The referent of “grading” is a specific pattern of action that involves reading and evaluating the paper. The teacher will not perform that pattern of action on papers that are turned in late. Depending on how the grading formula works, the relevant cell in the Excel spreadsheet might even remain empty.
What the teacher should say depends on what the formula is. If the formula ignores empty cells, then the teacher can say “I won’t grade it”. If, on the other hand, the formula treats empty cells as if they contained the value 0, then the teacher should not say “I won’t grade it”, but should instead say “I will assign it a grade of 0”.
“Grading” means “scoring”; it does not refer to a specific ritual performed by the teacher to arrive at the score. What if the teacher decided to score each student’s paper by means of a random process, such as rolling dice? Would you say that the teacher “did not grade” the papers, or would you say (as I would insist) that the teacher graded the papers in an unfair manner?
Furthermore, whatever the semantics of the verb “grade”, it is the impact on the student’s score, and not the teacher’s behavior, that is relevant, and consequently it is to the former that the teacher should be referring. (Indeed, the reality is that that is the intended referent, and the teacher is simply referring to his/her own behavior as an oblique, implicit way of referring to the impact on the student’s score. I object to such an oblique way of speaking.)
I honestly don’t understand the resistance to conceding me this point. I can perhaps understand if people aren’t as bothered by this kind of thing as I am, but...why the need to actually defend what is clearly less-than-maximally-considered language? Do people really not understand where I’m coming from here? In this, a place where I thought sympathy for logical precision mixed with skepticism of institutionalized education? Exactly what mistake do you think I’m making, all ye hordes-of-orthonormal-upvoters? Or is your apparent disagreement just a way of signaling disapproval of my having made the complaint (as I am inclined to suspect)?
I honestly don’t understand the resistance to conceding me this point.
Surmise: that’s because you’ve only gotten around to mentioning your real objection in this post, two replies down from the top of the thread. It’s not the inconsistency. You mean to say you object to the prof’s use of his greater power in this situation to frame the conversation to his benefit.
You’re right that “I will not grade it” is the wrong phrase to use. The correct one is “I will fail you on this assignment,” which the prof is deliberately avoiding because being honest makes him look more responsible for the student’s bad outcome than necessary.
Standard Divisive Topic Warning: I suspect there are some here who object to the power dynamics in academia, which are covert for reasons both good and ideological. I know there are also academics here who will naturally take issue with that characterization.
Surmise: that’s because you’ve only gotten around to mentioning your real objection in this post, two replies down from the top of the thread. It’s not the inconsistency. You mean to say you object to the prof’s use of his greater power in this situation to frame the conversation to his benefit.
I don’t see how that’s more “real” than his other objection—he mentioned that it’s not obvious that “I won’t grade it” actually means “I’ll grade it zero”. And as a real autistic-spectrum person, I can completely sympathize with missing these expected transformations you’re supposed to make. The fact that he has additional good reasons doesn’t take away from this, and it doesn’t justify a teacher’s use of sloppy language when clear language is just as easy.
Clear language is not just as easy for neurotypicals.
I’m not claiming that it is, as a general rule. I’m just claiming that the intrepretative assumptions they make about their speech are much more likely to match their audience’s, thus mitigating the effect of unclear speech.
Your failing to know this isn’t an autistic spectrum thing.
I didn’t fail to know it; when teachers have said what komponisto complains about, I’ve understood what they really meant. But I also recognize it’s because I made some assumptions about the teacher’s disposition that someone wouldn’t necessarily realize had to be made, especially if they were autistic-spectrum.
As a recent example, one time I was asked, “Did you come prepared to make a payment today?” Since I didn’t know I would have to make a payment at that time, I said no, on the grounds that my failing to expect it is a lack of preparation. Then I realized they meant “Are you capable of paying today?” and were just using a roundabout way of saying it.
Oh, I hadn’t heard you explicitly claim that before. It doesn’t change my impressions at all but it is still interesting to fill in my mental check-list of people’s identification with the label.
Meh, it’s still self-diagnosed. I’ve never gotten a professional diagnosis, which is why I only claim I’m on the spectrum. And in the context of the comment you’re replying to, my point was just that my claim to the title is much more realistic than that of a certain someone else who doesn’t seem to understand the problem with using “I won’t grade it” to mean “I will grade it zero.”
Peh. Professional diagnosis. I’ve got professional diagnoses of all sorts of things purely because it allowed access (or cheaper access) to substances that authorities have decided to exert control over. To be honest I think it’s easier to act the part of having various diagnosable conditions than it is to act neurotypical. (And even there a lot of high IQ spectrum folks avoid a diagnosis because they’re so good at emulation.)
Do people really not understand where I’m coming from here?
You are obsessing over a trivial nit and then blowing up in frustration that nobody gets it. Four paragraphs over the distinction-without-a-difference between “won’t grade” and “grade 0″?
You are obsessing over a trivial nit and then blowing up in frustration that nobody gets it.
No, I’m “blowing up in frustration” (an exaggerated description, I think) that people are stubbornly disagreeing. As I said, I understand if folks think it’s a trivial matter. What I don’t understand is the apparent disagreement on the matter itself, and the best explanation I can come up with is that people are trying to show their disapproval of my having introduced the topic. (Why wouldn’t they have just said that directly? Because upvoting orthonormal’s comment was just easier.)
Actually I suspect it may run deeper, and may have to do with a reflexive tendency some people have to resist strong claims (or expressions of strong feeling) in general.
Unrequested arbitration from someone who just read the thread:
“I won’t grade it” cannot be taken literally as obvious shorthand for “I will assign it a grade of zero”. That this is what it means is obvious to many people but only because they have spent a decent amount of time in an institutional context where everyone is already clear what it means.
That said, it also isn’t obvious that “I won’t grade it” means “I won’t include the assignment as part of your final grade.” The word “grade” is ambiguous between meaning “giving a number or letter that ostensibly represents the quality of work” and “reading and analyzing the assignment so as to form an opinion regarding what number or letter would best represent the quality of the work”. Assigning a 0 without looking at the assignment is certainly a grade under the former meaning, but it isn’t really under the latter meaning.
