I think such people believe they’re saying something close enough to what they actually mean
I think they believe they’re saying what they mean, but what you say is what’s actually happening. More generally, I think you’re talking about how people should act, and I’m talking about how they do act, which is making it sound like we disagree more than I believe we actually do.
This makes it sound like “clear to me” is a highly idiosyncratic criterion.
Yes, and I stand by that—even though, as you say, there is such a thing as objectively less ambiguous language. Which parts need to be less ambiguous in order to guarantee understanding varies from person to person. Even if the truth is so simple that people who aren’t neurotypical require, on average, less ambiguity than neurotypical people do, that doesn’t mean you can communicate with all of them exactly the same. Which parts you can fudge depend on the previous experience of the specific individual you’re addressing. If I say, “Hey, did you see the less wrong thread about grading?” you would know what I meant, but someone unfamiliar with LW would be entirely justified in calling that sentence confusing. Someone who’s, say, a weaver, might go off on entirely the wrong mental path.
By that logic, I think it’s absolutely reasonable for a teacher above the first grade level to assume that all of their students are generally familiar with the mechanics of grading and potential penalties for late assignments. Of the two intepretations of the disputed statement, “you will receive a score of 0” is much more plausible than “you will be freed from having to do the assignment” to anyone who’s been in academia for any length of time. I agree with you that the chosen wording could be, objectively, clearer; I do not believe there was sufficient reason to expect it would be misinterpreted that it was negligent not to be clearer. If I ask you to “make me a sandwich,” I don’t expect you to be tripped up by the real grammatical ambiguity and wonder if I would like you to put me between slices of bread. I expect you to go with the plausible choice.
I do agree with you that most people don’t think very much about how they communicate. This frustrates me a lot, because it’s something I think about a lot and which is important to me. But I don’t find this fact as inexcusable as you appear to. Shortcuts and built-in amibiguity are a part of, as far as I know, every human language. In almost all situations, they resolve without conflict. Very few humans have ever had reason to consider that their use of language is insufficiently ambiguous. (When ambiguity does result in conflict, we assume by default that the other person is wrong, misunderstanding or stupid—which is not good or useful, but happens, and reinforces our belief that the way we communicate is fine.) Could most people benefit from learning to communicate better? Absolutely! But they don’t know that.
Being upset that humans speak ambiguously is a little like being upset that humans shake hands. You’re free to dislike it, and choose not to engage in it, but actually being unhappy every time it happens is going to get exhausting. A more productive thing to do in both cases would be to educate people about what’s wrong with it and how they can do better … in a communication style, of course, which they will find compelling and convincing, even if you wouldn’t.
Which is why, if you give me a few years, I’ll have a degree in this.
ETA: Skipped something I think was important: While I do agree that we should strive to be clearer in our communication, I don’t think it’s feasible or even a good idea to try to be as unambiguous as possible all the time. Thinking carefully about everything you say is difficult and tiring, and it takes a long time. Optimizing for unambiguity would be a sacrifice of mental energy and communication throughput which I don’t think it’s worth, given that the system really does work most of the time. In my experience, it’s easier and more useful to try to optimize for the specific understanding of the person you’re addressing, which may include being less ambiguous but almost certainly includes choosing particular ambiguities that the listener is likely to understand as intended. This still uses some mental energy, but not as much (at a guess, that’s because it’s a more natural thought pattern), and it doesn’t sacrifice throughput because you’re just choosing your shortcuts more carefully, not abandoning them altogether.
Both the original discussion of this and the current one, not to mention numerous other discussions about other things, exemplify the following pattern:
I point out that phenomenon X is bad. Then, instead of replying with “I agree”, or “I agree that it’s bad, but don’t think it’s as bad as you do” or even “I agree with you about how bad it is now that you’ve pointed it out, but wouldn’t myself have bothered to raise the issue”, people come up with elaborate justifications, rationalizations, or explanations of X, which (I hypothesize) are basically intended to signal distance from “anti-X fanaticism”. The parent comment is yet another example of this.
