I think that someone reading this would be challenged to figure out for themselves what assumptions they think are justified in good discourse, and would fix some possible bad advice they took from reading Sabien’s post. I give this a +4.
(Below is a not especially focused discussion of some points raised; perhaps after I’ve done more reviews I can come back and tighten this up.)
Sabien’s Fifth guideline is “Aim for convergence on truth, and behave as if your interlocutors are also aiming for convergence on truth.”
My guess is that the idea that motivates Sabien’s Fifth Guideline is something like “Assume by-default that people are contributing to the discourse in order to share true information and strong arguments, rather than posing as doing that while sharing arguments they don’t believe or false information in order to win”, out of a sense that there is indeed enough basic trust to realize this as an equilibrium, and also a sense that this is one of the ~best equilibriums for public discourse to be in.
One thing this post argues is that a person’s motives are of little interest when one can assess their arguments. Argument screens off authority and many other things too. So we don’t need to make these assumptions about people’s motives.
There’s a sense in which I buy that, and yet also a sense in which the epistemic environment I’m in matters. Consider two possibilities:
I’m in an environment of people aspiring to “make true and accurate contributions to the discourse” but who are making many mistakes/failing.
I’m in an environment of people who are primarily sharing arguments and evidence filtered to sound convincing for positions that are convenient to them, and are pretending to be sort of people described in the first one.
I anticipate very different kinds of discussions, traps, and epistemic defenses I’ll want to have in the two environments, and I do want to treat the individuals differently.
I think there is a sense in which I can just focus on local validity and evaluating the strength of arguments, and that this is generally more resilient to whatever the particular motives are of the people in the local environment, but my guess is that I should still relate to people and their arguments differently, and invest in different explanations or different incentives or different kinds of comment thread behavior.
I also think this provides good pushbacks on some possible behaviors people might take away from Sabien’s fifth guideline. (I don’t think that this post correctly understands what Sabien is going for, but I think bringing up reasonable hypotheses and showing why they don’t make sense is helpful for people’s understanding of how to participate well in discourse.)
Simplifying a bit, this is another entry in the long-running discourse on how adversarial one should model individuals in public discourse as, and what assumptions to make about other people’s motives, and I think this provides useful arguments about that topic.
I think that someone reading this would be challenged to figure out for themselves what assumptions they think are justified in good discourse, and would fix some possible bad advice they took from reading Sabien’s post. I give this a +4.
(Below is a not especially focused discussion of some points raised; perhaps after I’ve done more reviews I can come back and tighten this up.)
Sabien’s Fifth guideline is “Aim for convergence on truth, and behave as if your interlocutors are also aiming for convergence on truth.”
My guess is that the idea that motivates Sabien’s Fifth Guideline is something like “Assume by-default that people are contributing to the discourse in order to share true information and strong arguments, rather than posing as doing that while sharing arguments they don’t believe or false information in order to win”, out of a sense that there is indeed enough basic trust to realize this as an equilibrium, and also a sense that this is one of the ~best equilibriums for public discourse to be in.
One thing this post argues is that a person’s motives are of little interest when one can assess their arguments. Argument screens off authority and many other things too. So we don’t need to make these assumptions about people’s motives.
There’s a sense in which I buy that, and yet also a sense in which the epistemic environment I’m in matters. Consider two possibilities:
I’m in an environment of people aspiring to “make true and accurate contributions to the discourse” but who are making many mistakes/failing.
I’m in an environment of people who are primarily sharing arguments and evidence filtered to sound convincing for positions that are convenient to them, and are pretending to be sort of people described in the first one.
I anticipate very different kinds of discussions, traps, and epistemic defenses I’ll want to have in the two environments, and I do want to treat the individuals differently.
I think there is a sense in which I can just focus on local validity and evaluating the strength of arguments, and that this is generally more resilient to whatever the particular motives are of the people in the local environment, but my guess is that I should still relate to people and their arguments differently, and invest in different explanations or different incentives or different kinds of comment thread behavior.
I also think this provides good pushbacks on some possible behaviors people might take away from Sabien’s fifth guideline. (I don’t think that this post correctly understands what Sabien is going for, but I think bringing up reasonable hypotheses and showing why they don’t make sense is helpful for people’s understanding of how to participate well in discourse.)
Simplifying a bit, this is another entry in the long-running discourse on how adversarial one should model individuals in public discourse as, and what assumptions to make about other people’s motives, and I think this provides useful arguments about that topic.