But this can only be a misguided goal. What is “good content”? Why do you want it? That is far too generica desideratum! If you just want “good content”, and you don’t really care what kind of “good content”, you’ll inevitably suffer value / focus drift; and if you always want more “good content” without specificgoals concerning how much and what kind and what is it for, then you’ll… well, you’ll have the sort of problem you’re having now, to be honest.
It seems like, having interpreted Vaniver as making an obvious error, you decided to argue at length against it instead of considering that he might have meant something else. This is tedious and is punishing Vaniver for not tediously overspecifying everything.
Suppose that one Alice writes something which I, on the straightforward reading, consider to be definitely and clearly wrong. I read it and imagine two possibilities:
(A) Alice meant exactly what it seems like she wrote.
Presumably, then, Alice disagrees with my judgment of what she wrote as being definitely and clearly wrong. Well, there is nothing unusual in this; I have often encountered cases where people hold views which I consider to be definitely and clearly wrong, and vice-versa. (Surely you can say the same?)
In this case, what else is there to do but to respond to what Alice wrote?
(B) Alice meant something other than what it seems like she wrote.
What might that be? Who knows. I could try to guess what Alice meant. However, that is impossible. So I won’t try. If Alice didn’t mean the thing that it seems, on a straightforward reading, like she meant, then what she actually meant could be anything at all.
But suppose I go ahead and try anyway, I come up with some possible thing that Alice could’ve meant. Do I have any reason to conclude that this is the only possibility for what Alice could’ve meant? I do not. I might be able to think longer, and come up with other possibilities. None of them would offer me any reason to assume that that one is what Alice meant.
And suppose I do pick out (via some mysterious and, no doubt, dubious method) some particular alternate meaning for Alice’s words. Well, and is that correct, then, or wrong? If it’s wrong, then I will argue the point, presumably. But then I will be in the strange position of saying something like this:
“Alice, you wrote X. However, X is obviously wrong. So you couldn’t have meant that. You instead meant Y, probably. But that’s still wrong, and here’s why.”
Have I any reason at all to expect that Alice won’t come back with “Actually, no, I did mean X; why do you say it’s obviously wrong?!”, or “Actually, no, I meant Z!”? None at all. And I’ll have wasted my time, and for what?
This sort of thing is almost always a pointless and terrible way of carrying on a discussion, why is why I don’t and won’t do it.
“I often successfully guess what people meant; it being impossible comes as a surprise to me. Are you claiming this has never happened to you?”
And response B:
Ah, Said likely meant that it is impossible to reliably infer Alice’s meaning, rather than occasionally doing so. But is a strategy where one never infers truly superior to a strategy where one infers, and demonstrates that they’re doing so such that a flat contradiction can be easily corrected?
[Incidentally, I believe this is the disjunction Benquo is pointing at; you seem to imply that either you interpret Alice literally, or you misinterpret Alice, which excludes the case where you correctly interpret Alice.]
[EDIT: I made a mistake in this comment, where response B was originally [what someone would say after doing that substitution], and then I said “wait, it’s not obvious where that came from, I should put the thoughts that would generate that response” and didn’t apply the same mental movement to say “wait, it’s not obvious that response A is a flat response and response B is a thought process that would generate a response, which are different types, I should call that out.”]
Yes, exactly; response A would be the more reasonable one, and more conducive to a smooth continuation of the discussion. So, responding to that one:
“Impossible” in a social context means “basically never happens, and if it does happen then it is probably by accident” (rather than “the laws of physics forbid it!”). Also, it is, of course, possible to guess what someone means by sheer dumb luck—picking an interpretation at random out of some pool of possibilities, no matter how unlikely-seeming, and managing by chance to be right.
But, I can’t remember a time when I’ve read what someone said, rejected the obvious (but obviously wrong) interpretation, tried to guess what they actually meant, and succeeded. When I’ve tried, the actual thing that (as it turned out) they meant was always something which I could never have even imagined as a hypothesis, much less picked out as the likeliest meaning. (And, conversely, when someone else has tried to interpret my comments in symmetric situations, the result has been the same.)
In my experience, this is true: for all practical purposes, either you understand what someone meant, or it’s impossible to guess what they could’ve meant instead.
[Incidentally, I believe this is the disjunction Benquo is pointing at; you seem to imply that either you interpret Alice literally, or you misinterpret Alice, which excludes the case where you correctly interpret Alice.]
This is not what I’m implying, because it’s not what I’m saying and what I’m saying has a straightforward meaning that isn’t this. See this comment. “Literally” is a strawman (not an intentional one, of course, I’m assuming); it can seem like Alice means something, without that necessarily being anything like the “literal reading” of her words (which in any case is a red herring); “straightforward” is what I said, remember.
Edit: I don’t know where all this downvoting is coming from; why is the parent at −2? I did not downvote it, in any case…
A couple more things I think your disjunction is missing.
1) If you don’t know what Alice means, instead of guessing, you can ask.
(alternately, you can offer a brief guess, and give them the opportunity to clarify. This has the benefit of training your ability to infer more about what people mean). You can do all this without making any arguments or judgments until you actually know what Alice meant.
