Others have approached this from slightly different angles, but I’d say “you’re being uncharitable” is a symptom rather than a cause. If the conversation gets to the point where someone doesn’t trust their conversation partner, something has already gone wrong.
This strikes me as wrong/very optimistic. Distrust will be an inevitable concern for any online community that frequently recruits new members (because how are you supposed to already trust new members?)
“Something went wrong” is perhaps not the best way to phrase it, my point was more like: if you’re diagnosing something as wrong with the thread, you don’t solve the problem by preventing people from saying “you’re operating in bad faith”, you solve the problem by fixing the fact that people are operating in bad faith.
Hmm, I feel like we can make significant intellectual progress without everyone having to trust everyone else. And also don’t think there are that many interventions that reliably establish trust between parties that don’t just mostly consist of people being around each other for a while without getting into conflict.
Huh, really? I think there are fairly standard operating procedures for “how to converse in good faith”, that are pretty common in rationalist circles, and should be common/expected in rationalist circles, and if people are failing to live up to them I’d expect a given conversation to be less productive.
I think we might be using different definitions of “trust”, as a consequence of assigning different levels of importance to different aspects of the underlying concept.
I.e. I am thinking of trust as more something along the lines of “I expect the other person to actually have my well-being in mind”, whereas you might be pointing at one of the followng “I expect the other person is not going to accidentally hurt me/ doesn’t have an intention of hurting me/ is following a process that makes adversarial behavior inconvenient”
Others have approached this from slightly different angles, but I’d say “you’re being uncharitable” is a symptom rather than a cause. If the conversation gets to the point where someone doesn’t trust their conversation partner, something has already gone wrong.
This strikes me as wrong/very optimistic. Distrust will be an inevitable concern for any online community that frequently recruits new members (because how are you supposed to already trust new members?)
“Something went wrong” is perhaps not the best way to phrase it, my point was more like: if you’re diagnosing something as wrong with the thread, you don’t solve the problem by preventing people from saying “you’re operating in bad faith”, you solve the problem by fixing the fact that people are operating in bad faith.
Hmm, I feel like we can make significant intellectual progress without everyone having to trust everyone else. And also don’t think there are that many interventions that reliably establish trust between parties that don’t just mostly consist of people being around each other for a while without getting into conflict.
Huh, really? I think there are fairly standard operating procedures for “how to converse in good faith”, that are pretty common in rationalist circles, and should be common/expected in rationalist circles, and if people are failing to live up to them I’d expect a given conversation to be less productive.
I think we might be using different definitions of “trust”, as a consequence of assigning different levels of importance to different aspects of the underlying concept.
I.e. I am thinking of trust as more something along the lines of “I expect the other person to actually have my well-being in mind”, whereas you might be pointing at one of the followng “I expect the other person is not going to accidentally hurt me/ doesn’t have an intention of hurting me/ is following a process that makes adversarial behavior inconvenient”
Ah, yes. That is what I meant in this case.