I suspect you have a notion of what “making proper arguments” is—and it involves clearly explaining your reasoning and such—and view participation in the forum as a game in which participants are trying to be the best at “making proper (and novel) arguments”.
Right!
specifically, are at least somewhat prone to turn arguments into slap fights if they feel like they’ve been slapped
I guess I’m OK with a little bit of slap-fighting when I don’t think it’s interfering too much with the “make proper and novel arguments” game, and that on the current margin (in the spaces where people are reading this post and the one it’s responding to), I’m worried that the cure is worse than the disease (even though this is a weird problem to have relative to the rest of the internet)?
The standard failure mode where fighting and insults get in the way of making-proper-and-novel-arguments is definitely bad. But in the spaces I inhabit, I’m much worried about the failure mode where people form a hugbox/echo-chamber where they/we congratulate them/our-selves on being such good “collaborative truth-seekers”, while implicitly colluding to shut out proper and novel arguments on the pretext that the speaker is being insufficiently “collaborative”, “charitable”, &c.
In particular, if I make a criticism that is itself wrong, I think it’s great and fine for people to just criticize my criticism right back, even if the process of litigating that superficially looks like a slap-fight. I think that’s more intellectually productive than (for example) expecting critics to pre-emptively pass someone’s Intellectual Turing Test.
therefore to have the “ideal posting goals” call for error-correcting mechanisms and stuff that make this less likely.
I’m in favor of ideal posting goals and error-correcting mechanisms, but I think that “rationalist” goals need to justify themselves in terms of correctness and only correctness, and I’m extremely wary of norm-enforcement attempts that I see as compromising correctness in favor of politeness (even when the people making such an attempt don’t think of themselves as compromising correctness in favor of politeness).
If someone thinks I’m mistaken in my claim that a particular norm-enforcement attempt is sacrificing correctness in favor of politeness, I’m happy to argue the details and explain why I think that, but it’s frustrating when attempts to explain problems with proposed norms are themselves subjected to attempts to enforce the norms that are being objected to!
The difference with betting markets is: with a betting market, you hope this keeps happening so you can keep profiting off others’ ignorance; but on a forum where the goals are what I think they are, you hope that the participants and observers learn to stop creating cesspools
Thanks, this is an important disanalogy that my post as originally written does not adequately address!
Right!
I guess I’m OK with a little bit of slap-fighting when I don’t think it’s interfering too much with the “make proper and novel arguments” game, and that on the current margin (in the spaces where people are reading this post and the one it’s responding to), I’m worried that the cure is worse than the disease (even though this is a weird problem to have relative to the rest of the internet)?
The standard failure mode where fighting and insults get in the way of making-proper-and-novel-arguments is definitely bad. But in the spaces I inhabit, I’m much worried about the failure mode where people form a hugbox/echo-chamber where they/we congratulate them/our-selves on being such good “collaborative truth-seekers”, while implicitly colluding to shut out proper and novel arguments on the pretext that the speaker is being insufficiently “collaborative”, “charitable”, &c.
In particular, if I make a criticism that is itself wrong, I think it’s great and fine for people to just criticize my criticism right back, even if the process of litigating that superficially looks like a slap-fight. I think that’s more intellectually productive than (for example) expecting critics to pre-emptively pass someone’s Intellectual Turing Test.
I’m in favor of ideal posting goals and error-correcting mechanisms, but I think that “rationalist” goals need to justify themselves in terms of correctness and only correctness, and I’m extremely wary of norm-enforcement attempts that I see as compromising correctness in favor of politeness (even when the people making such an attempt don’t think of themselves as compromising correctness in favor of politeness).
If someone thinks I’m mistaken in my claim that a particular norm-enforcement attempt is sacrificing correctness in favor of politeness, I’m happy to argue the details and explain why I think that, but it’s frustrating when attempts to explain problems with proposed norms are themselves subjected to attempts to enforce the norms that are being objected to!
Thanks, this is an important disanalogy that my post as originally written does not adequately address!