My guess is that most of the issues come from motivated cognition, where all the object level arguments hide the meta-level issue. Dweck seems unusual in that regard, she wants the growth mindset to be true, but also is meticulous in her approach. W.L Craig is a Christian apologist disguised as a philosopher, so he has 1000 proofs of God ready to throw at you, and to clever-arguer anyone who listens using a slew of carefully crafted object level arguments.
CDC and other public orgs operate at the Simulacrum level 1 (typo edited: level 2, of course), putting out statements designed to elicit a certain behavior, and unrelated to what they believe to be true. So it’s inaccurate to model them as interested in truth.
You can spot the existence of a hidden meta level by noticing self-contradictory arguments, lack of legibility, loose and context-dependent or even non-existent definitions of crucially important terms… At which point it doesn’t pay to go through the object level anymore, and instead focus on the meta.
It’s true that motivated cognition and such issues are at work; they always are! But this is no ding on demanding epistemic legibility.
Even if the author never was interested in transmitting truth (like the CDC in your example), now you know how to detect a message that’s hard to critique / spot check.
Rereading your comment, I think you’re saying that legibility will arise by itself well enough so long as someone is on Simulacrum level 1, caring only about the truth, and if their writing is not legible, they probably have an agenda and you’d better focus on finding out what that is, or just ignore what they said.
But
This feels unactionable—it’s just a rephrasing of old critical reading advice “find out the writer’s agenda and biases so you know where they’re coming from”. Which is so vague—even having that info, how do I debias just the right amount?? How do I avoid overcorrecting and falling prey to my own confirmation bias?
My experience writing legibly actually flagged areas in my belief system I didn’t realize was so weak—a huge boon for myself here—and in retrospect, if I’d published illegible writings about those topics I’d now want to take down those posts, as it’s both embarrassing to me as well as a disservice to readers. This is despite me being on Simulacrum 1 (or so I think I was).
My guess is that most of the issues come from motivated cognition, where all the object level arguments hide the meta-level issue. Dweck seems unusual in that regard, she wants the growth mindset to be true, but also is meticulous in her approach. W.L Craig is a Christian apologist disguised as a philosopher, so he has 1000 proofs of God ready to throw at you, and to clever-arguer anyone who listens using a slew of carefully crafted object level arguments.
CDC and other public orgs operate at the Simulacrum level
1(typo edited: level 2, of course), putting out statements designed to elicit a certain behavior, and unrelated to what they believe to be true. So it’s inaccurate to model them as interested in truth.You can spot the existence of a hidden meta level by noticing self-contradictory arguments, lack of legibility, loose and context-dependent or even non-existent definitions of crucially important terms… At which point it doesn’t pay to go through the object level anymore, and instead focus on the meta.
Did you mean level 2 for the CDC?
Yes, oops...
Then, please edit! :-) People come back to LW comments years and even decades after the fact.
It’s true that motivated cognition and such issues are at work; they always are! But this is no ding on demanding epistemic legibility.
Even if the author never was interested in transmitting truth (like the CDC in your example), now you know how to detect a message that’s hard to critique / spot check.
Rereading your comment, I think you’re saying that legibility will arise by itself well enough so long as someone is on Simulacrum level 1, caring only about the truth, and if their writing is not legible, they probably have an agenda and you’d better focus on finding out what that is, or just ignore what they said.
But
This feels unactionable—it’s just a rephrasing of old critical reading advice “find out the writer’s agenda and biases so you know where they’re coming from”. Which is so vague—even having that info, how do I debias just the right amount?? How do I avoid overcorrecting and falling prey to my own confirmation bias?
My experience writing legibly actually flagged areas in my belief system I didn’t realize was so weak—a huge boon for myself here—and in retrospect, if I’d published illegible writings about those topics I’d now want to take down those posts, as it’s both embarrassing to me as well as a disservice to readers. This is despite me being on Simulacrum 1 (or so I think I was).