Suppose further that Sam is the sort of person who, given a choice between changing their mind and admitting they were wrong on the one hand, and not changing their mind on the other, will choose not to change their mind.
You said:
F2 forces Sam to admit they were wrong.
If the first statement is true, F2 doesn’t force Sam to admit they were wrong. What it does is force Sam not to change their mind.
If you’re rejecting my supposition… that is, if you’re asserting that Sam as described just doesn’t exist, or isn’t worth discussing… then I agree with you. But I explicitly asked you if that was what you meant, and you said it wasn’t.
If you’re accepting my supposition… well, that suggests that even though Sam won’t change his mind under F2, F2 is good because it makes Sam change his mind. That’s just nonsense.
If there’s a third possibility, I don’t see what it is.
Yeah, no, my idea was that F2 forces Sam to admit they were wrong, given that they change their mind. When considering the case of ‘on LessWrong’, I skipped the bit that says Sam that does not change their mind. Ooops. Yeah, I don’t think there are many Sams on LessWrong.
Moving on… let me requote the line that started this thread:
frequently people will write something along the lines of “It looks like you’re arguing X. X is bad because...” This is a very important aspect of politeness—it means taking the potential status hit to yourself of having misinterpreted the other person and provides them a line of retreat in case they really did mean X and now want to distance themselves from it.
That seems to me to be a pretty good summary of the strategy I used here… I summarized the position I saw you as arguing, then went on to explain what was wrong with that position.
Looking at the conversation, that strategy at least seems to have worked well… at least, it got us to a place where we could resolve the disagreement in a couple of short moves.
But you seem to be saying that, when dealing with people as rational as the typical LWer, it’s not a good strategy.
So, OK: what ought I have said instead, and how would saying that have worked better?
If the first statement is true, F2 doesn’t force Sam to admit they were wrong. What it does is force Sam not to change their mind.
This by itself would have worked, and to the extent it could be described as working better, it would have punished me for not properly constructing your model in my head, something which I consider required for a response.
I said:
You said:
If the first statement is true, F2 doesn’t force Sam to admit they were wrong. What it does is force Sam not to change their mind.
If you’re rejecting my supposition… that is, if you’re asserting that Sam as described just doesn’t exist, or isn’t worth discussing… then I agree with you. But I explicitly asked you if that was what you meant, and you said it wasn’t.
If you’re accepting my supposition… well, that suggests that even though Sam won’t change his mind under F2, F2 is good because it makes Sam change his mind. That’s just nonsense.
If there’s a third possibility, I don’t see what it is.
Yeah, no, my idea was that F2 forces Sam to admit they were wrong, given that they change their mind. When considering the case of ‘on LessWrong’, I skipped the bit that says Sam that does not change their mind. Ooops. Yeah, I don’t think there are many Sams on LessWrong.
OK, glad we cleared that up.
Moving on… let me requote the line that started this thread:
That seems to me to be a pretty good summary of the strategy I used here… I summarized the position I saw you as arguing, then went on to explain what was wrong with that position.
Looking at the conversation, that strategy at least seems to have worked well… at least, it got us to a place where we could resolve the disagreement in a couple of short moves.
But you seem to be saying that, when dealing with people as rational as the typical LWer, it’s not a good strategy.
So, OK: what ought I have said instead, and how would saying that have worked better?
This by itself would have worked, and to the extent it could be described as working better, it would have punished me for not properly constructing your model in my head, something which I consider required for a response.
edit: the differences are very slight.