TheOtherDave comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (323)
I think I agree with this.
We are already supposed to be honest here most of the time. I think something needs to be changed to facilitate such a debate, if we wish to have it.
I just think that while there are hopeful signs that we will chew through this with our usual set of tools and norms, but those hopeful signs have been around for years, and the situation dosen't seem to be improving.
Honestly I think our only hope of addressing this is having a farm more robust debating style, far more limited in scope than we are used to since tangents often peter out without follow up or any kind of synthesis or even a clear idea of what is and what isn't agreed upon in these debates.
My $0.02:
It might help to state clearly what "addressing this" would actually comprise... that is, how could you tell if a discussion had done so successfully?
It might also help if everyone involved in that discussion (should such a discussion occur) agreed to some or all of the following guidelines:
I will, when I reject or challenge a conclusion, state clearly why I'm doing so. E.g.: is it incoherent? Is it dangerous? Is it hurtful? Is it ambiguous? Is it unsupported? Does it conflict with my experience? Etc.
I will "taboo" terms where I suspect people in the conversation have significantly different understandings of those terms (for example, "pickup"), and will instead unpack my understanding.
I will acknowledge out loud when a line of reasoning supports a conclusion I disagree with. This does not mean I agree with the conclusion.
I will, insofar as I can, interpret all comments without reference to my prior beliefs about what the individual speaker (as opposed to a generic person) probably meant. Where I can't do that, and my prior beliefs about the speaker are relevantly different from my beliefs about a generic person, I will explicitly summarize those beliefs before articulating conclusions based on them.