Collaborative: “I don’t know if that’s true, what about x” Adversarial “you’re wrong because of x”.
Culturally 99% of either is fine as long as all parties agree on the culture and act like it.
Okay, but those mean different things. “I don’t know if that’s true, what about x” is expressing uncertainty about one’s interlocutor’s claim, and entreating them to consider x as an alternative. “You’re wrong because of x” is a denial of one’s interlocutor’s claim for a specific reason.
I find myself needing to say both of these things, but in different situations, each of which probably occurs more than 1% of the time. This would seem to contradict the claim that 99% of either is fine!
A culture that expects me to refrain from saying “You’re wrong because of x” even if someone is in fact wrong because of x (because telling the truth about this wouldn’t be “collaborative”) is trying to decrease the expressive power of language and is unworthy of the “rationalist” brand name.
I advocate for collaboration over adversarial culture because of the bleed through from epistemics to inherent interpersonal beliefs.
I advocate for a culture that discourages bleed-through from epistemics to inherent interpersonal beliefs, except to whatever limited extent such bleed-through is epistemically justified.
“You’re wrong about this” and “You are stupid and bad” are distinct propositions. It is not only totally possible, but in fact ubiquitously common, for the former to be true but the latter to be false! They’re not statistically independent—if Kevin is wrong about everything all the time, that does raise my subjective probability that Kevin is stupid and bad. But I claim that any one particular instance of someone being wrong is only a very small amount of evidence about that person’s degree of stupidity or badness! It is for this reason it is written that you should Update Yourself Incrementally!
Humans are not perfect arguers or it would not matter so much.
I agree that humans are not perfect arguers! However, I remember reading a bunch of really great blog posts back in the late ’aughts articulating a sense that it should be possible for humans to become better arguers! I wonder whatever happened to that website!
if Kevin is wrong about everything all the time, that does raise my subjective probability that Kevin is stupid and bad.
This is largely tangential to your point (with which I agree), but I think it’s worth pointing out that if Kevin really manages to be wrong about everything, you’d be able to get the right answer just by taking his conclusions and inverting them—meaning whatever cognitive processes he’s using to get the wrong answer 100% of the time must actually be quite intelligent.
if Kevin really manages to be wrong about everything, you’d be able to get the right answer just by taking his conclusions and inverting them
That only works for true-or-false questions. In larger answer spaces, he’d need to be wrong in some specific way such that there exists some simple algorithm (the analogue of “inverting”) to compute the right answers from those wrong ones.
Okay, but those mean different things. “I don’t know if that’s true, what about x” is expressing uncertainty about one’s interlocutor’s claim, and entreating them to consider x as an alternative. “You’re wrong because of x” is a denial of one’s interlocutor’s claim for a specific reason.
I find myself needing to say both of these things, but in different situations, each of which probably occurs more than 1% of the time. This would seem to contradict the claim that 99% of either is fine!
A culture that expects me to refrain from saying “You’re wrong because of x” even if someone is in fact wrong because of x (because telling the truth about this wouldn’t be “collaborative”) is trying to decrease the expressive power of language and is unworthy of the “rationalist” brand name.
I advocate for a culture that discourages bleed-through from epistemics to inherent interpersonal beliefs, except to whatever limited extent such bleed-through is epistemically justified.
“You’re wrong about this” and “You are stupid and bad” are distinct propositions. It is not only totally possible, but in fact ubiquitously common, for the former to be true but the latter to be false! They’re not statistically independent—if Kevin is wrong about everything all the time, that does raise my subjective probability that Kevin is stupid and bad. But I claim that any one particular instance of someone being wrong is only a very small amount of evidence about that person’s degree of stupidity or badness! It is for this reason it is written that you should Update Yourself Incrementally!
I agree that humans are not perfect arguers! However, I remember reading a bunch of really great blog posts back in the late ’aughts articulating a sense that it should be possible for humans to become better arguers! I wonder whatever happened to that website!
This is largely tangential to your point (with which I agree), but I think it’s worth pointing out that if Kevin really manages to be wrong about everything, you’d be able to get the right answer just by taking his conclusions and inverting them—meaning whatever cognitive processes he’s using to get the wrong answer 100% of the time must actually be quite intelligent.
That only works for true-or-false questions. In larger answer spaces, he’d need to be wrong in some specific way such that there exists some simple algorithm (the analogue of “inverting”) to compute the right answers from those wrong ones.