A sort of opposite conversational thing I see which I hate is something like:
Bob : I am really sorry, I made a big mistake and (something has gone wrong).
Alice : How did this go wrong?
Bob : We had that event that day and we were all distracted talking to the visitors and eating the cake. I wasn't used to the new UI yet, and it looks like I must have muddled some of the inputs.
Alice : Well, that is no excuse.
Bob : I never said it was. You asked for an explanation. I owned this mistake in my first line of this dialogue.
The issue here is that Bob is trying to provide a real explanation, of the kind that would be useful in providing a plan to avoid similar issues in the future. But, Alice is instead trying to give him a dresssing down for his mistakes. Possibly both conversations should happen, but not at the same time and both parties should know which one they are in.
(Although I still think asking for an explanation, and then complaining about excuses is a jerk play that is surprisingly common.)
6
1
1A: "This is a bad problem! We should solve this problem by giving Group X more power to fix it!"
B: "Actually, it sure looks like this problem is plausibly caused by Group X, and certainly they're exercising all the power they currently have to make it worse. I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish by giving them more power."
A: "Bad problems don't stop being bad just because someone is bad at fault analysis!"
B: "No, they don't, but listening to your solutions to those bad problems can stop being a good idea because you're bad at fault analysis."
1
1As I read the OP, I thought to myself: If I were to steelman the people the post is complaining about, I would guess that they are interpreting the complaint about the problem as an implied proposal for how to address the problem, and they are reacting to the perceived-implied-proposal.
It seems like you're thinking along similar lines, but are about 3 assumptions further down that road:
- Not only are you guessing that they might have thought this, you're pretty sure this is what they were thinking
- Not only are you sure they thought this, you're sure they were justified in thinking this
- Not only were they justified, but all of this is so totally obvious that you're not even going to bother articulating it, and instead treat it as an unspoken presumption of your snarky comeback
It seems reasonable to me that some people are confused by your comment.
"This problem is real" is not itself a useful insight. It is useful to the extent that it might lead to the problem being fixed. And fixing problems is much, much, much harder than identifying them.
Perhaps you have noticed that Bay Area rents are really high. This is, indeed, a problem. But noticing that this is a problem is not a serious contribution to the conversation. If you have successfully identified a real problem, and then proposed a solution that will make it worse, you are not helping on net.
This goes double if someone points out that your solution will make it worse, and you say that you "aren't even primarily interested in fault analysis at [that] level of granularity" and that them pointing that out will "distract you from the problem being real."
"This problem is real" is not itself a useful insight.
Perhaps you have noticed that Bay Area rents are really high. This is, indeed, a problem. But noticing that this is a problem is not a serious contribution to the conversation.
Assume for the sake of the argument that everybody knows that Bay Area rents are too high. Are you really saying that three examples I cited above are exactly the same? That "everybody" knows when specific headlines are misleading, that it's a problem when you don't quarantine potential carriers at a beginning of an outbreak, and that AI companies should fix safety problems in a timely manner?
Moreover, are you really saying that this generalizes further such that you can never identify a problem without proposing an end-to-end solution? Eg investigative journalism on corruption needs to propose incentive-compatible ways to reduce corruption, scientists identifying issues need to identify solutions in the same paper, AI risk isn't a problem until people come up with end-to-end solutions, etc, etc?
If you have successfully identified a real problem, and then proposed a solution that will make it worse, you are not helping on net.
Again in the examples above...
Are you really saying that three examples I cited above are exactly the same?
Not all of them, but at least one. Let's take the quarantine one first because that's the one where I think you do well, and then look at the headlines one next. (The AI one doesn't have enough detail for me to be clear on what's going on there).
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I think you're pretty much on the money for the quarantine one, because:
- You are pointing to a relatively-large problem that many people are genuinely unaware of. (Before reading your post I had...uh...some vague idea that some people on a cruise ship had some virus).
- You aren't proposing any working solution - but you're clear that you don't have a proposed solution, and also aren't proposing anything actively harmful.
