At the risk of tediously repeating what Mary Chernyshenko said, I don’t think a key point was really addressed:
If “the exact phrasing is not important” implies unbiased errors in phrasing, then it’s quite surprising that people tend to round off “your argument is bad” to “you’re dumb” so often.
If, as therefore seems probable, there is a motivated tendency to do that, then it’s clearly important for some purpose and we ought to be curious about what, when we’re trying to evaluate the relation of various conversational modes to truth-seeking vs other potentially competing goals.
An outright “You’re dumb” is a mistake, period, unless you actually meant to say that the person is in fact dumb. This rounding is a pure bad, and there’s no need of it. Adding ‘being’ or ‘playing’ or ‘doing something’ before the dumb is necessary.
Part of a good combative-type culture is that you mean what you say and say what you mean, so the rounding off here is a serious problem even before the (important) feelings/status issue.
Your response here and Ruby’s both seem rude to me: you’re providing a (helpful) clarification, but doing that without either addressing the substantive issue directly or noting that you’re not doing that. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a big deal, but when the whole point of my comment was that jimmy ignored Mary’s substantive point I think it’s obnoxious to then ignore my substantive point about Mary’s substantive point being ignored.
[...]but when the whole point of my comment was that jimmy ignored Mary’s substantive point I think it’s obnoxious to then ignore my substantive point about Mary’s substantive point being ignored.
FWIW, “jimmy ignored Mary’s substantive point” is both uncharitable and untrue, and both “making uncharitable and untrue statements as if they were uncontested fact” and “stating that you find things obnoxious in cases where people might disagree about what is appropriate instead of offering an argument as to why it shouldn’t be done” stand out as far more obnoxious to me.
I normally would just ignore it (because again, I think saying “I think that’s obnoxious” is generally obnoxious and unhelpful) but given your comment you’ll probably either find the feedback helpful or else it’ll help you change your mind about whether it’s helpful to call out things one finds to be obnoxious :P
I emphatically agree with Zvi about the mistakeness of saying “you’re dumb.”
In my own words:
1) “You’re absolutely wrong” is strong language, but not unreasonable in a combative culture if that’s what you believe and you’re honestly reporting it.
2a) “You’re saying/doing something dumb” becomes a bit more personal than when making a statement about a particular view. Though I think it’s rare that one have need to say this, and it’s only appropriate when levels of trust and respect are very high.
2b) “You’re being dumb” is a little harsher than “saying/doing something dumb.” The two don’t register as much different to me, however, though they do to Mary Chernyshenko?
3) “You’re dumb” (introduced in this discussion by Benquo) is now making a general statement about someone else and is very problematic. It erodes the assumptions of respect which make combative-type cultures feasible in the first place. I’d say that conversations where people are calling others dumb to their faces are not situations I’d think of as healthy, good-faith, combative-type conversations.
[As an aside, even mild “that seems wrong to me”-type statements should be recognized as potentially combative. There are many contexts where any explicit disagreement registers as hostile or contrarian.]
(Not important, but my supervisor was a great man who tended to revel in combat settings and to say smth like “You’re being dumb” more often than other versions, & though everybody understood what he meant, it destroyed his team eventually. People found themselves better things to do, as, of course, people generally should. This is where I’m coming from.)
The exact phrasing isn’t important, but conveying the right message is. As Zvi and Ruby note, that “being”/”doing”/etc part is important. “You’re dumb” is not an acceptable alternative because it does not mean the same thing. “Your argument is bad” is also unacceptable because it also means something completely different.
“Your argument is bad” only means “your argument is bad”, and it is possible to go about things in a perfectly reasonable way and still have bad arguments sometimes. It is completely different than a situation where someone is failing to notice problems in their arguments which would be obvious to them if they weren’t engaging in motivated cognition and muddying their own thinking. An inability to think well is quite literally what “dumb” is, and “being dumb” is a literal description of what they’re doing, not a sloppy or motivated attempt to say or pretend to be saying something else.
As far as “then why does it always come out that way”, besides the fact that “you’re being dumb” is far quicker to say than the more neutral “you’re engaging in motivated cognition”, in my experience it doesn’t always or even usually come out that way — and in fact often doesn’t come out at all, which was kinda the point of my original comment.
When it does take that form, there are often good reasons which go beyond “¼ the syllables” and are completely above board, explicit, and agreed upon by both parties. Counter-signalling respect and affection is perhaps the clearest example.
