I’ll say it again: POC doesn’t mean “believe everyone is sane and intelligent”, it means “treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by a sane , intelligent, person”.
Ie, its a defeasible assumption. If you fail, you have evidence that it was a dumb comment. Ift you succeed, you have evidence it wasn’t. Either way, you have evidence, and you are not sitting in an echo chamber where your beliefs about people’s dumbness go forever untested, because you reject out of hand anything that sounds superficially dumb, .or was made by someone you have labelled , however unjustly,as dumb.
The PoC tends to be advised in the context of philosophy, where there is a background assumption of infinite amounts of time to consider things, The resource-constrained version would be to interpret comments charitably once you have, for whatever reason, got into a discussion....with the corollary of reserving some space for “I might be wrong” where you haven’t had the resources to test the hypothesis.
background assumption of infinite amounts of time to consider things
LOL. While ars may be longa, vita is certainly brevis. This is a silly assumption, better suited for theology, perhaps—it, at least, promises infinte time. :-)
If I were living in English countryside around XVIII century I might have had a different opinion on the matter, but I do not.
interpret comments charitably once you have, for whatever reason, got into a discussion
It’s not a binary either-or situation. I am willing to interpret comments charitably according to my (updateable) prior of how knowledgeable, competent, and reasonable the writer is. In some situations I would stop and ponder, in others I would roll my eyes and move on.
As I operationalize it, that definition effectively waters down the POC to a degree I suspect most POC proponents would be unhappy with.
Sane, intelligent people occasionally say wrong things; in fact, because of selection effects, it might even be that most of the wrong things I see & hear in real life come from sane, intelligent people. So even if I were to decide that someone who’s just made a wrong-sounding assertion were sane & intelligent, that wouldn’t lead me to treat the assertion substantially more charitably than I otherwise would (and I suspect that the kind of person who likes the(ir conception of the) POC might well say I were being “uncharitable”).
Edit: I changed “To my mind” to “As I operationalize it”. Also, I guess a shorter form of this comment would be: operationalized like that, I think I effectively am applying the POC already, but it doesn’t feel like it from the inside, and I doubt it looks like it from the outside.
You have uncharutably interpreted my formulation to mean ’treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by a sane intelligent person who may .or may have been having an off day”. What kind of guideline is that?
The charitable version would have been “treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by someone sane and intelligent at the time”.
(I’m giving myself half a point for anticipating that someone might reckon I was being uncharitable.)
You have uncharutably interpreted my formulation to mean ’treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by a sane intelligent person who may .or may have been having an off day”. What kind of guideline is that?
A realistic one.
The charitable version would have been “treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by someone sane and intelligent at the time”.
The thing is, that version actually sounds less charitable to me than my interpretation. Why? Well, I see two reasonable ways to interpret your latest formulation.
The first is to interpret “sane and intelligent” as I normally would, as a property of the person, in which case I don’t understand how appending “at the time” makes a meaningful difference. My earlier point that sane, intelligent people say wrong things still applies. Whispering in my ear, “no, seriously, that person who just said the dumb-sounding thing is sane and intelligent right now” is just going to make me say, “right, I’m not denying that; as I said, sanity & intelligence aren’t inconsistent with saying something dumb”.
The second is to insist that “at the time” really is doing some semantic work here, indicating that I need to interpret “sane and intelligent” differently. But what alternative interpretation makes sense in this context? The obvious alternative is that “at the time” is drawing my attention to whatever wrong-sounding comment was just made. But then “sane and intelligent” is really just a camouflaged assertion of the comment’s worthiness, rather than the claimant’s, which reduces this formulation of the POC to “treat everyone’s comments as though the comments are cogent”.
The first interpretation is surely not your intended one because it’s equivalent to one you’ve ruled out. So presumably I have to go with the second interpretation, but it strikes me as transparently uncharitable, because it sounds like a straw version of the POC (“oh, so I’m supposed to treat all comments as cogent, even if they sound idiotic?”).
The third alternative, of course, is that I’m overlooking some third sensible interpretation of your latest formulation, but I don’t see what it is; your comment’s too pithy to point me in the right direction.
But then “sane and intelligent” is really just a camouflaged assertion of the comment’s worthiness, rather than the claimant’s, which reduces this formulation of the POC to “treat everyone’s comments as though the comments are cogent”. [..] (“oh, so I’m supposed to treat all comments as cogent, even if they sound idiotic?”
Yep.