This ambiguity is resolved only when people are aware of the context and pragmatics surrounding the statement (for example, some people will probably infer that professor won’t just let them not do the assignment and so interpreting the statement as “I won’t include the paper assignment as part of your final grade” is too optimistic).
So when orthonormal says
No, what the teacher means is “I will act as if you had not turned in anything at all”, and “I won’t grade it” is a perfectly reasonable shorthand for that.
He is basically right. We use shorthands and euphemisms all the time and their literal ambiguity or inaccuracy is not really legitimate grounds for criticizing those phrasings...
...until people misunderstand. Komponisto says the first time he heard this phrasing he didn’t understand. I don’t know if this misunderstanding persisted until he received a failing grade for an assignment without realizing that would be the consequence, but it doesn’t matter. Given that assignment failure is usually a big deal, any reasonable chance of miscommunication should be headed off at the pass (no pun intended). Many professors are explicit about this and there is no evidence that suffer significantly as a result. College freshmen are particularly likely to misunderstand because they may not have heard the phrase before and are in a new environment whose contextual cues they are not used to. Further, neurotypicality issues arise in these circumstances and it is important that language users keep in mind that the contextual cues that are obvious to them or even most others may not be obvious to everyone (Nancy and Silas’s excellent exchange covers this well). This goes for the participants in the above debate, also.
So komponisto is totally right that professors should be explicit about what they mean. But he is wrong that the professors are really, truly misspeaking (instead of just being somewhat unclear) and he should recognize that other people will sometimes get annoyed with those who insist a statement is wrong because they don’t pick up on the obvious-to-some-but-not-to-others contextual clues which supply the meaning of the statement. It kind of reminds us of the grade school teacher who, when we asked if we could go to the bathroom, replied “I don’t know. Can you?”
This ambiguity is resolved only when people are aware of the context and pragmatics surrounding the statement
Or they could ask a simple question. I don’t understand why people feel the need to go into this huge analysis when conversation is a fluid and interactive process.
Awareness of context and pragmatics can be tacit or explicit, and if you don’t tacitly understand that you need to ask a question, some explicitness might help.
My handy example for communication failure on that sort of thing is a time when I was turned away from a restaurant for not being dressed properly. It took asking the same question a bunch of times to find out that the specific issue was that I was wearing shorts.
My impression is that the person I was asking had trouble imagining that anyone didn’t already know his concept of “dressed properly”.
It’s easier to change your own behavior than it is to change the rest of the world, especially when you’re the one who reads a rationality blog and etc.
It may be negative utility since requesting explicit and clear statements are against social norms and can be taken as implicit accusations of ignorance or incompetence.
Taking things literally and lacking the ability to determine hidden or assumed social meanings is a low status trait, showing that you can be easily tricked, are easy to ridicule in a public fashion without reprisal, etc. Or maybe that’s just me.
The influence of social norms is why it isn’t always a good think to advocate and request clarity in public and normal social interactions. But LessWrong is exactly the place to flout those norms and advocate non-oblique communication. Are we actually disagreeing?
If your statement is that we should cultivate explicit speech on LessWrong, then I would agree that the members of this community already practice that norm, and advocating it here is appropriate.
If your statement is that we, as members of the LessWrong community, should spread the use of explicit speech to the masses, then I would disagree, as training people in even small ways like that takes significantly more time than is worth the effort except with very close friends.
Or did you mean something else? You really should be more explicit ;-P
My statement is that we should observe the need for explicit speech in certain contexts, even though it might be impractical to actively encourage it in the masses.
If your statement is that we, as members of the LessWrong community, should spread the use of explicit speech to the masses, then I would disagree, as training people in even small ways like that takes significantly more time than is worth the effort except with very close friends.
Wouldn’t this statement also apply to promotion of, say, atheism? Advocating atheism on an individual level also “takes significantly more time than is worth the effort except with very close friends.”
Isn’t LessWrong exactly the place to make rational arguments over subjects that many regard as trivial, and arguments that are impractical to pursue with the masses of non-rationalists?
If your statement is that we, as members of the LessWrong community, should spread the use of explicit speech to the masses, then I would disagree, as training people in even small ways like that takes significantly more time than is worth the effort except with very close friends.
Disagreeing about whether something is practical is distinct from disagreeing about whether the world would be a better place if it were done.
I view this entire thread as a masturbatory word argument that was fully answered and explored in the first couple posts, and I let the pattern of votes upset me. Sorry.
My best guess would be that you said, “How am I dressed improperly?” I would also guess that if you had changed the question to something more specific like, “What, my shirt?” then you would have received a more specific answer instead of repeating yourself so many times.
It’s quite possible that more specific questions would have led to a faster answer. My failure of imagination was that I couldn’t believe he didn’t have a clear set of rules in mind.
I honestly don’t understand the resistance to conceding me this point. I can perhaps understand if people aren’t as bothered by this kind of thing as I am,
I don’t understand either. I agree with you that it is the wrong phrasing to use (when you say “I won’t grade it” and expect that to be equivalent to “I will give it the grade 0″). I’m certainly not as passionate about the issue as you are, but it seems like a valid point. I’ve been reversing some of your downvotes on this.
Please count me as a counterexample to you-know-who’s claim of “You are not obviously right to people other than yourself.”
You are clearly far more passionate about this triviality than I am, to the point of being less nice than I prefer my interlocutors to be, so I’m going to cease to talk to you about it. You can pretend you got me to agree if you want, I don’t mind.
Hmm, I’m quite puzzled. If you think I was being non-nice, that suggests a misunderstanding. Did you perhaps interpret the final paragraph of the grandparent as directed at you personally? (It wasn’t; it was directed at the 5 people who upvoted orthonormal’s aggressive reply and whoever has been downvoting my comments in this thread.)
I voted up orthonormal, although I did not downvote you. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt re: your niceness-related intentions, and explain:
or would you say (as I would insist)
This is a confrontational phrasing. The use of the second person is aggressive in context, and the aside where you strongly specify which answer you think is right comes off like a status grab (“When you make your choice between these two options, bear strongly in mind that I think this”).
