This is something I strongly encourage, even though it creates awkward situations where two people disagree about the truth values underneath a claim.
In more detail: when I have a problem and I ask for help with it, what I’m usually *actually* asking for is new hypotheses to put into my hypothesis space. I get to assign probability to those hypotheses. “I think your p[hyp107]=0.35 is too low; it should be 0.995” is not and cannot be valid criticism; if people mention a hypothesis that I already have in my hypothesis space, they should accept when I say “yes that’s hyp223, p[hyp223]=0.05; got any other ideas or any particularly strong evidence around p[hyp223]?”
But more often, people just want to *assert* that a particular hypothesis is true, and demand that I update.
I can think of two ways that one can de-silence without risking falling into this trap: one is kind of a Bayesian version of NVC, where you present potentially novel hypotheses with “what probability do you assign to the hypothesis that [X]?”. This makes it sound like you aren’t demanding that they believe X, *and* that you aren’t assuming that they haven’t thought of X, while still bringing their attention to X in a helpful way. The second method is to just dive in there, but be completely okay with them pushing back and challenging you on X, and not feeling attacked or disrespected if they appear to reject X out of hand.
This is something I strongly encourage, even though it creates awkward situations where two people disagree about the truth values underneath a claim.
In more detail: when I have a problem and I ask for help with it, what I’m usually *actually* asking for is new hypotheses to put into my hypothesis space. I get to assign probability to those hypotheses. “I think your p[hyp107]=0.35 is too low; it should be 0.995” is not and cannot be valid criticism; if people mention a hypothesis that I already have in my hypothesis space, they should accept when I say “yes that’s hyp223, p[hyp223]=0.05; got any other ideas or any particularly strong evidence around p[hyp223]?”
But more often, people just want to *assert* that a particular hypothesis is true, and demand that I update.
I can think of two ways that one can de-silence without risking falling into this trap: one is kind of a Bayesian version of NVC, where you present potentially novel hypotheses with “what probability do you assign to the hypothesis that [X]?”. This makes it sound like you aren’t demanding that they believe X, *and* that you aren’t assuming that they haven’t thought of X, while still bringing their attention to X in a helpful way. The second method is to just dive in there, but be completely okay with them pushing back and challenging you on X, and not feeling attacked or disrespected if they appear to reject X out of hand.
I hope that made sense?