I don’t see how the law of “people are obligated to respond to all requests for clarifications”, or even “people always have to define their terms in way that is understood by everyone participating” is somehow an iron law of communication. If anything, it is not an attribute that any existing successful engine of historical intellectual progress has had. Science has no such norms, and if anything strongly pushes in the opposite direction, with inquiries being completely non-public, and requests for clarification being practically impossible in public venues like journals and textbooks. Really very few venues have a norm of that type (and I would argue neither has historical LessWrong), even many that to me strike me as having produced large volumes of valuable writing and conceptual clarification.
Some thoughts.
I don’t see how the law of “people are obligated to respond to all requests for clarifications”
I feel like Said is either expressing himself poorly here, or being unreasonable. After all, the logical conclusion of this would be that people can DDoS an author by spamming them with bad faith requests for clarification.
However I do think there is a law in this vein, something more subtle, more nuanced, a lot harder to define. And its statement is something like:
In order for a space to have good epistemics, here defined as something like “keep out woo, charlatans, cranks, etc”, that space must have certain norms around discourse. These norms can be formulated many different ways, but at their core they insist that authors have an obligation to respond to questions which have standing and warrant.
Standing means that:
The speaker can be reasonably assumed not to be bad faith
Is an abstract “member of the community”
It is generally agreed on by the audience that this persons input is in some way valuable
There are multiple ways to establish standing. The most obvious is to be well respected, so that when you say something people have the prior that it is important. Another way to establish standing is to write your comment or question excellently, as a costly signal that this is not low-effort critique or Paul Graham’s infamous “middlebrow dismissal”.
Warrant means that:
There are either commonly assumed or clearly articulated reasons for asking this question. We are not privileging the hypothesis without justification.
These reasons are more or less accepted by the audience.
Questions & comments lacking either standing or warrant can be dismissed, in fact the author does not even have to respond to them. In practice the determination of standing and warrant is made by the author, unless something seems worthy enough that their ignoring it is conspicuous.
I think you would be hard pressed to argue to me in seriousness that academics do not claim to have norms that peoples beliefs are open to challenge from anyone who has standing and warrant. I would argue that the historical LessWrong absolutely had implicit norms of this type. Moreover, EY himself has written about insufficient obligation to respond as a major bug in how we do intellectual communication.
I think you would be hard pressed to argue to me in seriousness that academics do not claim to have norms that peoples beliefs are open to challenge from anyone who has standing and warrant.
So, I am actually honestly confused about this dimension. My sense is that there is very little academic apparatus, or even social norm enforcement, for scientists responding to critiques or requests for clarification of their work. See for example the answers to Ben’s question a while ago on “How did academia ensure papers were correct in the early 20th Century?”, which was a question that was direct result of me and Ben wondering about how science is implementing the relevant mechanisms here.
The top-voted answer on there says:
So, to sum things up, I think the process you are looking for is the one done under less official interactions. Theories are confronted in [private] meetings and such. Less accurate theories are simply ignored in future discourse.
Which mostly updated me towards “science really has surprisingly weak norms in this space, and operates primarily on positive selection of theories that achieve traction, and does very little in terms of weeding out bad theories”. Obviously my interpretation here might be wrong, and I actually find this state of affairs quite confusing, so any further evidence would be appreciated.
However, overall I like your model a good amount and think that my concerns fit into it reasonably well.
Concretely, in your model, I think am arguing that Said does not currently have good standing in terms of the requests for clarifications and implicit associated critiques that he has a tendency to make on many user’s posts. I think this could be remedied by him sending costly signals of his comments not being low-effort critique of the type that you point to, and/or more clearly putting in interpretative labor proportional to the effort of the author.
In addition, I think I am making a claim that the audience often gets confused about the warrant of the content of those comments, since to many they just seem like optional requests for clarification which is something that has broadly accepted warrant, whereas a request for an extensive defense (which often ends up being requested in multiple rounds of follow-up) has less warrant. This is then what often results in Said’s comments getting downvoted further into the thread, as people realize that the requests that Said is making do not have the relevant warrant.
I am not confident whether this fully fits all of my concerns, but it is a start, and I appreciate the model.
Some thoughts.
I feel like Said is either expressing himself poorly here, or being unreasonable. After all, the logical conclusion of this would be that people can DDoS an author by spamming them with bad faith requests for clarification.
However I do think there is a law in this vein, something more subtle, more nuanced, a lot harder to define. And its statement is something like:
In order for a space to have good epistemics, here defined as something like “keep out woo, charlatans, cranks, etc”, that space must have certain norms around discourse. These norms can be formulated many different ways, but at their core they insist that authors have an obligation to respond to questions which have standing and warrant.
Standing means that:
The speaker can be reasonably assumed not to be bad faith
Is an abstract “member of the community”
It is generally agreed on by the audience that this persons input is in some way valuable
There are multiple ways to establish standing. The most obvious is to be well respected, so that when you say something people have the prior that it is important. Another way to establish standing is to write your comment or question excellently, as a costly signal that this is not low-effort critique or Paul Graham’s infamous “middlebrow dismissal”.
Warrant means that:
There are either commonly assumed or clearly articulated reasons for asking this question. We are not privileging the hypothesis without justification.
These reasons are more or less accepted by the audience.
Questions & comments lacking either standing or warrant can be dismissed, in fact the author does not even have to respond to them. In practice the determination of standing and warrant is made by the author, unless something seems worthy enough that their ignoring it is conspicuous.
I think you would be hard pressed to argue to me in seriousness that academics do not claim to have norms that peoples beliefs are open to challenge from anyone who has standing and warrant. I would argue that the historical LessWrong absolutely had implicit norms of this type. Moreover, EY himself has written about insufficient obligation to respond as a major bug in how we do intellectual communication.
This is a great comment, thanks!
So, I am actually honestly confused about this dimension. My sense is that there is very little academic apparatus, or even social norm enforcement, for scientists responding to critiques or requests for clarification of their work. See for example the answers to Ben’s question a while ago on “How did academia ensure papers were correct in the early 20th Century?”, which was a question that was direct result of me and Ben wondering about how science is implementing the relevant mechanisms here.
The top-voted answer on there says:
Which mostly updated me towards “science really has surprisingly weak norms in this space, and operates primarily on positive selection of theories that achieve traction, and does very little in terms of weeding out bad theories”. Obviously my interpretation here might be wrong, and I actually find this state of affairs quite confusing, so any further evidence would be appreciated.
However, overall I like your model a good amount and think that my concerns fit into it reasonably well.
Concretely, in your model, I think am arguing that Said does not currently have good standing in terms of the requests for clarifications and implicit associated critiques that he has a tendency to make on many user’s posts. I think this could be remedied by him sending costly signals of his comments not being low-effort critique of the type that you point to, and/or more clearly putting in interpretative labor proportional to the effort of the author.
In addition, I think I am making a claim that the audience often gets confused about the warrant of the content of those comments, since to many they just seem like optional requests for clarification which is something that has broadly accepted warrant, whereas a request for an extensive defense (which often ends up being requested in multiple rounds of follow-up) has less warrant. This is then what often results in Said’s comments getting downvoted further into the thread, as people realize that the requests that Said is making do not have the relevant warrant.
I am not confident whether this fully fits all of my concerns, but it is a start, and I appreciate the model.