Even if it had, in fact, been insane, Zack would’ve been more effective if he’d been willing to bother with even the tiniest of softenings (e.g. “this sounds insane to me,” which, in addition to being socially smoother is also literally more true, as a reflection of the actual state of affairs).
Softening like this is one of those annoying things i wish we could do away with because it’s smurf naming. Saying that something is insane is literally a claim that I think it’s insane, and it’s only because of naive epistemology that we think some other meaning is possible.
I only started adding softening because Duncan wouldn’t shut up about the lack of smurfs in my comments.
But Duncan’s suggested softening was “this sounds insane to me”, not “I think this is insane”.
Like, consider the dress. We might imagine someone saying any of
“The dress is (white/blue).”
“I think the dress is (white/blue).”
“The dress looks (white/blue) to me.”
I think that in practice (1) and (2) mean different things; on a population level, they’ll be said by people whose internal experiences are different, and they’ll justly be interpreted differently by listeners.
But even if you disagree with that, surely you’d agree that (3) is different? Like, “I think the dress is white but it’s actually blue” is admittedly a kind of weird thing to say, but “the dress looks white to me but it’s actually blue” is perfectly normal, as is ”...but I think it’s actually blue”, or ”...but I don’t know what color it actually is”.
It may be that the dress looks blue to you and also you think it’s actually blue, but these are two importantly different claims!
I would further suggest that if the dress happens to look blue to you, but also you’re aware that it looks blue to a lot of people and white to a lot of people, and you don’t know what’s going on, and you nonetheless believe confidently that the dress is blue, you are doing something wrong. (Even though you happen to be correct, in this instance.)
When it comes to insanity, I think something similar happens. Whether or not something sounds insane to me is different from whether it actually is insane. Knowing that, I can hold in my head ideas like “this sounds insane to me, but I might be misinterpreting the idea, or I might be mistaken when I think some key premise that it rests on is obviously false, or or or… and so it might not be insane”.
And so we might stipulate that Zack’s “this is insane” was no more or less justifiable than “I think this is insane” would have been. But we should acknowledge the possibility that in thinking it insane, he was doing something wrong; and that thinking and saying “this sounds insane to me” while maintaining uncertainty about whether or not it was actually insane would have been more truth-tracking.
My point is that something cannot actually be insane, it can only be insane by some entity’s judgment. Insanity exists in the map, not the territory. In the territory there’s just stuff going on. We’re that ones that decide to call it insane. Maybe that’s because there’s some stable pattern about the world we want to put the label insanity on, and we develop some collective agreement about what things to call insane, but we’re still the ones that do it.
If you take this view, these statements don’t have much difference between them on a fundamental level because “The dress is X” means something like “I assess the dress to be X” since you’re the one speaking and are making this call. We do have things that mean something different, like “I think other people think the dress is X”, but that’s making a different type of claim than your 3 statements, which I see as making essentially the same fundamental claim with minor differences about how its expressed to try to convey something about the process by which you made the claim so that others can understand your epistemic state, which is sometimes useful but you can also just say this more directly with something like “I’m 80% sure the dress is X”.
A big part of what I’m often doing in my head is simulating a room of 100-1000 people listening, and thinking about what a supermajority of them are thinking or concluding.
When you go from e.g. “that sounds insane to me” or “I think that’s crazy” to “that is crazy,” most of what I think is happening is that you’re tapping into something like ”...and 70+ out of 100 neutral observers would agree.”
Ditto with word usage; one can use a word weirdly and that’s fine; it doesn’t become a wrong usage until it’s a usage that would reliably confuse 70+% of people/reliably cause 70+% of people to conclude the wrong thing, hearing it.
“Wrong in the territory” in this case being “wrong in the maps of a supermajority” + “it’s a socially constructed thing in the first place.”
I’m baffled by this, and kinda just going to throw a bunch of reactions out there without trying to build them into a single coherent reply.
If you take this view, these statements don’t have much difference between them on a fundamental level because “The dress is X” means something like “I assess the dress to be X” since you’re the one speaking and are making this call.
If someone says “the dress looks white to me, but I think it’s actually blue”… how would you analyze that? From this it sounds like you’d think they’re saying “I assess the dress to be white, but I assess it to be blue”?
To me it has a perfectly natural meaning, along the lines of “when I look at this picture my brain tells me that it’s white. But I’m reliably informed that it’s actually blue, and that the white appearance comes from such-and-such mental process combined with the lighting conditions of the photo”.