2) Your phrasing implies that if Alice writes something that “seems to straightforwardly mean something, and Alice meant something else”, that the issue is that Alice failed to write adequately. But it’s also possible for the failure to be on the part of your comprehension rather than Alice’s writing. (This might be because Alice is writing for an audience of people with more context/background than you, or different life experiences than you)
Re: asking: well, sure. But what level of confidence in having understood what someone said should prompt asking them for clarification?
If the answer is “anything less than 100%”, then you just never respond directly to anything anyone writes, without first going through an elaborate dance of “before I respond or comment, let me verify that this is what you meant: [insert re-stating of the entirety of the post or comment you’re responding to]”; then, after they say “yes, that is what I meant”, you respond; then, before they respond to you, they first go “now, let me make sure I understand your response: [insert re-stating of the entirety of your response]” … and so on.
Obviously, this is no way to have a discussion.
But if there is some threshold of confidence in having understood that licenses you to go ahead and respond, without first asking whether your interlocutor meant the thing that it seems like they meant, then… well, you’re going to have situations where it turns out that actually, they meant something else.
Unless, of course, what you’re proposing is a policy of always asking for clarification if you disagree, or think that your interlocutor is mistaken, etc.? But then what you’re doing is imposing a greater cost on dissenting responses than assenting ones. Is this really what you want?
Re: did Alice fail to communicate or did I fail to comprehend: well, the question of “who is responsible for successful communication—author or audience?” is hardly a new one. Certainly any answer other than “it is, to some extent, a collaborative effort” is clearly wrong.
The question is, just how much is “some extent”? It is, of course, quite possible to be so pedantic, so literal-minded, so all-around impenetrable, that even the most heroically patient and singularly clear of authors cannot get through to you. On the other hand, it’s also possible to write sloppily, or to just plain have bad ideas. (If I write something that is wrong, and you express your disagreement, and I say “no, you’ve misunderstood, actually I’m right”, is it fair to say that you’ve failed in your duty as a conscientious reader?)
In any case, the matter seems somewhat academic. As far as I can tell, in the case at hand, I have not misunderstood anything that Benquo said. (Certainly I’ve seen no one posting any corrections to my reading of the OP. Mere claims that I’ve misunderstood, with no elaboration, are hardly convincing!)
what level of confidence in having understood what someone said should prompt asking them for clarification?
This is an isolated demand for rigor. Obviously there’s no precise level of confidence, in percentages, that should prompt asking clarification. As with many things, context matters. Sometimes, what indicates a need to ask for clarification is that a disagreement persists for longer than it seems like it ought to (indicating that there might be something deeper at work, like a misunderstanding). Sometimes, what indicates this is your interlocutor saying something that seems absurd or obviously mistaken. The second seems relevant in the immediate instance, given that what prompted this line of discussion was your taking Vaniver at his word when he said something that seemed, to you, obviously mistaken.
Note that I say “obviously mistaken.” If your interlocutor says something that seems mistaken, that’s one thing, and as you say, it shouldn’t always prompt a request for clarification; sometimes there’s just a simple disagreement in play. But if your interlocutor says something that seems obviously wrong, and at the same time they seem like a generally smart person who isn’t wont to say obviously wrong things, that may indicate that there is something they see that you don’t, in which case it would be useful to ask for clarification.
In this particular case, it seems to me that “good content” could be vacuous, or it could be a stand-in for something like “content that meets some standards which I vaguely have in mind but don’t feel the desire or need to specify at the moment.” It looks like Vaniver, hoping that you would realize that the first usage is so obviously dumb that he wouldn’t be intending it, used it to mean the second usage in order to save some typing time or brain cycles or something (I don’t claim to know what particular standards he has in mind, but clearly standards that would be useful for “solving problems related to advancing human rationality and avoiding human extinction”). You interpreted it as the first anyways, even though it seemed to you quite obviously a bad idea to optimize for “good content” in that vacuous sense. Instead, the fact that it seemed not only wrong, but obviously wrong, should have alerted you to the fact that Vaniver perhaps meant something different, at which point you could have asked for clarification (“what do you have in mind when you say ‘good content’, that seems to me obviously too vacuous to be a good idea. Perhaps you have some more concrete standards in mind and simply decided not to spell them out?”)
As far as I can tell, in the case at hand, I have not misunderstood anything that Benquo said.
“The case at hand” was your misunderstanding of Vaniver, not Benquo.
Hm. After writing this comment I notice I did something of the same thing to you. I interpreted your request for a numerical threshold literally, even though I considered it not only mistaken, but obviously so. Thus I retract my claim (at least in its strong form “any time your interlocutor says something that seems obviously mistaken, ask for clarification”). I continue to think that asking for clarification is often useful, but I think that, as with many things, there are few or no hard-and-fast rules for when to do so; rather, there are messy heuristics. If your interlocutor says something obviously mistaken, that’s sometimes an indication that you should ask for clarification. Sometimes it’s not. I think it probably would have been prudent for you to either ask for clarification from Vaniver, or assume he didn’t mean the vacuous interpretation of “good content.” I think I probably don’t need to ask for clarification about what you meant, it seemed pretty obvious you meant it literally. I realize this seems like a rather self-serving set of judgements. Perhaps it is. I’m not really sure what to do about that right now, or whether and how to revise it.
