I find it morally abhorrent because, when not justified and made-cruxy (i.e. when done the only way I’ve ever seen Gordon do it), it’s tantamount to trying to erase another person/another person’s experience, and (as noted in my first objection) it often leads, in practice, to socially manipulative dismissiveness and marginalization that’s not backed by reality.
So it’s a moral principle under the belief vs. declaration distinction (as in this comment). In that case I mostly object to not making that distinction (a norm to avoid beliefs of that form is on entirely different level than a norm to avoid their declarations).
Personally I don’t think the norm about declarations is on the net a good thing, especially on LW, as it inhibits talking about models of thought. The examples you mentioned are important but should be covered by a more specialized norm that doesn’t cause as much collateral damage.
I’m not sure I’m exactly responding to what you want me to respond to, but:
It seems to me that a declaration like “I think this is true of other people in spite of their claims to the contrary; I’m not even sure if I could justify why? But for right now, that’s just the state of what’s in my head”
is not objectionable/doesn’t trigger the alarm I was trying to raise. Because even though it fails to offer cruxes or detail, it at least signals that it’s not A STATEMENT ABOUT THE TRUE STATE OF THE UNIVERSE, or something? Like, it’s self-aware about being a belief that may or may not match reality?
Which makes me re-evaluate my response to Gordon’s OP and admit that I could have probably offered the word “think” something like 20% more charity, on the same grounds, though on net I still am glad that I spelled out the objection in public (like, the objection now seems to me to apply a little less, but not all the way down to “oops, the objection was fundamentally inappropriate”).
(By “belief” I meant a belief that talkes place in someone’s head, and its existence is not necessarily communicated to anyone else. So an uttered statement “I think X” is a declaration of belief in X, not just a belief in X. A belief in X is just a fact about that person’s mind, without an accompanying declaration. In this framing, the version of the norm about beliefs (as opposed to declarations) is the norm not to think certain thoughts, not a norm to avoid sharing the observations about the fact that you are thinking them.)
I think a salient distinction between declarations of “I think X” and “it’s true that X” is a bad thing, as described in this comment. The distinction is that in the former case you might lack arguments for the belief. But if you don’t endorse the belief, it’s no longer a belief, and “I think X” is a bug in the mind that shouldn’t be called “belief”. If you do endorse it, then “I think X” does mean “X”. It is plausibly a true statement about the state of the universe, you just don’t know why; your mind inscrutably says that it is and you are inclined to believe it, pending further investigation.
So the statement “I think this is true of other people in spite of their claims to the contrary” should mean approximately the same as “This is true of other people in spite of their claims to the contrary”, and a meaningful distinction only appears with actual arguments about those statements, not with different placement of “I think”.
I forget if we’ve talked about this specifically before, but I rarely couch things in ways that make clear I’m talking about what I think rather than what is “true” unless I am pretty uncertain and want to make that really clear or expect my audience to be hostile or primarily made up of essentialists. This is the result of having an epistemology where there is no direct access to reality so I literally cannot say anything that is not a statement about my beliefs about reality, so saying “I think” or “I believe” all the time is redundant because I don’t consider eternal notions of truth meaningful (even mathematical truth, because that truth is contingent on something like the meta-meta-physics of the world and my knowledge of it is still mediated by perception, cf. certain aspects of Tegmark).
I think of “truth” as more like “correct subjective predictions, as measured against (again, subjective) observation”, so when I make claims about reality I’m always making what I think of as claims about my perception of reality since I can say nothing else and don’t worry about appearing to make claims to eternal, essential truth since I so strongly believe such a thing doesn’t exist that I need to be actively reminded that most of humanity thinks otherwise to some extent. Sort of like going so hard in one direction that it looks like I’ve gone in the other because I’ve carved out everything that would have allowed someone to observe me having to navigate between what appear to others to be two different epistemic states where I only have one of them.
This is perhaps a failure of communication, and I think I speak in ways in person that make this much clearer and then I neglect the aspects of tone not adequately carried in text alone (though others can be the judge of that, but I basically never get into discussions about this concern in person, even if I do get into meta discussions about other aspects of epistemology). FWIW, I think Eliezer has (or at least had) a similar norm, though to be fair it got him into a lot of hot water too, so maybe I shouldn’t follow his example here!