Folks, there just isn’t any need to defend the teacher here—unless you actually want to take the position that saying “I won’t grade it” is preferable to saying “you will receive a score of 0“ (and if anyone is tempted to take that position in reply to this comment, be forewarned that I simply won’t believe you’re being honest unless you say something genuinely surprising, that I hadn’t thought of). I did not say I was still confused by the teacher’s meaning, and I do not need an explanation of the fact that human language is imprecise in general, and of the reasons people say the ambiguous things they do. I’m not stupid, and I’m not even autistic. I’m aware of the social conventions that are operative here, and I’m not proposing that teachers speak to their students in Lojban. All I’m doing is expressing disapproval of the fact that some teachers say “I won’t grade it”, and proposing that they say “I will give it a score of 0” instead. This is really pretty simple; in particular, it would require much less effort on the teacher’s part to implement this suggestion than you spent writing the parent comment. It’s an easy, low-cost net-improvement on the world.
Agreeing with a “fanatic” doesn’t make you a fanatic. You’re allowed to agree with me and yet not feel as strongly about the matter as I do. You don’t need to signal your distance by presenting superfluous rationalizations of the bad phenomenon. In fact, you don’t even need to point out that you don’t feel as strongly as I do—because simple agreement carries no implication that you do feel that strongly!
No one really disagrees with me here; if you doubt this, ask yourself whether anyone would protest that a teacher who actually said “you will receive a score a 0” should instead have said “I won’t grade it”! Rather, the dialectic pattern of apparent disagreement is due to the fact that my original complaint violated two social rules: (1) it was tangential to the post; and, more importantly (2) it expressed a strong opinion not already established as a group-defining belief—something which is generally frowned upon in most human groups, but especially goes against the self-image of folks here as calm, reflective, “rational” people.
So, while I appreciate your concern with communication, and don’t want to discourage you from further pursuing your efforts in that area, I am obliged to point out that your comment—like those of many others—didn’t communicate anything to me other than resistance to my strength of feeling.
I just dropped in to agree with this: “it expressed a strong opinion not already established as a group-defining belief—something which is generally frowned upon in most human groups, but especially goes against the self-image of folks here as calm, reflective, “rational” people.”
I care about lots of things that are not themes of LW. I get a pretty negative reaction whenever I express such feelings—even when I don’t think I’m being particularly fanatical. I don’t believe it makes you foolish to have strong opinions or preferences about a variety of things.
It was on IRC, when I got a bit political and ranty. I was very mild, by my standards, but I do tend to slide into vendetta-mode, which this crowd doesn’t like.
(There is a useful place in the psyche for hate; it makes you feel like you matter.)
Ah, that would explain why I was having trouble thinking of times I’d noticed that happening :)
There is a useful place in the psyche for hate; it makes you feel like you matter
Disagree. My hatred of Scientology and dumb conspiracy theorists and really annoying coworkers doesn’t feel very useful to me, and makes me less able to react in a way consistent with my overall values.
If cultivating a hatred of Scientology and dumb conspiracy theorists makes you less likely to become a Scientologist or dumb conspiracy theorist, wouldn’t it be a rational self-modification to make to ensure that those undesirable self-modifications don’t come to pass?
I can strongly disagree or disapprove of a position or person without bringing hate into it.
eg. back when I was pseudo-religious and kept kosher, I was fine with seeing and smelling pork products and listening to my friends go on about how tasty pork products are, because I was completely confident in my choice not to eat them. No emotional bolstering required. In the case of Scientology et al. it’s even easier to be confident, because I would have to undergo brain damage or some kind of severe personality modification before their beliefs would look plausible.
Also on a more pragmatic note, humans aren’t good at separating people from their opinions. If you cultivate a hatred of Scientology and then meet someone who used to be a Scientologist but left, there’s a very real chance that I would feel dislike for them purely based on their past affiliation, and that’s not a behaviour I want to endorse.
In the case of Scientology et al. it’s even easier to be confident, because I would have to undergo brain damage or some kind of severe personality modification before their beliefs would look plausible.
Personality modification is exactly how cults and affective death spirals work. ;)
Right, but why would I want to undergo that kind of modification to join in something that I already find completely stupid and implausible? It would be like trying to convince myself that I’ve always wanted to be a circus clown. My prior for becoming a Scientologist is just so low that I can’t see how trying to cultivate an emotional response could decrease it any further.