You have assumed that cannot be the correct interpretation of the PoC, without saying why. In light of your other comments, it could well be that you are assuming that the PoC can only be true by correspondence to reality or false, by lack of correspondence. But norms, guidelines, heurisitics, advice, lie on an orthogonal axis to true/false: they are guides to action, not passive reflections. Their equivalent of the true/false axis are the Works/Does Not Work axis. So would adoption of the PoC work as way of understanding people, and calibrating your confidence levels?...that is the question.
But norms, guidelines, heurisitics, advice, lie on an orthogonal axis to true/false: they are guides to action, not passive reflections. Their equivalent of the true/false axis are the Works/Does Not Work axis. So would adoption of the PoC work as way of understanding people, and calibrating your confidence levels?...that is the question.
OK, but that’s not an adequate basis for recommending a given norm/guideline/heuristic. One has to at least sketch an answer to the question, drawing on evidence and/or argument (as RobinZ sought to).
You have assumed that cannot be the correct interpretation of the PoC, without saying why.
Well, because it’s hard for me to believe you really believe that interpretation and understand it in the same way I would naturally operationalize it: namely, noticing and throwing away any initial suspicion I have that a comment’s wrong, and then forcing myself to pretend the comment must be correct in some obscure way.
As soon as I imagine applying that procedure to a concrete case, I cringe at how patently silly & unhelpful it seems. Here’s a recent-ish, specific example of me expressing disagreement with a statement I immediately suspected was incorrect.
What specifically would I have done if I’d treated the seemingly patently wrong comment as cogent instead? Read the comment, thought “that can’t be right”, then shaken my head and decided, “no, let’s say that is right”, and then...? Upvoted the comment? Trusted but verified (i.e. not actually treated the comment as cogent)? Replied with “I presume this comment is correct, great job”? Surely these are not courses of action you mean to recommend (the first & third because they actively support misinformation, the second because I expect you’d find it insufficiently charitable). Surely I am being uncharitable in operationalizing your recommendation this way...even though that does seem to me the most literal, straightforward operationalization open to me. Surely I misunderstand you. That’s why I assumed “that cannot be the correct interpretation” of your POC.
Well, because it’s hard for me to believe you really believe that interpretation and understand it in the same way I would naturally operationalize it: namely, noticing and throwing away any initial suspicion I have that a comment’s wrong, and then forcing myself to pretend the comment must be correct in some obscure way.
If I may step in at this point; “cogent” does not mean “true”. The principle of charity (as I understand it) merely recommends treating any commenter as reasonably sane and intelligent. This does not mean he can’t be wrong—he may be misinformed, he may have made a minor error in reasoning, he may simply not know as much about the subject as you do. Alternatively, you may be misinformed, or have made a minor error in reasoning, or not know as much about the subject as the other commenter...
So the correct course of action then, in my opinion, is to find the source of error and to be polite about it. The example post you linked to was a great example—you provided statistics, backed them up, and linked to your sources. You weren’t rude about it, you simply stated facts. As far as I could see, you treated RomeoStevens as sane, intelligent, and simply lacking in certain pieces of pertinent historical knowledge—which you have now provided.
(As to what RomeoStevens said—it was cogent. That is to say, it was pertinent and relevant to the conversation at the time. That it was wrong does not change the fact that it was cogent; if it had been right it would have been a worthwhile point to make.)
If I may step in at this point; “cogent” does not mean “true”.
Yes, and were I asked to give synonyms for “cogent”, I’d probably say “compelling” or “convincing” [edit: rather than “true”]. But an empirical claim is only compelling or convincing (and hence may only be cogent) if I have grounds for believing it very likely true. Hence “treat all comments as cogent, even if they sound idiotic” translates [edit: for empirical comments, at least] to “treat all comments as if very likely true, even if they sound idiotic”.
Now you mention the issue of relevance, I think that, yeah, I agree that relevance is part of the definition of “cogent”, but I also reckon that relevance is only a necessary condition for cogency, not a sufficient one. And so...
As to what RomeoStevens said—it was cogent. That is to say, it was pertinent and relevant to the conversation at the time.
...I have to push back here. While pertinent, the comment was not only wrong but (to me) obviously very likely wrong, and RomeoStevens gave no evidence for it. So I found it unreasonable, unconvincing, and unpersuasive — the opposite of dictionary definitions of “cogent”. Pertinence & relevance are only a subset of cogency.