I do think you may be missing some important points in your quarantine commentary. Like, yes. There are some potential major beneficial effects of these potential carriers being quarantined. By. Uh. Some international organization that can unilaterally detain citizens of multiple different sovereign nations overseas without trial and prevent them from returning home. That seems to me...p...
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1When I see this dynamic, it seems to typically be that Alice is implicitly saying that the thing is easy to fix and that there is some deep incompetence from the thing being broken. When I am Bob I'm trying to explain why the thing being fixed is actually really hard and it's downstream with a bunch of complexity Alice probably wasn't thinking about. I think this is actually extremely relevant data when the difficulty of fixing the thing is important!
If Alice just wants emotional support and to complain about things being sad, without any orientation towards fixing it or the difficulty of the problem, then I agree with this post.
My read of such cases is that the implicit reasoning seems more like the first part only, ie, "these people are (implicitly) blaming some group G for an alleged problem P. I want to demonstrate that these people are wrong to blame group G"
where the reason for them wanting to demonstrate that you are wrong is something like, they know an interesting fact that demonstrates this, which they think you ought to know, or maybe just want the social status boost from showing you/the world they know said interesting fact
What makes you feel that there is usually an implicit "and therefore we no longer need to be worried about P”? I would assume that in the majority of cases if you followed up their statement by asking "Does this mean that you think P is fine actually?", they wouldn't say "yes", they would say "no, I'm just saying that P isn't G's fault"
(edit: looking specifically at the linked WHO-related tweet, something a little different seems to be going on here, where the implicit reasoning seems like "these people are (implicitly) proposing we ought to do X to fix an alleged problem P, but P isn't actually a problem and X would be really bad, so I'm going to push back" - which seems di...
Before reading between the lines, this isn't a fallacy:
- Alice: Man that article has a very inaccurate/misleading/horrifying headline.
- Bob: Did you know, actually article writers don't write their own headlines?
Alice shared her opinion of a headline. Bob asked Alice a question. There's not an argument, let alone a fallacious argument.
When reading between the lines, Bob's argument is probably not:
- Article writers don't write their own headlines
- ???
- The headline on this article is accurate and not misleading or horrifying.
A more charitable reading is more likely.
Who is to blame?
- Alice: This article has a horrifying headline.
- Bob: Article writers don't write their own headlines. I blame the editor.
Bob is following on from problem to blame.
Defensive reading
- Alice: The headline on this article is inaccurate and mislead me.
- Bob: Article writers don't write their own headlines. They are often inaccurate. Because I was aware of this, the inaccurate headline on this article didn't mislead me.
Bob is following on from problem to solution.
Did you know?
- Alice: Fun fact: this article has a Satanic headline.
- Bob: Fun fact: article writers don't write their own headlines
Bob is sha...
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2This can be taken further and even weaponized by those actually at fault. Disempower your service employees so much that they can't accomplish anything coupled with having no ability to escalate issues and suddenly there is no recourse to fix problems and your only option is to harass a powerless call center employee until you wasted enough of your time to justify giving up on the endeavor.
"I'm sorry, I don't have the ability to issue a refund for these tickets that were canceled"
"Well that's unacceptable and makes me very angry."
"Sir, please don't yell at me. It's not up to me."
There's a related concept of blame laundering: by making our party dependent on a third party for reliability, we can then wash our hands clean of any blame when things go wrong.
If you host your website on-prem then it's always your fault that websites down and your customers can't track the foobars. But if you host on AWS, and AWS goes down, well then obviously it's not your fault - it's AWS's fault!
Of course this is nonsense. Your customers contracted with you, not AWS. They don't care about your infra, all they care about is tracking foobars, and if it's down, it's your fault, whether it's down because of a fire in us-east-1 or you tripped on the power cable for your workstation. You contracted with AWS, and can and should complain to them, but that doesn't in any way exonerate you for your duty towards your customers.
Now of course sometimes it does make sense to point out a different person or institution is at fault. For example, if Alice saw a bad headline and wrongly blames Carol, the innocent columnist, and plans to angrily email Carol about it, you can gently point out it’s not Carol’s fault but her editor Eddie. Alice can angrily email Eddie instead, problem solved! [1]
However, often these explanations are delivered in a way that doesn't suggest a different person to blame, or that you're wrong for wanting a solution to begin with, somehow?
