when and only when it is in fact the case that I know better than those other people what’s going on in their heads (in accordance with the Litany of Tarski).
Yes, as clearly noted in my original objection, there is absolutely a time and a place for this, and a way to do it right; I too share this tool when able and willing to justify it. It’s only suspicious when people throw it out solely on the strength of their own dubious authority. My whole objection is that Gordon wasn’t bothering to (I believe as a cover for not being able to).
Acknowledged. (It felt important to react to the great-grandparent as a show of moral resistance to appeal-to-inner-privacy conversation halters, and it was only after posting the comment that I remembered that you had acknolwedged the point earlier in the thread, which, in retrospect, I should have at least acknowledged even if the great-grandparent still seemed worth criticizing.)
there is absolutely a time and a place for this
Exactly—and lesswrong.com is the place for people to report on their models of reality, which includes their models of other people’s minds as a special case.
Other places in Society are right to worry about erasure, marginalization, and socially manipulative dismissiveness! But in my rationalist culture, while standing in the Citadel of Truth, we’re not allowed to care whether a map is marginalizing or dismissive; we’re only allowed to care about whether the map reflects the territory. (And if there are other cultures competing for control of the “rationalist” brand name, then my culture is at war with them.)
My whole objection is that Gordon wasn’t bothering to
Great! Thank you for critcizing people who don’t justify their beliefs with adequate evidence and arguments. That’s really useful for everyone reading!
(I believe as a cover for not being able to).
In context, it seems worth noting that this is a claim about Gordon’s mind, and your only evidence for it is absence-of-evidence (you think that if he had more justification, he would be better at showing it). I have no problem with this (as we know, absence of evidence is evidence of absence), but it seems in tension with some of your other claims?
criticizing people who don’t justify their beliefs with adequate evidence and arguments
I think justification is in the nature of arguments, but not necessary for beliefs or declarations of beliefs. A belief offered without justification is a hypothesis called to attention. It’s concise, and if handled carefully, it can be sufficient for communication. As evidence, it’s a claim about your own state of mind, which holds a lot of inscrutable territory that nonetheless can channel understanding that doesn’t yet lend itself to arguments. Seeking arguments is certainly a good thing, to refactor and convey beliefs, but that’s only a small part of how human intelligence builds its map.
Yeah, if I had the comment to rewrite (I prefer not to edit it at this point) I would say “My whole objection is that Gordon wasn’t bothering to (and at this point in the exchange I have a hypothesis that it’s reflective of not being able to, though that hypothesis comes from gut-level systems and is wrong-until-proven-right as opposed to, like, a confident prior).”
So, having a little more space from all this now, I’ll say that I’m hesitant to try to provide justifications because certain parts of the argument require explaining complex internal models of human minds that are a level more complex than I can explain even though I’m using them (I only seem to be able to interpret myself coherently one level of organization less than the maximum level of organization present in my mind) and because other parts of the argument require gnosis of certain insights that I (and to the best of my knowledge, no one) knows how to readily convey without hundreds to thousands of hours of meditation and one-on-one interactions (though I do know a few people who continue to hope that they may yet discover a way to make that kind of thing scalable even though we haven’t figured it out in 2500 years, maybe because we were missing something important to let us do it).
So it is true that I can’t provide adequate episteme of my claim, and maybe that’s what you’re reacting to. I don’t consider this a problem, but I also recognize that within some parts of the rationalist community that is considered a problem (I model you as being one such person, Duncan). So given that, I can see why from your point of view it looks like I’m just making stuff up or worse since I can’t offer “justified belief” that you’d accept as “justified”, and I’m not really much interested in this particular case in changing your mind as I don’t yet completely know myself how to generate that change in stance towards epistemology in others even though I encountered evidence that lead me to that conclusion myself.
There’s a dynamic here that I think is somewhat important: socially recognized gnosis.