As a rule I don’t think hatred is very often a useful emotion to cultivate. Even if I decide before hand that a position is so bad that it deserves hatred, calculating calmly and rationally, after I have hatred towards a group it clouds any rational evaluation of them. It’s possible I was missing important evidence when I first came to that conclusion, but having hatred makes me less likely to re-examine the evidence and decide they’re not hate worthy. Maybe they change how they act subsequently, once again I will struggle to re-evaluate my position.
Further, even if I knew for sure that neither of the above situations could happen, hatred is generally not a useful emotion because it:
Clouds insights on myself I could gain from these groups. Perhaps particular decisions or beliefs they made or acquired led to their current status. I could learn a valuable lesson of what to avoid from that, but hatred makes it more likely that I will view them as other to me, and not want to acknowledge that I could make similar mistakes, and so should be wary of them.
Is generally not very pleasant. Hating people can increase stress, especially if I come into contact with them or mention of them often.
Diminishes the power of any warnings you may try to deliver to people regarding them. Trying to dissuade someone from joining them, or trying to warn people about some heinous action the hated group is undertaking is a lot harder if people are going to dismiss you because of your hatred.
When you can do something for the better, being rational helps. When you can’t—when somebody can or has hurt somebody you care about, and there’s not a damn thing you can do—there’s no point trying to get the details right or consider the situation fairly. You may as well hate, because it at least gives you a sense of loyalty when more impressive actions are impossible.
I never wind up hating anybody I know personally. Not permanently. They always seem to do something to remind me of their humanity. I actually wish I were more adversarial. It seems to give people a terrific glory buzz.
When you can do something for the better, being rational helps. When you can’t—when somebody can or has hurt somebody you care about, and there’s not a damn thing you can do—there’s no point trying to get the details right or consider the situation fairly. You may as well hate, because it at least gives you a sense of loyalty when more impressive actions are impossible.
There is nothing intrinsically irrational about hate. Indeed being rational can both make your act on your hate more effectively and actually encourage you to hate when doing so furthers your goals. But that’s an entirely different matter to “not point trying to get the details right or consider the situation fairly”.
If you aren’t trying to get the details right or act fairly while making political rants why on earth would you expect LW to be particularly accommodating?
(I am willing to believe that LW is not accommodating of expression of strong feeling even when not acting as you advocate here. It is a perfectly plausible bias for LW to have and I can see downsides to it. Another bias (or the same one generalised) is regarding not acting as though you have strong feelings about an issue that there is a social consensus about. People turn their brains off when it comes to cryonics avocation and utilitarian existential risk prevention, for example. ie. Not proselytising is labelled ‘murder’.)
Ok, fair enough. By local standards I was engaging in bad behavior.
(It still puzzles me why it’s important to try to be right about everything. Surely it’s not necessary for everyone to be correct about waterbirds in Antarctica or something. Why do we care so much about being right here?)
It still puzzles me why it’s important to try to be right about everything.
Hypothesis: Take a group of 30 12 year olds, randomly divided them into two groups and give one group the name “Less Wrong” and the other arbitrary and unrelated name then observed the group interaction over a period of a week, both free form interaction and while performing some suitable tasks. The “Less Wrong” group will forge an identity in which they rigorously hold themselves to high intellectual standards while the others may be belligerently irrational or contemptuous of all things intellectual. (Consequences may be long lasting. I don’t expect ethics approval! ;) )
Surely it’s not necessary for everyone to be correct about waterbirds in Antarctica or something. Why do we care so much about being right here?
If someone makes unfair and inaccurate political diatribes against water-birds in Antarctica then I will likely choose to correct the inaccuracies and defend the honour of the poor maligned water-birds even though I am otherwise neutral on the subject.. That is a natural egalitarian response against grabs for political power in my tribe (by a group of which I am not a part). Yet if another person with a hate filled passionate bias against water-birds in Antarctica were to come along they will just see people apparently advocating said birds without knowing the context. They may assume that LessWrong is a group of chauvanistic Antartican water-bird lovers and feel unwelcome or maligned.
