There is something that bother’s me and I would like to know if it bothers anyone else. I call it “Argument by Silliness”
Consider this quote from the Allais Malaise post:
“If satisfying your intuitions is more important to you than money, do whatever the heck you want. Drop the money over Niagara Falls. Blow it all on expensive champagne. Set fire to your hair. Whatever.”
I find this to be a common end point when demonstrating what it means to be rational. Someone will advance a good argument that correctly computes/deduces how you should act, given a certain goal. In the post quoted above, that would be maximizing your money. And in order to get their point across, they cite all the obviously silly things you could otherwise do. To a certain extent, it can be more blackmail than argument, because your audience does not want to seem a fool and so he dutifully agrees that yes, it would be silly to throw your money off of Niagara Falls and he is certainly a reasonable man who would never do that so of course he agrees with you.
Now, none of the intelligent readers on LW need to be blackmailed this way because we all understand what rationality demands of us and we respond to solid arguments not rhetoric. And Eliezer is just using that bit of trickery to get a basic point across to the uninitiated.
But the argument does little to help those who already grasp the concept improve their understanding. Absurdity does not mean you have correctly implemented a “reductio ad absurdum” technique. You have to be careful because he appealed to something that is self-evidently absurd and you should be wary of anything considered self-evident. Actually, I think it is more a case of being commonly accepted as absurd, but you should be just as wary of anything commonly accepted as silly. And you should be careful about where you think it is the former but it’s actually the later.
The biggest problem, however, is that silly is a class in which we put things that can be disregarded. Silly is not a truth statement. It is a value statement. It says things are unimportant, not that they are untrue. It says that according to a given standard, this thing is ranked very low, so low in fact that it is essentially worthless.
Now, disregarding things is important for thinking. It is often impossible to think through the whole problem, so we at first concern ourselves with just a part and put the troublesome cases aside for later. In the Allais Malaise post, Eliezer was concerned just with the minor problem of “How do we maximize money under these particular constraints?” and separating out intuitions was part of having a well-defined, solvable problem to discuss.
But the silliness he cites only proves that the two standards—maximizing money and satisfying your intuitions—conflict in a particular case. It tells you little about any other case or the standards themselves.
The point I most want to make is “Embrace what you find silly,” but since this comment has gone on very long, so I am going to break this up into several postings.
Yeah—argument by silliness (I think I’d describe it as finding something about the argument which can be made to sound silly) is one of the things I don’t like about normal people.
That’s why it can be such an effective tactic when persuading normal people. You can get them to commit to your side and then they rationalize themselves into believing it’s truth (which it is) because they don’t want to admit they were conned.
There is something that bother’s me and I would like to know if it bothers anyone else. I call it “Argument by Silliness”
Consider this quote from the Allais Malaise post: “If satisfying your intuitions is more important to you than money, do whatever the heck you want. Drop the money over Niagara Falls. Blow it all on expensive champagne. Set fire to your hair. Whatever.”
I find this to be a common end point when demonstrating what it means to be rational. Someone will advance a good argument that correctly computes/deduces how you should act, given a certain goal. In the post quoted above, that would be maximizing your money. And in order to get their point across, they cite all the obviously silly things you could otherwise do. To a certain extent, it can be more blackmail than argument, because your audience does not want to seem a fool and so he dutifully agrees that yes, it would be silly to throw your money off of Niagara Falls and he is certainly a reasonable man who would never do that so of course he agrees with you.
Now, none of the intelligent readers on LW need to be blackmailed this way because we all understand what rationality demands of us and we respond to solid arguments not rhetoric. And Eliezer is just using that bit of trickery to get a basic point across to the uninitiated.
But the argument does little to help those who already grasp the concept improve their understanding. Absurdity does not mean you have correctly implemented a “reductio ad absurdum” technique. You have to be careful because he appealed to something that is self-evidently absurd and you should be wary of anything considered self-evident. Actually, I think it is more a case of being commonly accepted as absurd, but you should be just as wary of anything commonly accepted as silly. And you should be careful about where you think it is the former but it’s actually the later.
The biggest problem, however, is that silly is a class in which we put things that can be disregarded. Silly is not a truth statement. It is a value statement. It says things are unimportant, not that they are untrue. It says that according to a given standard, this thing is ranked very low, so low in fact that it is essentially worthless.
Now, disregarding things is important for thinking. It is often impossible to think through the whole problem, so we at first concern ourselves with just a part and put the troublesome cases aside for later. In the Allais Malaise post, Eliezer was concerned just with the minor problem of “How do we maximize money under these particular constraints?” and separating out intuitions was part of having a well-defined, solvable problem to discuss.
But the silliness he cites only proves that the two standards—maximizing money and satisfying your intuitions—conflict in a particular case. It tells you little about any other case or the standards themselves.
The point I most want to make is “Embrace what you find silly,” but since this comment has gone on very long, so I am going to break this up into several postings.
Yeah—argument by silliness (I think I’d describe it as finding something about the argument which can be made to sound silly) is one of the things I don’t like about normal people.
That’s why it can be such an effective tactic when persuading normal people. You can get them to commit to your side and then they rationalize themselves into believing it’s truth (which it is) because they don’t want to admit they were conned.