I disagree with the first half of this post, and agree with the second half.
“Physicist Motors” makes sense to me as a topic. If I imagine it as a book, I can contrast it with other books like “Motors for Car Repair Mechanics” and “Motors for Hobbyist Boat Builders” and “Motors for Navy Contract Coordinators”. These would focus on other aspects of motors such as giving you advice for materials to use and which vendors to trust or how to evaluate the work of external contractors, and give you more rules of thumb for your use case that don’t rely on a great deal of complex mathematical calculations (e.g. “how to roughly know if a motor is strong enough for your boat as a function of the weight and surface area of the boat”). The “Physicist Motors” book would focus on the math of ideal motors and doing experiments to see the basic laws of physics at play.
Similarly, many places want norms of discourse, or have goals for discourse, and a rationalist focus would connect it to principles of truth-seeking more directly (e.g. in contrast with norms of “YouTube Discourse” or “Playful/Friendly Discourse”).
So I don’t believe that it is a confused thing to do, to outline practical heuristics or norms rationalist discourse as opposed to other kinds of discourse or other goals one might have with discourse.
In contrast, this critique seems of a valid type:
“A vague spirit of how to reason and argue” seems like an apt description of what “Basics of Rationalist Discourse” and “Elements of Rationalist Discourse” are attempting to codify—but with no explicit instruction on which guidelines arise from deep object-level principles of normative reasoning, and which from mere taste, politeness, or adaptation to local circumstances
Arguing that the principles/heuristics proposed are in conflict with the underlying laws of probability theory and such is a totally valid kind of critique. And I think the critique of the “goodwill” heuristic is pretty good.
My take is that if you positively vote on Bensinger’s “Elements of Rationalist Discourse” then it makes sense to also upvote this post in the review as it is a counterpoint that has a good critique, but I wouldn’t otherwise, as I disagree with the core analogy.
I disagree with the first half of this post, and agree with the second half.
“Physicist Motors” makes sense to me as a topic. If I imagine it as a book, I can contrast it with other books like “Motors for Car Repair Mechanics” and “Motors for Hobbyist Boat Builders” and “Motors for Navy Contract Coordinators”. These would focus on other aspects of motors such as giving you advice for materials to use and which vendors to trust or how to evaluate the work of external contractors, and give you more rules of thumb for your use case that don’t rely on a great deal of complex mathematical calculations (e.g. “how to roughly know if a motor is strong enough for your boat as a function of the weight and surface area of the boat”). The “Physicist Motors” book would focus on the math of ideal motors and doing experiments to see the basic laws of physics at play.
Similarly, many places want norms of discourse, or have goals for discourse, and a rationalist focus would connect it to principles of truth-seeking more directly (e.g. in contrast with norms of “YouTube Discourse” or “Playful/Friendly Discourse”).
So I don’t believe that it is a confused thing to do, to outline practical heuristics or norms rationalist discourse as opposed to other kinds of discourse or other goals one might have with discourse.
In contrast, this critique seems of a valid type:
Arguing that the principles/heuristics proposed are in conflict with the underlying laws of probability theory and such is a totally valid kind of critique. And I think the critique of the “goodwill” heuristic is pretty good.
My take is that if you positively vote on Bensinger’s “Elements of Rationalist Discourse” then it makes sense to also upvote this post in the review as it is a counterpoint that has a good critique, but I wouldn’t otherwise, as I disagree with the core analogy.