But even while frowning internally, I want to avoid tone-policing people whose word-choice procedures are calibrated differently from mine when I think I understand the structure-in-the-world they’re trying to point to.
What if you think that you know what the author is trying to convey, but due to different calibration on word choices, a large fraction of the audience will be mislead? Worse, what if you suspect that the author is deliberately or subconsciously using a more extreme word choice (compared to what most of the audience would choose if they were fully informed) for non-epistemic reasons (e.g., to get more attention, or to mislead the audience into thinking the situation is worse than it actually is)? It seems to me that tone-policing is useful for getting everyone to have (or to be closer to having) the same calibration on word choice, and to help prevent and defend against non-epistemic motivations for word choice. (Although maybe “tone-policing” is a bad word for this, and “word-choice-policing” makes more sense here.)
Like anything, it can be misused, but I guess the solution to that is to police the word-choice-policing rather than to avoid it altogether?
Oh, that’s a good point! Maybe read that paragraph as a vote for “relatively less word-choice-policing on the current margin in my memetic vicinity”? (The slip into the first person (“I want to avoid tone-policing,” not “tone-policing is objectively irrational”) was intentional.)
The tone and implications of comments along the lines of “this wording is going to cause a lot of people to believe specific proposition X, when it seems to me like what you would actually be willing to defend narrower proposition Y” is very different from that of “this wording is inappropriate because it is likely to upset people.”
An important feature of the first comment is that it actually does some work trying to clarify, and is an implicit ITT.
What if you think that you know what the author is trying to convey, but due to different calibration on word choices, a large fraction of the audience will be mislead? Worse, what if you suspect that the author is deliberately or subconsciously using a more extreme word choice (compared to what most of the audience would choose if they were fully informed) for non-epistemic reasons (e.g., to get more attention, or to mislead the audience into thinking the situation is worse than it actually is)? It seems to me that tone-policing is useful for getting everyone to have (or to be closer to having) the same calibration on word choice, and to help prevent and defend against non-epistemic motivations for word choice. (Although maybe “tone-policing” is a bad word for this, and “word-choice-policing” makes more sense here.)
Like anything, it can be misused, but I guess the solution to that is to police the word-choice-policing rather than to avoid it altogether?
Oh, that’s a good point! Maybe read that paragraph as a vote for “relatively less word-choice-policing on the current margin in my memetic vicinity”? (The slip into the first person (“I want to avoid tone-policing,” not “tone-policing is objectively irrational”) was intentional.)
The tone and implications of comments along the lines of “this wording is going to cause a lot of people to believe specific proposition X, when it seems to me like what you would actually be willing to defend narrower proposition Y” is very different from that of “this wording is inappropriate because it is likely to upset people.”
An important feature of the first comment is that it actually does some work trying to clarify, and is an implicit ITT.