EDIT: if it turns out you didn’t mean it literally, then obviously I will know how I should revise my judgements (namely I should revise my judgement that I didn’t need to ask you for clarification).
Ikaxas, I would be strong-upvoting your comments here except that I’m guessing engaging further here does more harm than good. I’d like to encourage you to write a separate post instead, perhaps reusing large portions of your comments. It seems like you have a bunch of valuable things to say about how to use the interpretive labor concept properly in discourse.
Well, the second part of your comment (after the rule) pre-empts much of what I was going to say, so—yes, indeed. Other than that:
I think it probably would have been prudent for you to either ask for clarification from Vaniver, or assume he didn’t mean the vacuous interpretation of “good content.” I think I probably don’t need to ask for clarification about what you meant, it seemed pretty obvious you meant it literally. I realize this seems like a rather self-serving set of judgements. Perhaps it is. I’m not really sure what to do about that right now, or whether and how to revise it.
Yes, I think this seems like a rather self-serving set of judgments.
As it happens, I didn’t mean my question literally, in the sense that it was a rhetorical question. My point, in fact, was almost precisely what you responded, namely: clearly the threshold is not 100%, and also clearly, it’s going to depend on context… but that it’s below 100% is really the key point, because it means that you’re going to have false positives—cases where you think that your interlocutor’s intent was clear and that you understood correctly, but where in fact you did not.
Other points:
But if your interlocutor says something that seems obviously wrong, and at the same time they seem like a generally smart person who isn’t wont to say obviously wrong things …
I have never met such a person, despite being surrounded, in my social environment, by people at least as intelligent as I am, and often more so. In my experience, everyone says obviously wrong things sometimes (and, conversely, I sometimes say things that seem obviously wrong to others). If this never happens to you, then this might be evidence of some troubling properties of your social circles.
In this particular case, it seems to me that “good content” could be vacuous, or it could be a stand-in for something like “content that meets some standards which I vaguely have in mind but don’t feel the desire or need to specify at the moment.”
That’s still vacuous, though. If that’s what it’s a stand-in for, then I stand by my comments.
Instead, the fact that it seemed not only wrong, but obviously wrong, should have alerted you to the fact that Vaniver perhaps meant something different, at which point you could have asked for clarification (“what do you have in mind when you say ‘good content’, that seems to me obviously too vacuous to be a good idea. Perhaps you have some more concrete standards in mind and simply decided not to spell them out?”)
Indeed, I could have. But consider these two scenarios:
Scenario 1:
Alice: [makes some statement]
Bob: What do you mean by that? Surely not [straightforward reading], right? Because that would be obviously wrong. So what do you mean instead?
Scenario 2:
Alice: [makes some statement]
Bob: That’s obviously wrong, because [reasons].
Alice: But of course [straightforward reading] isn’t actually what I meant, as that would indeed be obviously wrong. Instead, I meant [other thing].
You seem to be saying that Scenario 1 is obviously (!!) superior to Scenario 2. But I disagree! I think Scenario 2 is better.
… now, does this claim of mine seem obviously wrong to you? Is it immediately clear why I say this? (If I hadn’t asked this, would you have asked for clarification?) I hope you don’t mind if I defer the rest of my point until after your response to this bit, as I think it’s an interesting test case. (If you don’t want to guess, fair enough; let me know, and I’ll just make the rest of my point.)
I’ve been mulling over where I went wrong here, and I think I’ve got it.
that it’s below 100% is really the key point, because it means that you’re going to have false positives—cases where you think that your interlocutor’s intent was clear and that you understood correctly, but where in fact you did not.
I think this is where I misinterpreted you. I think I thought you were trying to claim that unless there’s some threshold or some clear rule for deciding when to ask for clarification, it’s not worth implementing “ask for clarification if you’re unsure” as a conversational norm at all, which is why I said it was an isolated demand for rigor. But if all you were trying to say was what you said in the quoted bit, that’s not an isolated demand for rigor. I totally agree that there will be false positives, in the sense that misunderstandings can persist for a while without anyone noticing or thinking to ask for clarification, without this being anyone’s fault. However, I also think that if there is a misunderstanding, this will become apparent at some point if the conversation goes on long enough, and whenever that is, it’s worth stopping to have one or both parties do something in the vicinity of trying to pass the other’s ITT, to see where the confusion is.
I think another part of the problem here is that part of what I was trying to argue was that in this case, of your (mis?)understanding of Vaniver, it should have been apparent that you needed to ask for clarification, but I’m much less confident of this now. My arguing that, if a discussion goes on long enough, misunderstandings will reveal themselves, isn’t enough to argue that in this case you should immediately have recognized that you had misunderstood (if in fact you have misunderstood, which if you still object to Vaniver’s point as I reframed it may not be the case.) My model allows that misunderstandings can persist for quite a while unnoticed, so it doesn’t really entail that you ought to have asked for clarification here, in this very instance.
