One is "We must never abandon this relentless commitment to precise truth. All we say, whether to each other or to the outside world, must be thoroughly vetted for its precise truthfulness." To which my reply is: how's that been working out for us so far?
[...]
We can win without sacrificing style and integrity.
But you just did propose sacrificing our integrity: specifically, the integrity of our relentless commitment to precise truth. It was two paragraphs ago. The text is right there. We can see it. Do you expect us not to notice?
To be clear, in this comment, I'm not even arguing that you're wrong. Given the situation, maybe sacrificing the integrity of our relentless commitment to precise truth is exactly what's needed!
But you can't seriously expect people not to notice, right? You are including the costs of people noticing as part of your consequentialist decision calculus, right?
5How do you think norm enforcement works, other than by threatening people who don't comply with the norm?
Like feeling the rain on your skin, no one else can feel it for you.
This is a deliberate reference to the lyrics of Natasha Bedingfield's thematically-relevant song "Unwritten", right? (Seems much more likely than coincidence or cryptomnesia.) I can empathize with it feeling too cute not to use, but it seems like a bad (self-undermining) choice in the context of an essay about the importance of struggling to find original words?
(Fixed; thanks for your patience.)
1your attempts at posting good-faith critiques in the comments of most LW posts are costlier to [...] the community you care about, than they are beneficial.
Why? What are the costs to the community?
Thanks for commenting!
Describing them as posts versus comments probably isn't ideal, but I think it's mostly okay.
Yes, in retrospect, I wish I had done a better job of flagging the metonymy. I'm glad the idea got through despite that.
I claim that yes, these two different types of writing are significantly different activities.
Different in what respect? When I write a critical post (arguing that author is wrong about because ), it feels like relevantly the same activity as when I write a "non-critical" post (just arguing that because without reference to any reputedly mistaken prior work) in terms of what cognitive skills I'm using: the substance is about working out how implies . That's the aspect relevant to the playing/coaching metaphor. Whether there happens to be an in the picture doesn't seem to change the essential character of the work. (Right? Does your subjective assessment differ?)
The effect of rendering these bytes as text preceded by my username does not need to be the same as the effect of rendering these bytes as text preceded by another username!
It doesn't need to, but should it? The section titled "However, Critic Contributions Can Inform Uncertain Estimates of Comment Value" describes one reason why it should. My bold philosophical claim is that that's the only reason. (I'm counting gjm's comment about known expertise as relevantly "the same reason.")
Alternatively, for the purpose of the argument in that section, we can instead imagine that we're talking about a blog where the commenting form has a blank "Author name" field, rather than a site with passworded accounts: the name could be forged just as easily as the comment content, and the "comment" is the (author-name, content) pair. That would restore the screening-off property.
When discussing rationality, I typically use the word normative to refer to what idealized Bayesian reasoners would do, often in contrast to what humans do.
(Example usage, bolding added: "Normatively, theories are preferred to the quantitative extent that they are simple and predict the observed data [...] For contingent evolutionary-psychological reasons, humans are innately biased to prefer 'their own' ideas, and in that context, a 'principle of charity' can be useful as a corrective heuristic—but the corrective heuristic only works by colliding the non-normative bias with a fairness instinct [...]")
As Schopenhauer observes, the entire concept of adversarial debate is non-normative!
"[N]ot demand[ing] [...] that a compelling argument be immediately accepted" is normatively correct insofar as even pretty idealized Bayesian reasoners would face computational constraints, but a "stubborn defense of one's starting position—combined with a willingness [...] to change one's mind later" isn't normatively correct, because the stubbornness part comes from humans' innate vanity rather than serving any functional purpose. You could just say, "Let me think about that and get back to you later."
Thank you for clarifying.
No, it was not obvious!
You replied to a comment that said, verbatim, "what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff", with, "This paragraph feels righter-to-me".
That response does prompt the reader to wonder whether you believe the quoted statement by Malcolm McLeod, which was a prominent thesis sentence of the comment that you were endorsing as feeling righter-to-you! I understand that "This feels righter-to-me" does not mean the same thing as "This is right." That's why I asked you to clarify!
In your clarification, you have now disavowed the quoted statement with your own statement that "We absolutely should have more practices that drive at the precise truth than saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff."
I emphatically agree with your statement for the reasons I explained at length in such posts as "Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think" and "Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists", but I don't think the matter is "fairly obvious." If it were, I wouldn't have had to write thousands of words about it.