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loqi comments on On Enjoying Disagreeable Company - Less Wrong
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Comments (243)
These are useful skills to apply to everyone, if you're at all concerned with being "fair" to people. But intentionally selective application of them just strikes me as throwing epistemic hygiene concerns to the wind. Liking the target had better be important.
Fair point. The logical reply to this issue would be a detailed account how to select candidates and precisely when to apply the techniques, although the differences of individuals' utility functions make it harder to convey useful advice. Perhaps Alicorn did good by presenting only the techniques, leaving us the task of weighing instrumental benefits/costs and risks of epistemic distortion.
It is my impression that people generally have an epistemic distortion already and Alicorn's advice would help them overcome it. When we justify our own actions, we place a weight on circumstances and give ourselves a fair benefit of the doubt. When we look for the reasons for other people's actions we often do not know, care to know or just plain care about what the circumstances were. No benefit of the doubt here. Reversing this bias seems a good and healthy thing to do. Judge others as you would judge yourself may sound simple but it takes the sort of persistence that Alicorn outlines.
The FAE is an epistemic distortion both ways (as I interpret it). Actively inducing a liking of someone appears to be shoving the lever in the other direction, replacing one bias with another.
These techniques don't seem to be in conflict with epistemic hygiene or epistemic rationality to me. They're modifying emotions, not knowledge.
I was talking about the means, whereby one alters one's "search priorities" when seeking to understand situations involving the target. This sort of selective perception may not be a direct corruption of existing knowledge, but it still constitutes an attention bias akin to privileging a hypothesis.
I agree that the emotional aspect isn't relevant to my concern, though I could imagine having instrumental qualms somewhat analogous to the above.