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Seth_Goldin comments on "Life Experience" as a Conversation-Halter - Less Wrong
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Comments (65)
You should declare your age here, and whether you have ever known so much more about anything, relative to someone else, that this might have been a valid claim for you to make in a conversation.
Telling someone that they just lack enough experience to appreciate some point is, if true, extremely valuable info. If it seems reasonable to end the conversation after receiving such info, then why shouldn't the conversation end at that point? The issue isn't Bayesian vs. not, but how easily could they communicate all the specific data on which their overall judgment is based.
Prof. Hanson,
I'm 22, and haven't encountered an opportunity where I thought to use this claim. There are probably instances where it would have been factually appropriate for me to do so, but I'm not inclined to make this point, because it seems to me like a cop-out.
Maybe I would have difficulty in explaining something highly technical or specialized to someone with no background, but crying "life experience" doesn't seem to be the proper response. It's far too vague. I would find it more appropriate to direct my debate partner to the specialized or technical material they haven't studied to understand why my position might be different.
The problem is that nebulously appealing to "life experience" doesn't even grant how the debate partner is uninformed. It's as if the person with more "life experience" is on such a higher level of understanding that they can't even communicate how their additional information informs their understanding. Like Silas Barta, I'm skeptical that even the most informed and educated people would ever be simply unable to explain the basic ideas of even the most difficult material. When this claim is not used to try to explain how their training or experience leads them to a different conclusion, I suspect that more often than not, their differing position isn't actually about any specialized training, just that their line of argumentation has run out of steam.
In critiquing postmodernism, Noam Chomsky wrote, "True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want."
Well most 22 year old are much less likely to have learned so much about something that they find it very hard to explain it to another adult. It isn't usually that one can't point in the direction of the basic idea, it is that your audience doesn't find such general pointing to be very persuasive.
But you should be capable of more than just "pointing in the direction of the basic idea"; you should be able to explain the full idea, from its layman-level foundations, all the way up to its bordering on humanity's collective knowledge. If you can't do that, well, start brushing up on your field's grounding, because you've probably overcompartmentalized.
For most real things that someone has learned over a lifetime, it just isn't feasible to explain most of what they know and why in any modest conversation. One can point in that direction quickly, but the whole shebang is just way way too much to explain.
But the advantage of it being a conversation is that you don't have to explain all of it. Rather, you take as large inferential steps as you like, and when you get to the point where someone thinks your reasoning is too hasty or otherwise unjustified, they can stop you and point out the unsatisfying part, and you can explain that part in greater detail.
Also, you needn't tell the full experiential content when making your point; just say, e.g., "Over this time I concluded that it is important to have several close friends". If your conversation partner already accepts that part of the chain, then of course you don't need to list all the experiences that led up to that conclusion. But if they don't, then you can start to say how your experiences support that sub-point, going into greater detail as necessary.
That's assuming, of course, you actually know how it all fits together.
Wow, that's formal.
Well, I am an undergrad right now, at least for a couple more months.
I am too, but this is the internet not a classroom. Call him "Robin" or "dude" or "listen man", whatever.
I know you two are joking, but I will take this opportunity to point out that I really do appreciate the culture of humility on Less Wrong. It's Yudkowsky's eighth virtue. I am aware of my profound ignorance as a mere 22-year-old undergrad.
Alternatively, is this a plea for the Skinnerian, egalitarian abolition of honorifics, as from Walden Two?
I look at it this way: because people choose their own usernames on this site, referring to them by their usernames is a safe choice. (For instance, I'm perfectly happy when other Less Wrong posters refer to me as 'cupholder,' even though for all they know I'm a janitor, or a professor of psychometrics at Arizona State, or Douglas Hofstadter or the president of the US.)
I put the odds of you being the current President at significantly less than one in 1.4 billion.
No joke (and I don't know about Walden Two).
The norm on this forum is to leave out any form of address from nearly all comments and replies to people's comments, so your addressing Robin as "Prof. Hanson" stuck out glaringly.
In the context of this discussion, it seemed as if you'd interpreted Robin's request as a "status transaction" and decided to respond in kind. The honorific foregrounds Robin's academic credentials and downplays the (tacitly assumed) norm that this blog is a conversation among peers, where evidence and argument are sought more than assurances of authority.
Humility, as I understand it from the Twelve Virtues pamphlet, isn't about comparing yourself to others. It is about comparing yourself to who you will become.
Noted, thanks.
For what it's worth, titles look too formal to me too, but naked first names look exaggeratedly friendly or diminutive; initialisms look more natural. Abbreviated or one-syllable first names are in between.
Edit: On further thought, that doesn't really relate to the topic of modes of address. I'm with Morendil that they're usually redundant here.