In defense there, that's often taken as implicit and or likely. It's a common mistake to think that authors write their own headlines and for people with complaints about headlines to blame the author for it. Chiming in with "Authors don't make their own headlines" doesn't fix the issue of bad headlines, but it does correct the (likely) mistake that Alice has in her head about who or what to blame.
Although in that case I suppose you could get really annoying and go "erm actually, it's the financial incentives that really determines how headlines turn out because good headline writers fail and stop writing headlines". And understanding that allows ...
1I've found myself giving explanations (not as exonerations) when I suspect the other person is looking for a solution to their problem but does not know the levers to pull.
I've encountered this kind of response before and have been similarly frustrated, and I think you're describing a real thing, however: in my own experience, sometimes these sorts of seemingly nonsequitur counterpoints are not meant to be counterpoints against my original normative point. I only realize this if I ask what they meant by it. Surprisingly often, I learn that the person who made that comment just sort of wanted to add some adjacent context and decided to drop it in without explaining their intent. Then I had reasonably but wrongly assumed it wa...
Curated. Classic issue that comes up all the time, yet I've never seen it called out so clearly and well. Thanks for writing it!
1The reasoning has to be something like “these people are (implicitly) blaming some group G for an alleged problem P. If I can demonstrate that these people are wrong to blame group G, then I’ve demonstrated that they’re Wrong. As Wrongness is a transitive property, therefore we can be sure that problem P isn’t real (???) and we no longer need to be worried about P”
I suspect the reasoning is something like: "No one actually cares about the problem P per se, only as a tool to attack someone. By explaining why the group G should not be blamed for P, we have a...
1I think what's often going on here is that saying "Actually, X happened because of Y" is a kind of status attack, trying to say that unlike the replier, the OP doesn't even know about Y, so they hardly know what they are talking about. So it's deployed by people who are trying to discredit the OP and/or their argument, or lift themselves and/or their own argument above them.
Thinking more, I think it's also often generated out of cynicism, when people have basically given up on the idea that a problem could be solved, and they are explaining to you some premise they have about why that is, but they don't really want to explain the whole thing in one big wall of text.
Australia and NZ quarantined their shipboard citizens before allowing them home. I am similarly horrified to hear that this practice wasn't universal.
1I read the twitter thread you linked, and I think you have a strange reading of it. Here's how I read it.
Anthony argued. 1) that everything is fine and seems to be going well. 2) - that the policies of the WHO and individual governments worked well to contain the virus.
Kelsey challenged 2, by arguing that whilst things are fine (1), this is not due to the policies of the WHO and individual governments, which were severely lacking (2).
From there the discussion shifts entirely to discussion of 2: what an adequate policy looks like. It's interesting to note t...
I also encounter this quite often and find it a bit irritating. What I found to work quite well is to clearly distinguish between descriptive and normative statements. I will for example ask the other person "Are you making a normative or descriptive statement?" After some forth and back they usually agree they were making a descriptive statement. Then I say "I was making a normative statement, do you disagree with it?". Often they don't disagree.
I suspect the confusion occurs because the other person parses the initial claim as a descriptive statement that fails to capture the complexity of the problem.
1I think the underlying issue here is a perspective mismatch. The person raising the complaint is operating at a higher level of abstraction, while the seemingly-helpful commenter isn't really thinking about or engaging with the problem itself — they're responding from the level of concrete operational facts they happen to know, rather than from the level of the problem itself.
But of course, any given problem can be read from multiple perspectives or dimensions. Even if the original complainer didn't intend the operational-level reading, the responder will ...
Here is something we need to keep in mind: not all powerful entities will always act in a way that actually resolves problems. Just because they are massive organizations (like the IT companies or the WHO used as examples) doesn't mean they all think, 'We must serve the public good of humanity.'
Outwardly, of course, that is what they profess. However, an organization is a collective of various stakeholders, and those who actually hold significant stakes might only be interested in downplaying the issue. In such cases, making excuses just for the sake of ma...
