Deep commitment to truth requires investing in the skill of nondisruptive pedantry.
Most communication contains minor errors: slightly wrong word choices, unstated assumptions, unacknowledged exceptions. By default, people interpret things in a way that smooths these out. When someone points out one of these issues in a way that’s disruptive to the flow of conversation, it’s called pedantry.
Often, someone will say something that’s incorrect, but close-enough to a true thing for you to repair it. One way you can handle this is to focus on the error. Smash the conversational context, complain about the question without answering it, that sort of thing.
A different thing you can do is to hear someone say something that’s incorrect, mentally flag it, repair it to a similar statement that matches the other person’s intent but is actually true, act as though the other person had something ambiguous (even if it was actually unambiguously wrong). Then you insert a few words of clarification, correcting the error without forcing the conversation to be about the error, and providing something to latch on to if the difference turns out to be a real disagreement rather than a pedantic thing.
And a third thing you can do is a thing where you sort of… try to do the second thing, but compressed all into one motion, where you substitute a corrected version of the sentence without noticing that you’ve repaired it, or verbally acknowledging the ambiguity.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone point at it explicitly, but I think this mental motion, noticing an error and fixing it without overreacting and damaging the surrounding context, may be one of the most important foundational rationality skills there is. And, it seems… actually pretty easy to practice, when you look squarely at it?
Being stupid at an expert, but for ordinary (technical) conversation, by unapologetic pervasive minor steelmanning, trusting to have resulting misunderstandings efficiently corrected later, as they break things, no fuss.
One alternative is defensively juggling nuanced uncertainty, which makes efficient thinking impossible and further communication of it cumbersome. Another is to aggressively resolve ambiguity, which pays the cost for sorting out irrelevant details, makes communication more nuanced than necessary. This stuff occasionally comes up as serious proposals for the way things ought to be.
Deep commitment to truth requires investing in the skill of nondisruptive pedantry.
Most communication contains minor errors: slightly wrong word choices, unstated assumptions, unacknowledged exceptions. By default, people interpret things in a way that smooths these out. When someone points out one of these issues in a way that’s disruptive to the flow of conversation, it’s called pedantry.
Often, someone will say something that’s incorrect, but close-enough to a true thing for you to repair it. One way you can handle this is to focus on the error. Smash the conversational context, complain about the question without answering it, that sort of thing.
A different thing you can do is to hear someone say something that’s incorrect, mentally flag it, repair it to a similar statement that matches the other person’s intent but is actually true, act as though the other person had something ambiguous (even if it was actually unambiguously wrong). Then you insert a few words of clarification, correcting the error without forcing the conversation to be about the error, and providing something to latch on to if the difference turns out to be a real disagreement rather than a pedantic thing.
And a third thing you can do is a thing where you sort of… try to do the second thing, but compressed all into one motion, where you substitute a corrected version of the sentence without noticing that you’ve repaired it, or verbally acknowledging the ambiguity.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone point at it explicitly, but I think this mental motion, noticing an error and fixing it without overreacting and damaging the surrounding context, may be one of the most important foundational rationality skills there is. And, it seems… actually pretty easy to practice, when you look squarely at it?
(Crossposted with FB)
Being stupid at an expert, but for ordinary (technical) conversation, by unapologetic pervasive minor steelmanning, trusting to have resulting misunderstandings efficiently corrected later, as they break things, no fuss.
One alternative is defensively juggling nuanced uncertainty, which makes efficient thinking impossible and further communication of it cumbersome. Another is to aggressively resolve ambiguity, which pays the cost for sorting out irrelevant details, makes communication more nuanced than necessary. This stuff occasionally comes up as serious proposals for the way things ought to be.