I think most people have some, but not infinite, ability to "not take things personally", to engage in conversations that border on personal attacks without emotions interfering with their ability to track logic.
Speaking only for myself, when something gets too triggering, too close to an attack on my ego or something I hold dear, then the conversation will predictably get unproductive. I will either defend myself when I'm in the wrong, or submit socially when I'm in the right, and I can't tell which it will be, but nobody is going to learn the truth and nobody is going to have a good time.
It is, maybe, an okay social convention to suppose "when somebody takes things personally, we presume they are guilty of something they don't want to admit." But it's not literally true. People can also get defensive or emotional when they're falsely accused. If you assume "everybody who's uncomfortable talking to me about this touchy subject is Up To No Good", you will be wrong a lot of the time. It is not at all uncommon for people to be insecure about things that are in fact fine. Particularly if they default to social submission rather than social dominance.
If you want to engage in honest intellectual reasoning about touchy subjects, you can put in effort to make them less touchy, by establishing social safety.
If you choose to assume that everybody who has a limit, beyond which they get uncomfortable, take things personally, etc, is not worth conversing with, then you are going to have a very biased view of the world. I have seen this happen to people. They are functionally limited to a tiny circle of interlocutors and their views become, from my perspective, very skewed and ungrounded. People who literally can't be triggered are psychologically unusual and they are not the only people worth learning from. I would strongly recommend continuing to intellectually engage with people who are limited to a "comfort zone", within that comfort zone, and optionally putting in the work yourself to make their comfort zone larger.
If you have a comfort zone, beyond which you can't engage productively, I would recommend being prompt and explicit about ending conversations when they approach the edge of what you can handle. Take responsibility for politely bowing out. Do not concede that you are in the wrong, because you don't know that. Let them believe what they want, but end the conversation before you say a bunch of things you regret. Push to the edge of your own comfort zone cautiously and at your own pace. Trying to push yourself beyond what you're capable of, because "that's what rational people do" and because someone is pressuring you to do so, leads to regrets.
1It certainly doesn't make conversation with me impossible. When someone tells me that my understanding of my beliefs and motives should be rejected, I don't take my ball and go home in a huff, muttering that they've made further conversation nearly impossible. Rather, I respond the same way I do to any other disagreement: by supporting my view with reasoning and evidence. Why would the rules be different just because the topic of discussion happens to be my own beliefs and motives?
Man, I was right there with you going "Yes! That! Exactly!" right up until "I respond [...] by supporting my view with reasoning and evidence". There is a very important step before that! In cases where I am wrong about my own beliefs or motives, it is very difficult to notice that myself; other people pointing it out is one of the very few ways to notice. So when someone suggests I am wrong about my beliefs or motives, is extra super-duper important to step back, check the evidence, and consider whether they might be right!
And of course they could turn out right or wrong, I need to use reasoning and evidence to figure that out just like I do for everything else. The rules are indeed not any different just because the topic of discussion happens to be my own internal mental states and mechanisms.
1I do agree that a lot of people just incompetently throw around hypotheses of others' self-models being wrong. Trying to convince someone that they're suffering from a bias is indeed usually pretty useless. But I do not think e.g. addressing their concrete reasons is typically helpful at all.
My go-to prototypical example is hangriness. When someone is hangry, it's often more obvious from the outside. There is easy-to-notice evidence, like e.g. "did this person get angry about three completely unrelated things one after another?". And when I notice someone is hangry, the correct response is not to argue against whatever they're object-level angry about at the moment; even if I "succeed" at that argument, they'll just immediately find a different thing to be angry about. The correct response is to go find food and put it in front of them.
1i think there is a social fiction of individual sovereignty that is present in most social situations that explains this http://lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=4qYeNi6HB3FFz5xyp
1But if it's "unproductive to continue conversations with people who make claims that their opponents are self-deceived in order to win political arguments", that would seem to be a stance against "bridging gaps with others" and "questioning self-models" in the specific case where the others with self-model questions are trying to win political arguments. Right?