Part of living in a system that’s a bit democratic is that it’s good if you promote accurate political beliefs among the population.
Even if you don’t change your behavior based on your beliefs politicians do change their behavior based on public polling. Politicians don’t always react to public opinion but it’s certainly incorrect to say that they don’t care about the results of polls.
Democracy works really well when people get outraged over the right things. It doesn’t work when people are outraged over made up drama.
Holding accurate political beliefs is a bit similar to voting. If one individual refuses, it’s no problem. Promoting social standards that prevent people from voting is a problem.
I have nothing against your strength of feeling, though I am a bit surprised at how strongly you resist having that feeling resisted. So let us get back to the original question, but lets come at it from a different direction. Let us ask why the professor chose to express himself with the words “I won’t grade it”, rather than “I will give it a failing grade”.
It is doubtful that this wording was chosen so as to confuse or annoy you. My guess would be that the professor assumed (incorrectly, it turns out) that both phrasings would be interpreted the same. So why would he chose to say “I won’t grade it”? Well, which statement sounds more like the professor imposing an arbitrary burden upon the student? And which sounds more like the professor refusing to be imposed upon by students? Which makes the failing grade appear as resulting from something the student did, and which makes it appear to result from something the professor did?
Statements have meanings at several levels. At the level of simply communicating the policy, yes, ambiguity should have been avoided. But at the level of communicating the reasonableness of the policy, the professor preferred to seem reasonable rather than arbitrary. It is often best to simply tolerate this kind of moral-positioning subtext in language, unless you are deconstructing some text for an English lit class.
You didn’t just do that. You said that the teacher’s words don’t match their meaning.
I do not need an explanation of the fact that human language is imprecise in general
Explanations may be a poor way of promoting beliefs, but belief in that fact would discourage your claim that the teacher’s statement has a precise meaning.
I think newerspeak’s take is pretty good. It quite late (and rather temporarily) that you switched from discussing lack of clarity, especially the need to learn a new idiom, to discussing what is bad about the phrasing. (except that I strongly object to newerspeak’s use of “wrong phrasing.”)
You can (like newerspeak, with the well-chosen username) think that the choice of idiom has bad consequences. I might agree, but only contingently on my political beliefs about education. But to say that an idiom is wrong is a category error.
I disagree with that interpretation, perhaps because of a meta-ambiguity about which of two questions we’re discussing:
Which of two example wordings should the teacher have used?
Was there anything wrong with what the teacher said?
These are obviously related but by no means the same. You seem to be assuming that the dispute is about the former (which, as you say, we all seem to agree on); my understanding was that it is about the latter. Specifically, I interpreted you as believing that the teacher’s wording was so unacceptable as to warrant correction, and this is what I disagreed with and presented arguments against. I suppose that, yes, that means we were arguing about your strength of feeling, but that’s exactly what I was trying to do. If I seemed to claim that I was arguing about anything else, that was a miscommunication.
I appreciate that you made a point of distinguishing between disliking the nature of this particular discussion and disliking this kind of feedback from me in general.
ETA after discussing in IRC: Also, you seem to be relying on the premise that less ambiguity in language is universally better, and for the reasons outlined in my previous comment I don’t think it’s that simple.
Which of two example wordings should the teacher have used?
Was there anything wrong with what the teacher said?
...You seem to be assuming that the dispute is about the former (which, as you say, we all seem to agree on); my understanding was that it is about the latter.
My assumption is that if A is preferable to B, then there is “something wrong” with B. The level of “wrongness” implied by this mere fact depends on how preferable A is to B, which in turn depends (among other things) on how easy A is to implement.
I suppose that, yes, that means we were arguing about your strength of feeling, but that’s exactly what I was trying to do
My assumption is that if A is preferable to B, then there is “something wrong” with B.
I use a fan to keep my room cool. An air conditioner would do a better job, but what I have is a fan. I don’t see anything wrong with using a fan.
To which I ask: why?
For the same reason anybody argues about anything—I disagreed with you, and was looking to either convince you of my reasons or learn new facts which would convince me of yours. But you seem not to want to argue about this, and it’s rapidly becoming more stressful than enlightening, so I’m happy to drop it.