(e: actually, “along the lines of” isn’t quite what I mean there. It’s more like “this is the kind of thing that might cause someone to say those words”.)
It sounds to me like you’re trying to say there’s, on some level, no meaningful distinction between how something is and how we assess it to be? But how something appears to be and how we assess it to be are still very different!
I see as making essentially the same fundamental claim with minor differences about how its expressed to try to convey something about the process by which you made the claim so that others can understand your epistemic state, which is sometimes useful but you can also just say this more directly with something like “I’m 80% sure the dress is X”.
But “I’m 80% sure the dress is X” doesn’t convey anything about the process by which I came to believe it? It’s simply a conclusion with no supporting argument.
Meanwhile “the dress looks X” is an argument with no ultimate conclusion. If a person says that and nothing else, we might reasonably guess that they probably think the dress is X, similar to how someone who answers “is it going to rain?” with “the forecast says yes” probably doesn’t have any particular grounds to disbelieve the forcast. But even if we assume correctly that they think that, both the explicit and implicit information they’ve conveyed to us are still different versus “I’m _% confident the dress is X” or “I’m _% confident it’s going to rain”.
In practice, humans (en masse) assign genuinely different weights/strengths to “This is insane” and “This sounds insane to me.” The response shows that they are meaningfully different.
I agree (?) with you (assuming you concur with the following) that it would be nice if we had better and more functional terminology, and could make clearer distinctions without spending words that do indeed feel extraneous.
But that’s not the world we live in, and given the world we live in, I disagree that it’s smurf naming.
I agree that people hearing Zack say “I think this is insane” will believe he has a lower P(this is insane) than people hearing him say “This is insane”, but I’m not sure that establishes the words mean that.
If Alice goes around saying “I’m kinda conservative” it would be wise to infer that she is probably conservative. If Bob goes around saying “That’s based” in the modern internet sense of the term, it would also be wise to infer that he is probably a conservative. But based doesn’t mean Bob is conservative, semantically it just means something like “cool”, and then it happens to be the case that this particular synonym for cool is used more often by conservatives than liberals.
If it turned out that Alice voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, one would have a reasonable case that she had used words wrong when she said she was kinda conservative, those words mean basically the opposite of her circumstances. If it turned out that Bob voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, then one might advise him “your word choice is causing people to form a false impression, you should maybe stop saying based”, but it would be weird to suggest this was about what based means. There’s just an observable regularity of our society that people who say based tend to be conservative, like how people who say “edema” tend to be doctors.
If Zack is interested in accurately conveying his level of confidence, he would do well to reserve “That’s insane” for cases where he is very confident and say “That seems insane” when he is less confident. If he instead decided to use “That’s insane” in all cases, that would be misleading. But I think it is significant that this would be a different kind of misleading than if he were to use the words “I am very confident that is insane”, even if the statements cause observers to make the exact same updates.
(My point in the comment above is merely “this is not contentless filler; these distinctions are real in practice; if adding them feels onerous or tedious it’s more likely because one is blind to, or does not care about, a real distinction, than because there’s no real difference and people want you to waste time adding meaningless words.” A lot of people act along lines that go something like “well these words SHOULD be taken to mean X, even though they predictably and reliably get interpreted to mean Y, so I’m going to keep saying them and when other people hear ‘Y’ I’ll blame them, and when other people ask me to say something different I will act put-upon.” <—That’s a caricature/extremer version of the actual position the actual Gordon takes; I’m not claiming Gordon’s saying or doing anything anywhere near that dumb, but it’s clear that there really are differences in how these different phrases are perceived, at the level of hundreds-of-readers.)
Is it wrong for Bob the Democrat to say “based” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a conservative? Is it wrong for Bob the plumber to say “edema” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a a doctor? If I told Bob to start saying “swelling” instead of “edema” then I feel like he would have some right to defend his word use: no one thinks edema literally means “swelling, and also I am a doctor” even if they update in a way that kind of looks like it does.
I don’t think we have a significant disagreement here, I was merely trying to highlight a distinction your comment didn’t dwell on, about different ways statements can be perceived differently. “There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
“There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly analogous, specifically because the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “swelling” and “edema” seems to me like it’s likely at least an order of magnitude smaller than the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “this is crazy” and “this sounds crazy to me.”
As for whether either of these usages are wrong, it depends entirely on whether you want to successfully communicate or not. If you reliably cause your listener to receive concepts that are different than those you were trying to transmit, and this is down to utterly predictable boring simple truths about your language usage, it’s certainly your call if you want to keep doing a thing you know will cause wrong beliefs in the people around you.
