Robin Hanson also doesn’t seem to be aware of what I wrote in the parent comment:
“Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them =… You say ‘By X, I don’t mean Y,’ but when you say X, they will still hear Y.” More precisely, they CHOOSE to hear Y, knowing enough associates also choose that
The rest of us can choose the opposite, & we should not accept their claim that they can decide what words mean & how language works.
But why are some people low-decouplers? I think it’s because “Statements of (purported) empirical fact are often strong Bayesian evidence of the speaker’s morality and politics” so we can’t simply “choose the opposite” without understanding this and its implications.
To put it another way, a lot of times when someone says “By X, I don’t mean Y” they actually secretly do believe Y, so if another person “CHOOSE to hear Y”, that’s not a completely unreasonable heuristic, and we can’t just “not accept their claim that they can decide what words mean & how language works” without acknowledging this.
Copy-pasting a followup to this with Robin Hanson via DM (with permission).
Robin: You can of course suspect people of many things using many weak clues. But you should hold higher standards of evidence when making public accusations that you say orgs should use to fire people, cancel speeches, etc.
Me: My instinct is to support/agree with this, but (1) it’s not an obvious interpretation of what you tweeted and (2) I think we need to understand why the standards of evidence for making public accusations and for actual firing/canceling have fallen so low (which my own comment didn’t address either) and what the leverage points are for changing that, otherwise we might just be tilting at windmills when we exhort people to raise those standards (or worse, making suicide charges, if we get lumped with “public enemies”).
Robin Hanson also doesn’t seem to be aware of what I wrote in the parent comment:
But why are some people low-decouplers? I think it’s because “Statements of (purported) empirical fact are often strong Bayesian evidence of the speaker’s morality and politics” so we can’t simply “choose the opposite” without understanding this and its implications.
To put it another way, a lot of times when someone says “By X, I don’t mean Y” they actually secretly do believe Y, so if another person “CHOOSE to hear Y”, that’s not a completely unreasonable heuristic, and we can’t just “not accept their claim that they can decide what words mean & how language works” without acknowledging this.
Copy-pasting a followup to this with Robin Hanson via DM (with permission).
Robin: You can of course suspect people of many things using many weak clues. But you should hold higher standards of evidence when making public accusations that you say orgs should use to fire people, cancel speeches, etc.
Me: My instinct is to support/agree with this, but (1) it’s not an obvious interpretation of what you tweeted and (2) I think we need to understand why the standards of evidence for making public accusations and for actual firing/canceling have fallen so low (which my own comment didn’t address either) and what the leverage points are for changing that, otherwise we might just be tilting at windmills when we exhort people to raise those standards (or worse, making suicide charges, if we get lumped with “public enemies”).