The principle of charity (as I understand it) merely recommends treating any commenter as reasonably sane and intelligent. This does not mean he can’t be wrong—he may be misinformed, he may have made a minor error in reasoning, he may simply not know as much about the subject as you do.
That’s why I wrote that that version of the POC strikes me as watered down; someone being “reasonably sane and intelligent” is totally consistent with their just having made a trivial blunder, and is (in my experience) only weak evidence that they haven’t just made a trivial blunder, so “treat commenters as reasonably sane and intelligent” dissolves into “treat commenters pretty much as I’d treat anyone”.
Hence “treat all comments as cogent, even if they sound idiotic” translates [edit: for empirical comments, at least] to “treat all comments as if very likely true, even if they sound idiotic”.
Then “cogent” was probably the wrong word to use.
I’d need a word that means pertinent, relevant, and believed to have been most likely true (or at least useful to say) by the person who said it; but not necessarily actually true.
While pertinent, the comment was not only wrong but (to me) obviously very likely wrong, and RomeoStevens gave no evidence for it. So I found it unreasonable, unconvincing, and unpersuasive — the opposite of dictionary definitions of “cogent”. Pertinence & relevance are only a subset of cogency.
I think at this point, so as not to get stuck on semantics, we should probably taboo the word ‘cogent’.
(Having said that, I do agree anyone with access to the statistics you quoted would most likely find RomeoSteven’s comments unreasonable, unconvincing and unpersuasive).
so “treat commenters as reasonably sane and intelligent” dissolves into “treat commenters pretty much as I’d treat anyone”.
Then you may very well be effectively applying the principle already. Looking at your reply to RomeoStevens supports this assertion.
TheAncientGeek assented to that choice of word, so I stuck with it. His conception of the POC might well be different from yours and everyone else’s (which is a reason I’m trying to pin down precisely what TheAncientGeek means).
Fair enough, I was checking different dictionaries (and I’ve hitherto never noticed other people using “cogent” for “pertinent”).
Then you may very well be effectively applying the principle already. Looking at your reply to RomeoStevens supports this assertion.
Maybe, though I’m confused here by TheAncientGeek saying in one breath that I applied the POC to RomeoStevens, but then agreeing (“Thats exactly what I mean.”) in the next breath with a definition of the POC that implies I didn’t apply the POC to RomeoStevens.
I think that you and I are almost entirely in agreement, then. (Not sure about TheAncientGeek).
Maybe, though I’m confused here by TheAncientGeek saying in one breath that I applied the POC to RomeoStevens, but then agreeing (“Thats exactly what I mean.”) in the next breath with a definition of the POC that implies I didn’t apply the POC to RomeoStevens.
I think you’re dealing with double-illusion-of-transparency issues here. He gave you a definition (“treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by someone sane and intelligent at the time”) by which he meant some very specific concept which he best approximated by that phrase (call this Concept A). You then considered this phrase, and mapped it to a similar-but-not-the-same concept (Concept B) which you defined and tried to point out a shortcoming in (“namely, noticing and throwing away any initial suspicion I have that a comment’s wrong, and then forcing myself to pretend the comment must be correct in some obscure way.”).
Now, TheAncientGeek is looking at your words (describing Concept B) and reading into them the very similar Concept A; where your post in response to RomeoStevens satisfies Concept A but not Concept B.
Nailing down the difference between A and B will be extremely tricky and will probably require both of you to describe your concepts in different words several times. (The English language is a remarkably lossy means of communication).
Your diagnosis sounds all too likely. I’d hoped to minimize the risk of this kind of thing by concretizing and focusing on a specific, publicly-observable example, but that might not have helped.
Yes, that was an example of PoC, because satt assumed RomeoStevens had failed to look up the figures, rather than insanely believing that 120,000ish < 500ish.
But norms, guidelines, heurisitics, advice, lie on an orthogonal axis to true/false: they are guides to action, not passive reflections. Their equivalent of the true/false axis are the Works/Does Not Work axis. So would adoption of the PoC work as way of understanding people, and calibrating your confidence levels?...that is the question.
OK, but that’s not an adequate basis for recommending a given norm/guideline/heuristic. One has to at least sketch an answer to the question, drawing on evidence and/or argument
Yes, but that’s beside the original point. What you call a realistic guideline doesnt work as a guideline at all, and therefore isnt a a charitable interpretation of the PoC.