Anyway, as Ben suggested I’m working on a post laying out my views on interpretive labor, ITTs, etc. in more detail, so I’ll say more there. (Relatedly, is there a way to create a top-level post from greaterwrong? I’ve been looking for a while and haven’t been able to find it if there is.)
consider these two scenarios
I agree the model I’ve been laying out here would suggest that the first scenario is better, but I find myself unsure which I think is better all things considered. I certainly don’t think scenario 1 is obviously better, despite the fact that this is probably at least a little inconsistent with my previous comments. My rough guess as to where you’re going with this is something like “scenario 1 is a waste of words since scenario 2 achieves the same results more efficiently (namely, the misunderstanding is cleared up either way).”
If this is where you are going, I have a couple disagreements with it, but I’ll wait until you’ve explained the rest of your point to state them in case I’ve guessed wrong (which I’d guess is fairly likely in this case).
My rough guess as to where you’re going with this is something like “scenario 1 is a waste of words since scenario 2 achieves the same results more efficiently (namely, the misunderstanding is cleared up either way).”
Basically, yes.
The problem, really, is—what? Not misunderstanding per se; that is solvable. The problem is the double illusion of transparency; when I think I’ve understood you (that is, I think that my interpretation of your words, call it X, matches your intent, which I assume is also X), and you think I’ve understood you (that is, you think that my interpretation of your words is Y, which matches what you know to be your intent, i.e. also Y); but actually your intent was Y and my interpretation is X, and neither of us is aware of this composite fact.
How to avoid this? Well, actually this might be one of two questions: first, how to guarantee that you avoid it? second, how to mostly guarantee that you avoid it? (It is easy to see that relaxing the requirement potentially yields gains in efficiency, which is why we are interested in the latter question also.)
Scenario 1—essentially, verifying your interpretation explicitly, every time any new ideas are exchanged—is one way of guaranteeing (to within some epsilon) the avoidance of double illusion of transparency. Unfortunately, it’s extremely inefficient. It gets tedious very quickly; frustration ensues. This approach cannot be maintained. It is not a solution, inasmuch as part of what makes a solution workable is that it must be actually practical to apply it.
By the way—just why is scenario 1 so very, very inefficient? Is it only because of the overhead of verification messages (a la the SYN-ACK of TCP)? That is a big part of the problem, but not the only problem. Consider this extended version:
Scenario 1a:
Alice: [makes some statement]
Bob: What do you mean by that? Surely not [straightforward reading], right? Because that would be obviously wrong. So what do you mean instead?
Alice: Wait, what? Why would that be obviously wrong?
Bob: Well, because [reasons], of course.
So now we’ve devolved into scenario 2, but having wasted two messages. And gained… what? Nothing.
Scenario 2—essentially, never explicitly verifying anything, responding to your interpretation of your interlocutors’s comments, and trusting that any misinterpretation will be inferred from your response and corrected—is one way of mostly guaranteeing the avoidance of double illusion of transparency. It is not foolproof, of course, but it is very efficient.
Scenarios 1 and 2 aren’t our only options. There is also…
Scenario 3:
Alice: [makes some statement]
Bob: Assuming you meant [straightforward reading], that is obviously wrong, because [reasons].
Note that we are now guaranteed (and not just mostly guaranteed) to avoid the double illusion of transparency. If Bob misinterpreted Alice, she can correct him. If Bob interpreted correctly, Alice can immediately respond to Bob’s criticism.
There is still overhead; Bob has to spend effort on explaining his interpretation of Alice. But it is considerably less overhead than scenario 1, and it is the minimum amount of overhead that still guarantees avoidance of the double illusion of transparency.
Personally, I favor the scenario 3 approach in cases of only moderate confidence that I’ve correctly understood my interlocutor, and the scenario 2 approach in cases of high confidence that I’ve correctly understood. (In cases of unusually low confidence, one simply asks for clarification, without necessarily putting forth a hypothesized interpretation.)
Scenarios 2 and 3 are undermined, however—their effectiveness and efficiency dramatically lowered—if people take offense at being misinterpreted, and demand that their critics achieve certainty of having correctly understood them, before writing any criticism. If people take any mis-aimed criticism as a personal attack, or lack of “interpretive labor” (in the form of the verification step as a prerequisite to criticism) as a sign of disrespect, then, obviously, scenarios 2 and 3 cannot work.
This constitutes a massive sacrifice of efficiency of communication, and thereby (because the burden of that inefficiency is borne by critics) disincentivizes lively debate, correction of flaws, and the exchange of ideas. What is gained, for that hefty price, is nothing.
After quite a while thinking about it I’m still not sure I have an adequate response to this comment; I do take your points, they’re quite good. I’ll do my best to respond to this in the post I’m writing on this topic. Perhaps when I post it we can continue the discussion there if you feel it doesn’t adequately address your points.