So, while I appreciate your concern with communication, and don’t want to discourage you from further pursuing your efforts in that area, I am obliged to point out that your comment—like those of many others—didn’t communicate anything to me other than resistance to my strength of feeling.
Now that I think about it, the real point I should have made is that getting noticeably angry on the Internet about language usage is sort of low-status (only the first level above using poor spelling and grammar); the second level is to let such things pass, and the third is to remark wittily on bad usage (or only remark openly on it when it has bad externalities).
My original response, in retrospect, was clearly meant to signal second-level sophistication. This one is, perhaps, attempting the fourth level (going meta on questions of language usage).
I think they believe they’re saying what they mean, but what you say is what’s actually happening. More generally, I think you’re talking about how people should act, and I’m talking about how they do act, which is making it sound like we disagree more than I believe we actually do.
Yes, and I stand by that—even though, as you say, there is such a thing as objectively less ambiguous language. Which parts need to be less ambiguous in order to guarantee understanding varies from person to person. Even if the truth is so simple that people who aren’t neurotypical require, on average, less ambiguity than neurotypical people do, that doesn’t mean you can communicate with all of them exactly the same. Which parts you can fudge depend on the previous experience of the specific individual you’re addressing. If I say, “Hey, did you see the less wrong thread about grading?” you would know what I meant, but someone unfamiliar with LW would be entirely justified in calling that sentence confusing. Someone who’s, say, a weaver, might go off on entirely the wrong mental path.
By that logic, I think it’s absolutely reasonable for a teacher above the first grade level to assume that all of their students are generally familiar with the mechanics of grading and potential penalties for late assignments. Of the two intepretations of the disputed statement, “you will receive a score of 0” is much more plausible than “you will be freed from having to do the assignment” to anyone who’s been in academia for any length of time. I agree with you that the chosen wording could be, objectively, clearer; I do not believe there was sufficient reason to expect it would be misinterpreted that it was negligent not to be clearer. If I ask you to “make me a sandwich,” I don’t expect you to be tripped up by the real grammatical ambiguity and wonder if I would like you to put me between slices of bread. I expect you to go with the plausible choice.
I do agree with you that most people don’t think very much about how they communicate. This frustrates me a lot, because it’s something I think about a lot and which is important to me. But I don’t find this fact as inexcusable as you appear to. Shortcuts and built-in amibiguity are a part of, as far as I know, every human language. In almost all situations, they resolve without conflict. Very few humans have ever had reason to consider that their use of language is insufficiently ambiguous. (When ambiguity does result in conflict, we assume by default that the other person is wrong, misunderstanding or stupid—which is not good or useful, but happens, and reinforces our belief that the way we communicate is fine.) Could most people benefit from learning to communicate better? Absolutely! But they don’t know that.
Being upset that humans speak ambiguously is a little like being upset that humans shake hands. You’re free to dislike it, and choose not to engage in it, but actually being unhappy every time it happens is going to get exhausting. A more productive thing to do in both cases would be to educate people about what’s wrong with it and how they can do better … in a communication style, of course, which they will find compelling and convincing, even if you wouldn’t.
Which is why, if you give me a few years, I’ll have a degree in this.
ETA: Skipped something I think was important: While I do agree that we should strive to be clearer in our communication, I don’t think it’s feasible or even a good idea to try to be as unambiguous as possible all the time. Thinking carefully about everything you say is difficult and tiring, and it takes a long time. Optimizing for unambiguity would be a sacrifice of mental energy and communication throughput which I don’t think it’s worth, given that the system really does work most of the time. In my experience, it’s easier and more useful to try to optimize for the specific understanding of the person you’re addressing, which may include being less ambiguous but almost certainly includes choosing particular ambiguities that the listener is likely to understand as intended. This still uses some mental energy, but not as much (at a guess, that’s because it’s a more natural thought pattern), and it doesn’t sacrifice throughput because you’re just choosing your shortcuts more carefully, not abandoning them altogether.