Justifying that PoC as something that works at what it is supposed to do, is a question that can be answered, but it is a separate question.
namely, noticing and throwing away any initial suspicion I have that a comment’s wrong, and then forcing myself to pretend the comment must be correct in some obscure way.
Thats exactly what I mean.
What specifically would I have done if I’d treated the seemingly patently wrong comment as cogent instead?
Cogent doesn’t mean right. You actually succeeded in treating it as wrong for sane reasons, ie failure to check data.
But norms, guidelines, heurisitics, advice, lie on an orthogonal axis to true/false: they are guides to action, not passive reflections. [...]
OK, but [...]
Yes, but that’s beside the original point.
You brought it up!
What you call a realistic guideline doesnt work as a guideline at all, and therefore isnt a a charitable interpretation of the PoC.
I continue tothink that the version I called realistic is no less workable than your version.
Justifying that PoC as something that works at what it is supposed to do, is a question that can be answered, but it is a separate question.
Again, it’s a question you introduced. (And labelled “the question”.) But I’m content to put it aside.
noticing and throwing away any initial suspicion I have that a comment’s wrong, and then forcing myself to pretend the comment must be correct in some obscure way.
Thats exactly what I mean.
But surely it isn’t. Just 8 minutes earlier you wrote that a case where I did the opposite was an “example of PoC”.
But not one that tells you unambiguously what to do, ie not a usable guideline at all.
There’s a lot of complaint about this heuristic along the lines that it doesn’t guarantee perfect results...ie, its a heuristic
And now there is the complaint that its not realistic, it doesn’t reflect reality.
Ideal rationalists can stop reading now.
Everybody else: you’re biased. Specifically, overconfident,. Overconfidence makes people overestimate their ability to understand what people are saying, and underestimate the rationality of others. The PoC is a heuristic which corrects those. As a heuristic, an approximate method, it i is based on the principle that overshooting the amount of sense people are making is better than undershooting. Overshooting would be a problem, if there were some goldilocks alternative, some way of getting things exactly right. There isn’t. The voice in your head that tells you you are doing just fine its the voice of your bias.
But not one that tells you unambiguously what to do, ie not a usable guideline at all.
I don’t see how this applies any more to the “may .or may have been having an off day”″ version than it does to your original. They’re about as vague as each other.
Overconfidence makes people overestimate their ability to understand what people are saying, and underestimate the rationality of others. The PoC is a heuristic which corrects those. As a heuristic, an approximate method, it i is based on the principle that overshooting the amount of sense people are making is better than undershooting.
Understood. But it’s not obvious to me that “the principle” is correct, nor is it obvious that a sufficiently strong POC is better than my more usual approach of expressing disagreement and/or asking sceptical questions (if I care enough to respond in the first place).
But not one that tells you unambiguously what to do, ie not a usable guideline at all.
I don’t see how this applies any more to the “may .or may have been having an off day”″ version than it does to your original. They’re about as vague as each other.
Mine implies a heuristic of “make repeated attempts at re-intepreting the comment using different background assumptions”. What does yours imply?
Understood. But it’s not obvious to me that “the principle” is correct,
As I have explained, it provides its own evidence.
nor is it obvious that a sufficiently strong POC is better than my more usual approach of expressing disagreement and/or asking sceptical questions (if I care enough to respond in the first place).
Neither of those is much good if interpreting someone who died 100 years ago.
Mine implies a heuristic of “make repeated attempts at re-intepreting the comment using different background assumptions”.
I don’t see how “treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by a sane , intelligent, person” entails that without extra background assumptions. And I expect that once those extra assumptions are spelled out, the “may .or may have been having an off day” version will imply the same action(s) as your original version.
As I have explained, it provides its own evidence.
Well, when I’ve disagreed with people in discussions, my own experience has been that behaving according to my baseline impression of how much sense they’re making gets me closer to understanding than consciously inflating my impression of how much sense they’re making.
Neither of those is much good if interpreting someone who died 100 years ago.
A fair point, but one of minimal practical import. Almost all of the disagreements which confront me in my life are disagreements with live people.
it means “treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by a sane , intelligent, person”.
I don’t like this rule. My approach is simpler: attempt to understand what the person means. This does not require me to treat him as sane or intelligent.
The PoC is a way of breaking down “understand what the other person says” into smaller steps, not .something entirely different, Treating your own mental processes as a black box that always delivers the right answer is a great way to stay in the grip of bias.
I’ll say it again: POC doesn’t mean “believe everyone is sane and intelligent”, it means “treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by a sane , intelligent, person”.
