I wouldn’t mind removing hyperboles from socially accepted language. Don’t say “everyone” if you don’t mean literally everyone, duh. (I suppose that many General Semantic fans would agree with this.)
For me a complicated question is one that compares against an unspecified stardard, such as “is this cake sweet?” I don’t know what kind of cakes you are used to eat, so maybe what’s “quite sweet” to me is “only a bit sweet” for you. Telling literal truths, such as “yes, it has a nonzero amount of sugar, but also a nonzero amount of other things” will not help here. I don’t know exactly how much sugar it contains. So, “it tastes quite sweet to me” is the best I can do here. Maybe that should be the norm.
I agree about the “nearest unblocked strategy”. You make the rules; people maximize within the rules (or break them when you are not watching). People wanting to do X will do the thing closest to X that doesn’t break the most literal interpretation of the anti-X rules (or break the rules in a deniable way). -- On the other hand, even trivial inconveniences can make a difference. We are not discussing superhuman AI trying to get out of the box, but humans with limited willpower who may at some level of difficulty simply give up.
The linked article “telling truth is social aggression” ignores the fact that even in competition, people make coalitions. And if you have large amounts of players, math is in favor of cooperation, at least on relatively small scale. If your school grades on a curve, it discourages helping your classmate without getting anything in return. But mutual cooperation with one classmate still helps you both against the rest of the class. The same is true about helping people create better models of the world, when the size of your group is tiny compared to the rest of the population.
The real danger these days usually isn’t Gestapo, but thousands of Twitter celebrities trying to convert parts of your writing taken out of context into polarizing tweets, and journalists trying to convert those tweets into clickbait, where the damage caused to you and your family is just an externality no one cares about. This is the elephant in the room: “I personally don’t disagree with X; or I disagree with X but I think there is no great harm in discussing it per se… but the social consequences of me being publicly known as ‘person who talks about X’ are huge, and I need to pick my battles. I have things to protect that are more important to me than my mere academic interest in X.” Faced by: “But if you lie about X, how can I trust that you are not lying about Y, too?”
I wouldn’t mind removing hyperboles from socially accepted language. Don’t say “everyone” if you don’t mean literally everyone, duh. (I suppose that many General Semantic fans would agree with this.)
For me a complicated question is one that compares against an unspecified stardard, such as “is this cake sweet?” I don’t know what kind of cakes you are used to eat, so maybe what’s “quite sweet” to me is “only a bit sweet” for you. Telling literal truths, such as “yes, it has a nonzero amount of sugar, but also a nonzero amount of other things” will not help here. I don’t know exactly how much sugar it contains. So, “it tastes quite sweet to me” is the best I can do here. Maybe that should be the norm.
I agree about the “nearest unblocked strategy”. You make the rules; people maximize within the rules (or break them when you are not watching). People wanting to do X will do the thing closest to X that doesn’t break the most literal interpretation of the anti-X rules (or break the rules in a deniable way). -- On the other hand, even trivial inconveniences can make a difference. We are not discussing superhuman AI trying to get out of the box, but humans with limited willpower who may at some level of difficulty simply give up.
The linked article “telling truth is social aggression” ignores the fact that even in competition, people make coalitions. And if you have large amounts of players, math is in favor of cooperation, at least on relatively small scale. If your school grades on a curve, it discourages helping your classmate without getting anything in return. But mutual cooperation with one classmate still helps you both against the rest of the class. The same is true about helping people create better models of the world, when the size of your group is tiny compared to the rest of the population.
The real danger these days usually isn’t Gestapo, but thousands of Twitter celebrities trying to convert parts of your writing taken out of context into polarizing tweets, and journalists trying to convert those tweets into clickbait, where the damage caused to you and your family is just an externality no one cares about. This is the elephant in the room: “I personally don’t disagree with X; or I disagree with X but I think there is no great harm in discussing it per se… but the social consequences of me being publicly known as ‘person who talks about X’ are huge, and I need to pick my battles. I have things to protect that are more important to me than my mere academic interest in X.” Faced by: “But if you lie about X, how can I trust that you are not lying about Y, too?”