Thanks for elaborating. I have a few disagreements:
1. Given a choice between thinking about more important topics, and thinking correctly, I think the answer is “alternate between trying to shift your thinking to more important topics, and thinking more correctly about the topics you are thinking about.” If you don’t do this, you are screwed.
2. Thinking about potential objections is not just a good dirty rhetoric trick. It’s a good rationality tool for getting yourself to red-team your own arguments and views. Many times I’ve written the last sentence of an argument, and then thought “OK, time to anticipate objections… oh huh, now that I think about it objection X is pretty plausible, I should go think more.” Plus it helps you rewrite your original argument to avoid stumbling into the objection, i.e. it helps to make your original argument more “clean logical chainy.”
3. Yes, there will always be a chance of people misinterpreting. So? It’s true that if your audience expands to include dumber people (or people who have less context and familiarity, or whatever) then the average comment quality will drop. But sometimes there are good reasons to want your writing to reach a wider audience! And often these reasons outweigh the cost of lower average comment quality.
4. If you quote G.Orwell it doesn’t mean you can’t come up with anything better to write; just that you can’t come up with any better way to phrase the exact point that you are quoting him making. This is pretty common IMO. Analogy: “If you reuse someone else’s code, that means you can’t code any better than them. Therefore you shouldn’t use libraries and whatnot, you should just do everything from scratch.”
5. There are honest methods of doing persuasion, and it’s very important that one master and employ these methods.
I agree with everything in your comment except the idea that we disagree.
Yes. You’re right.
I do think about potential objections. If an objection is valid then I fix what I wrote. If an objection is plausible-sounding widely-believed and invalid then I ignore it.
You’re right.
You’re right. I don’t understand what’s different between your software library analogy and my DLL analogy. The idea that you should quote someone when “you can’t come up with any better way to phrase the exact point” is something I almost included in my original post before deciding against. It is a valid point.
Thanks for elaborating. I have a few disagreements:
1. Given a choice between thinking about more important topics, and thinking correctly, I think the answer is “alternate between trying to shift your thinking to more important topics, and thinking more correctly about the topics you are thinking about.” If you don’t do this, you are screwed.
2. Thinking about potential objections is not just a good dirty rhetoric trick. It’s a good rationality tool for getting yourself to red-team your own arguments and views. Many times I’ve written the last sentence of an argument, and then thought “OK, time to anticipate objections… oh huh, now that I think about it objection X is pretty plausible, I should go think more.” Plus it helps you rewrite your original argument to avoid stumbling into the objection, i.e. it helps to make your original argument more “clean logical chainy.”
3. Yes, there will always be a chance of people misinterpreting. So? It’s true that if your audience expands to include dumber people (or people who have less context and familiarity, or whatever) then the average comment quality will drop. But sometimes there are good reasons to want your writing to reach a wider audience! And often these reasons outweigh the cost of lower average comment quality.
4. If you quote G.Orwell it doesn’t mean you can’t come up with anything better to write; just that you can’t come up with any better way to phrase the exact point that you are quoting him making. This is pretty common IMO. Analogy: “If you reuse someone else’s code, that means you can’t code any better than them. Therefore you shouldn’t use libraries and whatnot, you should just do everything from scratch.”
5. There are honest methods of doing persuasion, and it’s very important that one master and employ these methods.
I agree with everything in your comment except the idea that we disagree.
Yes. You’re right.
I do think about potential objections. If an objection is valid then I fix what I wrote. If an objection is plausible-sounding widely-believed and invalid then I ignore it.
You’re right.
You’re right. I don’t understand what’s different between your software library analogy and my DLL analogy. The idea that you should quote someone when “you can’t come up with any better way to phrase the exact point” is something I almost included in my original post before deciding against. It is a valid point.
Yes.