Thanks, I hadn’t noticed that there was a wiki.
phl43
Karma: 48
But of course I have done nothing of the sort.
Is there a glossary of your jargon somewhere?
Engaging in hyperbole instead of rational discussion is a choice.
I don’t think the kind of rhetorical hyperbole I’m using in my post, that any normal person can recognize as such, is incompatible with rational discussion. Other than that, what you say is fair enough.
(On another topic, you’re using the verb “steelman”, which I think you already used before. I had never encountered this word before. I’m guessing that it’s local jargon for the opposite of “to strawman”, meaning something like “making the position you attack as strong as possible”?)
I find it funny, by the way, that people here are criticizing me for not giving evidence for a claim that is not only known to be true by almost everyone, but which can be verified in 5 seconds with Google if you have a doubt, while recommending a piece that begins with a very strong and arguably unverifiable claim about the evolutionary origin of the way in which humans talk about politics… (Which is not to say, to be clear, that I disagree with everything Yudkowsky says in that essay.)
Yes, I read it, there was a link in one of the first replies I got.
But look, I think we’re both wasting our time here, since I’ve already decided to tone down my language and not to post anything here that is directly related to politics. So I’ll just leave it at that, because I really have work to do :-p
The issue isn’t what you see, the issue is what intelligent people from outside of your echo chamber see.
Okay, let me rephrase what I originally said: it’s not incompatible. Do you think it’s incompatible? Based on what you say later in your comment, I guess you do. So let me ask you a more general question: do you think there are no claims one can make, such that if someone denies them, one can reasonably conclude that the person denying it is not seriously engaging with one? I’m sure you don’t (obvious counterexamples are not hard to come up with), so there must something about the particular claim I made, which makes you think it doesn’t fall under that category.
Indeed, in the second part of that comment, you say that for someone like you this claim wasn’t obvious. I believe you when you say that you had no idea about this, but I also think that, for any random person, it’s highly unlikely they are in your epistemic situation with respect to this claim. And I don’t think I have to provide evidence for claims that, in all likelihood, an overwhelming proportion of my readers already know to be true.
Even if you disagree with that, it wouldn’t change the fact that, if you had a doubt, it would have taken you 5 seconds to assuage it by looking this up on Google. I just searched “trump hate crimes election” and got plenty of evidence that a lot of people were saying that after the election. Now, if what you mean is that, given my tone and the fact that you don’t know me, it was reasonable of you not to make any effort to ascertain the plausibility of that claim, then I’m happy to concede that. But I took you, perhaps mistakenly, to be making a stronger claim.
I don’t see how that’s incompatible. If I say that Trump often speaks unintelligibly and someone denies it or even claims not to be sure that it’s true, provided that person is intelligent and has a decent mastery of the English language, I would not believe they are saying that in good faith. Similarly, when I say that immediately after the election a lot of people were asserting that Trump’s victory had caused a substantial increase in the number of hate crimes and someone denies it or claims not to be sure it’s true, I think it’s perfectly reasonable of me to conclude that they are not seriously engaging with me.
Of course, people here didn’t deny it, they just asked me to provide evidence for that claim. But I don’t see the point of asking for evidence for a claim that you agree with unless you have some serious reason to think that you might be wrong in believing it’s true. (In this case, if someone had any doubt, Google would solve that problem in 5 seconds.) To my mind, this isn’t really being rational, it’s pedantry that can only serve to avoid dealing with the part of the argument that is actually contentious, which in this case was my argument that the evidence doesn’t support the claim that Trump’s victory had caused a substantial increase of the number of hate crimes.
I think one can reach a point past which asking for evidence is not a sign of rationality, but rather of pedantry. And I think that asking for evidence in favor of the first claim you mention definitely falls under that description. I didn’t provide evidence for that claim, because if someone denies it, I simply don’t believe they are saying that in good faith. Of course, you could argue that one could totally deny in good faith what I literally said in the passage you quote, because it’s probably not true that almost everyone seemed convinced of the claim I was talking about, but any person who has normal conversations should be able to recognize that kind of rhetorical hyperbole when he sees it and interpret it charitably. Now, I agree with you that my tone in that post didn’t invite charity and that rhetorical hyperbole doesn’t help the argument, but that’s not a reason to be voluntarily dense.
As for the data from the NYPD, I think it’s incredibly poor evidence. It really wouldn’t be surprising if, after Trump’s election, the propensity to report hate crimes to law enforcement had increased. It also wouldn’t be surprising if the NYPD, who reports to a Democratic mayor, had become more proactive on that kind of crimes. The article also doesn’t make any attempt to determine how inconsistent with past variability this spike in the number of incidents recorded by the NYPD was. It also seems to be driven by attacks against Jews, which is probably not what most people would have expected, if they had predicted a spike in hate crimes after Trump’s election. Now, it’s true that I didn’t make any of those points in my post, but I did point out that, for any kind of crime, data from law enforcement is problematic for all sorts of reasons (some of which I just mentioned), so it’s better to use victimization surveys.
Also, my post was criticizing people who claimed that Trump’s victory had caused a substantial increase in the number of hate crimes immediately after the election, whereas the NYPD made the announcement you mention almost a month later. The claim that Trump’s election caused a substantial increase in the number of hate crimes is not harmless, it has real effects such as making people who are members of minorities freak out, so I think it should require strong evidence before people can assert it. I really don’t see how anyone could reasonably maintain that we have strong evidence that it’s true and I also think that my post was doing a perfectly good job at showing that the evidence most commonly used immediately after the election to support that claim was clearly insufficient.