I find it morally abhorrent because, when not justified and made-cruxy (i.e. when done the only way I’ve ever seen Gordon do it), it’s tantamount to trying to erase another person/another person’s experience, and (as noted in my first objection) it often leads, in practice, to socially manipulative dismissiveness and marginalization that’s not backed by reality.
So it’s a moral principle under the belief vs. declaration distinction (as in this comment). In that case I mostly object to not making that distinction (a norm to avoid beliefs of that form is on entirely different level than a norm to avoid their declarations).
Personally I don’t think the norm about declarations is on the net a good thing, especially on LW, as it inhibits talking about models of thought. The examples you mentioned are important but should be covered by a more specialized norm that doesn’t cause as much collateral damage.
I’m not sure I’m exactly responding to what you want me to respond to, but:
It seems to me that a declaration like “I think this is true of other people in spite of their claims to the contrary; I’m not even sure if I could justify why? But for right now, that’s just the state of what’s in my head”
is not objectionable/doesn’t trigger the alarm I was trying to raise. Because even though it fails to offer cruxes or detail, it at least signals that it’s not A STATEMENT ABOUT THE TRUE STATE OF THE UNIVERSE, or something? Like, it’s self-aware about being a belief that may or may not match reality?
Which makes me re-evaluate my response to Gordon’s OP and admit that I could have probably offered the word “think” something like 20% more charity, on the same grounds, though on net I still am glad that I spelled out the objection in public (like, the objection now seems to me to apply a little less, but not all the way down to “oops, the objection was fundamentally inappropriate”).
(By “belief” I meant a belief that talkes place in someone’s head, and its existence is not necessarily communicated to anyone else. So an uttered statement “I think X” is a declaration of belief in X, not just a belief in X. A belief in X is just a fact about that person’s mind, without an accompanying declaration. In this framing, the version of the norm about beliefs (as opposed to declarations) is the norm not to think certain thoughts, not a norm to avoid sharing the observations about the fact that you are thinking them.)
I think a salient distinction between declarations of “I think X” and “it’s true that X” is a bad thing, as described in this comment. The distinction is that in the former case you might lack arguments for the belief. But if you don’t endorse the belief, it’s no longer a belief, and “I think X” is a bug in the mind that shouldn’t be called “belief”. If you do endorse it, then “I think X” does mean “X”. It is plausibly a true statement about the state of the universe, you just don’t know why; your mind inscrutably says that it is and you are inclined to believe it, pending further investigation.
So the statement “I think this is true of other people in spite of their claims to the contrary” should mean approximately the same as “This is true of other people in spite of their claims to the contrary”, and a meaningful distinction only appears with actual arguments about those statements, not with different placement of “I think”.
I forget if we’ve talked about this specifically before, but I rarely couch things in ways that make clear I’m talking about what I think rather than what is “true” unless I am pretty uncertain and want to make that really clear or expect my audience to be hostile or primarily made up of essentialists. This is the result of having an epistemology where there is no direct access to reality so I literally cannot say anything that is not a statement about my beliefs about reality, so saying “I think” or “I believe” all the time is redundant because I don’t consider eternal notions of truth meaningful (even mathematical truth, because that truth is contingent on something like the meta-meta-physics of the world and my knowledge of it is still mediated by perception, cf. certain aspects of Tegmark).
I think of “truth” as more like “correct subjective predictions, as measured against (again, subjective) observation”, so when I make claims about reality I’m always making what I think of as claims about my perception of reality since I can say nothing else and don’t worry about appearing to make claims to eternal, essential truth since I so strongly believe such a thing doesn’t exist that I need to be actively reminded that most of humanity thinks otherwise to some extent. Sort of like going so hard in one direction that it looks like I’ve gone in the other because I’ve carved out everything that would have allowed someone to observe me having to navigate between what appear to others to be two different epistemic states where I only have one of them.
This is perhaps a failure of communication, and I think I speak in ways in person that make this much clearer and then I neglect the aspects of tone not adequately carried in text alone (though others can be the judge of that, but I basically never get into discussions about this concern in person, even if I do get into meta discussions about other aspects of epistemology). FWIW, I think Eliezer has (or at least had) a similar norm, though to be fair it got him into a lot of hot water too, so maybe I shouldn’t follow his example here!