Furthermore, whatever the semantics of the verb “grade”, it is the impact on the student’s score, and not the teacher’s behavior, that is relevant, and consequently it is to the former that the teacher should be referring.
The teacher’s behavior is the sole determinant of the student’s score. Even if you showed that there is some normative reason to speak only in terms of the latter, that wouldn’t indicate that the teacher is in fact speaking in those terms. The fact that the teacher should speak about relevant matters doesn’t prevent a ramble about a faculty ski trip from last February; why should it prevent a digression to teacherly grading-related habits?
(Indeed, the reality is that that is the intended referent, and the teacher is simply referring to his/her own behavior as an oblique, implicit way of referring to the impact on the student’s score. I object to such an oblique way of speaking.)
Obliqueness is an epidemic, but you seem to be drawing the line very uncommonly. I would be only a little more surprised if you had chosen to rant about someone expressing an intention to turn on their lawn sprinkler, saying that this is objectionably oblique because what really matters is that the grass will get wet, not that it be delivered by a particular device.
I honestly don’t understand the resistance to conceding me this point.
This would be a reasonable thing to say if you were obviously right to people other than yourself, who stubbornly held out in spite of having clearly already lost out of pride or stubbornness or some incomprehensibly arcane reason. You are not obviously right to people other than yourself. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong; but it means you can’t get away with this sentence and sound nice.
why the need to actually defend what is clearly less-than-maximally-considered language?
This phrase is sneaky. “Less-than-maximally-considered” is probably denotationally true of every piece of natural language humans actually use. But the implication is that it is not just non-maximally considered; but inadequately considered, and as I said above, that’s not clear to people other than you. Also, you’re implying that people are actively defending the usage of language to which you object, which seems to me a mischaracterization.
Do people really not understand where I’m coming from here? In this, a place where I thought sympathy for logical precision mixed with skepticism of institutionalized education?
Now you are insinuating that disagreement with you constitutes flouting those values, which is insulting and kind of a cheap shot. (I thought you, a regular contributor to Less Wrong, would have more mindfulness and give a measured, polite reply...!)
Exactly what mistake do you think I’m making, all ye hordes-of-orthonormal-upvoters?
This is just an attack on orthonormal, whose comment was not particularly objectionable in any way except inasmuch as it attempted to correct you. Am I next? Also, it looks to me like people have made attempts to specify your mistake. If you don’t understand them, there are polite ways to ask for clarification. This ain’t one of them.
Or is your apparent disagreement just a way of signaling disapproval of my having made the complaint (as I am inclined to suspect)?
Do you have any reason apart from this incident that Less Wrong is particularly hostile to complaint? Or that disagreements are hard to find here, such that you should have high priors on apparent incommensurate opinions really being fake signaling tools?
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt re: your niceness-related intentions, and explain:
Thank you, because it was frankly shocking (“devastating” might be a tad too strong, though not that much) to find myself accused of non-niceness when I have on several occasions made a point of trying to increase the niceness level of this place, even linking to your post on the subject!
I was certainly right about there having been a misunderstanding. Your comment reveals that you interpreted my words in ways that I did not anticipate. For instance, it never would have occurred to me that use of the second person, as in
Would you say that the teacher “did not grade” the papers, or would you say (as I would insist) that the teacher graded the papers in an unfair manner?
could be construed as “aggressive” or “status-grabbing”. I think what happened here was what I had surmised: because my comment was a reply to yours, you interpreted it as if I were speaking directly and specifically to you (“Hey, you, Alicorn, would you really say this?”), when in fact I was addressing you only in a sort of rhetorical way, your mild comment being merely the latest and most proximate component of an unexpected and incomprehensible onslaught of disagreement represented principally by orthonormal’s comment and (most particularly) its score.
Despite our shared concern for niceness, it appears we may have substantially different conceptions of what it entails. Consider this:
I honestly don’t understand the resistance to conceding me this point.
...you can’t get away with this sentence and sound nice.
What?! I thought what I said was exactly the kind of thing a nice, polite person says when they’re puzzled in the way I was. As opposed to, e.g. “Are you people out of your freaking minds??” I even added the word “honestly”, specifically to signal that I wasn’t just being rhetorical: I really genuinely did not understand.
Do people really not understand where I’m coming from here? In this, a place where I thought sympathy for logical precision mixed with skepticism of institutionalized education?
Now you are insinuating that disagreement with you constitutes flouting those values, which is insulting and kind of a cheap shot. (I thought you, a regular contributor to Less Wrong, would have more mindfulness and give a measured, polite reply...!)
Again, how in the world was that impolite? (I suspect this may be a case where we, using only written text, are suffering from the absence of cues such as intonation and facial expression, which can be crucial in communicating “tone”.)
The disagreement was, as I have said, unanticipated. The reason I didn’t anticipate it did indeed have to do with my model of readers’ attitudes toward verbal precision and toward the educational system, represented in this case by the sort of teacher who would say “I won’t grade it” rather than “I will give you a score of 0″. How was communicating this insulting or a cheap shot?
Exactly what mistake do you think I’m making, all ye hordes-of-orthonormal-upvoters?
This is just an attack on orthonormal, whose comment was not particularly objectionable in any way except inasmuch as it attempted to correct you. Am I next?
It was most certainly not an attack on orthonormal (who in general is a fine contributor by my lights); in fact it was expressed in a somewhat lighthearted tone, as indicated by the archaism “ye”. Orthonormal’s comment may not have been “objectionable”, but, good golly, how was it worth 5 (now 6) upvotes? Especially when, if you stop to reflect, it couldn’t possibly have communicated anything that I hadn’t considered: of course the teacher means he/she will treat it as if the student turned in nothing! (And that means giving it a grade of 0.) Could anybody have reasonably expected that I would have read that comment and said “Oh, hadn’t thought of that, thank you for pointing it out”? My contention was that “I won’t grade it” wasn’t a reasonable shorthand; consequently the comment amounted to a mere denial, and not even an attempted refutation.
Now, speaking of niceness, I have to say that I think you were uncharitable to me in the parent comment. For example:
I would be only a little more surprised if you had chosen to rant about someone expressing an intention to turn on their lawn sprinkler, saying that this is objectionably oblique because what really matters is that the grass will get wet, not that it be delivered by a particular device.
