Rationality and intelligence are not the same thing—I’ve seen plenty of discussions here despairing about the existence of obviously-intelligent people, masters in their fields, who haven’t decided to practice rationality. I also know people who are observably less intelligent than I am, who practice rationality about as well as I do. One major difference between people in that latter group, and people who are not practicing rationality, no matter what the irrational peoples’ intelligence levels are, is that those people don’t get offended when someone points out a flaw in their reasoning, just as I don’t get offended when they, or even people who are not practicing rationality, point out a flaw in mine. People who are less intelligent will probably progress more slowly with rationality, as with any mental skill-set, but that’s not under discussion here. The irrational unwillingness to accept criticism is.
Being called ‘profoundly stupid’ is not exactly a criticism of someone’s reasoning. (Not that anybody was called that.) I think we’re objecting to this because of how it’ll offend people outside of the ‘in group’ anyway. Besides that, As much as we might wish we were immune to the emotional shock or glee at our thoughts and concepts being ridiculed or praised. I think it would be a rarity here to find someone who didn’t. People socializing and exchanging ideas is a type of system—It has to be understood and used effectively in order to produce the best results—and calling, essentially, everybody who disagrees with you ‘profoundly stupid’ is not good social lubrication.
You appear to be putting words into my mouth, but I’m currently too irritated to detangle this much beyond that point.
“Giving people too much credit” was a reference to peoples’ desire to be rational. I tend to assume that that’s significantly above zero in every case, even though the evidence does not seem to support that assumption. This is a failure to be rational on my part. (I doubt I’ll fix that; it’s the basis for most of my faith in humanity.)
I make no such assumption about intelligence (I do not assume that people want to be more intelligent than they are), and make a conscious effort to remove irrational biases toward intelligent people from my thought process when I encounter them. I have been doing so for years, with a significant degree of success, especially considering that I was significantly prejudiced against less intelligent people, before I realized that it was wrong to hold that view.
I have also put significant effort into learning how to bridge both of those communication gaps, and the skills required in each case are different. When I’m simply dealing with someone who’s less intelligent, I moderate my vocabulary, use lots of supporting social signaling, make smaller leaps of logic, and request feedback frequently to make sure I haven’t lost them. (Those skills are just as useful in regular conversation as they are in explaining things.) When I’m dealing with someone who’s not practicing rationality, I have to be very aware of their particular worldview, and only thoughtfully challenge it—which requires lots of complicated forethought, and can require outright lies.
The lack of either of those sets of communication skills will make dealing with the relevant people difficult, and can lead to them thinking poorly of you, whether you actually are prejudiced against them or not. Assuming that someone who does not have one of those sets of skills is prejudiced does not, in practice, work—there’s a very high risk of getting a false-positive.
When I’m dealing with someone who’s not practicing rationality, I have to be very aware of their particular worldview, and only thoughtfully challenge it -
A person who is ‘thinking’ irrationally can only be challeneged to the degree that they’re being rational. If they eschew rationality completely, there isn’t any way to communicate with them.
What have you actually accomplished, if you use social signals to get someone to switch their concept-allegiances?
I thought we’d already defined “practicing rationality” as “intentionally trying to make rational decisions and intentionally trying to become more rational”. Whether we had or not, that was what I meant by the term.
Someone can be being somewhat rational without ‘practicing’ rationality, and to the degree that they can accurately predict what effects follow what causes, or accomplish other tasks that depend on rationality, every person I know is at least somewhat rational. Even animals can be slightly rational—cats for example are well known for learning that the sound of a can opener is an accurate sign that they may be fed in the near future, even if they aren’t rational enough to make stronger predictions about which instances of that sound signal mealtime.
While social signaling can be used on its own to cause someone to switch their allegiances to concepts that they don’t value especially highly, that’s not the only possible use of it, and it’s not a use I consider acceptable. The use of social-signaling that I recommend is intended to keep a person from becoming defensive while ‘rationality-level appropriate’ rational arguments are used to actually encourage them to change their mind.
I thought we’d already defined “practicing rationality” as “intentionally trying to make rational decisions and intentionally trying to become more rational”.
No, only if you rationally try to make rational decisions and rationally try to become more rational.
If you’re acting irrationally, you’re not practicing rationality, in the same way that you’re not practicing vegetarianism if you’re eating meat.
You should expand this into a top-level post. Communication is difficult and I think most people could use advice about it. As it stands, it sounds like broad strokes which are obviously good ideas, but probably hard to implement without more details.
I’ve been considering it, actually, for my own use if not to post here. I think it’d be useful in several ways to try to come up with actual wordings for the tricks I’ve picked up.
