To what extent do you think there is still a disagreement between us, if I’m in agreement about the rule
8. “If it’s a conversation about norms, and the hypocrite is making an implicit status claim with their words, noticing the hypocrisy should counter-indicate the norm fairly strongly and also detract from the status of the hypocrite.”
I know we have pending points unrelated to that (IE, the status of #6), but it seems like bringing out the distinction of #8 may change the conversation. Certainly I was ignoring that distinction before. So, does your position on the disagreement about #6 change, with that in mind?
If not, my response to the scenarios which you mention above is that (unless I’m mistaken) they fall under #8, so it seems like I don’t need anything like #6 to get them right.
The problem with your #8 is that it’s too specific. What you seem to be doing here is taking a fairly general analytical framework, extracting two specific conclusions from it, and then replacing the framework with the conclusions. This is, of course, problematic for several reasons:
The conclusions in question won’t always hold. Note that inserting qualifiers like “fairly strongly” (and otherwise making explicit the idea that the conclusions are not an in-all-cases thing) doesn’t fix the problem, because without the framework, you don’t have a way of re-generating the conclusions, nor of determing whether they hold in any given case.
There could be (indeed, are likely to be) other conclusions which one may draw from said analytical framework, beyond the ones you’ve enumerated. (Turning an algorithm or heuristic into a lookup table is always problematic for this reason—how sure are you that you’ve enumerated all the input-output pairings?)
Because the analytic framework is itself only a heuristic (as we have discussed elsethread), it’s dangerous to elevate any particular conclusions it generates to the status of independent rules (or even heuristics); it obscures the heuristic nature of the generating framework. In this case, the specific problem is that #6 is highly amenable to having its output affected by other things that we know about the agent in question (i.e., the alleged hypocrite), in various fairly straightforward ways; whereas with your #8, it’s not really clear how to apply case-specific knowledge to modify the given conclusions (and so, if we do so at all, we’re likely to do it in an ad-hoc and imprecise manner—some sort of crude “social status override”, perhaps).
Of course, your #8 is certainly a good distillation of a particular sort of quite common hypocrisy-related issue. But beware of attempting to replace the generalized anti-hypocrisy norm with it, for the reasons I’ve given.
One thing that I’d like to mention here, that may help clarify some of our disagreement, is the following (which, perhaps, would better fit a different subthread of this conversation, but I’m not quite up to the task of finding the perfect place for it, at the moment)…
You’ve mentioned “high-trust spaces” (or similar language) several times now, and my response has been, essentially, that (to a first approximation), such things do not exist. Let me expand on that a bit.
If you define a “high-trust space” as a social context which does not require an anti-hypocrisy norm in order to function well—i.e., have mostly honest, mostly cooperative, mostly effective, positive-sum interactions between its members—then, indeed, I maintain that such things don’t exist (excluding close-knit family/friends groups, as I’ve noted).
However, what I think absolutely does exist is “high-trust spaces” in a different sense: social contexts which function well (in the sense just given) because they have a strong anti-hypocrisy norm (plus other reasons, of course).
Given this, I view the generalized anti-hypocrisy norm as a sort of “locks keep honest people honest” mechanism. A high-trust space remains high-trust by virtue of such mechanisms, which allow it to attract and retain people of high integrity, and repel and expel people of low integrity. Thus, observing that a social context exhibits high trust, and deciding that therefore no anti-hypocrisy norm is needed there, is a drastic misunderstanding of the direction of causation—and is likely to have unfortunate consequences for that social context, going forward.
What you seem to be doing here is taking a fairly general analytical framework, extracting two specific conclusions from it, and then replacing the framework with the conclusions.
I agree with your remarks about this general pattern, but the mitigating factor here is that when a powerful heuristic generates conclusions in specific cases which are clearly very wrong, it is useful to refine the framework. That’s what I’m trying to do here. Your objection is that my refinement throws the baby out with the bathwater. Fine—then where’s the baby? I currently see cause for #8, but you see #8 as neglecting a bunch of other useful stuff which comes from the general anti-hypocrisy norm. Can you point to some other useful things which don’t come from #8 alone?
But, perhaps it is premature to have a “where’s the baby?” conversation, because you are still saying “where’s the bathwater?” IE, you don’t see need to throw anything out at all.
Because the analytic framework is itself only a heuristic (as we have discussed elsethread), it’s dangerous to elevate any particular conclusions it generates to the status of independent rules (or even heuristics); it obscures the heuristic nature of the generating framework.