Relatedly, is there a way to create a top-level post from greaterwrong? I’ve been looking for a while and haven’t been able to find it if there is.
Indeed there is. You go to the All view or the Meta view, and click the green “+ New post” link at the upper-right, just below the tab bar. (The new-post link currently doesn’t display when viewing your own user page, which is an oversight and should be fixed soon.)
That’s not a spurious binary, and in any case it doesn’t make the disjunction wrong. Observe:
Let P = “Alice meant exactly what it seems like she wrote.”
¬P = “It is not the case that Alice meant exactly what it seems like she wrote.”
And we know that P ∨ ¬P is true for all P.
Is “It is not the case that Alice meant exactly what it seems like she wrote” the same as “Alice meant something other than what it seems like she wrote”?
No, not quite. Other possibilities include things like “Alice didn’t mean anything at all, and was making a nonsense comment, as a sort of performance art”, etc. But I think we can discount those.
It seems like, having interpreted Vaniver as making an obvious error, you decided to argue at length against it instead of considering that he might have meant something else. This is tedious and is punishing Vaniver for not tediously overspecifying everything.
This attitude makes very little sense.
Suppose that one Alice writes something which I, on the straightforward reading, consider to be definitely and clearly wrong. I read it and imagine two possibilities:
(A) Alice meant exactly what it seems like she wrote.
Presumably, then, Alice disagrees with my judgment of what she wrote as being definitely and clearly wrong. Well, there is nothing unusual in this; I have often encountered cases where people hold views which I consider to be definitely and clearly wrong, and vice-versa. (Surely you can say the same?)
In this case, what else is there to do but to respond to what Alice wrote?
(B) Alice meant something other than what it seems like she wrote.
What might that be? Who knows. I could try to guess what Alice meant. However, that is impossible. So I won’t try. If Alice didn’t mean the thing that it seems, on a straightforward reading, like she meant, then what she actually meant could be anything at all.
But suppose I go ahead and try anyway, I come up with some possible thing that Alice could’ve meant. Do I have any reason to conclude that this is the only possibility for what Alice could’ve meant? I do not. I might be able to think longer, and come up with other possibilities. None of them would offer me any reason to assume that that one is what Alice meant.
And suppose I do pick out (via some mysterious and, no doubt, dubious method) some particular alternate meaning for Alice’s words. Well, and is that correct, then, or wrong? If it’s wrong, then I will argue the point, presumably. But then I will be in the strange position of saying something like this:
“Alice, you wrote X. However, X is obviously wrong. So you couldn’t have meant that. You instead meant Y, probably. But that’s still wrong, and here’s why.”
Have I any reason at all to expect that Alice won’t come back with “Actually, no, I did mean X; why do you say it’s obviously wrong?!”, or “Actually, no, I meant Z!”? None at all. And I’ll have wasted my time, and for what?
This sort of thing is almost always a pointless and terrible way of carrying on a discussion, why is why I don’t and won’t do it.
Consider response A:
“I often successfully guess what people meant; it being impossible comes as a surprise to me. Are you claiming this has never happened to you?”
And response B:
Ah, Said likely meant that it is impossible to reliably infer Alice’s meaning, rather than occasionally doing so. But is a strategy where one never infers truly superior to a strategy where one infers, and demonstrates that they’re doing so such that a flat contradiction can be easily corrected?
[Incidentally, I believe this is the disjunction Benquo is pointing at; you seem to imply that either you interpret Alice literally, or you misinterpret Alice, which excludes the case where you correctly interpret Alice.]
[EDIT: I made a mistake in this comment, where response B was originally [what someone would say after doing that substitution], and then I said “wait, it’s not obvious where that came from, I should put the thoughts that would generate that response” and didn’t apply the same mental movement to say “wait, it’s not obvious that response A is a flat response and response B is a thought process that would generate a response, which are different types, I should call that out.”]
Yes, exactly; response A would be the more reasonable one, and more conducive to a smooth continuation of the discussion. So, responding to that one:
“Impossible” in a social context means “basically never happens, and if it does happen then it is probably by accident” (rather than “the laws of physics forbid it!”). Also, it is, of course, possible to guess what someone means by sheer dumb luck—picking an interpretation at random out of some pool of possibilities, no matter how unlikely-seeming, and managing by chance to be right.
But, I can’t remember a time when I’ve read what someone said, rejected the obvious (but obviously wrong) interpretation, tried to guess what they actually meant, and succeeded. When I’ve tried, the actual thing that (as it turned out) they meant was always something which I could never have even imagined as a hypothesis, much less picked out as the likeliest meaning. (And, conversely, when someone else has tried to interpret my comments in symmetric situations, the result has been the same.)
In my experience, this is true: for all practical purposes, either you understand what someone meant, or it’s impossible to guess what they could’ve meant instead.
This is not what I’m implying, because it’s not what I’m saying and what I’m saying has a straightforward meaning that isn’t this. See this comment. “Literally” is a strawman (not an intentional one, of course, I’m assuming); it can seem like Alice means something, without that necessarily being anything like the “literal reading” of her words (which in any case is a red herring); “straightforward” is what I said, remember.
