a. Private discussion is nearly as efficient as public discussion for information-transmission, but has way fewer political consequences. On top of that, the political context is more collaborative between participants and so it is less epistemically destructive.
b. I really don’t want to try to use collectively-enforced norms to guide epistemology and don’t think there are many examples of this working out well (whereas there seem to be examples of avoiding epistemically destructive norms by moving into private).
Can you define more precisely what you mean by “private discussion?” If by that you mean that all discourse is constrained to one-on-one conversations where the contents are not available to anyone else, I don’t intuitively see how this would be less destructive and more collaborative. It seems to require that a lot of interactions must occur before every person is up to date on the collective group knowledge, and also that for each conversation there is a lossy compression going on—it’s difficult for each conversation to carry the contents of each person’s history of previous conversations.
On the other hand, if you’re advocating for information to be filtered when transmitted beyond the trusted group, but flows freely within the trusted group, I believe that is less complicated and more efficient and I would have fewer objections to that.
By “private discussion” I mean discussions amongst small groups, in contrast with discussions amongst large groups. Both of them occur constantly. I’ve claimed that in general political considerations cut in favor of having private discussions more often than you otherwise would, I didn’t mean to be making a bold claim.
Can you define more precisely what you mean by “private discussion?” If by that you mean that all discourse is constrained to one-on-one conversations where the contents are not available to anyone else
I recently wanted to raise an issue with some possible controversy/politics in the main EA facebook group. Instead of approving the post I was told, “this post isn’t a good fit for the group, how about posting it instead in this secret facebook group.
That secret facebook group isn’t for one-on-one conversations but it’s still more private.
Private discussion is nearly as efficient as public discussion for information-transmission, but has way fewer political consequences.
If this is a categorical claim, then what are academic journals for? Should we ban the printing press?
If your claim is just that some public forums are too corrupted to be worth fixing, not a categorical claim, then the obvious thing to do is to figure out what went wrong, coordinate to move to an uncorrupted forum, and add the new thing to the set of things we filter out of our new walled garden.
I don’t believe that academic journals are an efficient form of information transmission. Academics support academic journals (when they support academic journals) because journals serve other useful purposes.
Often non-epistemic consequences of words are useful, and often they aren’t a big deal. I wouldn’t use the word “corrupted” to describe “having political consequences,” it’s the default state of human discussions.
Public discussion is sometimes much more efficient than private discussion. A central example is when the writer’s time is much more valuable than the reader’s time, or when it would be high-friction for the reader to buy off the writer’s time. (Though in this case, what’s occurring isn’t really discourse.) There are of course other examples.
Doing things like “writing down your thoughts carefully, and then reusing what you’ve written down” is important whether discussion occurs in public or private.
a. Private discussion is nearly as efficient as public discussion for information-transmission, but has way fewer political consequences. On top of that, the political context is more collaborative between participants and so it is less epistemically destructive.
b. I really don’t want to try to use collectively-enforced norms to guide epistemology and don’t think there are many examples of this working out well (whereas there seem to be examples of avoiding epistemically destructive norms by moving into private).
Can you define more precisely what you mean by “private discussion?” If by that you mean that all discourse is constrained to one-on-one conversations where the contents are not available to anyone else, I don’t intuitively see how this would be less destructive and more collaborative. It seems to require that a lot of interactions must occur before every person is up to date on the collective group knowledge, and also that for each conversation there is a lossy compression going on—it’s difficult for each conversation to carry the contents of each person’s history of previous conversations.
On the other hand, if you’re advocating for information to be filtered when transmitted beyond the trusted group, but flows freely within the trusted group, I believe that is less complicated and more efficient and I would have fewer objections to that.
By “private discussion” I mean discussions amongst small groups, in contrast with discussions amongst large groups. Both of them occur constantly. I’ve claimed that in general political considerations cut in favor of having private discussions more often than you otherwise would, I didn’t mean to be making a bold claim.
I recently wanted to raise an issue with some possible controversy/politics in the main EA facebook group. Instead of approving the post I was told, “this post isn’t a good fit for the group, how about posting it instead in this secret facebook group.
That secret facebook group isn’t for one-on-one conversations but it’s still more private.
If this is a categorical claim, then what are academic journals for? Should we ban the printing press?
If your claim is just that some public forums are too corrupted to be worth fixing, not a categorical claim, then the obvious thing to do is to figure out what went wrong, coordinate to move to an uncorrupted forum, and add the new thing to the set of things we filter out of our new walled garden.
I don’t believe that academic journals are an efficient form of information transmission. Academics support academic journals (when they support academic journals) because journals serve other useful purposes.
Often non-epistemic consequences of words are useful, and often they aren’t a big deal. I wouldn’t use the word “corrupted” to describe “having political consequences,” it’s the default state of human discussions.
Public discussion is sometimes much more efficient than private discussion. A central example is when the writer’s time is much more valuable than the reader’s time, or when it would be high-friction for the reader to buy off the writer’s time. (Though in this case, what’s occurring isn’t really discourse.) There are of course other examples.
Doing things like “writing down your thoughts carefully, and then reusing what you’ve written down” is important whether discussion occurs in public or private.