The difference between that sort of silly thing and my actual complaint is nothing short of stark. I’m talking about a teacher saying that he or she will not award a score as a sort of euphemism for awarding a particular low score (such as 0). Do you see how that’s a more reasonable complaint than your example, even if you don’t think it rises to the level of being reasonable in absolute terms?
Anyway, I hope this helps to clarify things, and I hope I didn’t seem non-nice in this comment.
Oxford types have a solution for this problem, it’s a pronoun called “one”.
I find it slightly amusing in a situation where you are highly critical of polite euphemisms, that are generally well understood (chance of error is far below 1%), you make your point with imprecise language by using an ambiguous pronoun “you” rather than the unambiguous “one”. In my experience people make this error with ambiguous pronouns at a far higher frequency than not-graded vs grade of zero.
komponisto’s tone would indeed be unjustified and not nice if his arguments had been rebutted and were only obvious to himself. As far as I can tell, nobody has actually rebutted komponisto’s arguments, and a couple other people do think his view is obviously right.
No, what the teacher means is “I will act as if you had not turned in anything at all”, and “I won’t grade it” is a perfectly reasonable shorthand for that.
The argument is that the equivalence in meaning between the two phrasings is so close the two are interchangeable. komponisto rebuts this argument:
(a) The first time I heard it, I didn’t realize what the teacher meant.
…
(d) Because people should say what they mean and mean what they say.
Later, SilasBarta argues that non-neurotypical people might be confused by such oblique language.
Right now, komponisto’s position lacks a convincing rebuttal. There could still be counter-arguments (e.g. “people who find ‘will not be graded’ confusing are atypical and they don’t matter”, “people who find ‘will not be graded’ confusing should learn to make inferences and detect euphemisms, because these are valuable skills”). But nobody has made any such potential rebuttals, unless I’m missing something.
(And there are rebuttals to those rebuttals: “people who have trouble with euphemism-detection deserve accommodation, not marginalization”, “euphemism detection is a valuable skill, but in the student-teacher relationship, clarity of communication is more important than teaching that skill.”)
You offered a potential rebuttal, but it hardly closes the case:
Obliqueness is an epidemic, but you seem to be drawing the line very uncommonly. I would be only a little more surprised if you had chosen to rant about someone expressing an intention to turn on their lawn sprinkler, saying that this is objectionably oblique because what really matters is that the grass will get wet, not that it be delivered by a particular device.
I don’t think it’s uncommon to hold certain types of communication to a higher standard of clarity, and communication of expectations between a teacher and student may be a good example. It’s a good thing for students to feel that the teacher is talking straight to them about potential punishments that could effect their futures, rather than talking in euphemisms.
It actually is perfectly fair for komponisto to query why people aren’t conceding the point, since his argument lacked real rebuttals at the time (and still does). To me, it sounds like he is saying “agree with me or show me how I’m wrong.” Since he seems to actually have grounds for being confident in his position, his tone reads as passionate to me, rather than an “not nice.” If someone shows some stronger arguments against his position, and he persists with the same tone, then I would say that he is being “not nice.”
Several people have been rubbed the wrong way by komponisto’s communication style in this discussion, which could well be evidence that it could use improvement. Perhaps if komponisto had spent more time eliciting counter-arguments before arguing that people should agree with him, then he would have avoided that interpretation. Yet calling him “not nice” seems to require acting as if his argument has holes in it which haven’t yet been shown, and requires a particular interpretation of the socioemotional content of his posts that I don’t share:
Also, you’re implying that people are actively defending the usage of language to which you object, which seems to me a mischaracterization.
By saying that “‘I won’t grade it’ is a perfectly reasonable shorthand,” it does sound like orthonormal was defending the acceptability of the oblique phrasing. If komponisto is mischaracterizing orthonormal, let orthonormal be the one to say so.
Now you are insinuating that disagreement with you constitutes flouting those values, which is insulting and kind of a cheap shot.
The question we should ask is whether is it reasonable for komponisto to believe that his position on this subject is so strong that he is justified in considering disagreement with him to be flouting rationalist values. As far as I can tell, his position might be strong enough to justify such a level of confidence. Yet I am not convinced that it is, so I think his meta-comments about rationality on Less Wrong would have been better saved for later. I’m willing to call his comment overconfident, but I’m not willing to call it insulting or a cheap shot.
This is just an attack on orthonormal, whose comment was not particularly objectionable in any way except inasmuch as it attempted to correct you.
I disagree that “Exactly what mistake do you think I’m making, all ye hordes-of-orthonormal-upvoters?” needs to be interpreted as an attack. While I wouldn’t object to orthonormal’s comment, his phrasing wasn’t the gentlest.
You are not obviously right to people other than yourself. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong; but it means you can’t get away with this sentence and sound nice.
Yet after you made this post, some people have appeared (e.g. Silas) who do think that komponisto is right (though they think the point is trivial), so perhaps he can get away with saying something like that without being not nice.
Personally, I would have preferred to see a bit more back-and-forth on the substantive issue in this discussion before either of you attempted to go meta (komponisto about why people were disagreeing and their rationality, and you about him being “not nice,” or being the only one who holds such a position).
First of all, this breakdown is much more “not nice” than anything that komponisto said, in the sense that it is explicitly negative against komopnisto’s post. Komponisto wasn’t actually explicitly negative.
Secondly, I think it’s unfortunate and unjustified for people to cop out of disagreements based on rudeness or “discursive impropriety”. Even if you didn’t like what you perceived, that doesn’t give you the justification to “victory by secession”.
To be perfectly frank, I would suggest that the entire thread should have been dropped after her original comment, and should be dropped now.
Doesn’t that mean your reply now contradicts your own suggestion?
Anyways, I find it really funny how debate takes on this aura of “No one shall pass!” when someone accuses someone else of bad intentions. I believe very, very strongly in the idea that debate should never be summarily ended in this manner. In my experience these claims come as a shield for people who are simply unwilling to think through the ideas. Anyone is free to withdraw, or discontinue, but there is no justification for silencing someone else. Hence I reject your suggestion to “drop this conversation”, just on principle, even though I basically know where you’re coming from.