In each of these situations, Alice is agitating about some ongoing problem and Bob is supplying some (incomplete) explanatory context for the existence/persistence of that problem. This isn't a fallacy and, in most of these cases, it's a perfectly constructive approach to what might ostensibly amount to pointless whinging.
I can't think of a single term for this, but it can be articulated as is-ought laundering through accountability sinks. The interlocutor describes what the structure is that diffuses local fault and treats that description as if it settles whether the outcome ought to happen.
This is a thing my brain does sometimes. It’s very counterproductive when it happens.
In my case, I believe it was caused by childhood violence. When I was ~six plus or minus a few years, I lived in an environment where being blamed for ~anything could result in being beaten bloody, so my hindbrain learned to drop everything and deflect blame, if blame is pointed at me.
I’m not in an environment like that anymore. Yet I can’t unlearn the response. It sucks. The part of me that can see “drop everything, deflect blame, escape as soon as blame is shifted” as hu...
This pattern appears in mainstream responses to left-economic critique.
The critiques point at concrete problems: real wage stagnation and extreme capital concentration distorting political institutions. The standard responses are: "capital concentration is necessary for economic development," "self-interest aggregates information better than bureaucratic central planning," "look at the Soviet Union."
Im not saying marxism or its implementations can be accepted without question, but defensive neoliberal rhetoric cannot be accepted either. "The theorist's fra...
we no longer need to be worried about P
sounds like projection and not what anyone actually claimed in any of the examples?
I think that it is the real issue. About the price and subjectivity.
All cases are estimated subjectively. Yes, some portion of estimation can be rationalised. But rationalisation requires energy. And experience dictates/chooses between price and results. It can wait, it is not so important, it is a weak disturbance. For them. For you all these cases are crucial, and you are ready to spend energy to resolve it, but again, it is your subjective view.
Could you suggest anything else that we can align our vision only through a dialogue (mutual reasoning)?
It is the dark side of thinking/reasoning, I think.
Are you investigating why giving an explanation instead of solving actual issue is a common answer? That is because if you see a seemingly irrational outcome, it is wise to ask 'why did we end up here?'.
IF you assume the other actors are rational, then the cause cannot be in individuals not wanting to solve the issue, it must be an inherent to the issue itself. This is common in prisoner-dilemma type problems, in which rational actors are unable to individually solve the issue in isolation but need a 'group-based incentive' to break the pattern.
In your examples, there aren't any words that persuade me that these examples weren't cases of "defense of the powerless". I have to assume there is some means by which you decide that's not the intent, and it's instead represents "problem solved". What could that be? Some words you didn't mention? A tone of voice? If it's true, you should be able to describe it.
If you can't you might wonder if your interpretation of the discussion is fully accurate. I can imagine the type of conversation where I might end up responding to someone's in that way, and it wo...
I think this pattern sometimes arises because people have different priorities. Some just want to share interesting and related info, or perhaps start a discussion on actually useful changes adressing what went wrong. But then this often sounds like shifting the blame or dismissing the problem.
When doing this I try to be careful so I'm not misinterpreted, adding something in the beginning like "Yeah, that's terrible and something needs to be done about it. Hmm, maybe [speculation about how the system works in order to find solutions]."
This fallacy could be called... understating the inevitable problem? Like saying that global warming isn't an issue because people naturally don't coordinate enough to prevent it, or factory farming isn't a problem because the incentives make it inevitable?
I think more often when people say things like that, they're trying to get you to stop assigning blame to a specific entity, for the problem is caused by Moloch.
With enough strong leadership and insightful regulation, a lot of issues could be solved. Is it fair to blame an entity that fails to slay the beast?
I think what you're taking to be an attempt to excuse a problem is instead an explanation of why your apparent surprise is unwarranted. Nothing in the examples you give suggests denial of the problem, but the way you frame the complaints not only states the problem but attributes fault and presumes some "obvious" way things should have happened that would have avoided it. The pushback seems to mainly be on these latter elements.
