I want a Generalized Emergency Taboo button for just such cases; press the button and everyone is banned from using the word “murder” when talking about “abortion”.
That way, in the future, we could talk about abortion using “abortion”, and murder in general using “murder”, whether abortion is murder or not, without weakening social norms in the process.
Or maybe Beisutsukai already have such a button? Perhaps they need a high enough level to unlock the skill? I had an idea of some third option we could use here to counter the social norm issue when I first read this, but got distracted and forgot it before I could follow up. Anyone else got any such ideas?
I want a Generalized Emergency Taboo button for just such cases; press the button and everyone is banned from using the word “murder” when talking about “abortion”.
That’s not really generalized, since it’s specific to abortion and murder. A generalized emergency taboo button would be a custom where it’s considered polite to ask people to taboo a word (if you think this might help the discussion), and impolite to ignore this request.
I think Less Wrong is pretty decent about this, at least compared to the rest of the world. It’s the only place where I’ve ever seen such a request succeed. For most people it’s far from onvious what the point of tabooing a word would be, and it’s hard to give a compelling justification for it in a quick sound-bite that you can drop into an in-person discussion.
In the rest of the world, when I find it necessary to invoke the concept, I generally ask people to clarify what they mean by a word and then echo back the phrase they used the word in, substituting their explanation.
Generally speaking, people respond to this as though I’d played some dirty rhetorical trick on them and deny ever having said any such thing, at which point I apologize and ask them again to clarify what they mean by the word.
Among conversations that continue past this point, it works pretty well. (They are the minority.)
Yeah, that works pretty well for me too. Unfortunately, the side effects—extremely powerful dork and/or argument-winning sophist signalling, misinterpretation as a status move, etc. - often far outweigh the benefits I would get from this tactic.
If people decide to trust me enough to actually engage honestly with the question, I try to be careful about engaging honestly with their answer, and often that can lead to some exceptionally interesting conversations. I’ve made some excellent friends this way, as well as a few educational opponents.
Most people don’t trust me that much, of course. But I’m at a stage in my life where efficiently working my way through lots of people in order to find one or two worth exploring as excellent friends, even if it means unnecessarily alienating dozens of people who would have made perfectly adequate friends, feels like a pretty good tradeoff. I already have more perfectly adequate friends than I’m capable of fully engaging with.
The major benefit I see is that in discussions where this ends the conversation, the conversation would have had very little value if it had continued.
That’s not really generalized, since it’s specific to abortion and murder. A generalized emergency taboo button would be a custom where it’s considered polite to ask people to taboo a word (if you think this might help the discussion), and impolite to ignore this request.
My intent wasn’t to contextualize, thanks for making it more explicit.
(...) and it’s hard to give a compelling justification for it in a quick sound-bite that you can drop into an in-person discussion.
Don’t Try This At Home Capsule: Some dark arts work really well. I’ve found that out firsthand, both accidentally/involuntarily and in a tiny-sample controlled test (not scientifically relevant, but anecdotally sufficient for me to have good intuitive confidence thanks for confirmation bias vs VoI and different in expected utility). This was before I learned of confirmation bias and the risks of Dark Arts, though.
I want a Generalized Emergency Taboo button for just such cases; press the button and everyone is banned from using the word “murder” when talking about “abortion”.
That way, in the future, we could talk about abortion using “abortion”, and murder in general using “murder”, whether abortion is murder or not, without weakening social norms in the process.
Or maybe Beisutsukai already have such a button? Perhaps they need a high enough level to unlock the skill? I had an idea of some third option we could use here to counter the social norm issue when I first read this, but got distracted and forgot it before I could follow up. Anyone else got any such ideas?
That’s not really generalized, since it’s specific to abortion and murder. A generalized emergency taboo button would be a custom where it’s considered polite to ask people to taboo a word (if you think this might help the discussion), and impolite to ignore this request.
I think Less Wrong is pretty decent about this, at least compared to the rest of the world. It’s the only place where I’ve ever seen such a request succeed. For most people it’s far from onvious what the point of tabooing a word would be, and it’s hard to give a compelling justification for it in a quick sound-bite that you can drop into an in-person discussion.
In the rest of the world, when I find it necessary to invoke the concept, I generally ask people to clarify what they mean by a word and then echo back the phrase they used the word in, substituting their explanation.
Generally speaking, people respond to this as though I’d played some dirty rhetorical trick on them and deny ever having said any such thing, at which point I apologize and ask them again to clarify what they mean by the word.
Among conversations that continue past this point, it works pretty well. (They are the minority.)
Yeah, that works pretty well for me too. Unfortunately, the side effects—extremely powerful dork and/or argument-winning sophist signalling, misinterpretation as a status move, etc. - often far outweigh the benefits I would get from this tactic.
Yeah, there’s that.
For me it becomes a matter of tradeoffs.
If people decide to trust me enough to actually engage honestly with the question, I try to be careful about engaging honestly with their answer, and often that can lead to some exceptionally interesting conversations. I’ve made some excellent friends this way, as well as a few educational opponents.
Most people don’t trust me that much, of course. But I’m at a stage in my life where efficiently working my way through lots of people in order to find one or two worth exploring as excellent friends, even if it means unnecessarily alienating dozens of people who would have made perfectly adequate friends, feels like a pretty good tradeoff. I already have more perfectly adequate friends than I’m capable of fully engaging with.
The major benefit I see is that in discussions where this ends the conversation, the conversation would have had very little value if it had continued.
My intent wasn’t to contextualize, thanks for making it more explicit.
Don’t Try This At Home Capsule: Some dark arts work really well. I’ve found that out firsthand, both accidentally/involuntarily and in a tiny-sample controlled test (not scientifically relevant, but anecdotally sufficient for me to have good intuitive confidence thanks for confirmation bias vs VoI and different in expected utility). This was before I learned of confirmation bias and the risks of Dark Arts, though.