To be clear, I think that's a coherent position: in a world of good-faith actors who want the truth and bad-faith actors who want to win political arguments, probably you don't want to waste your time talking to bad-faith actors when you can get all the information you need from good-faith actors. The reason I disagree with it is that I don't think we live in that kind of binary world: I think that mixed motives are ubiquitous and that you lose information by refusing to talk to people who want to win political arguments against you. People trying to win political arguments selectively attend to information that supports their preferred policy, but that doesn't make them wrong about the information they do report, which might not be available from other sources.
Kelsey freaking Piper, of all people
I see this kind of hero-worship occasionally (Piper being perhaps the most common "beneficiary" behind Alexander and Yudkowsky), and I think it's bad: bad for you and bad for Kelsey. Your favorite writers are not gods! They—"of all people" and like all people—make mistakes sometimes, including politically motivated mistakes.
If a critic is claiming that they got something simple wrong, maybe it's not worth your time to consider (if your favorite writer is usually right and the critic doesn't have a track record you care about), but it shouldn't occasion a (bold and italic!) pronouncement that the critic has gone catastophically wrong in some supposed duty to steelman your favorite writer.
1if you happened to not produce artifacts of your thinking when deciding where to buy cookies, the only thing you have is claims about your internal reasoning
Sure. So, there was actually a bit of unflagged dramatic irony in the (fictional, despite being told in the first person) cookie story—
Suppose "I" didn't make any spreadsheets, but when questioned, I say (as in the post) that my internal reasoning considered the "obvious objective criteria" of "price, quality, Anzac biscuit availability, and owner's prior familiarity with the salon's reading list."
It might occur to you to ask followup questions: "Wait, why specifically Australian cookies? And what does it matter if the dessert vendor has done the reading? It kind of seems like you specifically chose those criteria in order to give your girlfriend the business." If I don't have a surprisingly compelling response to these obvious questions, that's also a sort of evidence about my intent.
1
Kelsey Piper replies to Richard Ngo on Twitter:
I categorically reject the idea that rejecting someone's understanding of their beliefs and motives inherently makes conversation with them nearly impossible.
It certainly doesn't make conversation with me impossible. When someone tells me that my understanding of my beliefs and motives should be rejected, I don't take my ball and go home in a huff, muttering that they've made further conversation nearly impossible. Rather, I respond the same way I do to any other disagreement: by supporting my view with reasoning and evidence. Why would the rules be different just because the topic of discussion happens to be my own beliefs and motives?
Why It's Possible to Communicate with People Who Think You're Self-Deceived
One reason why someone might think it's different is for fear that accusations of self-deception are unfalsifiable. I have privileged introspective access to my beliefs and motivations. On what possible basis could someone else tell me I'm wrong? And what evidence could I possibly offer to defend the accuracy of my self-perception? If the accusation or its denial can be made just as well independently of any third-party-accessible evidence, then that inherently does make conversation nearly impossible. What would there be to talk about?
However, I reject the premise that the accusation or its denial can be made just as well independently of any third-party-accessible evidence. I may have privileged introspective access to my beliefs and motivations, but beliefs and motivations aren't epiphenomenal, either. We form beliefs about other entities' beliefs and motivations because such beliefs let us predict their behavior. An animal that goes to the stream to drink is presumed to be motivated by thirst; the same animal going to the stream despite it having dried up in the summer heat is presumed to have (falsely) believed that the water would still be there. We don't need to know what it feels like to be the animal in order to speak sensibly of such mental states.
In the same way, people don't need to know what it feels like to be me in order to speak sensibly about rejecting my own understanding of my beliefs and motives. They could claim that my stated beliefs and motives are inconsistent with my behavior (which they can see) while remaining agnostic about how it feels to be me (which they don't have access to). Such a claim probably wouldn't be based on nothing at all; indeed, the very existence of persistent disagreements (when you'd expect honest rational agents to simply update on each other's evidence and converge on the correct probability) suggests that hidden motives are common.