Drop this coversation with Alicorn. You can and should continue elsewhere, with other interested parties, and if necessary you should post a wrapup to conclude any dangling threads.
If someone exits a conversation, that is their choice. But on an internet forum, there is no reason that others shouldn’t reply to them, or continue to make points in response. They don’t have to respond.
So your response to my question, how do I tap out, would be, “You can’t! We’re going to continue to pound you into the ground, even and especially if you’re not defending yourself.” ?
And whether she updated as much as she should have is her business, not yours.
I would think that on a site like this, that wouldn’t be true; the issue of whether someone is appropriately updating seems like exactly what we should be talking about. Leaving people to their own rituals of cognition while believing them to be flawed is not an act of courtesy here.
And she was reporting her feelings and their sources precisely as requested, not setting out to slander anyone.
Whether or not she sought to slander anyone, she came off as pretty harsh for (what seem like) very trivial things. (At least I can link to this if anyone claims my disputes with Alicorn have been 100% unreasonableness on my part...)
Now, if komponisto’s criticized “non-nice” remarks really are offensive to a large group of people, this is important to know—and it’s just as important to know that it’s not someone falsely representing that group for personal reasons.
That’s not what she did. She explicitly declared that she was done with the argument, not that she won it—by standard debating rules, she forfeited.
Umm, hang on, she ‘forfeited’ prior to posting a 500 word reply. I’d say that in the absence of further data it is reasonable to conclude that the forfeit was revoked.
The referent of “grading” is a specific pattern of action that involves reading and evaluating the paper. The teacher will not perform that pattern of action on papers that are turned in late. Depending on how the grading formula works, the relevant cell in the Excel spreadsheet might even remain empty.
What the teacher should say depends on what the formula is. If the formula ignores empty cells, then the teacher can say “I won’t grade it”. If, on the other hand, the formula treats empty cells as if they contained the value 0, then the teacher should not say “I won’t grade it”, but should instead say “I will assign it a grade of 0”.
“Grading” means “scoring”; it does not refer to a specific ritual performed by the teacher to arrive at the score. What if the teacher decided to score each student’s paper by means of a random process, such as rolling dice? Would you say that the teacher “did not grade” the papers, or would you say (as I would insist) that the teacher graded the papers in an unfair manner?
Furthermore, whatever the semantics of the verb “grade”, it is the impact on the student’s score, and not the teacher’s behavior, that is relevant, and consequently it is to the former that the teacher should be referring. (Indeed, the reality is that that is the intended referent, and the teacher is simply referring to his/her own behavior as an oblique, implicit way of referring to the impact on the student’s score. I object to such an oblique way of speaking.)
I honestly don’t understand the resistance to conceding me this point. I can perhaps understand if people aren’t as bothered by this kind of thing as I am, but...why the need to actually defend what is clearly less-than-maximally-considered language? Do people really not understand where I’m coming from here? In this, a place where I thought sympathy for logical precision mixed with skepticism of institutionalized education? Exactly what mistake do you think I’m making, all ye hordes-of-orthonormal-upvoters? Or is your apparent disagreement just a way of signaling disapproval of my having made the complaint (as I am inclined to suspect)?
Surmise: that’s because you’ve only gotten around to mentioning your real objection in this post, two replies down from the top of the thread. It’s not the inconsistency. You mean to say you object to the prof’s use of his greater power in this situation to frame the conversation to his benefit.
You’re right that “I will not grade it” is the wrong phrase to use. The correct one is “I will fail you on this assignment,” which the prof is deliberately avoiding because being honest makes him look more responsible for the student’s bad outcome than necessary.
Standard Divisive Topic Warning: I suspect there are some here who object to the power dynamics in academia, which are covert for reasons both good and ideological. I know there are also academics here who will naturally take issue with that characterization.
I don’t see how that’s more “real” than his other objection—he mentioned that it’s not obvious that “I won’t grade it” actually means “I’ll grade it zero”. And as a real autistic-spectrum person, I can completely sympathize with missing these expected transformations you’re supposed to make. The fact that he has additional good reasons doesn’t take away from this, and it doesn’t justify a teacher’s use of sloppy language when clear language is just as easy.
Clear language is not just as easy for neurotypicals. It’s contrary to their models and their habits.
Your failing to know this isn’t an autistic spectrum thing. People are generally very bad at modeling minds different from their own.
I’m not claiming that it is, as a general rule. I’m just claiming that the intrepretative assumptions they make about their speech are much more likely to match their audience’s, thus mitigating the effect of unclear speech.
I didn’t fail to know it; when teachers have said what komponisto complains about, I’ve understood what they really meant. But I also recognize it’s because I made some assumptions about the teacher’s disposition that someone wouldn’t necessarily realize had to be made, especially if they were autistic-spectrum.
As a recent example, one time I was asked, “Did you come prepared to make a payment today?” Since I didn’t know I would have to make a payment at that time, I said no, on the grounds that my failing to expect it is a lack of preparation. Then I realized they meant “Are you capable of paying today?” and were just using a roundabout way of saying it.
My apologies for misunderstanding and being a little sharp about it.
Apology accepted :) (And I didn’t take your comment as breaking any kind of etiquette.)
Oh, I hadn’t heard you explicitly claim that before. It doesn’t change my impressions at all but it is still interesting to fill in my mental check-list of people’s identification with the label.
Meh, it’s still self-diagnosed. I’ve never gotten a professional diagnosis, which is why I only claim I’m on the spectrum. And in the context of the comment you’re replying to, my point was just that my claim to the title is much more realistic than that of a certain someone else who doesn’t seem to understand the problem with using “I won’t grade it” to mean “I will grade it zero.”
Peh. Professional diagnosis. I’ve got professional diagnoses of all sorts of things purely because it allowed access (or cheaper access) to substances that authorities have decided to exert control over. To be honest I think it’s easier to act the part of having various diagnosable conditions than it is to act neurotypical. (And even there a lot of high IQ spectrum folks avoid a diagnosis because they’re so good at emulation.)
You are obsessing over a trivial nit and then blowing up in frustration that nobody gets it. Four paragraphs over the distinction-without-a-difference between “won’t grade” and “grade 0″?
