I see the vision described as something like a community of people who want to do argument mapping together, which involves lots of exposing of tacit linked premises. I think a reason no such community exists (in any appreciable size) is that that mode of discourse is more like discovery rather than creation, as if all of the structure of arguments is already latent within the people arguing and the structure of the argument itself. The intuition then becomes reliable structure->reliable output. Creation, generativity is much messier and involves people surfacing their reactions to things without fully accounting for the reactions others might have (incl. negative), because non predicted reactions are, like, the whole point. There are a large class of persons I would have hedged my comment out more substantially with, but on the basis of past interactions and writing, I consider Aella an adult (in the high-bar 99th% emotional reflective ability sense). I didn’t really think about how not having that context would affect how it was perceived.
Okay, if you’re creating your argument and exposing it sort of at the same time, in a high-bandwidth back-and-forth, then you have to have some degree of trust in your conversational partner and audience. Like, you have to have faith that they won’t “gotcha” super hard, that you will be able to revisit and rephrase, that you will be able to change your mind, that if you skip a step they’ll ask about it rather than attacking it, that they won’t pour a bunch of projections and assumptions onto what you said and then be loath to let them go, etc.
Which I think actually becomes a (weak) argument for higher standards in general? Because if the discourse is overall cleaner, then it becomes easier to do things like “interpret Romeo’s comment charitably, and if you have a problem with it, just cooperatively fill in the cracks.”
Whereas if things are slipping all over the place, there’s a kind of race-to-the-bottom that makes it harder to extend that charity and good faith in each individual case, which makes people less willing to share their thoughts in the first place, since avoiding the gotchas takes so much effort.
Right and in my mind canon people are free to respond strongly like ‘I think this is a central example of something that is really bad but am having a hard time articulating, can you say more about what you mean?’
Because obviously in most communities people would be like wait what? Why would you give the person more ammo after they just said you are bad? To which you’d then have to attempt to point them to the idea that if you are actually confused as badly as they think you might be that would be super valuable to know.
I see the vision described as something like a community of people who want to do argument mapping together, which involves lots of exposing of tacit linked premises. I think a reason no such community exists (in any appreciable size) is that that mode of discourse is more like discovery rather than creation, as if all of the structure of arguments is already latent within the people arguing and the structure of the argument itself. The intuition then becomes reliable structure->reliable output. Creation, generativity is much messier and involves people surfacing their reactions to things without fully accounting for the reactions others might have (incl. negative), because non predicted reactions are, like, the whole point. There are a large class of persons I would have hedged my comment out more substantially with, but on the basis of past interactions and writing, I consider Aella an adult (in the high-bar 99th% emotional reflective ability sense). I didn’t really think about how not having that context would affect how it was perceived.
This is an interesting and relevant point.
In particular, it sparks in me a thought like:
Okay, if you’re creating your argument and exposing it sort of at the same time, in a high-bandwidth back-and-forth, then you have to have some degree of trust in your conversational partner and audience. Like, you have to have faith that they won’t “gotcha” super hard, that you will be able to revisit and rephrase, that you will be able to change your mind, that if you skip a step they’ll ask about it rather than attacking it, that they won’t pour a bunch of projections and assumptions onto what you said and then be loath to let them go, etc.
Which I think actually becomes a (weak) argument for higher standards in general? Because if the discourse is overall cleaner, then it becomes easier to do things like “interpret Romeo’s comment charitably, and if you have a problem with it, just cooperatively fill in the cracks.”
Whereas if things are slipping all over the place, there’s a kind of race-to-the-bottom that makes it harder to extend that charity and good faith in each individual case, which makes people less willing to share their thoughts in the first place, since avoiding the gotchas takes so much effort.
Right and in my mind canon people are free to respond strongly like ‘I think this is a central example of something that is really bad but am having a hard time articulating, can you say more about what you mean?’ Because obviously in most communities people would be like wait what? Why would you give the person more ammo after they just said you are bad? To which you’d then have to attempt to point them to the idea that if you are actually confused as badly as they think you might be that would be super valuable to know.