One important idea I’ve picked up from reading Zvi is that, in communication, it’s important to buy out the status cost imposed by your claims.
If you’re fielding a theory of the world that, as a side effect, dunks on your interlocutor and diminishes their social status, you can work to get that person to think in terms of Bayesian epistemology and not decision theory if you make sure you aren’t hurting their social image. You have to put in the unreasonable-feeling work of framing all your claims such that their social status is preserved or fairly increased. If you don’t, your counterparty isn’t going to treat that as a good-faith interaction, and they’re going to stay in a bad faith, “arguments as soldiers” conversational mode instead.
When a community puts in the hard work of cooperating in maintaining a strong epistemic commons, you don’t have to put as much effort in your communications protocol if you want to get a model across. When a community’s collective epistemology is degraded, you have to do this work, always packaging your points just so, as the price of communicating.
One important idea I’ve picked up from reading Zvi is that, in communication, it’s important to buy out the status cost imposed by your claims.
If you’re fielding a theory of the world that, as a side effect, dunks on your interlocutor and diminishes their social status, you can work to get that person to think in terms of Bayesian epistemology and not decision theory if you make sure you aren’t hurting their social image. You have to put in the unreasonable-feeling work of framing all your claims such that their social status is preserved or fairly increased. If you don’t, your counterparty isn’t going to treat that as a good-faith interaction, and they’re going to stay in a bad faith, “arguments as soldiers” conversational mode instead.
When a community puts in the hard work of cooperating in maintaining a strong epistemic commons, you don’t have to put as much effort in your communications protocol if you want to get a model across. When a community’s collective epistemology is degraded, you have to do this work, always packaging your points just so, as the price of communicating.