No, I’m “blowing up in frustration” (an exaggerated description, I think) that people are stubbornly disagreeing. As I said, I understand if folks think it’s a trivial matter. What I don’t understand is the apparent disagreement on the matter itself, and the best explanation I can come up with is that people are trying to show their disapproval of my having introduced the topic. (Why wouldn’t they have just said that directly? Because upvoting orthonormal’s comment was just easier.)
Actually I suspect it may run deeper, and may have to do with a reflexive tendency some people have to resist strong claims (or expressions of strong feeling) in general.
Unrequested arbitration from someone who just read the thread:
“I won’t grade it” cannot be taken literally as obvious shorthand for “I will assign it a grade of zero”. That this is what it means is obvious to many people but only because they have spent a decent amount of time in an institutional context where everyone is already clear what it means.
That said, it also isn’t obvious that “I won’t grade it” means “I won’t include the assignment as part of your final grade.” The word “grade” is ambiguous between meaning “giving a number or letter that ostensibly represents the quality of work” and “reading and analyzing the assignment so as to form an opinion regarding what number or letter would best represent the quality of the work”. Assigning a 0 without looking at the assignment is certainly a grade under the former meaning, but it isn’t really under the latter meaning.
This ambiguity is resolved only when people are aware of the context and pragmatics surrounding the statement (for example, some people will probably infer that professor won’t just let them not do the assignment and so interpreting the statement as “I won’t include the paper assignment as part of your final grade” is too optimistic).
So when orthonormal says
He is basically right. We use shorthands and euphemisms all the time and their literal ambiguity or inaccuracy is not really legitimate grounds for criticizing those phrasings...
...until people misunderstand. Komponisto says the first time he heard this phrasing he didn’t understand. I don’t know if this misunderstanding persisted until he received a failing grade for an assignment without realizing that would be the consequence, but it doesn’t matter. Given that assignment failure is usually a big deal, any reasonable chance of miscommunication should be headed off at the pass (no pun intended). Many professors are explicit about this and there is no evidence that suffer significantly as a result. College freshmen are particularly likely to misunderstand because they may not have heard the phrase before and are in a new environment whose contextual cues they are not used to. Further, neurotypicality issues arise in these circumstances and it is important that language users keep in mind that the contextual cues that are obvious to them or even most others may not be obvious to everyone (Nancy and Silas’s excellent exchange covers this well). This goes for the participants in the above debate, also.
So komponisto is totally right that professors should be explicit about what they mean. But he is wrong that the professors are really, truly misspeaking (instead of just being somewhat unclear) and he should recognize that other people will sometimes get annoyed with those who insist a statement is wrong because they don’t pick up on the obvious-to-some-but-not-to-others contextual clues which supply the meaning of the statement. It kind of reminds us of the grade school teacher who, when we asked if we could go to the bathroom, replied “I don’t know. Can you?”
Or they could ask a simple question. I don’t understand why people feel the need to go into this huge analysis when conversation is a fluid and interactive process.
Awareness of context and pragmatics can be tacit or explicit, and if you don’t tacitly understand that you need to ask a question, some explicitness might help.
My handy example for communication failure on that sort of thing is a time when I was turned away from a restaurant for not being dressed properly. It took asking the same question a bunch of times to find out that the specific issue was that I was wearing shorts.
My impression is that the person I was asking had trouble imagining that anyone didn’t already know his concept of “dressed properly”.
It’s easier to change your own behavior than it is to change the rest of the world, especially when you’re the one who reads a rationality blog and etc.
Anyway, have fun with your analysis.
True, but there is no contradiction between doing so, and also advocating that the world change.
It may be negative utility since requesting explicit and clear statements are against social norms and can be taken as implicit accusations of ignorance or incompetence.
Taking things literally and lacking the ability to determine hidden or assumed social meanings is a low status trait, showing that you can be easily tricked, are easy to ridicule in a public fashion without reprisal, etc. Or maybe that’s just me.
No, I agree that there’s a risk to asking questions in some social circles, and it may not even be obvious which social circles they are.
I believe we are making the world a little with our interactions, and it’s sometimes worth trying to bend the world in our preferred direction.
The influence of social norms is why it isn’t always a good think to advocate and request clarity in public and normal social interactions. But LessWrong is exactly the place to flout those norms and advocate non-oblique communication. Are we actually disagreeing?
If your statement is that we should cultivate explicit speech on LessWrong, then I would agree that the members of this community already practice that norm, and advocating it here is appropriate.
If your statement is that we, as members of the LessWrong community, should spread the use of explicit speech to the masses, then I would disagree, as training people in even small ways like that takes significantly more time than is worth the effort except with very close friends.
Or did you mean something else? You really should be more explicit ;-P
My statement is that we should observe the need for explicit speech in certain contexts, even though it might be impractical to actively encourage it in the masses.
Wouldn’t this statement also apply to promotion of, say, atheism? Advocating atheism on an individual level also “takes significantly more time than is worth the effort except with very close friends.”
Isn’t LessWrong exactly the place to make rational arguments over subjects that many regard as trivial, and arguments that are impractical to pursue with the masses of non-rationalists?
I hope that’s explicit enough ;)
Disagreeing about whether something is practical is distinct from disagreeing about whether the world would be a better place if it were done.
I’m not sure what you think I said.
I view this entire thread as a masturbatory word argument that was fully answered and explored in the first couple posts, and I let the pattern of votes upset me. Sorry.
My best guess would be that you said, “How am I dressed improperly?” I would also guess that if you had changed the question to something more specific like, “What, my shirt?” then you would have received a more specific answer instead of repeating yourself so many times.
It’s quite possible that more specific questions would have led to a faster answer. My failure of imagination was that I couldn’t believe he didn’t have a clear set of rules in mind.
Hm, are you starting to understand how I feel whenever I argue that people only pretend to have a refined palette for alcoholic drinks? ;-)
There is a distinction, and there is a difference. Just because the difference is small doesn’t make it go away.