Edit: I don’t know where all this downvoting is coming from; why is the parent at −2? I did not downvote it, in any case…
A couple more things I think your disjunction is missing.
1) If you don’t know what Alice means, instead of guessing, you can ask.
(alternately, you can offer a brief guess, and give them the opportunity to clarify. This has the benefit of training your ability to infer more about what people mean). You can do all this without making any arguments or judgments until you actually know what Alice meant.
2) Your phrasing implies that if Alice writes something that “seems to straightforwardly mean something, and Alice meant something else”, that the issue is that Alice failed to write adequately. But it’s also possible for the failure to be on the part of your comprehension rather than Alice’s writing. (This might be because Alice is writing for an audience of people with more context/background than you, or different life experiences than you)
Re: asking: well, sure. But what level of confidence in having understood what someone said should prompt asking them for clarification?
If the answer is “anything less than 100%”, then you just never respond directly to anything anyone writes, without first going through an elaborate dance of “before I respond or comment, let me verify that this is what you meant: [insert re-stating of the entirety of the post or comment you’re responding to]”; then, after they say “yes, that is what I meant”, you respond; then, before they respond to you, they first go “now, let me make sure I understand your response: [insert re-stating of the entirety of your response]” … and so on.
Obviously, this is no way to have a discussion.
But if there is some threshold of confidence in having understood that licenses you to go ahead and respond, without first asking whether your interlocutor meant the thing that it seems like they meant, then… well, you’re going to have situations where it turns out that actually, they meant something else.
Unless, of course, what you’re proposing is a policy of always asking for clarification if you disagree, or think that your interlocutor is mistaken, etc.? But then what you’re doing is imposing a greater cost on dissenting responses than assenting ones. Is this really what you want?
Re: did Alice fail to communicate or did I fail to comprehend: well, the question of “who is responsible for successful communication—author or audience?” is hardly a new one. Certainly any answer other than “it is, to some extent, a collaborative effort” is clearly wrong.
The question is, just how much is “some extent”? It is, of course, quite possible to be so pedantic, so literal-minded, so all-around impenetrable, that even the most heroically patient and singularly clear of authors cannot get through to you. On the other hand, it’s also possible to write sloppily, or to just plain have bad ideas. (If I write something that is wrong, and you express your disagreement, and I say “no, you’ve misunderstood, actually I’m right”, is it fair to say that you’ve failed in your duty as a conscientious reader?)
In any case, the matter seems somewhat academic. As far as I can tell, in the case at hand, I have not misunderstood anything that Benquo said. (Certainly I’ve seen no one posting any corrections to my reading of the OP. Mere claims that I’ve misunderstood, with no elaboration, are hardly convincing!)
This is an isolated demand for rigor. Obviously there’s no precise level of confidence, in percentages, that should prompt asking clarification. As with many things, context matters. Sometimes, what indicates a need to ask for clarification is that a disagreement persists for longer than it seems like it ought to (indicating that there might be something deeper at work, like a misunderstanding). Sometimes, what indicates this is your interlocutor saying something that seems absurd or obviously mistaken. The second seems relevant in the immediate instance, given that what prompted this line of discussion was your taking Vaniver at his word when he said something that seemed, to you, obviously mistaken.
Note that I say “obviously mistaken.” If your interlocutor says something that seems mistaken, that’s one thing, and as you say, it shouldn’t always prompt a request for clarification; sometimes there’s just a simple disagreement in play. But if your interlocutor says something that seems obviously wrong, and at the same time they seem like a generally smart person who isn’t wont to say obviously wrong things, that may indicate that there is something they see that you don’t, in which case it would be useful to ask for clarification.
In this particular case, it seems to me that “good content” could be vacuous, or it could be a stand-in for something like “content that meets some standards which I vaguely have in mind but don’t feel the desire or need to specify at the moment.” It looks like Vaniver, hoping that you would realize that the first usage is so obviously dumb that he wouldn’t be intending it, used it to mean the second usage in order to save some typing time or brain cycles or something (I don’t claim to know what particular standards he has in mind, but clearly standards that would be useful for “solving problems related to advancing human rationality and avoiding human extinction”). You interpreted it as the first anyways, even though it seemed to you quite obviously a bad idea to optimize for “good content” in that vacuous sense. Instead, the fact that it seemed not only wrong, but obviously wrong, should have alerted you to the fact that Vaniver perhaps meant something different, at which point you could have asked for clarification (“what do you have in mind when you say ‘good content’, that seems to me obviously too vacuous to be a good idea. Perhaps you have some more concrete standards in mind and simply decided not to spell them out?”)
“The case at hand” was your misunderstanding of Vaniver, not Benquo.