Not too sure if I misunderstood the initial premise of the post, but the examples given seem not to be "similar" enough for me to follow the reasoning about the cause(s) for the dialog going poorly to be the same.
The one commonality I can immediately make out is that the initial proposition seems too unspecific for the interlocutor to know what the intention of the speaker actually is (other than to answer with, "you're exactly right, so now what?").
At the very least, if I add an implied question of, "assuming you agree with P, what do you suggest we do ab...
This sounds related to assuming everything must be a dog-whistle for some other less "acceptable" idea and then rebutting the idea you must secretly be advocating. In your example, presumably that every instance of pointing out a public health mistake is advocating against the concept of public health broadly or the value of specific public health institutions.
"No systematic quarantine seemed in place, and only some of the exposed people were even instructed to self-quarantine. Now in light of new information we think it’s very unlikely that this’d end up being a pandemic"
What's the new information here? It sounds like the information was new to you, which led you to form the impression that this decision was horrifyingly reckless. But upon gaining some more decision about the disease, presumably the same information that the (health expert) decisionmakers already had, you decided it wasn't reckless?
I have no do...
There ought to be a term for this and Claude recommends ”The Exculpation Fallacy”
Other candidates:
Culprit displacement as problem dissolution
Its a layer separation problem.
You are noticing participants within a localized system responding to issues from within that same system. It's similar to asking people to judge themselves correctly. Many people fail to accurately map their own shortcomings because they are doing it from within the constraints of the same system.
To an outside observer the logic may not make sense. What can sometimes seem obvious from outside doesnt necessarily transfer to participants within the system.
You are taking explanations to why the system is behaving the way it ...
1Now of course sometimes it does make sense to point out a different person or institution is at fault. For example, if Alice saw a bad headline and wrongly blames Carol, the innocent columnist, and plans to angrily email Carol about it, you can gently point out it’s not Carol’s fault but her editor Eddie. Alice can angrily email Eddie instead, problem solved!
There may also be many other reasons to do this. Perhaps Alice is trying to decide whether Alice is a trustworthy journalist, and thus how much credibility to assign to things Alice writes, both that c...
I think that sometimes, a problem is the optimal solution. A lot of rules are trade-offs between things, and it doesn't help anyone to complain about the negatives of the trade-off which was made, as "fixing" it merely pushes the problem elsewhere. (Or alternatively, it requires a higher granularity of laws and regulations)
I could complain about criminals getting away with their crimes, but fixing that would require lowering the threshold of evidence, which would mean that more innocent people were unfairly punished. And if this 'solution' is implemented, ...
One of the systemic issues is that we do not innately understand the ontology of prevention.
There is no benchmark for “infections prevented” like there is no benchmark for “buildings uncollapsed by earthquakes”, “windows unbroken by hurricanes”, or with AI “inaccurate claims unconfabulated”.
Our neurological architecture struggles to model second-order effects, and the trust+time+attention+energy+memory it requires to listen, evaluate, and act on someone else’s ideas about the future is usually a cost we do not pay when we cannot see the idea for ourselves.
Google (and various other software companies) has a practice called a blameless postmortem. When something has gone badly wrong, everyone involved and some associated senior tech people sit down, do a review, and write an incident report, answering the following questions:
1) what happened?
2) how did it happen?
3) why did it (manage to) happen?
4) what do we have to do to make sure it never happens again?
5) what do we have to do to minimize the chance of other, similar things ever happening?
They make a bunch of recommendations based on 4) and 5), and people a...
Cease, Linch, to chide the follies of mankind,
Whose erring will, though seeming free, was wrought
In that first Forge whence reason, weak and warped,
Issued half-finished. Blame not Adam's sons —
Arraign the Hand that shaped them so!
Out-of-band theory: this is chat assistant driven societal change.
Insofar as this is a recent development, it could be explained by people often reaching for models to Explain Things -- models which are prone to explaining away issues systemically/by-third-angle, as for various legal reasons they cannot outright blame specific humans/issues often -- gradually adjusting human behaviors to match.
