Don’t jump to conclusions—maintain at least two hypotheses consistent with the available information.
… or be ready and willing to generate a real alternative to your main hypothesis, if asked or if it seems like it would help another user.
Most of these seem straightforwardly correct to me. But I think of the 10 things in this list, this is the one I’d be most hesitant to present as a discourse norm, and most worried about doing damage if it were one. The problem with it is that it’s taking an epistemic norm and translating it into a discourse norm, in a way that accidentally sets up an assumption that the participants in a conversation are roughly matched in their knowledge of a subject. Whereas in my experience, it’s fairly common to have conversations where one person has an enormous amount of unshared history with the question at hand. In the best case scenario, where this is highly legible, the conversation might go something like:
A: I think [proposition P] because of [argument A] B: [A] is wrong; I previously wrote a long thing about it. [Link]
In which case B isn’t currently maintaining two hypotheses, and is firmly set in a conclusion, but there’s enough of a legible history to see that the conclusion was reached via a full process and wasn’t jumped to.
But often what happens is that B has previously engaged with the topic in depth, but in an illegible way; eg, they spent a bunch of hours thinking about the topic and maybe discussed it in person, but never produced a writeup, or they wrote long blog-comments but forgot about them and didn’t keep track of the link. So the conversation winds up looking like:
A: I think [proposition P] because of [argument A] B: No, [A] is wrong because [shallow summary of argument for not-A]. I’m super confident in this. A: You seem a lot more confident about that than [shallow summary of argument] can justify, I think you’ve jumped to the conclusion.
A misparses B as having a lot less context and prior thinking about [P] than they really do. In this situation, emphasizing the virtue of not-jumping-to-conclusions as a discourse norm (rather than an epistemic norm) encourages A to treat the situation as a norm violation by B, rather than as a mismodeling by A. And, sure, at a slightly higher meta-level this would be an epistemic failure on A’s part, under the same standard, and if A applied that standard to themself reliably this could keep them out of that trap. But I think the overall effect of promoting this as a norm, on this situation, is likely ot be that A gets nudged in the wrong direction.
Most of these seem straightforwardly correct to me. But I think of the 10 things in this list, this is the one I’d be most hesitant to present as a discourse norm, and most worried about doing damage if it were one. The problem with it is that it’s taking an epistemic norm and translating it into a discourse norm, in a way that accidentally sets up an assumption that the participants in a conversation are roughly matched in their knowledge of a subject. Whereas in my experience, it’s fairly common to have conversations where one person has an enormous amount of unshared history with the question at hand. In the best case scenario, where this is highly legible, the conversation might go something like:
In which case B isn’t currently maintaining two hypotheses, and is firmly set in a conclusion, but there’s enough of a legible history to see that the conclusion was reached via a full process and wasn’t jumped to.
But often what happens is that B has previously engaged with the topic in depth, but in an illegible way; eg, they spent a bunch of hours thinking about the topic and maybe discussed it in person, but never produced a writeup, or they wrote long blog-comments but forgot about them and didn’t keep track of the link. So the conversation winds up looking like:
A misparses B as having a lot less context and prior thinking about [P] than they really do. In this situation, emphasizing the virtue of not-jumping-to-conclusions as a discourse norm (rather than an epistemic norm) encourages A to treat the situation as a norm violation by B, rather than as a mismodeling by A. And, sure, at a slightly higher meta-level this would be an epistemic failure on A’s part, under the same standard, and if A applied that standard to themself reliably this could keep them out of that trap. But I think the overall effect of promoting this as a norm, on this situation, is likely ot be that A gets nudged in the wrong direction.