Both the original discussion of this and the current one, not to mention numerous other discussions about other things, exemplify the following pattern:
I point out that phenomenon X is bad. Then, instead of replying with “I agree”, or “I agree that it’s bad, but don’t think it’s as bad as you do” or even “I agree with you about how bad it is now that you’ve pointed it out, but wouldn’t myself have bothered to raise the issue”, people come up with elaborate justifications, rationalizations, or explanations of X, which (I hypothesize) are basically intended to signal distance from “anti-X fanaticism”. The parent comment is yet another example of this.
Folks, there just isn’t any need to defend the teacher here—unless you actually want to take the position that saying “I won’t grade it” is preferable to saying “you will receive a score of 0“ (and if anyone is tempted to take that position in reply to this comment, be forewarned that I simply won’t believe you’re being honest unless you say something genuinely surprising, that I hadn’t thought of). I did not say I was still confused by the teacher’s meaning, and I do not need an explanation of the fact that human language is imprecise in general, and of the reasons people say the ambiguous things they do. I’m not stupid, and I’m not even autistic. I’m aware of the social conventions that are operative here, and I’m not proposing that teachers speak to their students in Lojban. All I’m doing is expressing disapproval of the fact that some teachers say “I won’t grade it”, and proposing that they say “I will give it a score of 0” instead. This is really pretty simple; in particular, it would require much less effort on the teacher’s part to implement this suggestion than you spent writing the parent comment. It’s an easy, low-cost net-improvement on the world.
Agreeing with a “fanatic” doesn’t make you a fanatic. You’re allowed to agree with me and yet not feel as strongly about the matter as I do. You don’t need to signal your distance by presenting superfluous rationalizations of the bad phenomenon. In fact, you don’t even need to point out that you don’t feel as strongly as I do—because simple agreement carries no implication that you do feel that strongly!
No one really disagrees with me here; if you doubt this, ask yourself whether anyone would protest that a teacher who actually said “you will receive a score a 0” should instead have said “I won’t grade it”! Rather, the dialectic pattern of apparent disagreement is due to the fact that my original complaint violated two social rules: (1) it was tangential to the post; and, more importantly (2) it expressed a strong opinion not already established as a group-defining belief—something which is generally frowned upon in most human groups, but especially goes against the self-image of folks here as calm, reflective, “rational” people.
So, while I appreciate your concern with communication, and don’t want to discourage you from further pursuing your efforts in that area, I am obliged to point out that your comment—like those of many others—didn’t communicate anything to me other than resistance to my strength of feeling.
I just dropped in to agree with this: “it expressed a strong opinion not already established as a group-defining belief—something which is generally frowned upon in most human groups, but especially goes against the self-image of folks here as calm, reflective, “rational” people.”
I care about lots of things that are not themes of LW. I get a pretty negative reaction whenever I express such feelings—even when I don’t think I’m being particularly fanatical. I don’t believe it makes you foolish to have strong opinions or preferences about a variety of things.
May I ask for an example or two of times when you’ve expressed feelings about non-LW themes and been met with negativity?
It was on IRC, when I got a bit political and ranty. I was very mild, by my standards, but I do tend to slide into vendetta-mode, which this crowd doesn’t like.
(There is a useful place in the psyche for hate; it makes you feel like you matter.)
Ah, that would explain why I was having trouble thinking of times I’d noticed that happening :)
Disagree. My hatred of Scientology and dumb conspiracy theorists and really annoying coworkers doesn’t feel very useful to me, and makes me less able to react in a way consistent with my overall values.
If cultivating a hatred of Scientology and dumb conspiracy theorists makes you less likely to become a Scientologist or dumb conspiracy theorist, wouldn’t it be a rational self-modification to make to ensure that those undesirable self-modifications don’t come to pass?
I can strongly disagree or disapprove of a position or person without bringing hate into it. eg. back when I was pseudo-religious and kept kosher, I was fine with seeing and smelling pork products and listening to my friends go on about how tasty pork products are, because I was completely confident in my choice not to eat them. No emotional bolstering required. In the case of Scientology et al. it’s even easier to be confident, because I would have to undergo brain damage or some kind of severe personality modification before their beliefs would look plausible.
Also on a more pragmatic note, humans aren’t good at separating people from their opinions. If you cultivate a hatred of Scientology and then meet someone who used to be a Scientologist but left, there’s a very real chance that I would feel dislike for them purely based on their past affiliation, and that’s not a behaviour I want to endorse.