Ie, its a defeasible assumption. If you fail, you have evidence that it was a dumb comment. Ift you succeed, you have evidence it wasn’t. Either way, you have evidence, and you are not sitting in an echo chamber where your beliefs about people’s dumbness go forever untested, because you reject out of hand anything that sounds superficially dumb, .or was made by someone you have labelled , however unjustly,as dumb.
That’s fine. I have limited information processing capacity—my opportunity costs for testing other people’s dumbness are fairly high.
In the information age I don’t see how anyone can operate without the “this is too stupid to waste time on” pre-filter.
The PoC tends to be advised in the context of philosophy, where there is a background assumption of infinite amounts of time to consider things, The resource-constrained version would be to interpret comments charitably once you have, for whatever reason, got into a discussion....with the corollary of reserving some space for “I might be wrong” where you haven’t had the resources to test the hypothesis.
LOL. While ars may be longa, vita is certainly brevis. This is a silly assumption, better suited for theology, perhaps—it, at least, promises infinte time. :-)
If I were living in English countryside around XVIII century I might have had a different opinion on the matter, but I do not.
It’s not a binary either-or situation. I am willing to interpret comments charitably according to my (updateable) prior of how knowledgeable, competent, and reasonable the writer is. In some situations I would stop and ponder, in others I would roll my eyes and move on.
Users report that charitable interpretation gives you more evidence for updating than you would have otherwise.
Are you already optimal? How do you know?
As I operationalize it, that definition effectively waters down the POC to a degree I suspect most POC proponents would be unhappy with.
Sane, intelligent people occasionally say wrong things; in fact, because of selection effects, it might even be that most of the wrong things I see & hear in real life come from sane, intelligent people. So even if I were to decide that someone who’s just made a wrong-sounding assertion were sane & intelligent, that wouldn’t lead me to treat the assertion substantially more charitably than I otherwise would (and I suspect that the kind of person who likes the(ir conception of the) POC might well say I were being “uncharitable”).
Edit: I changed “To my mind” to “As I operationalize it”. Also, I guess a shorter form of this comment would be: operationalized like that, I think I effectively am applying the POC already, but it doesn’t feel like it from the inside, and I doubt it looks like it from the outside.
You have uncharutably interpreted my formulation to mean ’treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by a sane intelligent person who may .or may have been having an off day”. What kind of guideline is that?
The charitable version would have been “treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by someone sane and intelligent at the time”.
(I’m giving myself half a point for anticipating that someone might reckon I was being uncharitable.)
A realistic one.
The thing is, that version actually sounds less charitable to me than my interpretation. Why? Well, I see two reasonable ways to interpret your latest formulation.
The first is to interpret “sane and intelligent” as I normally would, as a property of the person, in which case I don’t understand how appending “at the time” makes a meaningful difference. My earlier point that sane, intelligent people say wrong things still applies. Whispering in my ear, “no, seriously, that person who just said the dumb-sounding thing is sane and intelligent right now” is just going to make me say, “right, I’m not denying that; as I said, sanity & intelligence aren’t inconsistent with saying something dumb”.
The second is to insist that “at the time” really is doing some semantic work here, indicating that I need to interpret “sane and intelligent” differently. But what alternative interpretation makes sense in this context? The obvious alternative is that “at the time” is drawing my attention to whatever wrong-sounding comment was just made. But then “sane and intelligent” is really just a camouflaged assertion of the comment’s worthiness, rather than the claimant’s, which reduces this formulation of the POC to “treat everyone’s comments as though the comments are cogent”.
The first interpretation is surely not your intended one because it’s equivalent to one you’ve ruled out. So presumably I have to go with the second interpretation, but it strikes me as transparently uncharitable, because it sounds like a straw version of the POC (“oh, so I’m supposed to treat all comments as cogent, even if they sound idiotic?”).
The third alternative, of course, is that I’m overlooking some third sensible interpretation of your latest formulation, but I don’t see what it is; your comment’s too pithy to point me in the right direction.
Yep.
You have assumed that cannot be the correct interpretation of the PoC, without saying why. In light of your other comments, it could well be that you are assuming that the PoC can only be true by correspondence to reality or false, by lack of correspondence. But norms, guidelines, heurisitics, advice, lie on an orthogonal axis to true/false: they are guides to action, not passive reflections. Their equivalent of the true/false axis are the Works/Does Not Work axis. So would adoption of the PoC work as way of understanding people, and calibrating your confidence levels?...that is the question.
