curi, please reread what I wrote. Please note that the whole sentence is not as you quoted “It isn’t helpful to pick out a small problem with an argument” but “It isn’t helpful to pick out a small problem with an argument someone makes and then ignore the rest of the argument until they’ve responded to doing so.” Please also reread the first paragraph where I outlined the ideal approach, noting the issue, and supplying a correction yourself, and then replying to the corrected form.
I sometimes try to fix people’s arguments for them.
What sometimes happens is they don’t like or want the fixed form.
That especially happens a lot when it’s a person with different methods of judging what is a good argument, and a rather different worldview than my own.
That issue applies here. Having people fix their own stuff is the less ambitious and less error prone approach. It’s the one that is more resilient to frequent miscommunication.
I am especially not inclined to fix people’s arguments when they are wrong either way. Fixing from wrong to still wrong is weird. In that case, I think it would be wise for people to fix mistakes in their argument, one by one. And starting with an easy one is good, not bad. If they won’t even fix that, what is going to happen with a more subtle issue?
If I jump ahead to the fully clarified version of their argument—written perhaps in a way that also helps make it easier to see why it’s wrong—people complain. If I write it in a way that makes it hard to see why it’s wrong (as they’ve been doing by unconscious bias), then they might be a bit happier but we’ll still have the problem of having to walk them through improvements of it until they get it to a better state.
Learning isn’t super easy. You need patience and persistence. You need to be happy fixing one mistake at a time. You shouldn’t complain that people aren’t helping you skip steps. That it’s too slow. That if only I would reply to what I know they meant, instead of what they actually said, we’d make progress faster. Attempts at mind reading increase miscommunication difficulties and misunderstanding. They usually seem to work well because the two people do it share a ton of background knowledge, cultural assumptions, biases, and so on.
If I was replying to what people really meant it’d just create a mess. I would reply to a lot of their unconscious biases they weren’t aware they had and they’d just get confused. And yet many of their statements express those unconscious ideas. To learn, they need to engage with the process of improving their ideas, not just insist I should be able to improve their stuff to the point it’s true—without changing the conclusion—and then concede.
As to skipping ahead while smaller issues are still pending, I wonder why you think building on rotten foundations is wise. I think it can work sometimes, but it’s a bit ambitious.
I am especially not inclined to fix people’s arguments when they are wrong either way. Fixing from wrong to still wrong is weird.
Not really, it’s a common method for showing that someone is very wrong. It’s just the common “But let’s suppose we fix that [alternatively, that I spot you that for now] - even then there’s still a problem, as...”
Regarding much of the rest of the post: The idea is not to silently reply to a corrected version, but to explicitly note the correction and reply to that! Then people can, rather than just being confused about your correction, actually evaluate your corrected version and verify whether or not it still conforms to their intentions.
As to skipping ahead while smaller issues are still pending, I wonder why you think building on rotten foundations is wise. I think it can work sometimes, but it’s a bit ambitious.
Hence you fix those foundations, rather than silently building on top of them.
curi, please reread what I wrote. Please note that the whole sentence is not as you quoted “It isn’t helpful to pick out a small problem with an argument” but “It isn’t helpful to pick out a small problem with an argument someone makes and then ignore the rest of the argument until they’ve responded to doing so.” Please also reread the first paragraph where I outlined the ideal approach, noting the issue, and supplying a correction yourself, and then replying to the corrected form.
I sometimes try to fix people’s arguments for them.
What sometimes happens is they don’t like or want the fixed form.
That especially happens a lot when it’s a person with different methods of judging what is a good argument, and a rather different worldview than my own.
That issue applies here. Having people fix their own stuff is the less ambitious and less error prone approach. It’s the one that is more resilient to frequent miscommunication.
I am especially not inclined to fix people’s arguments when they are wrong either way. Fixing from wrong to still wrong is weird. In that case, I think it would be wise for people to fix mistakes in their argument, one by one. And starting with an easy one is good, not bad. If they won’t even fix that, what is going to happen with a more subtle issue?
If I jump ahead to the fully clarified version of their argument—written perhaps in a way that also helps make it easier to see why it’s wrong—people complain. If I write it in a way that makes it hard to see why it’s wrong (as they’ve been doing by unconscious bias), then they might be a bit happier but we’ll still have the problem of having to walk them through improvements of it until they get it to a better state.
Learning isn’t super easy. You need patience and persistence. You need to be happy fixing one mistake at a time. You shouldn’t complain that people aren’t helping you skip steps. That it’s too slow. That if only I would reply to what I know they meant, instead of what they actually said, we’d make progress faster. Attempts at mind reading increase miscommunication difficulties and misunderstanding. They usually seem to work well because the two people do it share a ton of background knowledge, cultural assumptions, biases, and so on.
If I was replying to what people really meant it’d just create a mess. I would reply to a lot of their unconscious biases they weren’t aware they had and they’d just get confused. And yet many of their statements express those unconscious ideas. To learn, they need to engage with the process of improving their ideas, not just insist I should be able to improve their stuff to the point it’s true—without changing the conclusion—and then concede.
As to skipping ahead while smaller issues are still pending, I wonder why you think building on rotten foundations is wise. I think it can work sometimes, but it’s a bit ambitious.
Not really, it’s a common method for showing that someone is very wrong. It’s just the common “But let’s suppose we fix that [alternatively, that I spot you that for now] - even then there’s still a problem, as...”
Regarding much of the rest of the post: The idea is not to silently reply to a corrected version, but to explicitly note the correction and reply to that! Then people can, rather than just being confused about your correction, actually evaluate your corrected version and verify whether or not it still conforms to their intentions.
Hence you fix those foundations, rather than silently building on top of them.
I don’t like attributing to people false ideas they didn’t actually write. I think that’s a recipe for disaster. You disagree?
I wasn’t talking about silent corrections either.