One of the most common difficulties faced in discussions is when the parties involved have different beliefs as to what the scope of the discussion should be. In particular, John Nerst identifies two styles of conversation as follows :
- Decoupling norms: It is considered eminently reasonable to require your claims to be considered in isolation - free of any context or potential implications. An insistence on raising these issues despite a decoupling request are often seen as sloppy thinking or attempts to deflect.
- Contextualising norms: It is considered eminently reasonable to expect certain contextual factors or implications to be addressed. Not addressing these factors is often seen as sloppy or even an intentional evasion.
Let's suppose that blue-eyed people commit murders at twice the rate of the rest of the population. With decoupling norms, it would be considered churlish to object to such direct statements of facts. With contextualising norms, this is deserving of criticism as it risks creates a stigma around blue-eyed people. At the very least, you would be expected to have issued a disclaimer to make it clear that you don't think blue-eyed people should be stereotyped as criminals.
John Nerst writes (slightly edited): "To a contextualiser, decouplers’ ability to fence off any threatening implications looks like a lack of empathy for those threatened, while to a decoupler the contextualiser's insistence that this isn’t possible looks like naked bias and an inability to think straight"
For both these norms, it's quite easy to think of circumstances when expectations for the other party to use these norms would normally be considered unreasonable. Weak men are superweapons demonstrates how true statements can be used to destroy a group's credibility and so it may be quite reasonable to refuse to engage in low-decoupling conversation if you suspect this is the other person's strategy. On the other hand, it's possible to use a strategy of painting every action you dislike to be part of someone's agenda (neo-liberal agenda, cultural marxist agenda, far right agenda, ect. take your pick). People definitely have agendas and take actions as a result of this, but the loose use of universal counter-arguments should rightly be frowned upon.
I agree with the contextualisers that making certain statements, even if true, can be incredibly naive in highly charged situations that could be set off by a mere spark. On the other hand, it seems that we need at least some spaces for engaging in decoupling-style conversations. Elizier wrote an article on Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilisation. I believe that having access to such spaces is another key.
These complexities mean that there isn't a simple prescriptive solution here. Instead this post merely aimed to describe this phenomenon, as at least if you are aware of this, it may be possible to navigate this.
Further reading:
- A Deep Dive into the Harris-Klein Controversy - John Nerst's Original Post
- Putanumonit - Ties decoupling to mistake/conflict theory
(ht prontab. He actually uses low decoupling/high decoupling, but I prefer avoiding double-negatives. Both John Nerst and prontab passed up the opportunity to post on this topic here)
This post seems to be making a few claims, which I think can be evaluated separately:
1) Decoupling norms exist
2) Contextualizing norms exist
3) Decoupling and contextualization norms are useful to think as opposites (either as a dichotomy or spectrum)
(i.e. there are enough people using those norms that it's a useful way to carve up the discussion-landscape)
There's a range of "strong" / "weak" versions of these claims – decoupling and/or contextualization might be principled norms that some people explicitly endorse, or they might just be clusters of tendencies people have sometimes.
In the comments of his response post, Zack Davis noted:
And, reading that, I think it may actually the opposite – there is general factor of "decoupling", not contextualizing. By default people are using language for a bunch of reasons all jumbled together, and it's a relatively small set of people who have the deliberately-decouple tendency, skill and/or norm, of "checking individual statements to see if they make sense."
Upon reflection, this is actually more in line with the original Nerst article, which used the terms "Low Decoupling" and "High Decoupling", which less strongly conveys the idea of "contextualizer" being a coherent thing.
On the other hand, Nerst's original post does make some claims about Klein being the sort of person (a journalist) who is "definitively a contextualizer, as opposed to just 'not a decoupler'", here:
Although they're interwoven, I think it might be worth distinguishing some subclaims here (not necessarily made by Nerst or Leong, but I think implied and worth thinking about)
My Epistemic State
Empirical Questions
There's a set of fairly concrete "empirical" questions here, which are basically "if you do a bunch of factor analysis of discussions, would decoupling and/or contextualization and/or any of the specific contextual-subcategories listed above be major predictive power?"
The experiments you'd run for this might be expensive but not very confusing.
I would currently guess:
Conceptual Question
I have a remaining confusion, which is something like "what exactly is a contextualizer?". I feel like I have a crisp definition of "decoupling". I don't have that for contextualizers. Are the three subcategories listed above really 'relatives' or are they just three different groups doing different things? Is it meaningful to put these on a spectrum with decouplers on the other side?
mr-hire suggests:
Which sounds like a plausibly good definition, that maybe applies to all three of the subcategories. But I feel like it's not quite the natural definition for each individual subcategory. (Rather, it's something a bit downstream of each category definition)
"Jumbled" vs "Contextual"
"High decoupling" and "low decoupling" are still pretty confusing terms, even if you get rid of any notion of "low decoupling" being a cogent thing. It occured to me, writing this review, that you might replace the word "contextual" with "jumbled".
Contextual implies some degree of principled norms. Jumbled points more towards "the person is using language for a random mishmash of strategies all thrown together." (Politicians might sometimes be best described as "jumbled", and sometimes as "principled" [but, not necessarily good principles, i.e. 'I will deliberately say whatever causes my party to win']).
...
That's what I got for now.
The OP comment was optimizing for "improving my understanding of the domain" more than direct advice of how to change the post.
(I'm not necessarily expecting the points and confusions there to resolve within the next month – it's possible that you'll reflect on it a bit and then figure out a slightly different orientation to the post, that distills the various concepts into a new form. Another possible outcome is that you leave the post as-is for now, and then in another year or two after mulling things over someone writers a new post doing a somewha
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