Hm. After writing this comment I notice I did something of the same thing to you. I interpreted your request for a numerical threshold literally, even though I considered it not only mistaken, but obviously so. Thus I retract my claim (at least in its strong form “any time your interlocutor says something that seems obviously mistaken, ask for clarification”). I continue to think that asking for clarification is often useful, but I think that, as with many things, there are few or no hard-and-fast rules for when to do so; rather, there are messy heuristics. If your interlocutor says something obviously mistaken, that’s sometimes an indication that you should ask for clarification. Sometimes it’s not. I think it probably would have been prudent for you to either ask for clarification from Vaniver, or assume he didn’t mean the vacuous interpretation of “good content.” I think I probably don’t need to ask for clarification about what you meant, it seemed pretty obvious you meant it literally. I realize this seems like a rather self-serving set of judgements. Perhaps it is. I’m not really sure what to do about that right now, or whether and how to revise it.
EDIT: if it turns out you didn’t mean it literally, then obviously I will know how I should revise my judgements (namely I should revise my judgement that I didn’t need to ask you for clarification).
Ikaxas, I would be strong-upvoting your comments here except that I’m guessing engaging further here does more harm than good. I’d like to encourage you to write a separate post instead, perhaps reusing large portions of your comments. It seems like you have a bunch of valuable things to say about how to use the interpretive labor concept properly in discourse.
Thanks for the encouragement. I will try writing one and see how it goes.
Well, the second part of your comment (after the rule) pre-empts much of what I was going to say, so—yes, indeed. Other than that:
Yes, I think this seems like a rather self-serving set of judgments.
As it happens, I didn’t mean my question literally, in the sense that it was a rhetorical question. My point, in fact, was almost precisely what you responded, namely: clearly the threshold is not 100%, and also clearly, it’s going to depend on context… but that it’s below 100% is really the key point, because it means that you’re going to have false positives—cases where you think that your interlocutor’s intent was clear and that you understood correctly, but where in fact you did not.
Other points:
I have never met such a person, despite being surrounded, in my social environment, by people at least as intelligent as I am, and often more so. In my experience, everyone says obviously wrong things sometimes (and, conversely, I sometimes say things that seem obviously wrong to others). If this never happens to you, then this might be evidence of some troubling properties of your social circles.
That’s still vacuous, though. If that’s what it’s a stand-in for, then I stand by my comments.
Indeed, I could have. But consider these two scenarios:
Scenario 1:
Alice: [makes some statement]
Bob: What do you mean by that? Surely not [straightforward reading], right? Because that would be obviously wrong. So what do you mean instead?
Scenario 2:
Alice: [makes some statement]
Bob: That’s obviously wrong, because [reasons].
Alice: But of course [straightforward reading] isn’t actually what I meant, as that would indeed be obviously wrong. Instead, I meant [other thing].
You seem to be saying that Scenario 1 is obviously (!!) superior to Scenario 2. But I disagree! I think Scenario 2 is better.
… now, does this claim of mine seem obviously wrong to you? Is it immediately clear why I say this? (If I hadn’t asked this, would you have asked for clarification?) I hope you don’t mind if I defer the rest of my point until after your response to this bit, as I think it’s an interesting test case. (If you don’t want to guess, fair enough; let me know, and I’ll just make the rest of my point.)
I’ve been mulling over where I went wrong here, and I think I’ve got it.
I think this is where I misinterpreted you. I think I thought you were trying to claim that unless there’s some threshold or some clear rule for deciding when to ask for clarification, it’s not worth implementing “ask for clarification if you’re unsure” as a conversational norm at all, which is why I said it was an isolated demand for rigor. But if all you were trying to say was what you said in the quoted bit, that’s not an isolated demand for rigor. I totally agree that there will be false positives, in the sense that misunderstandings can persist for a while without anyone noticing or thinking to ask for clarification, without this being anyone’s fault. However, I also think that if there is a misunderstanding, this will become apparent at some point if the conversation goes on long enough, and whenever that is, it’s worth stopping to have one or both parties do something in the vicinity of trying to pass the other’s ITT, to see where the confusion is.
I think another part of the problem here is that part of what I was trying to argue was that in this case, of your (mis?)understanding of Vaniver, it should have been apparent that you needed to ask for clarification, but I’m much less confident of this now. My arguing that, if a discussion goes on long enough, misunderstandings will reveal themselves, isn’t enough to argue that in this case you should immediately have recognized that you had misunderstood (if in fact you have misunderstood, which if you still object to Vaniver’s point as I reframed it may not be the case.) My model allows that misunderstandings can persist for quite a while unnoticed, so it doesn’t really entail that you ought to have asked for clarification here, in this very instance.
Anyway, as Ben suggested I’m working on a post laying out my views on interpretive labor, ITTs, etc. in more detail, so I’ll say more there. (Relatedly, is there a way to create a top-level post from greaterwrong? I’ve been looking for a while and haven’t been able to find it if there is.)
I agree the model I’ve been laying out here would suggest that the first scenario is better, but I find myself unsure which I think is better all things considered. I certainly don’t think scenario 1 is obviously better, despite the fact that this is probably at least a little inconsistent with my previous comments. My rough guess as to where you’re going with this is something like “scenario 1 is a waste of words since scenario 2 achieves the same results more efficiently (namely, the misunderstanding is cleared up either way).”
