Alas, that typically also won’t be the right connotations. “Terrible” still leads me to engage with the statement in a fashion that I believe to be unhelpful.
A core background belief of mine is that many of our intuitions about what responses to “Alice is wrong” are useful are actually (counterintuitively) harmful for truthseeking. This is because the intuitions specifically come from ‘thinking/language as a political tool’ rather than ‘thinking/language as a truthseeking tool’ (and, meanwhile, we are incentivized to not notice when we are optimizing for politics rather than truthseeking)
One of the most important, foundational elements a truthseeking culture needs to serve is helping people override their tendency to use language and beliefs for politics. Doing this while also being able to talk sanely about politics is quite hard, and requires a game-theoretic under
The shortest string of words that get across the right thing is maybe “Alice is motivatedly wrong, and this is important.”
OHHH! I just clicked that “this” in “this is important” is that it’s the mechanism/motivation that’s important to you, not the wrongness. Not “Alice is wrong on an important topic in an influential way”, but “Alice is wrong in a systematic way, regardless of the importance of the topic or the distance from the truth”.
Still not sure why “Alice is wrong” isn’t a strict superset of the issue, and sufficient motivation to dig further into reasons and corrections if it matters.
FWIW, “Alice is systematically wrong [and/or poorly justified] [about X thing]” came to mind as a thing that I think would make me sit up and take note, while having the right implications.
Different situations might call for the wrongness or the rationalization being more important, but it’s the rationalization that’s slippery-er and makes it harder to talk about.
I edited the post slightly to try and make this more clear – glad you noticed the miscommunication and said so concretely.
Alas, that typically also won’t be the right connotations. “Terrible” still leads me to engage with the statement in a fashion that I believe to be unhelpful.
A core background belief of mine is that many of our intuitions about what responses to “Alice is wrong” are useful are actually (counterintuitively) harmful for truthseeking. This is because the intuitions specifically come from ‘thinking/language as a political tool’ rather than ‘thinking/language as a truthseeking tool’ (and, meanwhile, we are incentivized to not notice when we are optimizing for politics rather than truthseeking)
One of the most important, foundational elements a truthseeking culture needs to serve is helping people override their tendency to use language and beliefs for politics. Doing this while also being able to talk sanely about politics is quite hard, and requires a game-theoretic under
The shortest string of words that get across the right thing is maybe “Alice is motivatedly wrong, and this is important.”
OHHH! I just clicked that “this” in “this is important” is that it’s the mechanism/motivation that’s important to you, not the wrongness. Not “Alice is wrong on an important topic in an influential way”, but “Alice is wrong in a systematic way, regardless of the importance of the topic or the distance from the truth”.
Still not sure why “Alice is wrong” isn’t a strict superset of the issue, and sufficient motivation to dig further into reasons and corrections if it matters.
FWIW, “Alice is systematically wrong [and/or poorly justified] [about X thing]” came to mind as a thing that I think would make me sit up and take note, while having the right implications.
Different situations might call for the wrongness or the rationalization being more important, but it’s the rationalization that’s slippery-er and makes it harder to talk about.
I edited the post slightly to try and make this more clear – glad you noticed the miscommunication and said so concretely.