… inability to do what the vast majority of people have a pretty easy time doing (“checking interpretations” and “sharing any of the interpretive labor at all”, respectively).
My objection to this sort of claim is basically the same as my objection to this, from an earlier comment of yours:
[Interacting with Said] has never once felt cooperative or collaborative; I can make twice the intellectual progress with half the effort with a randomly selected LWer
And similar to my objection in a much earlier discussion (which I can’t seem to find now, apologies) about Double Crux (I think), wherein (I am summarizing from memory) you said that you have usually been able to easily explain and apply the concept when teaching it to people in person, as a CFAR instructor; to which I asked how you could distinguish between your interlocutor/student really understanding you, vs. the social pressure of the situation (the student/teacher frame, your personal charisma, etc.) causing them, perhaps, to persuade themselves that they’ve understood, when in fact they have not.
In short, the problem is this:
If “sharing interpretive labor”, “making intellectual progress”, etc., just boils down to “agreeing with you, without necessarily getting any closer to (or perhaps even getting further away from) the truth”, then of course you would observe exactly what you say you observe, yes?
And yet it would, in this scenario, be very bad if you self-selected into discussions where everyone had (it would seem to you) an easy time “sharing interpretive labor”, where you routinely made (or so you would think) plenty of “intellectual progress”, etc.
No doubt you disagree with this view of things. But on what basis? How can you tell that this isn’t what’s happening?
My objection to this sort of claim is basically the same as my objection to this, from an earlier comment of yours:
And similar to my objection in a much earlier discussion (which I can’t seem to find now, apologies) about Double Crux (I think), wherein (I am summarizing from memory) you said that you have usually been able to easily explain and apply the concept when teaching it to people in person, as a CFAR instructor; to which I asked how you could distinguish between your interlocutor/student really understanding you, vs. the social pressure of the situation (the student/teacher frame, your personal charisma, etc.) causing them, perhaps, to persuade themselves that they’ve understood, when in fact they have not.
In short, the problem is this:
If “sharing interpretive labor”, “making intellectual progress”, etc., just boils down to “agreeing with you, without necessarily getting any closer to (or perhaps even getting further away from) the truth”, then of course you would observe exactly what you say you observe, yes?
And yet it would, in this scenario, be very bad if you self-selected into discussions where everyone had (it would seem to you) an easy time “sharing interpretive labor”, where you routinely made (or so you would think) plenty of “intellectual progress”, etc.
No doubt you disagree with this view of things. But on what basis? How can you tell that this isn’t what’s happening?