this beyond “literally any kind of speech is legitimate to call out as objectionable, when it is in fact objectionable”? If so, what?
I thought we were arguing about which speech is in fact objectionable, not which speech it’s okay to evaluate as potentially objectionable. If you meant only to talk about the latter, that would explain how we’ve been talking past each other.
I thought we were arguing about which speech is in fact objectionable, not which speech it’s okay to evaluate as potentially objectionable. If you meant only to talk about the latter, that would explain how we’ve been talking past each other.
I feel like multiple questions have been discussed in the thread, but in my mind none of them were about which speech is in fact objectionable. That could well explain the talking past each other.
I think some of the problem here is that important parts of the way you framed this stuff seemed as though you really didn’t get it—by the Gricean maxim of relevance—even if you verbally affirmed it. Your framing didn’t distinguish between “don’t say things through the side channels of your speech” and “don’t criticize other participants.” You provided a set of examples that skipped over the only difficult case entirely. The only example you gave of criticizing the motives of a potential party to the conversation was gratuitous insults.
(The conversational move I want to recommend to you here is something like, “You keep saying X. It sort of seems like you think that I believe not-X. I’d rather you directly characterized what you think I’m getting wrong, and why, instead of arguing on the assumption that I believe something silly.” If you don’t explicitly invite this, people are going to be inhibited about claiming that you believe something silly, and arguing to you that you believe it, since it’s generally rude to “put words in other people’s mouths” and people get unhelpfully defensive about that pretty reliably, so it’s natural to try to let you save face by skipping over the unpleasantness there.)
I think there’s also a big disagreement about how frequently someone’s motivations are interfering with their ability to get the right answer, or how frequently we should bring up something like this. It seems like you’re thinking of that as something like the “nuclear option,” which will of course be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also prevents anything like a rationality forum from working, given how much bias comes from trying to get the wrong answer.
Then there’s also a problem where it’s a huge amount of additional work to separate out side channel content into explicit content reliably. Your response to Zack’s “What? Why?” seemed to imply that it was contentless aggression it would be costless to remove. It was in fact combative, and an explicit formulation would have been better, but it’s a lot of extra work to turn that sort of tone into content reliably, and most people—including most people on this forum—don’t know how to do it. It’s fine to ask for extra work, but it’s objectionable to do so while either implying that this is a free action, or ignoring the asymmetric burdens such requests impose.
[Attempt to engage with your comment substantively]
Yeah, I think that’s a good recommendation and it’s helpful to hear it. I think it’s really excellent if someone says “I think you’re saying X which seems silly to me, can you clarify what you really mean?” In Double-Cruxes, that is ideal and my inner sim says it goes down well with everyone I’m used to talking with. Though seems quite plausible others don’t share that and I should be more proactive + know that I need to be careful in how I going about doing this move. Here I felt very offended/insulted by what seemed like I thought the view being confidently assigned to me, which I let mindkill me. :(
I’m not sure how to measure, but my confidence interval feels wide on this. I think there probably isn’t any big disagreement here between us here.
If this means “talking about someone’s motivations for saying things”, I agree with you that that is very important for a rationality space to be able to do that. I don’t see it as a nuclear option, not by far. I’d hope often that people would respond very well to it “You know what? You’re right and I’m really you mentioned it. :)”
I have more thoughts on my exchange with Zack, though I’d want to discuss them if it really made sense to, and carefully. I think we have some real disagreements about it.
This response makes me think we’ve been paying attention to different parts of the picture. I haven’t been focused the “can you criticize other participants and their motives” part of the picture (to me the answer is yes but I’m going to being paying attention your motives). My attention has been on which parts of speech it is legitimate to call out.
My examples were of ways side channels can be used to append additional information to a side message. I gave an example of this being done “positively” (admittedly over the top), “negatively”, and “not at all”. Those examples weren’t about illustrating all legitimate and illegitimate behavior—only that concerning side channels. (And like, if you want to impugn someone’s motives in a side channel—maybe that’s okay, so long as they’re allowed to point it out and disengage from interacting with you because of it even they suspect your motives.)
I pretty much haven’t been thinking about the question of “criticizing motives” being okay or not throughout this conversation. It seemed besides the point—because I assumed that, in essence, was okay and I thought my statements indicated I believed that.
I’d venture that if this was the concern, why not ask me directly “how and when do you think it’s okay to criticize motives?” before assuming I needed a moral lecturin’. Also seems like a bad inference to say it seemed “I really didn’t get it” because I didn’t address something head on the way you were thinking about it. Again, maybe that wasn’t the point I was addressing. The response also didn’t make this clear. It wasn’t “it’s really important to be able to criticize people” (I would have said “yes, it is”), instead it was “how dare you trade off truth for other things.” ← not that specific.
On the subject of motives though, a major concern of mine is that half the time (or more) when people are being “unpleasant” in their communication, it’s not born of truth-seeking motive, it’s because it’s a way to play human political games. To exert power, to win. My concern is that given the prevalence of that motive, it’d be bad to render people defenseless and say “you can never call people out for how they’re speaking to you,” you must play this game where others are trying to make you look dumb, etc., it would bad of you to object to this. I think it’s virtuous (though not mandatory) to show people that you’re not playing political games if they’re not interested in that.
You want to be able to call people out on bad motives for their reasoning/conclusions.
I want to be able to call people out on how they act towards others when I suspect their motives for being aggressive/demeaning/condescending. (Or more, I want people to able to object and disengage if they wish. I want moderators to able to step in when it’s egregious, but this already the case.)
I think I am incredulous that 1) it is that much work, 2) that the burden doesn’t actually fall to others to do it. But I won’t argue for those positions now. Seems like a long debate, even if it’s important to get to.
I’m not sure why you think I was implying it was costless (I don’t think I’d ever argue it was costless). I asked him not to do it when talking to me, that I wasn’t up for it. He said he didn’t know how, I tried to demonstrate (not claiming this would be costless for him to do), merely showing what I was seeking—showing that the changes seemed small. I did assume that anyone who was so skilful at communicating in one particular way could also see how to not communicate that one particular way, but I can see maybe one can get stuck only knowing how to use one style.
Do you think anyone in this conversation has an opinion on this beyond “literally any kind of speech is legitimate to call out as objectionable, when it is in fact objectionable”? If so, what?
I thought we were arguing about which speech is in fact objectionable, not which speech it’s okay to evaluate as potentially objectionable. If you meant only to talk about the latter, that would explain how we’ve been talking past each other.
I feel like multiple questions have been discussed in the thread, but in my mind none of them were about which speech is in fact objectionable. That could well explain the talking past each other.