OK, but that’s not an adequate basis for recommending a given norm/guideline/heuristic. One has to at least sketch an answer to the question, drawing on evidence and/or argument (as RobinZ sought to).
Well, because it’s hard for me to believe you really believe that interpretation and understand it in the same way I would naturally operationalize it: namely, noticing and throwing away any initial suspicion I have that a comment’s wrong, and then forcing myself to pretend the comment must be correct in some obscure way.
As soon as I imagine applying that procedure to a concrete case, I cringe at how patently silly & unhelpful it seems. Here’s a recent-ish, specific example of me expressing disagreement with a statement I immediately suspected was incorrect.
What specifically would I have done if I’d treated the seemingly patently wrong comment as cogent instead? Read the comment, thought “that can’t be right”, then shaken my head and decided, “no, let’s say that is right”, and then...? Upvoted the comment? Trusted but verified (i.e. not actually treated the comment as cogent)? Replied with “I presume this comment is correct, great job”? Surely these are not courses of action you mean to recommend (the first & third because they actively support misinformation, the second because I expect you’d find it insufficiently charitable). Surely I am being uncharitable in operationalizing your recommendation this way...even though that does seem to me the most literal, straightforward operationalization open to me. Surely I misunderstand you. That’s why I assumed “that cannot be the correct interpretation” of your POC.
If I may step in at this point; “cogent” does not mean “true”. The principle of charity (as I understand it) merely recommends treating any commenter as reasonably sane and intelligent. This does not mean he can’t be wrong—he may be misinformed, he may have made a minor error in reasoning, he may simply not know as much about the subject as you do. Alternatively, you may be misinformed, or have made a minor error in reasoning, or not know as much about the subject as the other commenter...
So the correct course of action then, in my opinion, is to find the source of error and to be polite about it. The example post you linked to was a great example—you provided statistics, backed them up, and linked to your sources. You weren’t rude about it, you simply stated facts. As far as I could see, you treated RomeoStevens as sane, intelligent, and simply lacking in certain pieces of pertinent historical knowledge—which you have now provided.
(As to what RomeoStevens said—it was cogent. That is to say, it was pertinent and relevant to the conversation at the time. That it was wrong does not change the fact that it was cogent; if it had been right it would have been a worthwhile point to make.)
Yes, and were I asked to give synonyms for “cogent”, I’d probably say “compelling” or “convincing” [edit: rather than “true”]. But an empirical claim is only compelling or convincing (and hence may only be cogent) if I have grounds for believing it very likely true. Hence “treat all comments as cogent, even if they sound idiotic” translates [edit: for empirical comments, at least] to “treat all comments as if very likely true, even if they sound idiotic”.
Now you mention the issue of relevance, I think that, yeah, I agree that relevance is part of the definition of “cogent”, but I also reckon that relevance is only a necessary condition for cogency, not a sufficient one. And so...
...I have to push back here. While pertinent, the comment was not only wrong but (to me) obviously very likely wrong, and RomeoStevens gave no evidence for it. So I found it unreasonable, unconvincing, and unpersuasive — the opposite of dictionary definitions of “cogent”. Pertinence & relevance are only a subset of cogency.
That’s why I wrote that that version of the POC strikes me as watered down; someone being “reasonably sane and intelligent” is totally consistent with their just having made a trivial blunder, and is (in my experience) only weak evidence that they haven’t just made a trivial blunder, so “treat commenters as reasonably sane and intelligent” dissolves into “treat commenters pretty much as I’d treat anyone”.
Then “cogent” was probably the wrong word to use.
I’d need a word that means pertinent, relevant, and believed to have been most likely true (or at least useful to say) by the person who said it; but not necessarily actually true.
Okay, I appear to have been using a different definition (see definition two).
I think at this point, so as not to get stuck on semantics, we should probably taboo the word ‘cogent’.
(Having said that, I do agree anyone with access to the statistics you quoted would most likely find RomeoSteven’s comments unreasonable, unconvincing and unpersuasive).
Then you may very well be effectively applying the principle already. Looking at your reply to RomeoStevens supports this assertion.
TheAncientGeek assented to that choice of word, so I stuck with it. His conception of the POC might well be different from yours and everyone else’s (which is a reason I’m trying to pin down precisely what TheAncientGeek means).