Personality modification is exactly how cults and affective death spirals work. ;)
Right, but why would I want to undergo that kind of modification to join in something that I already find completely stupid and implausible? It would be like trying to convince myself that I’ve always wanted to be a circus clown. My prior for becoming a Scientologist is just so low that I can’t see how trying to cultivate an emotional response could decrease it any further.
Maybe, but if you were less informed about their methods, you might be surprised how easily they might be able to suck you in.
As a rule I don’t think hatred is very often a useful emotion to cultivate. Even if I decide before hand that a position is so bad that it deserves hatred, calculating calmly and rationally, after I have hatred towards a group it clouds any rational evaluation of them. It’s possible I was missing important evidence when I first came to that conclusion, but having hatred makes me less likely to re-examine the evidence and decide they’re not hate worthy. Maybe they change how they act subsequently, once again I will struggle to re-evaluate my position.
Further, even if I knew for sure that neither of the above situations could happen, hatred is generally not a useful emotion because it:
Clouds insights on myself I could gain from these groups. Perhaps particular decisions or beliefs they made or acquired led to their current status. I could learn a valuable lesson of what to avoid from that, but hatred makes it more likely that I will view them as other to me, and not want to acknowledge that I could make similar mistakes, and so should be wary of them.
Is generally not very pleasant. Hating people can increase stress, especially if I come into contact with them or mention of them often.
Diminishes the power of any warnings you may try to deliver to people regarding them. Trying to dissuade someone from joining them, or trying to warn people about some heinous action the hated group is undertaking is a lot harder if people are going to dismiss you because of your hatred.
nah, I stand by this.
When you can do something for the better, being rational helps. When you can’t—when somebody can or has hurt somebody you care about, and there’s not a damn thing you can do—there’s no point trying to get the details right or consider the situation fairly. You may as well hate, because it at least gives you a sense of loyalty when more impressive actions are impossible.
I never wind up hating anybody I know personally. Not permanently. They always seem to do something to remind me of their humanity. I actually wish I were more adversarial. It seems to give people a terrific glory buzz.
There is nothing intrinsically irrational about hate. Indeed being rational can both make your act on your hate more effectively and actually encourage you to hate when doing so furthers your goals. But that’s an entirely different matter to “not point trying to get the details right or consider the situation fairly”.
If you aren’t trying to get the details right or act fairly while making political rants why on earth would you expect LW to be particularly accommodating?
(I am willing to believe that LW is not accommodating of expression of strong feeling even when not acting as you advocate here. It is a perfectly plausible bias for LW to have and I can see downsides to it. Another bias (or the same one generalised) is regarding not acting as though you have strong feelings about an issue that there is a social consensus about. People turn their brains off when it comes to cryonics avocation and utilitarian existential risk prevention, for example. ie. Not proselytising is labelled ‘murder’.)
Ok, fair enough. By local standards I was engaging in bad behavior.
(It still puzzles me why it’s important to try to be right about everything. Surely it’s not necessary for everyone to be correct about waterbirds in Antarctica or something. Why do we care so much about being right here?)
Hypothesis: Take a group of 30 12 year olds, randomly divided them into two groups and give one group the name “Less Wrong” and the other arbitrary and unrelated name then observed the group interaction over a period of a week, both free form interaction and while performing some suitable tasks. The “Less Wrong” group will forge an identity in which they rigorously hold themselves to high intellectual standards while the others may be belligerently irrational or contemptuous of all things intellectual. (Consequences may be long lasting. I don’t expect ethics approval! ;) )
If someone makes unfair and inaccurate political diatribes against water-birds in Antarctica then I will likely choose to correct the inaccuracies and defend the honour of the poor maligned water-birds even though I am otherwise neutral on the subject.. That is a natural egalitarian response against grabs for political power in my tribe (by a group of which I am not a part). Yet if another person with a hate filled passionate bias against water-birds in Antarctica were to come along they will just see people apparently advocating said birds without knowing the context. They may assume that LessWrong is a group of chauvanistic Antartican water-bird lovers and feel unwelcome or maligned.