There are examples of people doing it poorly or with hostile and dishonest intent, of course, but the answer to “why do those people do it that way” is a very different question than what was asked.
At the risk of tediously repeating what Mary Chernyshenko said, I don’t think a key point was really addressed:
If “the exact phrasing is not important” implies unbiased errors in phrasing, then it’s quite surprising that people tend to round off “your argument is bad” to “you’re dumb” so often.
If, as therefore seems probable, there is a motivated tendency to do that, then it’s clearly important for some purpose and we ought to be curious about what, when we’re trying to evaluate the relation of various conversational modes to truth-seeking vs other potentially competing goals.
An outright “You’re dumb” is a mistake, period, unless you actually meant to say that the person is in fact dumb. This rounding is a pure bad, and there’s no need of it. Adding ‘being’ or ‘playing’ or ‘doing something’ before the dumb is necessary.
Part of a good combative-type culture is that you mean what you say and say what you mean, so the rounding off here is a serious problem even before the (important) feelings/status issue.
Your response here and Ruby’s both seem rude to me: you’re providing a (helpful) clarification, but doing that without either addressing the substantive issue directly or noting that you’re not doing that. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a big deal, but when the whole point of my comment was that jimmy ignored Mary’s substantive point I think it’s obnoxious to then ignore my substantive point about Mary’s substantive point being ignored.
FWIW, “jimmy ignored Mary’s substantive point” is both uncharitable and untrue, and both “making uncharitable and untrue statements as if they were uncontested fact” and “stating that you find things obnoxious in cases where people might disagree about what is appropriate instead of offering an argument as to why it shouldn’t be done” stand out as far more obnoxious to me.
I normally would just ignore it (because again, I think saying “I think that’s obnoxious” is generally obnoxious and unhelpful) but given your comment you’ll probably either find the feedback helpful or else it’ll help you change your mind about whether it’s helpful to call out things one finds to be obnoxious :P
I emphatically agree with Zvi about the mistakeness of saying “you’re dumb.”
In my own words:
1) “You’re absolutely wrong” is strong language, but not unreasonable in a combative culture if that’s what you believe and you’re honestly reporting it.
2a) “You’re saying/doing something dumb” becomes a bit more personal than when making a statement about a particular view. Though I think it’s rare that one have need to say this, and it’s only appropriate when levels of trust and respect are very high.
2b) “You’re being dumb” is a little harsher than “saying/doing something dumb.” The two don’t register as much different to me, however, though they do to Mary Chernyshenko?
3) “You’re dumb” (introduced in this discussion by Benquo) is now making a general statement about someone else and is very problematic. It erodes the assumptions of respect which make combative-type cultures feasible in the first place. I’d say that conversations where people are calling others dumb to their faces are not situations I’d think of as healthy, good-faith, combative-type conversations.
[As an aside, even mild “that seems wrong to me”-type statements should be recognized as potentially combative. There are many contexts where any explicit disagreement registers as hostile or contrarian.]
(Not important, but my supervisor was a great man who tended to revel in combat settings and to say smth like “You’re being dumb” more often than other versions, & though everybody understood what he meant, it destroyed his team eventually. People found themselves better things to do, as, of course, people generally should. This is where I’m coming from.)
The exact phrasing isn’t important, but conveying the right message is. As Zvi and Ruby note, that “being”/”doing”/etc part is important. “You’re dumb” is not an acceptable alternative because it does not mean the same thing. “Your argument is bad” is also unacceptable because it also means something completely different.
“Your argument is bad” only means “your argument is bad”, and it is possible to go about things in a perfectly reasonable way and still have bad arguments sometimes. It is completely different than a situation where someone is failing to notice problems in their arguments which would be obvious to them if they weren’t engaging in motivated cognition and muddying their own thinking. An inability to think well is quite literally what “dumb” is, and “being dumb” is a literal description of what they’re doing, not a sloppy or motivated attempt to say or pretend to be saying something else.
As far as “then why does it always come out that way”, besides the fact that “you’re being dumb” is far quicker to say than the more neutral “you’re engaging in motivated cognition”, in my experience it doesn’t always or even usually come out that way — and in fact often doesn’t come out at all, which was kinda the point of my original comment.
When it does take that form, there are often good reasons which go beyond “¼ the syllables” and are completely above board, explicit, and agreed upon by both parties. Counter-signalling respect and affection is perhaps the clearest example.
There are examples of people doing it poorly or with hostile and dishonest intent, of course, but the answer to “why do those people do it that way” is a very different question than what was asked.