That is, contemporary American society views doctors as knowing things that laypeople don’t know, and views physicists as knowing things that laypeople don’t know, and so on. Suppose a doctor examines a person and says “ah, they have condition X,” and Amy responds with “why do you say that?”, and the doctor responds with “sorry, I don’t think I can generate a short enough explanation that is understandable to you.” It seems like the doctor’s response to Amy is ‘socially justified’, in that the doctor won’t really lose points for referring to a pre-existing distinction between those-in-the-know and laypeople (except maybe for doing it rudely or gracelessly). There’s an important sense in which society understands that it in fact takes many years of focused study to become a physicist, and physicists should not be constrained by ‘immediate public justification’ or something similar.
But then there’s a social question, of how to grant that status. One might imagine that we want astronomers to be able to do their astronomy and have their unintelligibility be respected, while we don’t want to respect the unintelligibility of astrologers.
So far I’ve been talking ‘nationally’ or ‘globally’ but I think a similar question holds locally. Do we want it to be the case that ‘rationalists as a whole’ think that meditators have gnosis and that this is respectable, or do we want ‘rationalists as a whole’ to think that any such respect is provisional or ‘at individual discretion’ or a mistake?
That is, when you say:
I don’t consider this a problem, but I also recognize that within some parts of the rationalist community that is considered a problem (I model you as being one such person, Duncan).
I feel hopeful that we can settle whether or not this is a problem (or at least achieve much more mutual understanding and clarity).
So it is true that I can’t provide adequate episteme of my claim, and maybe that’s what you’re reacting to.
This feels like the more important part (“if you don’t have episteme, why do you believe it?”) but I think there’s a nearly-as-important other half, which is something like “presenting as having respected gnosis” vs. “presenting as having unrespected gnosis.” If you’re like “as a doctor, it is my considered medical opinion that everyone has spirituality”, that’s very different from “look, I can’t justify this and so you should take it with a grain of salt, but I think everyone secretly has spirituality”. I don’t think you’re at the first extreme, but I think Duncan is reacting to signals along that dimension.
That’s not the point! Zack is talking about beliefs, not their declaration, so it’s (hopefully) not the case that there is “a time and a place” for certain beliefs (even when they are not announced), or that beliefs require ability and willingness to justify them (at least for some senses of “justify” and “belief”).
Yes, as clearly noted in my original objection, there is absolutely a time and a place for this, and a way to do it right; I too share this tool when able and willing to justify it. It’s only suspicious when people throw it out solely on the strength of their own dubious authority. My whole objection is that Gordon wasn’t bothering to (I believe as a cover for not being able to).
Acknowledged. (It felt important to react to the great-grandparent as a show of moral resistance to appeal-to-inner-privacy conversation halters, and it was only after posting the comment that I remembered that you had acknolwedged the point earlier in the thread, which, in retrospect, I should have at least acknowledged even if the great-grandparent still seemed worth criticizing.)
Exactly—and lesswrong.com is the place for people to report on their models of reality, which includes their models of other people’s minds as a special case.
Other places in Society are right to worry about erasure, marginalization, and socially manipulative dismissiveness! But in my rationalist culture, while standing in the Citadel of Truth, we’re not allowed to care whether a map is marginalizing or dismissive; we’re only allowed to care about whether the map reflects the territory. (And if there are other cultures competing for control of the “rationalist” brand name, then my culture is at war with them.)
Great! Thank you for critcizing people who don’t justify their beliefs with adequate evidence and arguments. That’s really useful for everyone reading!
In context, it seems worth noting that this is a claim about Gordon’s mind, and your only evidence for it is absence-of-evidence (you think that if he had more justification, he would be better at showing it). I have no problem with this (as we know, absence of evidence is evidence of absence), but it seems in tension with some of your other claims?
