I agree, that’s a very strange interpretation of “hold yourself to the absolute highest standard”, to the point where I’d say “no, that’s just not what it means to hold someone to some standard”.
Er. Are you intentionally conflating [holding yourself to a standard] with [holding someone else/someone else holding you]? Because those are very different mental and social motions and I’m not sure why you just elided the distinction.
I believe the burden of proof/burden of explanation here is on “how are these two obviously different things the same?”
I’ll be happy to ELI5 if you genuinely try to figure out how they’re different and genuinely fail, but I have a hard time believing that this will be necessary.
I don’t understand how they aren’t the same. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to make this distinction before you said anything, and it’s still not occurring to me now.
Holding someone else to some standard: if they perform below the standard, consider them to have failed, act accordingly.
Holding yourself to some standard: if you perform below the standard, consider yourself to have failed, act accordingly.
What’s the difference? It can’t be that you don’t have to “act accordingly”, that’s true in both cases. It can’t be the matter of who knows the person failed—in both cases, that’s (a) the person who failed, (b) the person doing the standard-to-holding, (c) any onlookers. (In the latter case, (a) and (b) are the same person.)
So what is the important difference you’re seeing?
This does not yet seem to me like a genuine attempt to figure it out; this reads to me like what you actually attempted to do was confirm in your own head that you were correct.
Come on. Why am I the one who needs to be making a “genuine attempt to figure it out”? Have you given me any reason to believe that you know something that I don’t, that you’re more right about this? You disagreed with something I said, and that’s fine. Tell me why. I explained my view (even though it seemed obvious to me), but you’ve explained nothing, and only claimed that your view was obvious. I think the ball is clearly in your court, and the “instructor” posture is, to put it mildly, unhelpful.
Because the claim you’re making is “two completely different things are effectively the same.”
So you say. But I say that that the claim you are making is “two things that are effectively the same are completely different”.
Thus by the same token, it’s you who should be making a genuine attempt to figure out what I mean!
But of course this is silly. Again: you disagree with a thing I said, and that’s fine. Tell me why. This shouldn’t be hard. What, in brief, is the difference you see between these two (allegedly) obviously different things?
Also, I must note that I did, in fact, “genuinely try to figure out how they’re different”, and failed (genuinely, one assumes?). I have no idea why you would suggest otherwise. I can’t read your mind, so I have no idea even what sort of objection you are thinking of. Short of that, analyzing the apparently relevant aspects of the question is all I can do, and is what I did. (Indeed even doing this, for what seems to me to be an obvious point, was motivated by an unusually high degree of trust that my interlocutor had some non-stupid reason for disagreeing, so it seems quite absurd to have it met with a suggestion that it was somehow insufficient.)
(Actually, I note that I was careful to only talk about my perceptions and not make claims about your internal state, because indeed I have no access to it)
—the reason that I stated that it did not seem to me to be the case that you had made a genuine effort is because your comment both:
a) bears hallmarks/markers that one would expect to find in someone rehearsing their preexisting belief, such as listing out justifications for that belief
b) conspicuously lacks hallmarks/markers that one would expect to find in someone making a serious attempt, such as offering up any hypotheses at all (even if tenuous; “the best I was able to come up with was X, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re thinking”), or making visible a thought process that contains (e.g.) “okay, but if this were true, what sorts of things might I expect to see? Hmmm...”
If you were to collect 1000 examples of people genuinely trying to squint their way across an inferential gap, very very few of them would look like yours.
If you were to collect 1000 examples of people who were mostly just paying lip service to the idea of entertaining an alternative hypothesis, and primarily spending their time rehearsing their own arguments, the vast majority of them would look a lot like yours.
(Additionally, though this is small/circumstantial, I’m pretty sure your comment came up much faster than even a five-minute timer’s worth of thought would have allowed, meaning that you spent less time trying to see the thing than it would have taken me to write out a comment that would have a good chance of making it clear to a five-year-old.)
Basically, it would be unreasonable for someone to conclude, based on looking at your comment, that you had probably put forth anything resembling a genuine effort. It’s certainly possible; the representativeness heuristic can lead us astray and it’s not always what it looks like. But the safe bet is clear.
