I don’t think people have any sort of capacity to fully describe their entire audio/video experience in full resolution, but if you think about the real barriers to more limited communication I predict that you’ll be able to imagine plausible attempts to circumvent these barriers for the specific purpose of developing a model of a particular real world domain in common with someone with enough precision to derive similar strategic conclusions in limited domains.
I can’t define Xs and you can’t define Ys, but we know them when we see them.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but my impression is that this is what extensive definitions and rationalist taboo are for: the first to inspire words and the second to trim away confusing connotations that already adhere to the words people have started to use. The procedure for handling the apparently incommensurable “know it when I see it” concepts of each party is thus to coin new words in private for the sake of the conversation, master the common vocabulary, and then communicate while using these new terms and see if the reasonable predictions of the novel common understanding square with observable reality.
A lot of times I expect that each person will turn out to have been somewhat confused, perhaps by committing a kind of fallacy of equivocation due to lumping genuinely distinct things under the same “know it when I see it” concept, which (in the course of the conversation) could be converted to a single word and explored thoroughly enough to detect the confusion, perhaps suggesting the need for more refined sub-concepts that “cut reality at the joints”.
When I think of having a conversation with a skilled rationalist, I expect them to be able to deploy these sorts of skills on the most important seeming source of disagreement, rather than having to fall back to “agreeing to disagree”. They might still do so if the estimated cost of the time in conversation is lower the the expected benefit of agreement, but they wouldn’t be forced to it out of raw incapacity. That is, it wouldn’t be a matter of incapacity, but a matter of a pragmatically reasonable lack of interest. In some sense, one or both of us would be too materially, intellectually, or relationally impoverished to be able to afford thinking clearly together on that subject.
However, notice how far the proposal has come from “talking about politics in a web forum”. It starts to appear as though it would be a feat of communication for two relatively richly endowed people, in private, to rationally update with each other on a single conceptually tricky and politically contentious point. If that conversational accomplishment seems difficult for many people here, does it seem easier or more likely to work for many people at different levels of skill, to individually spend fewer hours, in public, writing for a wide and heterogeneously knowledgeable audience, who can provide no meaningful feedback, on that same conceptually tricky and politically contentious point?
I don’t think people have any sort of capacity to fully describe their entire audio/video experience in full resolution, but if you think about the real barriers to more limited communication I predict that you’ll be able to imagine plausible attempts to circumvent these barriers for the specific purpose of developing a model of a particular real world domain in common with someone with enough precision to derive similar strategic conclusions in limited domains.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but my impression is that this is what extensive definitions and rationalist taboo are for: the first to inspire words and the second to trim away confusing connotations that already adhere to the words people have started to use. The procedure for handling the apparently incommensurable “know it when I see it” concepts of each party is thus to coin new words in private for the sake of the conversation, master the common vocabulary, and then communicate while using these new terms and see if the reasonable predictions of the novel common understanding square with observable reality.
A lot of times I expect that each person will turn out to have been somewhat confused, perhaps by committing a kind of fallacy of equivocation due to lumping genuinely distinct things under the same “know it when I see it” concept, which (in the course of the conversation) could be converted to a single word and explored thoroughly enough to detect the confusion, perhaps suggesting the need for more refined sub-concepts that “cut reality at the joints”.
When I think of having a conversation with a skilled rationalist, I expect them to be able to deploy these sorts of skills on the most important seeming source of disagreement, rather than having to fall back to “agreeing to disagree”. They might still do so if the estimated cost of the time in conversation is lower the the expected benefit of agreement, but they wouldn’t be forced to it out of raw incapacity. That is, it wouldn’t be a matter of incapacity, but a matter of a pragmatically reasonable lack of interest. In some sense, one or both of us would be too materially, intellectually, or relationally impoverished to be able to afford thinking clearly together on that subject.
However, notice how far the proposal has come from “talking about politics in a web forum”. It starts to appear as though it would be a feat of communication for two relatively richly endowed people, in private, to rationally update with each other on a single conceptually tricky and politically contentious point. If that conversational accomplishment seems difficult for many people here, does it seem easier or more likely to work for many people at different levels of skill, to individually spend fewer hours, in public, writing for a wide and heterogeneously knowledgeable audience, who can provide no meaningful feedback, on that same conceptually tricky and politically contentious point?