If I buy cookies for the salon from a bakery owned by my girlfriend in Australia (at a substantial markup for international shipping), it kind of makes sense for other salon members to wonder if my choice might have been biased by favoritism towards my beloved rather than reflecting true optimization towards the goal of the salon having the best desserts.
At the same time, my belief that I wasn't swayed by favoritism is something I can provide reasoning and evidence for: for example, I could try showing the other salon members the notes and spreadsheets I compiled while comparison shopping, which justify my belief that my girlfriend just happens to be the optimal dessert vendor for the salon according to the obvious objective criteria—price, quality, Anzac biscuit availability, and owner's prior familiarity with the salon's reading list.
I might not convince them, but at least we have something to talk about: it's not a deadlock between an unfalsifiable accusation of self-deception and an unfalsifiable denial, because my catering decision (and therefore the beliefs and motives that led to it) was tangled up with empirical realities of the world. For example, if my comparison shopping was thorough and credibly documents the many ways in which my girlfriend's bakery is just the best, that makes my story about only wanting the best cookies for the salon more credible; if I didn't really shop around much, that makes my story less credible. The correctness of my understanding of my beliefs and motives is something I can defend to skeptics in front of third parties (successfully or otherwise); it's not something that needs to be assumed as a prerequisite for even talking at all.
Why the Self-Understanding of Those Who Think It's Impossible Should Be Rejected
But if I'm right about that, it raises the question: why would someone incorrectly believe that self-deception accusations make conversation impossible? It could just be a random, unmotivated mistake: maybe someone found the unfalsifiability objection superficially compelling, didn't really think it through, and would change their minds as soon as the error was pointed out to them. If someone incorrectly says that 123 + 68 = 181 (when in fact it's 191), it's almost certainly just because they forgot to carry the one; there's no reason for someone to want to believe the wrong answer to that question.
In contrast, there is a clear reason why someone would want the wrong answer about whether self-deception accusations make communication impossible. If I feel vaguely guilty about something and am at some level afraid of being found out, then I have an incentive to shut down conversations that might lead to me being found out, by only agreeing to talk to people who already trust me and won't press me on any uncomfortable questions. (And those who know themselves to be innocent and want to distinguish themselves from those who have something to hide have an incentive to welcome the uncomfortable questions.)
Notice how Piper writes about Ngo calling liberals self-deceived: warning him that the "move" of adopting that "frame" sacrifices his ability to communicate with liberals, and that while he might find the benefit worth the cost, from her perspective, "it's a really serious loss."
But positing self-deception isn't just a "move" that one could decline to make while still transmitting the same information; the "frame" is the expression of a hypothesis that could be true or false, which Ngo believes to be true. (Piper characterizes Ngo as claiming that he "should make up beliefs [he thinks liberals] have", but Ngo says his distrust of liberals' self-identifications is based on what he sees as their failure to "reason very explicitly about how much they've capitulated to wokeness"; reasoning from behavioral evidence aspires to be more disciplined than just "mak[ing] up" things.)
Furthermore, as I've discussed above, the cost of not being able to communicate with people you're accusing of self-deception isn't a logical or physical inevitability; it's a choice imposed by the people who don't want to talk to those who don't already trust them.
In light of these observations, I think Piper's apparently well-meaning advice is more naturally understood as a negotiating threat: don't criticize us in this way, or we'll walk. Even if you privately think us self-deceived, you must not reveal that you think that, or we'll destroy the surplus of you being able to interact with us.
If Piper doesn't think of herself as making a negotiating threat, I guess that implies that I'm rejecting her self-understanding? But, you know, I don't think I'm doing it maliciously. I'm just applying my knowledge of game theory, human psychology, &c. to the words I see before me and observing, hey, my maximum a posteriori (point estimate) interpretation of this behavior is that it looks like a veiled negotiating threat intended to suppress a class of criticism; that's an interesting phenomenon to analyze in a blog post.
But if you think I'm kidding myself about that, then I'm happy to talk about it.