(speaking loosely) This is such a weird conversation, wtf is happening.
(speaking not so loosely) I think I’m confused? I have some (mutually compatible) hypotheses:
H1) the concept “burden of proof” is doing a lot of STUFF here somehow, and I don’t quite understand how or why. (Apparently relevant questions: What is it doing? Why is it doing it? Does “burden of proof” mean something really different to Duncan than to Said? What does “burden of proof” mean to me and where exactly does my own model of it stumble in surprise while reading this?)
H2) Something about personal history between Duncan and Said? This is not at all gearsy but “things go all weird and bad when people have been mad at each other in the past” seems to be a thing. (Questions: Could it be that at least one of Duncan and Said has recognized they are not in a dynamic where following the rationalist discourse guidelines makes sense and so they are not doing so, but I’m expecting them to do so and this is the source of my dissonance? Are they perhaps failing to listen to each other because their past experiences have caused strong (accurate or not) caricatures to exist in the head of the other, such that each person is listening mainly to the caricature and hearing mainly what they expect to hear by default? What exactly is their past history? How much do which parts of it matter?)
H3) Duncan and Said have different beliefs about the correct order of operations for disagreements (or something like that). Perhaps Duncan emphasizes “getting structural discourse practices in proper order first”, while Said emphasizes “engaging primarily with the object level topic by whatever means feel natural in the moment, and only attending to more structural things when stuck”. (Questions: Is this true? Why the difference? Are there times when one order of operations is better than another? What are the times?)
FWIW, it’s not at all clear to me, before really thinking about, what the difference is between “holding oneself to a standard” and “holding someone else to a standard”. Here’s what happens when I try to guess at what the differences might be.
1) Maybe it has something to do with the points at which intervention is feasible. When holding yourself to a standard, you can intervene in your own mind before taking action, and you can also attempt to course-correct in the middle of acting. When holding someone else to a standard, you can only intervene after you have observed the action.
2) Like 1, except since you can also intervene after observing the action when holding yourself to a standard as well, “holding yourself to a standard” is an umbrella covering a wider range of thingies than “holding someone else to a standard”, but some of the thingies it covers are the same.
3) Perhaps the difference is a matter of degree, for some reason? Like perhaps there is something about holding other people to standards that makes the highest standard you can reasonably hold someone to much lower than the highest standard you can reasonably hold yourself to, or (less plausibly?) vise versa.
Of these, 2 certainly seems the closest to matching my observations of the world in general; but it does not help me make sense of Duncan’s words as much as 1 does.
There’s also a huge distinction between the set of standards it’s possible to try to hold oneself to, which is a set you will mostly feel on-board with or at worst conflicted about—
(Like, when you try to hold yourself to a standard you either think it’s good/correct to do so or at least a part of you thinks it’s good/correct to do so)
—versus the set of standards you could try to hold someone else to, which contains a lot of stuff that they might reject or disagree with or think stupid, etc.
The kinds of conflict that can emerge, internally, from trying to hold myself to some standard are very very different from the kinds of conflict that can emerge, interpersonally, from trying to hold someone else to some standard. The former has way fewer ways in which it can go explosively wrong in the broader social web.
Additionally, though this is small/circumstantial, I’m pretty sure your comment came up much faster than even a five-minute timer’s worth of thought would have allowed, meaning that you spent less time trying to see the thing than it would have taken me to write out a comment that would have a good chance of making it clear to a five-year-old.
Another possibility is that he did some of his thinking before he read the post he was replying to, right? On my priors that’s even likely; I think that when people post disagreement on LW it’s mostly after thinking about the thing they’re disagreeing with, and your immediate reply didn’t really add any new information for him to update on. Your inference isn’t valid.
Yes, that’s why I haven’t made any statements like that; I disagree that there’s any irony present unless you layer in a bunch of implication and interpretation over top of what I have actually said.
I agree, that’s a very strange interpretation of “hold yourself to the absolute highest standard”, to the point where I’d say “no, that’s just not what it means to hold someone to some standard”.