Separately, 100% of the people I’ve encountered using the word “based” are radical leftist transfolk, and there are like twelve of them?
I understood “based” to be a 4chan-ism but I didn’t think very hard about the example, it is possible I chose a word that does not actually work in the way I had meant to illustrate. Hopefully the intended meaning was still clear.
Softening like this is one of those annoying things i wish we could do away with because it’s smurf naming. Saying that something is insane is literally a claim that I think it’s insane, and it’s only because of naive epistemology that we think some other meaning is possible.
I only started adding softening because Duncan wouldn’t shut up about the lack of smurfs in my comments.
But Duncan’s suggested softening was “this sounds insane to me”, not “I think this is insane”.
Like, consider the dress. We might imagine someone saying any of
“The dress is (white/blue).”
“I think the dress is (white/blue).”
“The dress looks (white/blue) to me.”
I think that in practice (1) and (2) mean different things; on a population level, they’ll be said by people whose internal experiences are different, and they’ll justly be interpreted differently by listeners.
But even if you disagree with that, surely you’d agree that (3) is different? Like, “I think the dress is white but it’s actually blue” is admittedly a kind of weird thing to say, but “the dress looks white to me but it’s actually blue” is perfectly normal, as is ”...but I think it’s actually blue”, or ”...but I don’t know what color it actually is”.
It may be that the dress looks blue to you and also you think it’s actually blue, but these are two importantly different claims!
I would further suggest that if the dress happens to look blue to you, but also you’re aware that it looks blue to a lot of people and white to a lot of people, and you don’t know what’s going on, and you nonetheless believe confidently that the dress is blue, you are doing something wrong. (Even though you happen to be correct, in this instance.)
When it comes to insanity, I think something similar happens. Whether or not something sounds insane to me is different from whether it actually is insane. Knowing that, I can hold in my head ideas like “this sounds insane to me, but I might be misinterpreting the idea, or I might be mistaken when I think some key premise that it rests on is obviously false, or or or… and so it might not be insane”.
And so we might stipulate that Zack’s “this is insane” was no more or less justifiable than “I think this is insane” would have been. But we should acknowledge the possibility that in thinking it insane, he was doing something wrong; and that thinking and saying “this sounds insane to me” while maintaining uncertainty about whether or not it was actually insane would have been more truth-tracking.
My point is that something cannot actually be insane, it can only be insane by some entity’s judgment. Insanity exists in the map, not the territory. In the territory there’s just stuff going on. We’re that ones that decide to call it insane. Maybe that’s because there’s some stable pattern about the world we want to put the label insanity on, and we develop some collective agreement about what things to call insane, but we’re still the ones that do it.
If you take this view, these statements don’t have much difference between them on a fundamental level because “The dress is X” means something like “I assess the dress to be X” since you’re the one speaking and are making this call. We do have things that mean something different, like “I think other people think the dress is X”, but that’s making a different type of claim than your 3 statements, which I see as making essentially the same fundamental claim with minor differences about how its expressed to try to convey something about the process by which you made the claim so that others can understand your epistemic state, which is sometimes useful but you can also just say this more directly with something like “I’m 80% sure the dress is X”.
A big part of what I’m often doing in my head is simulating a room of 100-1000 people listening, and thinking about what a supermajority of them are thinking or concluding.
When you go from e.g. “that sounds insane to me” or “I think that’s crazy” to “that is crazy,” most of what I think is happening is that you’re tapping into something like ”...and 70+ out of 100 neutral observers would agree.”
Ditto with word usage; one can use a word weirdly and that’s fine; it doesn’t become a wrong usage until it’s a usage that would reliably confuse 70+% of people/reliably cause 70+% of people to conclude the wrong thing, hearing it.
“Wrong in the territory” in this case being “wrong in the maps of a supermajority” + “it’s a socially constructed thing in the first place.”
I’m baffled by this, and kinda just going to throw a bunch of reactions out there without trying to build them into a single coherent reply.
If someone says “the dress looks white to me, but I think it’s actually blue”… how would you analyze that? From this it sounds like you’d think they’re saying “I assess the dress to be white, but I assess it to be blue”?
To me it has a perfectly natural meaning, along the lines of “when I look at this picture my brain tells me that it’s white. But I’m reliably informed that it’s actually blue, and that the white appearance comes from such-and-such mental process combined with the lighting conditions of the photo”.
(e: actually, “along the lines of” isn’t quite what I mean there. It’s more like “this is the kind of thing that might cause someone to say those words”.)