Here's a dynamic I’ve seen at least a dozen times:
Alice: Man that article has a very inaccurate/misleading/horrifying headline.
Bob: Did you know, *actually* article writers don't write their own headlines?
…
But what I care about is the misleading headline, not your org chart.
Another example I’ve encountered recently is (anonymizing) when a friend complained about a prosaic safety problem at a major AI company that went unfixed for multiple months. Someone else with background information “usefully” chimed in with a long explanation of organizational restrictions and why the team responsible for fixing the problem had limitations on resources like senior employees and compute, and actually not fixing the problem was the correct priority for them etc etc etc.
But what I (and my friend) cared about was the prosaic safety problem not being fixed! And what this says about the company’s ability to proactively respond to and fix future problems. We’re complaining about your company overall. Your internal team management was never a serious concern for us to begin with!
Kelsey Piper wrote about the (horrifying) case where Hantavirus carriers in the recent outbreak on a cruise ship were released and sent back to their home countries on (often) public airplanes. No systematic quarantine seemed in place, and only some of the exposed people were even instructed to self-quarantine.
Now in light of new information we think it’s very unlikely that this’d end up being a pandemic (the virus isn’t contagious enough at human-to-human transmission). But sure seems like pure luck rather than careful risk-benefit analysis; we only learned about the low contagiousness from negative tests after the cruise ship passengers were sent home.
Seems pretty incompetent for humanity to manage a potential future pandemic this way!
Tweeters disagreed. They argued that everything’s fine because in fact the WHO as an advisory body can’t enforce legal quarantines on sovereign states.
Huh? Why is that relevant here? If this hantavirus outbreak was in fact as contagious as COVID (while maintaining the ~30% fatality rate common for past infections), Nature’s not going to be like “oops my bad. I was planning to kill 2 billion of you but I misunderstood your world’s by-laws for which entities are responsible for enforcing quarantines. I’ll just let y’all have a pass on this otherwise fatal pandemic and take my business elsewhere until you sort it out.”
In each of these examples, people’s reactions were something like explanation-as-exoneration: treating the descriptive fact of why something happened as if it answered the normative question of whether it should have.
This is a cognitive mistake or logical fallacy that is so wrong I’m not even sure how to address it. Like in the examples above, people weren’t even originally blaming the group that someone else rushed to defend! But even granting that they were, how does shifting the blame address the underlying problem?
The reasoning has to be something like “these people are (implicitly) blaming some group G for an alleged problem P. If I can demonstrate that these people are wrong to blame group G, then I’ve demonstrated that they’re Wrong. As Wrongness is a transitive property, therefore we can be sure that problem P isn’t real (???) and we no longer need to be worried about P”
Maybe I’m strawmanning, but I really don’t understand the logic here!
In some of those cases, like the second example about prosaic AI safety, clearly there’s a specific party feeling accused and defensive. So self-serving bias is at play. But most of the times I’ve encountered this fallacy in the wild it’s from seemingly disinterested third parties! So I really don’t know what makes people react in this way.
Now of course sometimes it does make sense to point out a different person or institution is at fault. For example, if Alice saw a bad headline and wrongly blames Carol, the innocent columnist, and plans to angrily email Carol about it, you can gently point out it’s not Carol’s fault but her editor Eddie. Alice can angrily email Eddie instead, problem solved! [1]
However, often these explanations are delivered in a way that doesn't suggest a different person to blame, or that you're wrong for wanting a solution to begin with, somehow?
Another good adjacent reason stems from “ought implies can.” If it turns out a problem somebody complains about is impossible to solve (or practically infeasible, or too expensive, etc), it (sometimes) helps to inform them of this so they can set realistic expectations and/or complain about more tractable problems.
This is both true for physical impossibilities and answers of the form “if everybody would just.”
But saying that one person or institution that you might think is at fault is not at fault isn’t exactly a proof that solving a problem is impossible! I don’t really see how it’s even evidence, most of the time.
Overall I’m pretty confused by this pattern of thinking. On the other hand we might have discovered a novel fallacy, so that’s fun!
Though in my experience if you email the writer about a bad headline usually they can get it resolved anyway.