Fair enough, I was checking different dictionaries (and I’ve hitherto never noticed other people using “cogent” for “pertinent”).
Maybe, though I’m confused here by TheAncientGeek saying in one breath that I applied the POC to RomeoStevens, but then agreeing (“Thats exactly what I mean.”) in the next breath with a definition of the POC that implies I didn’t apply the POC to RomeoStevens.
I think that you and I are almost entirely in agreement, then. (Not sure about TheAncientGeek).
I think you’re dealing with double-illusion-of-transparency issues here. He gave you a definition (“treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by someone sane and intelligent at the time”) by which he meant some very specific concept which he best approximated by that phrase (call this Concept A). You then considered this phrase, and mapped it to a similar-but-not-the-same concept (Concept B) which you defined and tried to point out a shortcoming in (“namely, noticing and throwing away any initial suspicion I have that a comment’s wrong, and then forcing myself to pretend the comment must be correct in some obscure way.”).
Now, TheAncientGeek is looking at your words (describing Concept B) and reading into them the very similar Concept A; where your post in response to RomeoStevens satisfies Concept A but not Concept B.
Nailing down the difference between A and B will be extremely tricky and will probably require both of you to describe your concepts in different words several times. (The English language is a remarkably lossy means of communication).
Your diagnosis sounds all too likely. I’d hoped to minimize the risk of this kind of thing by concretizing and focusing on a specific, publicly-observable example, but that might not have helped.
Yes, that was an example of PoC, because satt assumed RomeoStevens had failed to look up the figures, rather than insanely believing that 120,000ish < 500ish.
Yes, but that’s beside the original point. What you call a realistic guideline doesnt work as a guideline at all, and therefore isnt a a charitable interpretation of the PoC.
Justifying that PoC as something that works at what it is supposed to do, is a question that can be answered, but it is a separate question.
Thats exactly what I mean.
Cogent doesn’t mean right. You actually succeeded in treating it as wrong for sane reasons, ie failure to check data.
You brought it up!
I continue to think that the version I called realistic is no less workable than your version.
Again, it’s a question you introduced. (And labelled “the question”.) But I’m content to put it aside.
But surely it isn’t. Just 8 minutes earlier you wrote that a case where I did the opposite was an “example of PoC”.
See my response to CCC.
But not one that tells you unambiguously what to do, ie not a usable guideline at all.
There’s a lot of complaint about this heuristic along the lines that it doesn’t guarantee perfect results...ie, its a heuristic
And now there is the complaint that its not realistic, it doesn’t reflect reality.
Ideal rationalists can stop reading now.
Everybody else: you’re biased. Specifically, overconfident,. Overconfidence makes people overestimate their ability to understand what people are saying, and underestimate the rationality of others. The PoC is a heuristic which corrects those. As a heuristic, an approximate method, it i is based on the principle that overshooting the amount of sense people are making is better than undershooting. Overshooting would be a problem, if there were some goldilocks alternative, some way of getting things exactly right. There isn’t. The voice in your head that tells you you are doing just fine its the voice of your bias.
I don’t see how this applies any more to the “may .or may have been having an off day”″ version than it does to your original. They’re about as vague as each other.
Understood. But it’s not obvious to me that “the principle” is correct, nor is it obvious that a sufficiently strong POC is better than my more usual approach of expressing disagreement and/or asking sceptical questions (if I care enough to respond in the first place).
Mine implies a heuristic of “make repeated attempts at re-intepreting the comment using different background assumptions”. What does yours imply?
As I have explained, it provides its own evidence.
Neither of those is much good if interpreting someone who died 100 years ago.
I don’t see how “treat everyone’s comments as though they were made by a sane , intelligent, person” entails that without extra background assumptions. And I expect that once those extra assumptions are spelled out, the “may .or may have been having an off day” version will imply the same action(s) as your original version.
Well, when I’ve disagreed with people in discussions, my own experience has been that behaving according to my baseline impression of how much sense they’re making gets me closer to understanding than consciously inflating my impression of how much sense they’re making.
A fair point, but one of minimal practical import. Almost all of the disagreements which confront me in my life are disagreements with live people.
I don’t like this rule. My approach is simpler: attempt to understand what the person means. This does not require me to treat him as sane or intelligent.
How do you know how many mistakes you are or aren’t making?
The PoC is a way of breaking down “understand what the other person says” into smaller steps, not .something entirely different, Treating your own mental processes as a black box that always delivers the right answer is a great way to stay in the grip of bias.