It sounds to me like you’re trying to say there’s, on some level, no meaningful distinction between how something is and how we assess it to be? But how something appears to be and how we assess it to be are still very different!
But “I’m 80% sure the dress is X” doesn’t convey anything about the process by which I came to believe it? It’s simply a conclusion with no supporting argument.
Meanwhile “the dress looks X” is an argument with no ultimate conclusion. If a person says that and nothing else, we might reasonably guess that they probably think the dress is X, similar to how someone who answers “is it going to rain?” with “the forecast says yes” probably doesn’t have any particular grounds to disbelieve the forcast. But even if we assume correctly that they think that, both the explicit and implicit information they’ve conveyed to us are still different versus “I’m _% confident the dress is X” or “I’m _% confident it’s going to rain”.
Words mean what they mean, in practice.
In practice, humans (en masse) assign genuinely different weights/strengths to “This is insane” and “This sounds insane to me.” The response shows that they are meaningfully different.
I agree (?) with you (assuming you concur with the following) that it would be nice if we had better and more functional terminology, and could make clearer distinctions without spending words that do indeed feel extraneous.
But that’s not the world we live in, and given the world we live in, I disagree that it’s smurf naming.
I agree that people hearing Zack say “I think this is insane” will believe he has a lower P(this is insane) than people hearing him say “This is insane”, but I’m not sure that establishes the words mean that.
If Alice goes around saying “I’m kinda conservative” it would be wise to infer that she is probably conservative. If Bob goes around saying “That’s based” in the modern internet sense of the term, it would also be wise to infer that he is probably a conservative. But based doesn’t mean Bob is conservative, semantically it just means something like “cool”, and then it happens to be the case that this particular synonym for cool is used more often by conservatives than liberals.
If it turned out that Alice voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, one would have a reasonable case that she had used words wrong when she said she was kinda conservative, those words mean basically the opposite of her circumstances. If it turned out that Bob voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, then one might advise him “your word choice is causing people to form a false impression, you should maybe stop saying based”, but it would be weird to suggest this was about what based means. There’s just an observable regularity of our society that people who say based tend to be conservative, like how people who say “edema” tend to be doctors.
If Zack is interested in accurately conveying his level of confidence, he would do well to reserve “That’s insane” for cases where he is very confident and say “That seems insane” when he is less confident. If he instead decided to use “That’s insane” in all cases, that would be misleading. But I think it is significant that this would be a different kind of misleading than if he were to use the words “I am very confident that is insane”, even if the statements cause observers to make the exact same updates.
(My point in the comment above is merely “this is not contentless filler; these distinctions are real in practice; if adding them feels onerous or tedious it’s more likely because one is blind to, or does not care about, a real distinction, than because there’s no real difference and people want you to waste time adding meaningless words.” A lot of people act along lines that go something like “well these words SHOULD be taken to mean X, even though they predictably and reliably get interpreted to mean Y, so I’m going to keep saying them and when other people hear ‘Y’ I’ll blame them, and when other people ask me to say something different I will act put-upon.” <—That’s a caricature/extremer version of the actual position the actual Gordon takes; I’m not claiming Gordon’s saying or doing anything anywhere near that dumb, but it’s clear that there really are differences in how these different phrases are perceived, at the level of hundreds-of-readers.)
Is it wrong for Bob the Democrat to say “based” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a conservative? Is it wrong for Bob the plumber to say “edema” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a a doctor? If I told Bob to start saying “swelling” instead of “edema” then I feel like he would have some right to defend his word use: no one thinks edema literally means “swelling, and also I am a doctor” even if they update in a way that kind of looks like it does.
I don’t think we have a significant disagreement here, I was merely trying to highlight a distinction your comment didn’t dwell on, about different ways statements can be perceived differently. “There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly analogous, specifically because the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “swelling” and “edema” seems to me like it’s likely at least an order of magnitude smaller than the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “this is crazy” and “this sounds crazy to me.”
As for whether either of these usages are wrong, it depends entirely on whether you want to successfully communicate or not. If you reliably cause your listener to receive concepts that are different than those you were trying to transmit, and this is down to utterly predictable boring simple truths about your language usage, it’s certainly your call if you want to keep doing a thing you know will cause wrong beliefs in the people around you.
Separately, 100% of the people I’ve encountered using the word “based” are radical leftist transfolk, and there are like twelve of them?
I understood “based” to be a 4chan-ism but I didn’t think very hard about the example, it is possible I chose a word that does not actually work in the way I had meant to illustrate. Hopefully the intended meaning was still clear.