This sounds right to me, but I think it mostly applies to discussions that are directly related to politics, whereas my post was primarily about the evidence for a claim that is very popular and only indirectly about politics insofar as this claim has become part of the political debate.
But, as I explained in the post I published yesterday about what I would like to do with my blog, I don’t want it to become an echo chamber. So I don’t just want to increase the number of people, I also want to attract intelligent people. I’ll probably just post here only things which deal with evidence and I will tone down the language so as not to turn off people. That being said, I think the argument in my piece on hate crimes was perfectly sound and did provide evidence, notwithstanding the abrasive language.
Actually, you’re probably right, I should work on my dissertation.
I was just reading my post again, and I guess this passage is also misleading, for exactly the same reason: “if you had calculated a probability that Clinton was going to win in each state using the method I explained above (which you then use to compute a probability that Clinton is going to win the electoral college)”.
I agree that shev’s comment was informative, but he or she also made claims I disagree with. Just because they are only indirectly related to my original question, I don’t see why I should not explain why I disagree with the claims in question. If shev doesn’t think continuing this conversation is likely to be productive, which I would understand, I imagine he or she will just not stop replying. I know I’m new here, so I’m not used to your customs, but this kind of comment strikes me as weird.
Note, however, that a took a good resolution.
You’re clearly not interested in discussion of your condemnation of liberals, and certainly not rational discussion.
Look, if you had just said that my tone makes it unlikely that I’m interested in rational discussion for someone who doesn’t know me, I would have conceded that point to you. But it’s simply not true that I’m not interested in rational discussion and, crucially, anyone who has read my post can see that it’s not true. Indeed, in the note at the end of the post, I say that on the blog where the original version of this post was published, I report a conversation about that post I had with a friend which led to some useful clarifications. I actually report the conversation verbatim and, if you go read it, you will see that it’s not only civil and rational, but also fruitful. Now, you may think that, given the tone of the post, people are less likely to read that conversation and you’re probably right about that. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not true that I’m clearly not interested in rational discussion and the evidence to the contrary is available to anyone who has read my post.
Also, while I agree with you that, by saying the kind of things you quote, I made it less likely that people will read my post,I want to make clear that it doesn’t mean they are just false, gratuitous assertions. It’s certainly true of some of them, so I’ll grant you that, but I don’t believe for a second it’s true of all. For instance, when I say that Trump’s victory led to hysterical reactions in academia, I don’t see how any reasonable person who works in academia and understand the meaning of the word “hysterical” could deny it. Of course, we could even argue about this, but that’s because as philosophers know, you can always give a seemingly reasonable argument for virtually every claim no matter how absurd. But this doesn’t mean that you’re being rational.
People who don’t already agree with you won’t be convinced because you obviously disdain them and are writing with obviously massive bias against them.
Again, I would have conceded a weaker point, but this is just false. I actually have argued for the claim I’m defending in my post with some of my liberal friends in a non-confrontational way and, not only did it fail to have any effect on them, but it was met with accusations that I was insensitive to the plight of minorities. (To be clear, I’m not suggesting that it justifies the tone I’m using in my post, I’m only saying that it’s evidence against the strong claim you make.) Most of them are highly intelligent people with a PhD, yet when it came to this issue, they adopted standards of evidence that on any other issue they would have rejected as completely unacceptable. So while I would be happy to concede that, in some cases, the fact that I used abrasive language may have prevented me from convincing people whose mind I would otherwise have changed, but it doesn’t mean that, in most cases, it’s because I used that kind of language that I failed to convince people and, indeed, I think it’s false. Some facts are causally overdetermined and I think it’s one of them.
It’s not even true that I didn’t convince anyone who wasn’t already convinced, since I know for a fact that some people were. This should not be surprising since, although there is a sense of “strength” according to which my tone make the argument in my post weaker (i. e. the probability that I will succeed in convincing people who have a look at it), there is another sense of “strength” (i. e. how well my evidence and my reasoning establish my conclusion from a purely logical/statistical point of view) according to which my tone is completely irrelevant to how strong my argument was. Intelligent people should be able to make abstraction of the tone to assess the merits of the argument independently of it, although I agree with you that intelligent people should also be able to avoid the kind of language that makes it less likely that others will read what they have written.
Just out of curiosity, why did you think that my post wasn’t very relevant or appropriate for Less Wrong? I ask this because, based on what you’re saying (again I just arrived here), according to some people here, it’s a community for people to rationally discuss topics of interest to the group. I think that, on a common understanding of “rational”, my post was rationally discussing the claim that Trump’s election caused a substantial increase of the number of hate crimes. After all, I’m using evidence to argue logically that, even though a large number of people asserted this claim as if it had been conclusively established, the evidence doesn’t actually support it. Of course, if by “rational” you meant something stronger, such that my post wasn’t rationally discussing this claim in that sense because I was using unnecessarily abrasive language, then I guess I understand.
I now understand that people on LW don’t like to talk about politics here, and like I said I don’t really care about this particular incident, nor do I want to argue that you should change the customs around here. But I want to point out that, as far as the claim I was attacking in my post was concerned, I don’t think I was assuming anything controversial to show that it was not supported by the evidence.
I’m guessing that’s not really what you meant when you said that “[I] wrote in a style that assumed a lot of opinions are held by [my] readers, without justification”, but just in case it was, I wanted to make that clear. It matters to me because, although I have a natural tendency to write in a polemical style on political issues, I usually try to give rational and evidence-based arguments in favor of my views, and I think it was also true of the post we are talking about.
This is definitely something I can understand.