It might seem like a little thing of no significance—requiring “I” statements is commonplace in therapy groups and corporate sensitivity training—but this little thing coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky setting guidelines for an explicitly “rationalist” space made a pattern click. If everyone is forced to only make claims about their map (“I think”, “I feel”) and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people’s maps into question and thereby threaten them, because disagreement is disrespect), that’s great for reducing social conflict but not for the kind of collective information processing that accomplishes cognitive work,[21] like good literary criticism. A rationalist space needs to be able to talk about the territory.
I strongly disagree with the bolded text. It often helps a lot to say phrases like “on my model” or “as I see it”, because it emphasizes the difference between my map and the territory, even though I’m implicitly/explicitly claiming that my map models the territory.
This is helpful for a bunch of human psychological reasons, but one is that humans often feel social pressure to overwrite their own models or impressions with their received model of someone speaking confidently. In most parts of the world, stating something with confidence is not just a claim about truth values to be disputed, it’s a social bid (sometimes a social threat) for others to treat what we’re saying as true. That’s very bad for collective epistemology!
Many of us rationalist-types (especially, in practice, males) have a social aura of confidence that fucks with other people’s epistemology. (I’ve been on both sides of that dynamic, depending on who I’m talking to.)
By making these sorts of declarations where we emphasize that our maps are not the territory, we make space for others to have their own differing impressions and views, which means that I am able to learn more from them.
Now, it’s totally fine to say “well, people shouldn’t be like that.” But we already knew we were dealing with corrupted hardware riddled with biases. The question is how can we make use of the faculties that we actually have at our disposable to cobble together effective epistemic processes (individual and collective) anyway.
And it turns out that being straightforward about what you think is true at a content level (not dissembling), while also adopting practices and norms that attend to people’s emotional and social experience works better than ignoring the social dimension, and trying to just focus on the content.
I strongly disagree with the bolded text. It often helps a lot to say phrases like “on my model” or “as I see it”, because it emphasizes the difference between my map and the territory, even though I’m implicitly/explicitly claiming that my map models the territory.
This is helpful for a bunch of human psychological reasons, but one is that humans often feel social pressure to overwrite their own models or impressions with their received model of someone speaking confidently. In most parts of the world, stating something with confidence is not just a claim about truth values to be disputed, it’s a social bid (sometimes a social threat) for others to treat what we’re saying as true. That’s very bad for collective epistemology!
Many of us rationalist-types (especially, in practice, males) have a social aura of confidence that fucks with other people’s epistemology. (I’ve been on both sides of that dynamic, depending on who I’m talking to.)
By making these sorts of declarations where we emphasize that our maps are not the territory, we make space for others to have their own differing impressions and views, which means that I am able to learn more from them.
Now, it’s totally fine to say “well, people shouldn’t be like that.” But we already knew we were dealing with corrupted hardware riddled with biases. The question is how can we make use of the faculties that we actually have at our disposable to cobble together effective epistemic processes (individual and collective) anyway.
And it turns out that being straightforward about what you think is true at a content level (not dissembling), while also adopting practices and norms that attend to people’s emotional and social experience works better than ignoring the social dimension, and trying to just focus on the content.
...Or that’s my understanding anyway.
See for instance: https://musingsandroughdrafts.com/2018/12/24/using-the-facilitator-to-make-sure-that-each-persons-point-is-held/