I feel like you’re not doing the mirror of guideline 8, here? Like, you’re being asked to restate or clarify your point, and your response looks to me like “well, until you show that you got it the first time around, I’m not going to clarify it.” If they got it the first time around, why would they need clarification?
Here and in one other notable place in this larger back-and-forth, I wasn’t asking him to show me that he understood it; I was asking him to share the labor of getting him across this inferential gap.
This was written when I thought Vaniver’s question was in the other place, so it’s a smidge odd as an answer here, but:
If someone asks me to explain why I think the sky is blue, especially if it’s someone who’s historically been a mixture of hostile, dismissive, and personally critical, I am suspicious that anything worthwhile will come from me putting forth effort.
(Here I’m basically claiming “I would have answered this question differently if it had come from Vaniver, or RandomLWUser420.”)
If they demonstrate that they’re really actually curious, by e.g. showing a little of their own attempt to figure out why I might have this belief, I am reassured, and more willing to give them the effort.
But of course, they’re welcome to say “not gonna jump through a hoop,” and in my world we have then achieved cooperation (in the form of each of us noting what we’re not interested in doing, and not doing it).
(I’m not super motivated to correct misunderstandings in the heads of Said or Zack particularly, so I didn’t have a want, myself, along the lines of “please let me try again.”)
Neither Said (who was actually present in the conversation) nor Zack (who was spiritually present and being invoked and very much at the forefront of my mind) seems to me to ever bother with the sixth guideline/split-and-commit, and more locally Zack was not bothering with it in his post in any genuinely substantive way, and Said was similarly not bothering with it in his back-and-forth with me.
“My conversational partner is willing to flex their sixth guideline muscles from time to time” is a prerequisite for my sustained/enthusiastic participation in a conversation.
In my experience, Said is pretty good at not jumping to conclusions in the ‘putting words in their mouth’ sense, tho in the opposite direction from how your guideline 6 suggests. Like, my model of Said tries to have a hole where the confusions are, instead of filling it with a distribution over lots of guesses.
I remember at one point pressing him on the “but why don’t you just guess and get it right tho” point, but couldn’t quickly find it; I think I might have been thinking of this thread on Zetetic Explanation. I don’t use his style, but it does seem coherent to me and I’m reluctant to declare it outside the bounds of rational conversation, and more than once have used Said as the target audience for a post.
“My conversational partner is willing to flex their sixth guideline muscles from time to time” is a prerequisite for my sustained/enthusiastic participation in a conversation.
This seems right and fair to me, and I think you and others feeling this way is a huge force behind the “we’re going to try to make LW fun again” moderation push of the last ~5 years.
I feel like you’re not doing the mirror of guideline 8, here? Like, you’re being asked to restate or clarify your point, and your response looks to me like “well, until you show that you got it the first time around, I’m not going to clarify it.” If they got it the first time around, why would they need clarification?
Here and in one other notable place in this larger back-and-forth, I wasn’t asking him to show me that he understood it; I was asking him to share the labor of getting him across this inferential gap.
This was written when I thought Vaniver’s question was in the other place, so it’s a smidge odd as an answer here, but:
If someone asks me to explain why I think the sky is blue, especially if it’s someone who’s historically been a mixture of hostile, dismissive, and personally critical, I am suspicious that anything worthwhile will come from me putting forth effort.
(Here I’m basically claiming “I would have answered this question differently if it had come from Vaniver, or RandomLWUser420.”)
If they demonstrate that they’re really actually curious, by e.g. showing a little of their own attempt to figure out why I might have this belief, I am reassured, and more willing to give them the effort.
But of course, they’re welcome to say “not gonna jump through a hoop,” and in my world we have then achieved cooperation (in the form of each of us noting what we’re not interested in doing, and not doing it).
(I’m not super motivated to correct misunderstandings in the heads of Said or Zack particularly, so I didn’t have a want, myself, along the lines of “please let me try again.”)
Another way to say this:
Neither Said (who was actually present in the conversation) nor Zack (who was spiritually present and being invoked and very much at the forefront of my mind) seems to me to ever bother with the sixth guideline/split-and-commit, and more locally Zack was not bothering with it in his post in any genuinely substantive way, and Said was similarly not bothering with it in his back-and-forth with me.
“My conversational partner is willing to flex their sixth guideline muscles from time to time” is a prerequisite for my sustained/enthusiastic participation in a conversation.
In my experience, Said is pretty good at not jumping to conclusions in the ‘putting words in their mouth’ sense, tho in the opposite direction from how your guideline 6 suggests. Like, my model of Said tries to have a hole where the confusions are, instead of filling it with a distribution over lots of guesses.
I remember at one point pressing him on the “but why don’t you just guess and get it right tho” point, but couldn’t quickly find it; I think I might have been thinking of this thread on Zetetic Explanation. I don’t use his style, but it does seem coherent to me and I’m reluctant to declare it outside the bounds of rational conversation, and more than once have used Said as the target audience for a post.
This seems right and fair to me, and I think you and others feeling this way is a huge force behind the “we’re going to try to make LW fun again” moderation push of the last ~5 years.