I think justification is in the nature of arguments, but not necessary for beliefs or declarations of beliefs. A belief offered without justification is a hypothesis called to attention. It’s concise, and if handled carefully, it can be sufficient for communication. As evidence, it’s a claim about your own state of mind, which holds a lot of inscrutable territory that nonetheless can channel understanding that doesn’t yet lend itself to arguments. Seeking arguments is certainly a good thing, to refactor and convey beliefs, but that’s only a small part of how human intelligence builds its map.
Yeah, if I had the comment to rewrite (I prefer not to edit it at this point) I would say “My whole objection is that Gordon wasn’t bothering to (and at this point in the exchange I have a hypothesis that it’s reflective of not being able to, though that hypothesis comes from gut-level systems and is wrong-until-proven-right as opposed to, like, a confident prior).”
So, having a little more space from all this now, I’ll say that I’m hesitant to try to provide justifications because certain parts of the argument require explaining complex internal models of human minds that are a level more complex than I can explain even though I’m using them (I only seem to be able to interpret myself coherently one level of organization less than the maximum level of organization present in my mind) and because other parts of the argument require gnosis of certain insights that I (and to the best of my knowledge, no one) knows how to readily convey without hundreds to thousands of hours of meditation and one-on-one interactions (though I do know a few people who continue to hope that they may yet discover a way to make that kind of thing scalable even though we haven’t figured it out in 2500 years, maybe because we were missing something important to let us do it).
So it is true that I can’t provide adequate episteme of my claim, and maybe that’s what you’re reacting to. I don’t consider this a problem, but I also recognize that within some parts of the rationalist community that is considered a problem (I model you as being one such person, Duncan). So given that, I can see why from your point of view it looks like I’m just making stuff up or worse since I can’t offer “justified belief” that you’d accept as “justified”, and I’m not really much interested in this particular case in changing your mind as I don’t yet completely know myself how to generate that change in stance towards epistemology in others even though I encountered evidence that lead me to that conclusion myself.
There’s a dynamic here that I think is somewhat important: socially recognized gnosis.
That is, contemporary American society views doctors as knowing things that laypeople don’t know, and views physicists as knowing things that laypeople don’t know, and so on. Suppose a doctor examines a person and says “ah, they have condition X,” and Amy responds with “why do you say that?”, and the doctor responds with “sorry, I don’t think I can generate a short enough explanation that is understandable to you.” It seems like the doctor’s response to Amy is ‘socially justified’, in that the doctor won’t really lose points for referring to a pre-existing distinction between those-in-the-know and laypeople (except maybe for doing it rudely or gracelessly). There’s an important sense in which society understands that it in fact takes many years of focused study to become a physicist, and physicists should not be constrained by ‘immediate public justification’ or something similar.
But then there’s a social question, of how to grant that status. One might imagine that we want astronomers to be able to do their astronomy and have their unintelligibility be respected, while we don’t want to respect the unintelligibility of astrologers.
So far I’ve been talking ‘nationally’ or ‘globally’ but I think a similar question holds locally. Do we want it to be the case that ‘rationalists as a whole’ think that meditators have gnosis and that this is respectable, or do we want ‘rationalists as a whole’ to think that any such respect is provisional or ‘at individual discretion’ or a mistake?
That is, when you say:
I feel hopeful that we can settle whether or not this is a problem (or at least achieve much more mutual understanding and clarity).
This feels like the more important part (“if you don’t have episteme, why do you believe it?”) but I think there’s a nearly-as-important other half, which is something like “presenting as having respected gnosis” vs. “presenting as having unrespected gnosis.” If you’re like “as a doctor, it is my considered medical opinion that everyone has spirituality”, that’s very different from “look, I can’t justify this and so you should take it with a grain of salt, but I think everyone secretly has spirituality”. I don’t think you’re at the first extreme, but I think Duncan is reacting to signals along that dimension.
That’s not the point! Zack is talking about beliefs, not their declaration, so it’s (hopefully) not the case that there is “a time and a place” for certain beliefs (even when they are not announced), or that beliefs require ability and willingness to justify them (at least for some senses of “justify” and “belief”).