I don’t understand either. I agree with you that it is the wrong phrasing to use (when you say “I won’t grade it” and expect that to be equivalent to “I will give it the grade 0″). I’m certainly not as passionate about the issue as you are, but it seems like a valid point. I’ve been reversing some of your downvotes on this.
Please count me as a counterexample to you-know-who’s claim of “You are not obviously right to people other than yourself.”
You are clearly far more passionate about this triviality than I am, to the point of being less nice than I prefer my interlocutors to be, so I’m going to cease to talk to you about it. You can pretend you got me to agree if you want, I don’t mind.
Hmm, I’m quite puzzled. If you think I was being non-nice, that suggests a misunderstanding. Did you perhaps interpret the final paragraph of the grandparent as directed at you personally? (It wasn’t; it was directed at the 5 people who upvoted orthonormal’s aggressive reply and whoever has been downvoting my comments in this thread.)
I voted up orthonormal, although I did not downvote you. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt re: your niceness-related intentions, and explain:
This is a confrontational phrasing. The use of the second person is aggressive in context, and the aside where you strongly specify which answer you think is right comes off like a status grab (“When you make your choice between these two options, bear strongly in mind that I think this”).
The teacher’s behavior is the sole determinant of the student’s score. Even if you showed that there is some normative reason to speak only in terms of the latter, that wouldn’t indicate that the teacher is in fact speaking in those terms. The fact that the teacher should speak about relevant matters doesn’t prevent a ramble about a faculty ski trip from last February; why should it prevent a digression to teacherly grading-related habits?
Obliqueness is an epidemic, but you seem to be drawing the line very uncommonly. I would be only a little more surprised if you had chosen to rant about someone expressing an intention to turn on their lawn sprinkler, saying that this is objectionably oblique because what really matters is that the grass will get wet, not that it be delivered by a particular device.
This would be a reasonable thing to say if you were obviously right to people other than yourself, who stubbornly held out in spite of having clearly already lost out of pride or stubbornness or some incomprehensibly arcane reason. You are not obviously right to people other than yourself. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong; but it means you can’t get away with this sentence and sound nice.
This phrase is sneaky. “Less-than-maximally-considered” is probably denotationally true of every piece of natural language humans actually use. But the implication is that it is not just non-maximally considered; but inadequately considered, and as I said above, that’s not clear to people other than you. Also, you’re implying that people are actively defending the usage of language to which you object, which seems to me a mischaracterization.
Now you are insinuating that disagreement with you constitutes flouting those values, which is insulting and kind of a cheap shot. (I thought you, a regular contributor to Less Wrong, would have more mindfulness and give a measured, polite reply...!)
This is just an attack on orthonormal, whose comment was not particularly objectionable in any way except inasmuch as it attempted to correct you. Am I next? Also, it looks to me like people have made attempts to specify your mistake. If you don’t understand them, there are polite ways to ask for clarification. This ain’t one of them.
Do you have any reason apart from this incident that Less Wrong is particularly hostile to complaint? Or that disagreements are hard to find here, such that you should have high priors on apparent incommensurate opinions really being fake signaling tools?
Thank you, because it was frankly shocking (“devastating” might be a tad too strong, though not that much) to find myself accused of non-niceness when I have on several occasions made a point of trying to increase the niceness level of this place, even linking to your post on the subject!
I was certainly right about there having been a misunderstanding. Your comment reveals that you interpreted my words in ways that I did not anticipate. For instance, it never would have occurred to me that use of the second person, as in
could be construed as “aggressive” or “status-grabbing”. I think what happened here was what I had surmised: because my comment was a reply to yours, you interpreted it as if I were speaking directly and specifically to you (“Hey, you, Alicorn, would you really say this?”), when in fact I was addressing you only in a sort of rhetorical way, your mild comment being merely the latest and most proximate component of an unexpected and incomprehensible onslaught of disagreement represented principally by orthonormal’s comment and (most particularly) its score.
Despite our shared concern for niceness, it appears we may have substantially different conceptions of what it entails. Consider this:
What?! I thought what I said was exactly the kind of thing a nice, polite person says when they’re puzzled in the way I was. As opposed to, e.g. “Are you people out of your freaking minds??” I even added the word “honestly”, specifically to signal that I wasn’t just being rhetorical: I really genuinely did not understand.
Again, how in the world was that impolite? (I suspect this may be a case where we, using only written text, are suffering from the absence of cues such as intonation and facial expression, which can be crucial in communicating “tone”.)
The disagreement was, as I have said, unanticipated. The reason I didn’t anticipate it did indeed have to do with my model of readers’ attitudes toward verbal precision and toward the educational system, represented in this case by the sort of teacher who would say “I won’t grade it” rather than “I will give you a score of 0″. How was communicating this insulting or a cheap shot?
It was most certainly not an attack on orthonormal (who in general is a fine contributor by my lights); in fact it was expressed in a somewhat lighthearted tone, as indicated by the archaism “ye”. Orthonormal’s comment may not have been “objectionable”, but, good golly, how was it worth 5 (now 6) upvotes? Especially when, if you stop to reflect, it couldn’t possibly have communicated anything that I hadn’t considered: of course the teacher means he/she will treat it as if the student turned in nothing! (And that means giving it a grade of 0.) Could anybody have reasonably expected that I would have read that comment and said “Oh, hadn’t thought of that, thank you for pointing it out”? My contention was that “I won’t grade it” wasn’t a reasonable shorthand; consequently the comment amounted to a mere denial, and not even an attempted refutation.
Now, speaking of niceness, I have to say that I think you were uncharitable to me in the parent comment. For example:
The difference between that sort of silly thing and my actual complaint is nothing short of stark. I’m talking about a teacher saying that he or she will not award a score as a sort of euphemism for awarding a particular low score (such as 0). Do you see how that’s a more reasonable complaint than your example, even if you don’t think it rises to the level of being reasonable in absolute terms?
Anyway, I hope this helps to clarify things, and I hope I didn’t seem non-nice in this comment.
Oxford types have a solution for this problem, it’s a pronoun called “one”.
