I'm Screwtape, also known as Skyler. I'm an aspiring rationalist originally introduced to the community through HPMoR, and I stayed around because the writers here kept improving how I thought. I'm fond of the Rationality As A Martial Art metaphor, new mental tools to make my life better, and meeting people who are strange in ways I find familiar and comfortable. If you're ever in the Boston area, feel free to say hi.
Starting early in 2023, I'm the ACX Meetups Czar and have been funded by the Long-Term Future Fund to work on rationality meetups. You might also know me from the New York City Rationalist Megameetup, editing the Animorphs: The Reckoning podfic, or being that guy at meetups with a bright bandanna who gets really excited when people bring up indie tabletop roleplaying games.
I recognize that last description might fit more than one person.
"Come back when your scientific journal is much later than 1880" is not particularly distinguishable, no.
Multiple things that I think are simultaneously true:
There's an unhelpful kind of munchkinry that looks for poor phrasing in pre-stated rejections like a devil in a fantasy novel or a highly motivated and perhaps unscrupulous lawyer, making suggestions that technically satisfy my rejections but obviously aren't what I meant. There's also a helpful kind of munchkinry that looks for out-of-the-box ways to work out without tripping anything we hate. The line is kind of blurry and may just outright be a gradient. I can't write out rules that unhelpful munchkins couldn't get around, but sometimes I know it when you see it and I don't want to discourage helpful munchkinry.
Since the True Rejection Challenge exercise is in large part designed to practice the skill which Is That Your True Rejection points at, it's going to involve a bunch of "oops, I didn't think to add this rejection" in the beginning as well as the harder to spot failure of "oops, I added this as a rejection but it isn't actually important to me." When you start practicing juggling, you drop a lot of balls. That's fine! Dropping balls in juggling practice and singing off key in choir practice aren't mortal sins, they're kind of supposed to happen! Obviously try not to make mistakes but go ahead and make lots of mistakes if it's on the path to getting good at the skill.
In the case of prayer regrowing a leg, I think it's possible someone failed a skill check by leaving the word "reputable" under-specified, and also possible their interlocutor is being an unhelpful munchkin. Both could be true at once! The helpful thing might be to say "hey, what do you mean by reputable?" Does that make sense?
If someone is motivated to "win" and have the side they started on be correct (or to get people to view the other side as incorrect) then that's a less cooperative atmosphere than I'd ideally want to run True Rejection Challenge with. I stuck the Investment tag on this one for a reason, and that reason is basically that I would expect doing this on someone's facebook wall to be frustrating and unproductive, but that doing it with an established group of friends in person to be helpful.
(Sidenote: I'm aware that the way I'm using that tag section between Summary and Purpose isn't really achieving what I want it to here. Ideally I'd want to be able to search up all the Investment meetups within the Meetups In A Box sequence and to quickly get the usage of each tag from a single post instead of leaving them on the sequence description. If you missed that usage, that's mostly on me.)
That said, I have the sense you might be missing a useful piece of the True Rejection technique. There's this thing human brains do sometimes where they say "I don't believe you because you don't have a Ph.D" and then, when the person they're talking to comes back with a Ph.D, they say "There are lots of Ph.Ds, come back when you have tenure." It's frustrating when other people do it to me, but I sometimes catch myself doing it to other people. I've caught my own brain doing it to myself! The countercharm I use is to try and list out all my rejections at once, to pause and consider if I'd change my mind if all of them were satisfied, and then to at least dock myself points if I don't change my mind if all of them are satisfied.
If the proposed example or solution really doesn't satisfy my rejection, that's one thing. The easy road is to come up with a reason whatever they did doesn't satisfy the rejection so that I don't have to change my mind. I try not to take that easy road.
I agree there may be multiple reasons. "True Rejections Challenge" doesn't scan quite as well for a title, but most of the time pluralizing it to "true rejections" is accurate. Compare "Do you have an allergy" and "do you have any allergies" or "do you have a question" and "do you have any questions?" as other cases where I'd expect the other person to respond with multiples if it's needed. If you're doing this activity and someone says you have to pick just one rejection, I declare as the author of this post they're doing it wrong. (I didn't invent the concept but my understanding from reading Alicorn and Eliezer's versions that they'd also endorse multiple rejections.)