Er. Are you intentionally conflating [holding yourself to a standard] with [holding someone else/someone else holding you]? Because those are very different mental and social motions and I’m not sure why you just elided the distinction.
How are they different?
I believe the burden of proof/burden of explanation here is on “how are these two obviously different things the same?”
I’ll be happy to ELI5 if you genuinely try to figure out how they’re different and genuinely fail, but I have a hard time believing that this will be necessary.
I don’t understand how they aren’t the same. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to make this distinction before you said anything, and it’s still not occurring to me now.
Holding someone else to some standard: if they perform below the standard, consider them to have failed, act accordingly.
Holding yourself to some standard: if you perform below the standard, consider yourself to have failed, act accordingly.
What’s the difference? It can’t be that you don’t have to “act accordingly”, that’s true in both cases. It can’t be the matter of who knows the person failed—in both cases, that’s (a) the person who failed, (b) the person doing the standard-to-holding, (c) any onlookers. (In the latter case, (a) and (b) are the same person.)
So what is the important difference you’re seeing?
This does not yet seem to me like a genuine attempt to figure it out; this reads to me like what you actually attempted to do was confirm in your own head that you were correct.
Come on. Why am I the one who needs to be making a “genuine attempt to figure it out”? Have you given me any reason to believe that you know something that I don’t, that you’re more right about this? You disagreed with something I said, and that’s fine. Tell me why. I explained my view (even though it seemed obvious to me), but you’ve explained nothing, and only claimed that your view was obvious. I think the ball is clearly in your court, and the “instructor” posture is, to put it mildly, unhelpful.
Because the claim you’re making is “two completely different things are effectively the same.”
Note that I didn’t say you “need” to make the genuine attempt. I said that’s what it would take for me personally to be happy to explain it to you.
You’re welcome to not pay that price of entry! But I’d prefer you not try to pass off rehearsing your own position as paying that price of entry.
So you say. But I say that that the claim you are making is “two things that are effectively the same are completely different”.
Thus by the same token, it’s you who should be making a genuine attempt to figure out what I mean!
But of course this is silly. Again: you disagree with a thing I said, and that’s fine. Tell me why. This shouldn’t be hard. What, in brief, is the difference you see between these two (allegedly) obviously different things?
Also, I must note that I did, in fact, “genuinely try to figure out how they’re different”, and failed (genuinely, one assumes?). I have no idea why you would suggest otherwise. I can’t read your mind, so I have no idea even what sort of objection you are thinking of. Short of that, analyzing the apparently relevant aspects of the question is all I can do, and is what I did. (Indeed even doing this, for what seems to me to be an obvious point, was motivated by an unusually high degree of trust that my interlocutor had some non-stupid reason for disagreeing, so it seems quite absurd to have it met with a suggestion that it was somehow insufficient.)
The reason I would suggest otherwise—
(Actually, I note that I was careful to only talk about my perceptions and not make claims about your internal state, because indeed I have no access to it)
—the reason that I stated that it did not seem to me to be the case that you had made a genuine effort is because your comment both:
a) bears hallmarks/markers that one would expect to find in someone rehearsing their preexisting belief, such as listing out justifications for that belief
b) conspicuously lacks hallmarks/markers that one would expect to find in someone making a serious attempt, such as offering up any hypotheses at all (even if tenuous; “the best I was able to come up with was X, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re thinking”), or making visible a thought process that contains (e.g.) “okay, but if this were true, what sorts of things might I expect to see? Hmmm...”
If you were to collect 1000 examples of people genuinely trying to squint their way across an inferential gap, very very few of them would look like yours.
If you were to collect 1000 examples of people who were mostly just paying lip service to the idea of entertaining an alternative hypothesis, and primarily spending their time rehearsing their own arguments, the vast majority of them would look a lot like yours.
(Additionally, though this is small/circumstantial, I’m pretty sure your comment came up much faster than even a five-minute timer’s worth of thought would have allowed, meaning that you spent less time trying to see the thing than it would have taken me to write out a comment that would have a good chance of making it clear to a five-year-old.)
Basically, it would be unreasonable for someone to conclude, based on looking at your comment, that you had probably put forth anything resembling a genuine effort. It’s certainly possible; the representativeness heuristic can lead us astray and it’s not always what it looks like. But the safe bet is clear.