Maybe it’s not very cruxy, but this part didn’t make sense to me. If it’s dangerous to elevate #8 to the status of a heuristic because it might be taken as a rigid rule, isn’t it similarly dangerous to elevate general anti-hypocrisy to the level of heuristic for fear of it becoming rigid? That’s basically my whole schtick here—that the general norm seems to create a lot of specific behaviors which are silly upon closer inspection. Your argument in the above paragraph seems to be begging some kind of assumption which gives the general norm a radically different status than any more specific variations we are discussing. Maybe it does require a radically different status, but, that seems like the subject under debate rather than something to be assumed.
If you define a “high-trust space” as a social context which does not require an anti-hypocrisy norm in order to function well—i.e., have mostly honest, mostly cooperative, mostly effective, positive-sum interactions between its members—then, indeed, I maintain that such things don’t exist (excluding close-knit family/friends groups, as I’ve noted).
However, what I think absolutely does exist is “high-trust spaces” in a different sense: social contexts which function well (in the sense just given) because they have a strong anti-hypocrisy norm (plus other reasons, of course).
Given this, I view the generalized anti-hypocrisy norm as a sort of “locks keep honest people honest” mechanism.
My argument was an either-or, stating why I didn’t see the norm as useful in high-trust or low-trust situations. But I agree that I have to address the case where the norm is useful precisely because its existence prevents the sort of cases where it would be needed.
But, to this I’d currently reply that I don’t see what’s captured by the general norm and not by #8. So the baby/bathwater discussion seems most useful at the moment:
(if we can think of ways forward) re-starting the conversation on #6, which gets at some of the cases where I think anti-hypocrisy yields conclusions that are wrong and harmful. Specifically, I claim that in many cases in my recent experience, people discounted their own advice due to anti-hypocrisy heuristic; I noticed this; I noticed that I myself had updated against their advice; and, none of this really seemed to make any sense in context. Sometimes advice is really straightforward, has obvious and verifiable reasons for being good advice, is easy for the listener to follow, and is hypocritical.
Or, otherwise, can you illustrate positive use-cases which fall outside of #8?
I note that your response is not what I expected—I would have sooner expected you to defend the position that #8 implies the entire norm because all discussions are actually veiled discussions about norms (IE, you can’t really separate advice from status games, good ideas always have “should”-nature, etc).
Also, I want to call out progress which has occurred in this discussion, lest it seem like an interminable argument:
We have done a lot of refinement of what could be meant by anti-hypocrisy norms (or their negation).
I now understand that you don’t mean that we should always call out hypocrisy, which was at one point the main thing I was arguing against.
We agree on how these cases should be handled, if not on the underlying heuristics at play.
To what extent do you think there is still a disagreement between us, if I’m in agreement about the rule
8. “If it’s a conversation about norms, and the hypocrite is making an implicit status claim with their words, noticing the hypocrisy should counter-indicate the norm fairly strongly and also detract from the status of the hypocrite.”
I know we have pending points unrelated to that (IE, the status of #6), but it seems like bringing out the distinction of #8 may change the conversation. Certainly I was ignoring that distinction before. So, does your position on the disagreement about #6 change, with that in mind?
If not, my response to the scenarios which you mention above is that (unless I’m mistaken) they fall under #8, so it seems like I don’t need anything like #6 to get them right.
The problem with your #8 is that it’s too specific. What you seem to be doing here is taking a fairly general analytical framework, extracting two specific conclusions from it, and then replacing the framework with the conclusions. This is, of course, problematic for several reasons:
The conclusions in question won’t always hold. Note that inserting qualifiers like “fairly strongly” (and otherwise making explicit the idea that the conclusions are not an in-all-cases thing) doesn’t fix the problem, because without the framework, you don’t have a way of re-generating the conclusions, nor of determing whether they hold in any given case.
There could be (indeed, are likely to be) other conclusions which one may draw from said analytical framework, beyond the ones you’ve enumerated. (Turning an algorithm or heuristic into a lookup table is always problematic for this reason—how sure are you that you’ve enumerated all the input-output pairings?)
Because the analytic framework is itself only a heuristic (as we have discussed elsethread), it’s dangerous to elevate any particular conclusions it generates to the status of independent rules (or even heuristics); it obscures the heuristic nature of the generating framework. In this case, the specific problem is that #6 is highly amenable to having its output affected by other things that we know about the agent in question (i.e., the alleged hypocrite), in various fairly straightforward ways; whereas with your #8, it’s not really clear how to apply case-specific knowledge to modify the given conclusions (and so, if we do so at all, we’re likely to do it in an ad-hoc and imprecise manner—some sort of crude “social status override”, perhaps).