Rationality and intelligence are not the same thing—I’ve seen plenty of discussions here despairing about the existence of obviously-intelligent people, masters in their fields, who haven’t decided to practice rationality. I also know people who are observably less intelligent than I am, who practice rationality about as well as I do. One major difference between people in that latter group, and people who are not practicing rationality, no matter what the irrational peoples’ intelligence levels are, is that those people don’t get offended when someone points out a flaw in their reasoning, just as I don’t get offended when they, or even people who are not practicing rationality, point out a flaw in mine. People who are less intelligent will probably progress more slowly with rationality, as with any mental skill-set, but that’s not under discussion here. The irrational unwillingness to accept criticism is.
Being called ‘profoundly stupid’ is not exactly a criticism of someone’s reasoning. (Not that anybody was called that.) I think we’re objecting to this because of how it’ll offend people outside of the ‘in group’ anyway. Besides that, As much as we might wish we were immune to the emotional shock or glee at our thoughts and concepts being ridiculed or praised. I think it would be a rarity here to find someone who didn’t. People socializing and exchanging ideas is a type of system—It has to be understood and used effectively in order to produce the best results—and calling, essentially, everybody who disagrees with you ‘profoundly stupid’ is not good social lubrication.
You appear to be putting words into my mouth, but I’m currently too irritated to detangle this much beyond that point.
“Giving people too much credit” was a reference to peoples’ desire to be rational. I tend to assume that that’s significantly above zero in every case, even though the evidence does not seem to support that assumption. This is a failure to be rational on my part. (I doubt I’ll fix that; it’s the basis for most of my faith in humanity.)
I make no such assumption about intelligence (I do not assume that people want to be more intelligent than they are), and make a conscious effort to remove irrational biases toward intelligent people from my thought process when I encounter them. I have been doing so for years, with a significant degree of success, especially considering that I was significantly prejudiced against less intelligent people, before I realized that it was wrong to hold that view.
I have also put significant effort into learning how to bridge both of those communication gaps, and the skills required in each case are different. When I’m simply dealing with someone who’s less intelligent, I moderate my vocabulary, use lots of supporting social signaling, make smaller leaps of logic, and request feedback frequently to make sure I haven’t lost them. (Those skills are just as useful in regular conversation as they are in explaining things.) When I’m dealing with someone who’s not practicing rationality, I have to be very aware of their particular worldview, and only thoughtfully challenge it—which requires lots of complicated forethought, and can require outright lies.
The lack of either of those sets of communication skills will make dealing with the relevant people difficult, and can lead to them thinking poorly of you, whether you actually are prejudiced against them or not. Assuming that someone who does not have one of those sets of skills is prejudiced does not, in practice, work—there’s a very high risk of getting a false-positive.
A person who is ‘thinking’ irrationally can only be challeneged to the degree that they’re being rational. If they eschew rationality completely, there isn’t any way to communicate with them.
What have you actually accomplished, if you use social signals to get someone to switch their concept-allegiances?
I thought we’d already defined “practicing rationality” as “intentionally trying to make rational decisions and intentionally trying to become more rational”. Whether we had or not, that was what I meant by the term.
Someone can be being somewhat rational without ‘practicing’ rationality, and to the degree that they can accurately predict what effects follow what causes, or accomplish other tasks that depend on rationality, every person I know is at least somewhat rational. Even animals can be slightly rational—cats for example are well known for learning that the sound of a can opener is an accurate sign that they may be fed in the near future, even if they aren’t rational enough to make stronger predictions about which instances of that sound signal mealtime.
While social signaling can be used on its own to cause someone to switch their allegiances to concepts that they don’t value especially highly, that’s not the only possible use of it, and it’s not a use I consider acceptable. The use of social-signaling that I recommend is intended to keep a person from becoming defensive while ‘rationality-level appropriate’ rational arguments are used to actually encourage them to change their mind.
No, only if you rationally try to make rational decisions and rationally try to become more rational.
If you’re acting irrationally, you’re not practicing rationality, in the same way that you’re not practicing vegetarianism if you’re eating meat.
I wrote this rant before I saw the thing above. I’m not deleting it, because someone may find this useful, but the issue has been resolved. :)
You should expand this into a top-level post. Communication is difficult and I think most people could use advice about it. As it stands, it sounds like broad strokes which are obviously good ideas, but probably hard to implement without more details.
I’ve been considering it, actually, for my own use if not to post here. I think it’d be useful in several ways to try to come up with actual wordings for the tricks I’ve picked up.