If this is where you are going, I have a couple disagreements with it, but I’ll wait until you’ve explained the rest of your point to state them in case I’ve guessed wrong (which I’d guess is fairly likely in this case).
Basically, yes.
The problem, really, is—what? Not misunderstanding per se; that is solvable. The problem is the double illusion of transparency; when I think I’ve understood you (that is, I think that my interpretation of your words, call it X, matches your intent, which I assume is also X), and you think I’ve understood you (that is, you think that my interpretation of your words is Y, which matches what you know to be your intent, i.e. also Y); but actually your intent was Y and my interpretation is X, and neither of us is aware of this composite fact.
How to avoid this? Well, actually this might be one of two questions: first, how to guarantee that you avoid it? second, how to mostly guarantee that you avoid it? (It is easy to see that relaxing the requirement potentially yields gains in efficiency, which is why we are interested in the latter question also.)
Scenario 1—essentially, verifying your interpretation explicitly, every time any new ideas are exchanged—is one way of guaranteeing (to within some epsilon) the avoidance of double illusion of transparency. Unfortunately, it’s extremely inefficient. It gets tedious very quickly; frustration ensues. This approach cannot be maintained. It is not a solution, inasmuch as part of what makes a solution workable is that it must be actually practical to apply it.
By the way—just why is scenario 1 so very, very inefficient? Is it only because of the overhead of verification messages (a la the SYN-ACK of TCP)? That is a big part of the problem, but not the only problem. Consider this extended version:
Scenario 1a:
Alice: [makes some statement]
Bob: What do you mean by that? Surely not [straightforward reading], right? Because that would be obviously wrong. So what do you mean instead?
Alice: Wait, what? Why would that be obviously wrong?
Bob: Well, because [reasons], of course.
So now we’ve devolved into scenario 2, but having wasted two messages. And gained… what? Nothing.
Scenario 2—essentially, never explicitly verifying anything, responding to your interpretation of your interlocutors’s comments, and trusting that any misinterpretation will be inferred from your response and corrected—is one way of mostly guaranteeing the avoidance of double illusion of transparency. It is not foolproof, of course, but it is very efficient.
Scenarios 1 and 2 aren’t our only options. There is also…
Scenario 3:
Alice: [makes some statement]
Bob: Assuming you meant [straightforward reading], that is obviously wrong, because [reasons].
Note that we are now guaranteed (and not just mostly guaranteed) to avoid the double illusion of transparency. If Bob misinterpreted Alice, she can correct him. If Bob interpreted correctly, Alice can immediately respond to Bob’s criticism.
There is still overhead; Bob has to spend effort on explaining his interpretation of Alice. But it is considerably less overhead than scenario 1, and it is the minimum amount of overhead that still guarantees avoidance of the double illusion of transparency.
Personally, I favor the scenario 3 approach in cases of only moderate confidence that I’ve correctly understood my interlocutor, and the scenario 2 approach in cases of high confidence that I’ve correctly understood. (In cases of unusually low confidence, one simply asks for clarification, without necessarily putting forth a hypothesized interpretation.)
Scenarios 2 and 3 are undermined, however—their effectiveness and efficiency dramatically lowered—if people take offense at being misinterpreted, and demand that their critics achieve certainty of having correctly understood them, before writing any criticism. If people take any mis-aimed criticism as a personal attack, or lack of “interpretive labor” (in the form of the verification step as a prerequisite to criticism) as a sign of disrespect, then, obviously, scenarios 2 and 3 cannot work.
This constitutes a massive sacrifice of efficiency of communication, and thereby (because the burden of that inefficiency is borne by critics) disincentivizes lively debate, correction of flaws, and the exchange of ideas. What is gained, for that hefty price, is nothing.
After quite a while thinking about it I’m still not sure I have an adequate response to this comment; I do take your points, they’re quite good. I’ll do my best to respond to this in the post I’m writing on this topic. Perhaps when I post it we can continue the discussion there if you feel it doesn’t adequately address your points.
Sounds good, and I am looking forward to reading your post!
Indeed there is. You go to the All view or the Meta view, and click the green “+ New post” link at the upper-right, just below the tab bar. (The new-post link currently doesn’t display when viewing your own user page, which is an oversight and should be fixed soon.)
Ah, thanks!
Your disjunction is wrong.
EDIT: oops, replied to the wrong comment.
How?
Spurious binary between one way things really seem, and the many ways one might guess. Even the one way it seems to you is in fact an educated guess.
That’s not a spurious binary, and in any case it doesn’t make the disjunction wrong. Observe:
Let P = “Alice meant exactly what it seems like she wrote.”
¬P = “It is not the case that Alice meant exactly what it seems like she wrote.”
And we know that P ∨ ¬P is true for all P.
Is “It is not the case that Alice meant exactly what it seems like she wrote” the same as “Alice meant something other than what it seems like she wrote”?
No, not quite. Other possibilities include things like “Alice didn’t mean anything at all, and was making a nonsense comment, as a sort of performance art”, etc. But I think we can discount those.