[...] and yet suppose that I were invited to write for a venue where my ideas would never be challenged, where my writing were not subjected to scrutiny, where no interested and intelligent readers would ask probing questions… shouldn’t I expect my writing (and my ideas!) to degrade?
I’m not completely swayed either way, but I want to acknowledge this as an important and interesting point.
I believe there is a possible middle way between two extremes:
1) There are no questions, ever.
2) When someone writes “today I had an ice-cream and it made me happy”, they get a comment: “define ‘happiness’, or you are not rational”.
As Habryka already explained somewhere, the problem is not asking question per se, but the specific low-effort way.
I assume that most of has some idea of what “authentic” (or other words) means, but also it would be difficult to provide a full definition. So the person who asks should provide some hints about the purpose of the question. Are they a p-zombie who has absolutely no idea what words refer to? Do they see multiple possible interpretations of the word? In that case it would help to point at the difference, which would allow the author to say “the first one” or maybe “neither, it’s actually more like X”. Do they see some contradiction in the naive definition? For example, what would “authentic” refer to, if the person simply has two brain modules that want contradictory things? Again, it would help to ask the specific thing. Otherwise there is a risk that the author would spend 20 minutes trying to write a good answer, only to get “nope, that’s not what I wanted” in return.
Asking a short question is not necessarily low effort. Asking the right question can actually take a lot of mental work, even if it ends up being a single sentence long. It takes a sharp knife to cleanly cut at the joints of an argument.
As mentioned elsewhere, I really, really don’t have an understanding of what an “authentic relationship” means in this context, and therefore it was an astute question to ask. It helped clarify the qualms I had about the article as well.
And it took all of 2 seconds to read, which I really appreciate.
I’m not completely swayed either way, but I want to acknowledge this as an important and interesting point.
I believe there is a possible middle way between two extremes:
1) There are no questions, ever.
2) When someone writes “today I had an ice-cream and it made me happy”, they get a comment: “define ‘happiness’, or you are not rational”.
As Habryka already explained somewhere, the problem is not asking question per se, but the specific low-effort way.
I assume that most of has some idea of what “authentic” (or other words) means, but also it would be difficult to provide a full definition. So the person who asks should provide some hints about the purpose of the question. Are they a p-zombie who has absolutely no idea what words refer to? Do they see multiple possible interpretations of the word? In that case it would help to point at the difference, which would allow the author to say “the first one” or maybe “neither, it’s actually more like X”. Do they see some contradiction in the naive definition? For example, what would “authentic” refer to, if the person simply has two brain modules that want contradictory things? Again, it would help to ask the specific thing. Otherwise there is a risk that the author would spend 20 minutes trying to write a good answer, only to get “nope, that’s not what I wanted” in return.
Asking a short question is not necessarily low effort. Asking the right question can actually take a lot of mental work, even if it ends up being a single sentence long. It takes a sharp knife to cleanly cut at the joints of an argument.
As mentioned elsewhere, I really, really don’t have an understanding of what an “authentic relationship” means in this context, and therefore it was an astute question to ask. It helped clarify the qualms I had about the article as well.
And it took all of 2 seconds to read, which I really appreciate.