The essay gave me a yucky sense of “rationalists try to prove their superiority by creating strawmen and then beating them in arguments”, sneer culture, etc. It doesn’t help that some of its central examples involve hot-button issues on which many readers will have strong and yet divergent opinions, which imo makes them rather unsuited as examples for teaching most rationality techniques or concept
Yeah, I take your point that the post’s tone and political-ish topic choice undermine the ability of readers to absorb its lessons about the power of specificity. This is a clear message I’ve gotten from many commenters, whether explicitly or implicitly. I shall edit the post.
Update: I’ve edited the post to remove a lot of parts that I recognized as gratuitous yuckiness.
Object-level reply
In the meantime, I still think it’s worth pointing out where I think you are, in fact, analyzing the content wrong and not absorbing its lessons :)
For instance, I read the “Uber exploits its drivers” example discussion as follows: the author already disagrees with the claim as their bottom line, then tries to win the discussion by picking their counterpart’s arguments apart
My dialogue character has various positive-affect a-priori beliefs about Uber, but having an a-priori belief state isn’t the same thing as having an immutable bottom line. If Steve had put forth a coherent claim, and a shred of support for that claim, then the argument would have left me with a modified a-posteriori belief state.
In contrast to e.g. Double Crux, that seems like an unproductive and misguided pursuit
My character is making a good-faith attempt at Double Crux. It’s just impossible for me to ascertain Steve’s claim-underlying crux until I first ascertain Steve’s claim.
even if we “demolish” our counterpart’s supposedly bad arguments, at best we discover that they could not shift our priors.
You seem to be objecting that selling “the power to demolish bad arguments” means that I’m selling a Fully General Counterargument, but I’m not. The way this dialogue goes isn’t representative of every possible dialogue where the power of specificity is applied. If Steve’s claim were coherent, then asking him to be specific would end up helping me change my own mind faster and demolish my own a-priori beliefs.
reversed stupidity is not intelligence
It doesn’t seem relevant to mention this. In the dialogue, there’s no instance of me creating or modifying my beliefs about Uber by reversing anything.
all the while insulting this fictitious person with asides like “By sloshing around his mental ball pit and flinging smart-sounding assertions about “capitalism” and “exploitation”, he just might win over a neutral audience of our peers.”.
I’m making an example out of Steve because I want to teach the reader about an important and widely-applicable observation about so-called “intellectual discussions”: that participants often win over a crowd by making smart-sounding general assertions whose corresponding set of possible specific interpretations is the empty set.
Meta-level reply
Yeah, I take your point that the post’s tone and political-ish topic choice undermine the ability of readers to absorb its lessons about the power of specificity. This is a clear message I’ve gotten from many commenters, whether explicitly or implicitly. I shall edit the post.
Update: I’ve edited the post to remove a lot of parts that I recognized as gratuitous yuckiness.
Object-level reply
In the meantime, I still think it’s worth pointing out where I think you are, in fact, analyzing the content wrong and not absorbing its lessons :)
My dialogue character has various positive-affect a-priori beliefs about Uber, but having an a-priori belief state isn’t the same thing as having an immutable bottom line. If Steve had put forth a coherent claim, and a shred of support for that claim, then the argument would have left me with a modified a-posteriori belief state.
My character is making a good-faith attempt at Double Crux. It’s just impossible for me to ascertain Steve’s claim-underlying crux until I first ascertain Steve’s claim.
You seem to be objecting that selling “the power to demolish bad arguments” means that I’m selling a Fully General Counterargument, but I’m not. The way this dialogue goes isn’t representative of every possible dialogue where the power of specificity is applied. If Steve’s claim were coherent, then asking him to be specific would end up helping me change my own mind faster and demolish my own a-priori beliefs.
It doesn’t seem relevant to mention this. In the dialogue, there’s no instance of me creating or modifying my beliefs about Uber by reversing anything.
I’m making an example out of Steve because I want to teach the reader about an important and widely-applicable observation about so-called “intellectual discussions”: that participants often win over a crowd by making smart-sounding general assertions whose corresponding set of possible specific interpretations is the empty set.