Write down A, B, C, and the other six reasons. Put them all on the paper and see if anyone comes up with a way to avoid them.
In this circumstance, the intent is mostly cooperative. If, as an example, you want to work out more but hate getting sweaty and hate people watching you exercise, then buying a treadmill so you can work out in your home while the air conditioning blasts might actually solve your problem. The other people are helping you come up with ways to do the thing you said you wanted to do. "I know I said people, but I kind of count my cats as people and I hate my cats watching me too" is, in good faith, a pretty useful communication addition. Your interlocutor may reply "lock the cats in another room" and now we're back to maybe having solved the problem. If someone finds they have to go through lots of revisions like that when they do this then yeah, uh, I actually think there's a useful skill that person would benefit from improving.
Looking at your example about prayer causing someone's leg to grow back, I think if I were contemplating taking the other side of that bet I'd ask what counted as reputable. I believe it's good form to try and clarify obvious ambiguities before putting money on something. Add a "and there's no chicanery" clause to the bet if you need, or agree in advance who will judge if an example counts. That said, you're talking to someone who has ever confidently predicted that obviously prayer studies would work, turned out to be wrong, and then changed their mind about whether God took an active hand in the world. There is power in noticing when what you predicted is wrong, even if it's for reasons that might not count.
(I was not fast about this update. I had to be wrong basically that exact way multiple times before I caught on. I got there eventually.)
Hypothetical: Adam writes a couple pages of initial post, Bella writes a page long reply, Adam writes a page long reply to that, Bella writes a page long reply to that, Adam reacts "not going to respond" and moves on.
That seems fine to me? Like, the norm in face to face conversation is (I think) that you're not expected to spend more than a few minutes on most replies.
Interesting! I'm quite curious how the discussion went. The groups I've run this with tend to talk about game design and how to give it more variety.
I think I disagree with the prevalence of situations where it's really useful to act like a group is an individual person, but I'm not sure that's your claim exactly. It's possible we're in agreement. Step one of this essay is to crystalize the idea of the Mob, this crowd that can look united but is actually different once you look closer. The conversation between Amy, Bob, and Bella is a caricature but I have seen conversations that resembled it. Sometimes it feels like Twitter is designed to create them.
Once the idea of the Mob & Bailey is in your toolbelt, then yeah, dealing with them once they've started is a useful topic (though on the small scale, you can catch yourself midway through an argument and go "Okay, hang on, I'm going to specifically address Bella for a moment here-") and it can segue into how organizations are structured. I claim the platonic Mob & Bailey is seen when there isn't a clear structure or where there are lots of people aligned but outside the formal structure, like a political party or a religious group. If I need to convince the United Nations to do something then maybe I start by drawing up their org chart (both formal and informal) but like, I don't think investigating the social structure of Deists as a group is going to be helpful.
Which, again, we might just agree on. If I want to talk the U.S. Military (a group) into doing something, then I might start by talking to the Secretary of Defense (a person) or I might start by talking to a middle-manager in charge of trainings (a person) or talking to an inventory manager (a person). The reductio ad absurdum version of talking to The U.S. Military (a group) might be standing on the front lawn of the Pentagon with a megaphone. That's unlikely to get me what I want. I've got some ideas on how to deal with talking to things like the U.S. MIlitary (not great ideas, but ideas) but the megaphone thing just doesn't work.
Yeah, I do think the original Motte and Bailey can exist. If you're sitting across a table from one person and they seem to equivocate between two positions, this post is not really addressing that problem. The art of Internal Family Systems meets Double Crux is left as an exercise for another day I guess.
Maybe, though if it's the only condition given and I actually went out, got a PhD, came back, and the other person didn't change their mind I'd be kind of annoyed. I have some direct experience with
and anecdotal evidence seems in favour of Eliezer's point. Having feature X doesn't mean they'll buy, and they might buy even without feature X if you change some other thing.
I'm noticing I'm not clear if we're disagreeing here, or where that disagreement might lie. I think but am not at all confident that you think the unhelpful munchkinry is so prevalent and multiple rejections are sufficiently common as to make this technique useless. Can you try restate your point? At present this thread doesn't seem productive to me.