Part of living in a system that’s a bit democratic is that it’s good if you promote accurate political beliefs among the population.
Even if you don’t change your behavior based on your beliefs politicians do change their behavior based on public polling. Politicians don’t always react to public opinion but it’s certainly incorrect to say that they don’t care about the results of polls.
Democracy works really well when people get outraged over the right things. It doesn’t work when people are outraged over made up drama.
Holding accurate political beliefs is a bit similar to voting. If one individual refuses, it’s no problem. Promoting social standards that prevent people from voting is a problem.
I have nothing against your strength of feeling, though I am a bit surprised at how strongly you resist having that feeling resisted. So let us get back to the original question, but lets come at it from a different direction. Let us ask why the professor chose to express himself with the words “I won’t grade it”, rather than “I will give it a failing grade”.
It is doubtful that this wording was chosen so as to confuse or annoy you. My guess would be that the professor assumed (incorrectly, it turns out) that both phrasings would be interpreted the same. So why would he chose to say “I won’t grade it”? Well, which statement sounds more like the professor imposing an arbitrary burden upon the student? And which sounds more like the professor refusing to be imposed upon by students? Which makes the failing grade appear as resulting from something the student did, and which makes it appear to result from something the professor did?
Statements have meanings at several levels. At the level of simply communicating the policy, yes, ambiguity should have been avoided. But at the level of communicating the reasonableness of the policy, the professor preferred to seem reasonable rather than arbitrary. It is often best to simply tolerate this kind of moral-positioning subtext in language, unless you are deconstructing some text for an English lit class.
You didn’t just do that.
You said that the teacher’s words don’t match their meaning.
Explanations may be a poor way of promoting beliefs, but belief in that fact would discourage your claim that the teacher’s statement has a precise meaning.
I think newerspeak’s take is pretty good. It quite late (and rather temporarily) that you switched from discussing lack of clarity, especially the need to learn a new idiom, to discussing what is bad about the phrasing. (except that I strongly object to newerspeak’s use of “wrong phrasing.”)
I don’t understand. That was the phenomenon in question.
You can (like newerspeak, with the well-chosen username) think that the choice of idiom has bad consequences. I might agree, but only contingently on my political beliefs about education. But to say that an idiom is wrong is a category error.
I disagree with that interpretation, perhaps because of a meta-ambiguity about which of two questions we’re discussing:
Which of two example wordings should the teacher have used?
Was there anything wrong with what the teacher said?
These are obviously related but by no means the same. You seem to be assuming that the dispute is about the former (which, as you say, we all seem to agree on); my understanding was that it is about the latter. Specifically, I interpreted you as believing that the teacher’s wording was so unacceptable as to warrant correction, and this is what I disagreed with and presented arguments against. I suppose that, yes, that means we were arguing about your strength of feeling, but that’s exactly what I was trying to do. If I seemed to claim that I was arguing about anything else, that was a miscommunication.
I appreciate that you made a point of distinguishing between disliking the nature of this particular discussion and disliking this kind of feedback from me in general.
ETA after discussing in IRC: Also, you seem to be relying on the premise that less ambiguity in language is universally better, and for the reasons outlined in my previous comment I don’t think it’s that simple.
My assumption is that if A is preferable to B, then there is “something wrong” with B. The level of “wrongness” implied by this mere fact depends on how preferable A is to B, which in turn depends (among other things) on how easy A is to implement.
To which I ask: why?
I use a fan to keep my room cool. An air conditioner would do a better job, but what I have is a fan. I don’t see anything wrong with using a fan.
For the same reason anybody argues about anything—I disagreed with you, and was looking to either convince you of my reasons or learn new facts which would convince me of yours. But you seem not to want to argue about this, and it’s rapidly becoming more stressful than enlightening, so I’m happy to drop it.
Now that I think about it, the real point I should have made is that getting noticeably angry on the Internet about language usage is sort of low-status (only the first level above using poor spelling and grammar); the second level is to let such things pass, and the third is to remark wittily on bad usage (or only remark openly on it when it has bad externalities).
My original response, in retrospect, was clearly meant to signal second-level sophistication. This one is, perhaps, attempting the fourth level (going meta on questions of language usage).
I disagree.