On LW rational debate is a core goal. How to reason about political issues matters more than the question of whether or not marriage should be abolished.
Posts that advocate for good political ideas but do so in an irrational way have no place on LW.
Rational debate is indeed a core goal. Object level arguments are essential to rational debate in most cases. Avoiding ad hominem subtext is also important.
You said that you can’t think of any reason.
I can’t address that without using the word “you”.
There are indeed two options: 1) You didn’t put enough time into understanding the subject. 2) You lack ability to understand it.
Okay maybe there a third: 3) You lied about not seeing any reason
“Argument from ignorance” does not have any place on LW. Discouraging it by calling it out is valuable. It’s not something that should stand unchallenged.
Not just because it’s wrong, but for garden purposes. It lowers the quality of the debate.
I disagree. It seems to me completely rational to say “Guys, why are we doing X? It looks like there was a reason why we were doing X before but the reason is irrelevant by now and we still keep doing it. Since I see no reason to keep doing it, I suspect it is pure inertia and we should stop doing it. If there is a reason I missed, please point it out”.
Imagine you start working in a software company, and you discover the codebase is a jumble of spaghetti. You say “what is going on here? why don’t we remove all of this legacy code?” and the other person goes “this is a arguing from ignorance, the fact you don’t know why we need this code doesn’t mean there is no reason!”.
Instead the other person should have either
a. Agreed that we need to schedule refactoring
or
b. Explained the reasons why we need all this complex code
And in case b it might still turn out the reasons are mere rationalisations i.e. the code would never have been written this way if we wrote the system from scratch. Or not. But establishing which requires an actual object level debate.
I think the true issue here is that you may not have much of a trust in other people’s rationality. In this example you sound like you work from the assumption that they have no reasons at all, while in your marriage opinion it sounds like people of “previous eras” (too unspecific) had largely unethical reasons (marriage-as-slavery).
Well this sounds like me when I was 20 :) But what I have learned since is that it is better to assume people are not stupid and not evil unless evidenced otherwise. Now of course this sounds entirely trivial, but at 20 I did not realize the full extent of that principle of charitability. Namely that this also implies that may have entirely valid reasons of which I am entirely ignorant of, and that implies I am not as smart and knowledgeable as I like to think. I had to realize the whole chain of it. Starting from liking to think I am smart and knowledge, when I was younger I too easily went to thinking if I don’t understand the reasons for a thing then there aren’t any or no good ones just stupid or evil ones, and this led to me ignoring the principle of charity and implicitly thinking other people are stupid and / or evil.
Antoher thing I learned since that reasons are not always explicit. I learned to accept reasons like “because we tried stuff, and this one worked, we have no idea why but it did”.
I do not assume other people are stupid or evil. However, in this particular case my best current hypothesis is that the reasons are mostly historical. That said, I will gladly update on information to the contrary.
I disagree. It seems to me completely rational to say “Guys, why are we doing X? It looks like there was a reason why we were doing X before but the reason is irrelevant by now and we still keep doing it. Since I see no reason to keep doing it, I suspect it is pure inertia and we should stop doing it. If there is a reason I missed, please point it out”.
It’s rational to say that about a topic that you don’t understand.
It’s no sin to not put significant time into understanding every topic one wants to speak about and asking other people for insights.
Imagine you start working in a software company, and you discover the codebase is a jumble of spaghetti. You say “what is going on here? why don’t we remove all of this legacy code?” and the other person goes “this is a arguing from ignorance, the fact you don’t know why we need this code doesn’t mean there is no reason!”.
If you start working at a company you are ignorant about why the company is acting the way it is. If you are starting at a company you haven’t put significant time into understand it’s inner workings.
You didn’t focus on asking a question. Your posts doesn’t contain any question marks expect in the part about polyamous marriage.
There a huge difference between: “I don’t know why we do X, we shouldn’t do it.” and “Can you please explain to me why we do X?”
I don’t think we are going to make progress without going to object level.
On LW rational debate is a core goal. How to reason about political issues matters more than the question of whether or not marriage should be abolished.
Posts that advocate for good political ideas but do so in an irrational way have no place on LW.
Rational debate is indeed a core goal. Object level arguments are essential to rational debate in most cases. Avoiding ad hominem subtext is also important.
You said that you can’t think of any reason. I can’t address that without using the word “you”.
There are indeed two options:
1) You didn’t put enough time into understanding the subject.
2) You lack ability to understand it.
Okay maybe there a third:
3) You lied about not seeing any reason
“Argument from ignorance” does not have any place on LW. Discouraging it by calling it out is valuable. It’s not something that should stand unchallenged. Not just because it’s wrong, but for garden purposes. It lowers the quality of the debate.
I disagree. It seems to me completely rational to say “Guys, why are we doing X? It looks like there was a reason why we were doing X before but the reason is irrelevant by now and we still keep doing it. Since I see no reason to keep doing it, I suspect it is pure inertia and we should stop doing it. If there is a reason I missed, please point it out”.
Imagine you start working in a software company, and you discover the codebase is a jumble of spaghetti. You say “what is going on here? why don’t we remove all of this legacy code?” and the other person goes “this is a arguing from ignorance, the fact you don’t know why we need this code doesn’t mean there is no reason!”.
Instead the other person should have either
a. Agreed that we need to schedule refactoring
or
b. Explained the reasons why we need all this complex code
And in case b it might still turn out the reasons are mere rationalisations i.e. the code would never have been written this way if we wrote the system from scratch. Or not. But establishing which requires an actual object level debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton’s_fence
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2012/08/proxy-measures-sunk-costs-and.html
I think the true issue here is that you may not have much of a trust in other people’s rationality. In this example you sound like you work from the assumption that they have no reasons at all, while in your marriage opinion it sounds like people of “previous eras” (too unspecific) had largely unethical reasons (marriage-as-slavery).
Well this sounds like me when I was 20 :) But what I have learned since is that it is better to assume people are not stupid and not evil unless evidenced otherwise. Now of course this sounds entirely trivial, but at 20 I did not realize the full extent of that principle of charitability. Namely that this also implies that may have entirely valid reasons of which I am entirely ignorant of, and that implies I am not as smart and knowledgeable as I like to think. I had to realize the whole chain of it. Starting from liking to think I am smart and knowledge, when I was younger I too easily went to thinking if I don’t understand the reasons for a thing then there aren’t any or no good ones just stupid or evil ones, and this led to me ignoring the principle of charity and implicitly thinking other people are stupid and / or evil.
Antoher thing I learned since that reasons are not always explicit. I learned to accept reasons like “because we tried stuff, and this one worked, we have no idea why but it did”.
I do not assume other people are stupid or evil. However, in this particular case my best current hypothesis is that the reasons are mostly historical. That said, I will gladly update on information to the contrary.
It’s rational to say that about a topic that you don’t understand. It’s no sin to not put significant time into understanding every topic one wants to speak about and asking other people for insights.
If you start working at a company you are ignorant about why the company is acting the way it is. If you are starting at a company you haven’t put significant time into understand it’s inner workings.
You didn’t focus on asking a question. Your posts doesn’t contain any question marks expect in the part about polyamous marriage.
There a huge difference between: “I don’t know why we do X, we shouldn’t do it.” and “Can you please explain to me why we do X?”
Fair enough. See edit.