(speaking loosely) This is such a weird conversation, wtf is happening.
(speaking not so loosely) I think I’m confused? I have some (mutually compatible) hypotheses:
H1) the concept “burden of proof” is doing a lot of STUFF here somehow, and I don’t quite understand how or why. (Apparently relevant questions: What is it doing? Why is it doing it? Does “burden of proof” mean something really different to Duncan than to Said? What does “burden of proof” mean to me and where exactly does my own model of it stumble in surprise while reading this?)
H2) Something about personal history between Duncan and Said? This is not at all gearsy but “things go all weird and bad when people have been mad at each other in the past” seems to be a thing. (Questions: Could it be that at least one of Duncan and Said has recognized they are not in a dynamic where following the rationalist discourse guidelines makes sense and so they are not doing so, but I’m expecting them to do so and this is the source of my dissonance? Are they perhaps failing to listen to each other because their past experiences have caused strong (accurate or not) caricatures to exist in the head of the other, such that each person is listening mainly to the caricature and hearing mainly what they expect to hear by default? What exactly is their past history? How much do which parts of it matter?)
H3) Duncan and Said have different beliefs about the correct order of operations for disagreements (or something like that). Perhaps Duncan emphasizes “getting structural discourse practices in proper order first”, while Said emphasizes “engaging primarily with the object level topic by whatever means feel natural in the moment, and only attending to more structural things when stuck”. (Questions: Is this true? Why the difference? Are there times when one order of operations is better than another? What are the times?)
FWIW, it’s not at all clear to me, before really thinking about, what the difference is between “holding oneself to a standard” and “holding someone else to a standard”. Here’s what happens when I try to guess at what the differences might be.
1) Maybe it has something to do with the points at which intervention is feasible. When holding yourself to a standard, you can intervene in your own mind before taking action, and you can also attempt to course-correct in the middle of acting. When holding someone else to a standard, you can only intervene after you have observed the action.
2) Like 1, except since you can also intervene after observing the action when holding yourself to a standard as well, “holding yourself to a standard” is an umbrella covering a wider range of thingies than “holding someone else to a standard”, but some of the thingies it covers are the same.
3) Perhaps the difference is a matter of degree, for some reason? Like perhaps there is something about holding other people to standards that makes the highest standard you can reasonably hold someone to much lower than the highest standard you can reasonably hold yourself to, or (less plausibly?) vise versa.
Of these, 2 certainly seems the closest to matching my observations of the world in general; but it does not help me make sense of Duncan’s words as much as 1 does.
There’s also a huge distinction between the set of standards it’s possible to try to hold oneself to, which is a set you will mostly feel on-board with or at worst conflicted about—
(Like, when you try to hold yourself to a standard you either think it’s good/correct to do so or at least a part of you thinks it’s good/correct to do so)
—versus the set of standards you could try to hold someone else to, which contains a lot of stuff that they might reject or disagree with or think stupid, etc.
The kinds of conflict that can emerge, internally, from trying to hold myself to some standard are very very different from the kinds of conflict that can emerge, interpersonally, from trying to hold someone else to some standard. The former has way fewer ways in which it can go explosively wrong in the broader social web.
Another possibility is that he did some of his thinking before he read the post he was replying to, right? On my priors that’s even likely; I think that when people post disagreement on LW it’s mostly after thinking about the thing they’re disagreeing with, and your immediate reply didn’t really add any new information for him to update on. Your inference isn’t valid.
I agree that it wouldn’t be valid as an absolute, or even as a strong claim.
I’m not sure I agree that it is no evidence at all.
Disclaimer: I know Said Achmiz from another LW social context.
In my experience, the safe bet is that minds are more diverse than almost anyone expects.
A statement advanced in a discussion like “well, but nobody could seriously miss that X” is near-universally false.
(This is especially ironic cause of the “You don’t exist” post you just wrote.)
Yes, that’s why I haven’t made any statements like that; I disagree that there’s any irony present unless you layer in a bunch of implication and interpretation over top of what I have actually said.
(I refer you to guideline 7.)