NancyLebovitz comments on Forager Anthropology - Less Wrong

11 Post author: WrongBot 28 July 2010 05:48AM

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Comment author: MichaelVassar 29 July 2010 05:41:11PM 8 points [-]

I saw my initial complaint as identical to CousinIt's except for being admittedly lazy and vague (but later elaborated somewhat). I don't think that you understood my or cousin it's complaints. None of the complaints are about ratios of fact to claims. Both are about the relationship between facts and claims. It seems to me that, simply put, you don't know how facts are supposed to relate to claims.

Cousin it's original comment said "This post doesn't make a convincing argument for any of its points."
That's the key point. It's not enough that fact suggest claims to you. It's necessary to actually make an argument that leads from the facts to the claims. You don't seem to be doing that but making mistakes, which is why I find it difficult to criticize your mistakes. Rather, you don't seem to be making arguments at all, just giving facts and saying what they suggest to you. This is a valid way of reasoning, communicating, or figuring things out. It's a useful way of arguing, and it's all humans did for thousands of years. Combined with swordsmanship it can even work for resolving arguments, but by itself it doesn't serve that purpose. I honestly think that you don't know that something else is possible, and I think that in this respect you are like almost everyone else in the world.

It seems to me to be a serious deficiency in the LW population that we aren't able to recognize this problem and that when we do see it we don't know how to do anything about it. Until we do, we will mostly be an echo chamber, talking only to the tiny fringe of the population who shares our implicit beliefs about how arguments should be made.

The good news is, this is WrongBot's chance to be a hero. If he can keep paying attention to what other people are doing on this forum, patterns of address other than sharing facts and claims are likely to click into place for him. He'll find that he can share information in a manner conforming to those patterns and that when he does it will be much better received, and especially much more likely to win concessions and resolve apparent differences of opinion, especially by the top posters. If he is then able to correctly figure out what sort of explanation would have enabled other people to quickly explain this difference in reasoning technique, he will be better positioned than any of us are to expand Less Wrong's target audience to the huge majority of people at all levels of intelligence who are simply not ready for the Sequences. If such a technique is fast enough and reliable enough I would literally expect its development to solve all of the world's problems within a half century in the absence of a Singularity before then.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 July 2010 12:31:22AM 2 points [-]

Maybe it would help to suggest a few especially good examples of going from facts to claims.