Of course, your #8 is certainly a good distillation of a particular sort of quite common hypocrisy-related issue. But beware of attempting to replace the generalized anti-hypocrisy norm with it, for the reasons I’ve given.
One thing that I’d like to mention here, that may help clarify some of our disagreement, is the following (which, perhaps, would better fit a different subthread of this conversation, but I’m not quite up to the task of finding the perfect place for it, at the moment)…
You’ve mentioned “high-trust spaces” (or similar language) several times now, and my response has been, essentially, that (to a first approximation), such things do not exist. Let me expand on that a bit.
If you define a “high-trust space” as a social context which does not require an anti-hypocrisy norm in order to function well—i.e., have mostly honest, mostly cooperative, mostly effective, positive-sum interactions between its members—then, indeed, I maintain that such things don’t exist (excluding close-knit family/friends groups, as I’ve noted).
However, what I think absolutely does exist is “high-trust spaces” in a different sense: social contexts which function well (in the sense just given) because they have a strong anti-hypocrisy norm (plus other reasons, of course).
Given this, I view the generalized anti-hypocrisy norm as a sort of “locks keep honest people honest” mechanism. A high-trust space remains high-trust by virtue of such mechanisms, which allow it to attract and retain people of high integrity, and repel and expel people of low integrity. Thus, observing that a social context exhibits high trust, and deciding that therefore no anti-hypocrisy norm is needed there, is a drastic misunderstanding of the direction of causation—and is likely to have unfortunate consequences for that social context, going forward.
I agree with your remarks about this general pattern, but the mitigating factor here is that when a powerful heuristic generates conclusions in specific cases which are clearly very wrong, it is useful to refine the framework. That’s what I’m trying to do here. Your objection is that my refinement throws the baby out with the bathwater. Fine—then where’s the baby? I currently see cause for #8, but you see #8 as neglecting a bunch of other useful stuff which comes from the general anti-hypocrisy norm. Can you point to some other useful things which don’t come from #8 alone?
But, perhaps it is premature to have a “where’s the baby?” conversation, because you are still saying “where’s the bathwater?” IE, you don’t see need to throw anything out at all.
Maybe it’s not very cruxy, but this part didn’t make sense to me. If it’s dangerous to elevate #8 to the status of a heuristic because it might be taken as a rigid rule, isn’t it similarly dangerous to elevate general anti-hypocrisy to the level of heuristic for fear of it becoming rigid? That’s basically my whole schtick here—that the general norm seems to create a lot of specific behaviors which are silly upon closer inspection. Your argument in the above paragraph seems to be begging some kind of assumption which gives the general norm a radically different status than any more specific variations we are discussing. Maybe it does require a radically different status, but, that seems like the subject under debate rather than something to be assumed.
My argument was an either-or, stating why I didn’t see the norm as useful in high-trust or low-trust situations. But I agree that I have to address the case where the norm is useful precisely because its existence prevents the sort of cases where it would be needed.
But, to this I’d currently reply that I don’t see what’s captured by the general norm and not by #8. So the baby/bathwater discussion seems most useful at the moment:
(if we can think of ways forward) re-starting the conversation on #6, which gets at some of the cases where I think anti-hypocrisy yields conclusions that are wrong and harmful. Specifically, I claim that in many cases in my recent experience, people discounted their own advice due to anti-hypocrisy heuristic; I noticed this; I noticed that I myself had updated against their advice; and, none of this really seemed to make any sense in context. Sometimes advice is really straightforward, has obvious and verifiable reasons for being good advice, is easy for the listener to follow, and is hypocritical.
Or, otherwise, can you illustrate positive use-cases which fall outside of #8?
I note that your response is not what I expected—I would have sooner expected you to defend the position that #8 implies the entire norm because all discussions are actually veiled discussions about norms (IE, you can’t really separate advice from status games, good ideas always have “should”-nature, etc).
Also, I want to call out progress which has occurred in this discussion, lest it seem like an interminable argument:
We have done a lot of refinement of what could be meant by anti-hypocrisy norms (or their negation).
I now understand that you don’t mean that we should always call out hypocrisy, which was at one point the main thing I was arguing against.
We agree on how these cases should be handled, if not on the underlying heuristics at play.