I find it slightly amusing in a situation where you are highly critical of polite euphemisms, that are generally well understood (chance of error is far below 1%), you make your point with imprecise language by using an ambiguous pronoun “you” rather than the unambiguous “one”. In my experience people make this error with ambiguous pronouns at a far higher frequency than not-graded vs grade of zero.
komponisto’s tone would indeed be unjustified and not nice if his arguments had been rebutted and were only obvious to himself. As far as I can tell, nobody has actually rebutted komponisto’s arguments, and a couple other people do think his view is obviously right.
orthonormal gave the following objection:
The argument is that the equivalence in meaning between the two phrasings is so close the two are interchangeable. komponisto rebuts this argument:
Later, SilasBarta argues that non-neurotypical people might be confused by such oblique language.
Right now, komponisto’s position lacks a convincing rebuttal. There could still be counter-arguments (e.g. “people who find ‘will not be graded’ confusing are atypical and they don’t matter”, “people who find ‘will not be graded’ confusing should learn to make inferences and detect euphemisms, because these are valuable skills”). But nobody has made any such potential rebuttals, unless I’m missing something.
(And there are rebuttals to those rebuttals: “people who have trouble with euphemism-detection deserve accommodation, not marginalization”, “euphemism detection is a valuable skill, but in the student-teacher relationship, clarity of communication is more important than teaching that skill.”)
You offered a potential rebuttal, but it hardly closes the case:
I don’t think it’s uncommon to hold certain types of communication to a higher standard of clarity, and communication of expectations between a teacher and student may be a good example. It’s a good thing for students to feel that the teacher is talking straight to them about potential punishments that could effect their futures, rather than talking in euphemisms.
It actually is perfectly fair for komponisto to query why people aren’t conceding the point, since his argument lacked real rebuttals at the time (and still does). To me, it sounds like he is saying “agree with me or show me how I’m wrong.” Since he seems to actually have grounds for being confident in his position, his tone reads as passionate to me, rather than an “not nice.” If someone shows some stronger arguments against his position, and he persists with the same tone, then I would say that he is being “not nice.”
Several people have been rubbed the wrong way by komponisto’s communication style in this discussion, which could well be evidence that it could use improvement. Perhaps if komponisto had spent more time eliciting counter-arguments before arguing that people should agree with him, then he would have avoided that interpretation. Yet calling him “not nice” seems to require acting as if his argument has holes in it which haven’t yet been shown, and requires a particular interpretation of the socioemotional content of his posts that I don’t share:
By saying that “‘I won’t grade it’ is a perfectly reasonable shorthand,” it does sound like orthonormal was defending the acceptability of the oblique phrasing. If komponisto is mischaracterizing orthonormal, let orthonormal be the one to say so.
The question we should ask is whether is it reasonable for komponisto to believe that his position on this subject is so strong that he is justified in considering disagreement with him to be flouting rationalist values. As far as I can tell, his position might be strong enough to justify such a level of confidence. Yet I am not convinced that it is, so I think his meta-comments about rationality on Less Wrong would have been better saved for later. I’m willing to call his comment overconfident, but I’m not willing to call it insulting or a cheap shot.
I disagree that “Exactly what mistake do you think I’m making, all ye hordes-of-orthonormal-upvoters?” needs to be interpreted as an attack. While I wouldn’t object to orthonormal’s comment, his phrasing wasn’t the gentlest.
Yet after you made this post, some people have appeared (e.g. Silas) who do think that komponisto is right (though they think the point is trivial), so perhaps he can get away with saying something like that without being not nice.
Personally, I would have preferred to see a bit more back-and-forth on the substantive issue in this discussion before either of you attempted to go meta (komponisto about why people were disagreeing and their rationality, and you about him being “not nice,” or being the only one who holds such a position).
First of all, this breakdown is much more “not nice” than anything that komponisto said, in the sense that it is explicitly negative against komopnisto’s post. Komponisto wasn’t actually explicitly negative.
Secondly, I think it’s unfortunate and unjustified for people to cop out of disagreements based on rudeness or “discursive impropriety”. Even if you didn’t like what you perceived, that doesn’t give you the justification to “victory by secession”.
That’s not what she did. She explicitly declared that she was done with the argument, not that she won it—by standard debating rules, she forfeited.
And whether she updated as much as she should have is her business, not yours.
And she was reporting her feelings and their sources precisely as requested, not setting out to slander anyone.
To be perfectly frank, I would suggest that the entire thread should have been dropped after her original comment, and should be dropped now.
Doesn’t that mean your reply now contradicts your own suggestion?
Anyways, I find it really funny how debate takes on this aura of “No one shall pass!” when someone accuses someone else of bad intentions. I believe very, very strongly in the idea that debate should never be summarily ended in this manner. In my experience these claims come as a shield for people who are simply unwilling to think through the ideas. Anyone is free to withdraw, or discontinue, but there is no justification for silencing someone else. Hence I reject your suggestion to “drop this conversation”, just on principle, even though I basically know where you’re coming from.
Drop this coversation with Alicorn. You can and should continue elsewhere, with other interested parties, and if necessary you should post a wrapup to conclude any dangling threads.
If someone exits a conversation, that is their choice. But on an internet forum, there is no reason that others shouldn’t reply to them, or continue to make points in response. They don’t have to respond.
So your response to my question, how do I tap out, would be, “You can’t! We’re going to continue to pound you into the ground, even and especially if you’re not defending yourself.” ?
I would think that on a site like this, that wouldn’t be true; the issue of whether someone is appropriately updating seems like exactly what we should be talking about. Leaving people to their own rituals of cognition while believing them to be flawed is not an act of courtesy here.
Whether or not she sought to slander anyone, she came off as pretty harsh for (what seem like) very trivial things. (At least I can link to this if anyone claims my disputes with Alicorn have been 100% unreasonableness on my part...)
Now, if komponisto’s criticized “non-nice” remarks really are offensive to a large group of people, this is important to know—and it’s just as important to know that it’s not someone falsely representing that group for personal reasons.
Umm, hang on, she ‘forfeited’ prior to posting a 500 word reply. I’d say that in the absence of further data it is reasonable to conclude that the forfeit was revoked.
Her reply was not an addition to the previous conversation—it was a meta remark.
(I just noticed this comment. My reply to your earlier comment takes almost exactly the same position.)