“Intent to inform” jives with my sense of it much more than “tell the truth.”
On reflection, I think the ‘epistemic peer’ thing is close but not entirely right. Definitely if I think Bob “can’t handle the truth” about climate change, and so I only talk about AI with Bob, then I’m deciding that Bob isn’t an epistemic peer. But if I have only a short conversation with Bob, then there’s a Gricean implication point that saying X implicitly means I thought it was more relevant to say than Y, or is complete, or so on, and so there are whole topics that might be undiscussed because I don’t want to send the implicit message that my short thoughts on the matter are complete enough to reconstruct my position or that this topic is more relevant than other topics.
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More broadly, I note that I often see “the discourse” used as a term of derision, I think because it is (currently) something more like a marketing war than an open exchange of information. Or, like a market left to its own devices, it has Goodharted on marketing. It is unclear to me whether it’s better to abandon it (like, for example, not caring about what people think on Twitter) or attempt to recapture it (by pushing for the sorts of ‘public goods’ and savvy customers that cause markets to Goodhart less on marketing).
“Intent to inform” jives with my sense of it much more than “tell the truth.”
On reflection, I think the ‘epistemic peer’ thing is close but not entirely right. Definitely if I think Bob “can’t handle the truth” about climate change, and so I only talk about AI with Bob, then I’m deciding that Bob isn’t an epistemic peer. But if I have only a short conversation with Bob, then there’s a Gricean implication point that saying X implicitly means I thought it was more relevant to say than Y, or is complete, or so on, and so there are whole topics that might be undiscussed because I don’t want to send the implicit message that my short thoughts on the matter are complete enough to reconstruct my position or that this topic is more relevant than other topics.
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More broadly, I note that I often see “the discourse” used as a term of derision, I think because it is (currently) something more like a marketing war than an open exchange of information. Or, like a market left to its own devices, it has Goodharted on marketing. It is unclear to me whether it’s better to abandon it (like, for example, not caring about what people think on Twitter) or attempt to recapture it (by pushing for the sorts of ‘public goods’ and savvy customers that cause markets to Goodhart less on marketing).