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Lumifer comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong
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Comments (395)
I don't see it as self-evident. Or, more precisely, in some situations it is, and in other situations it is not.
You are saying (a bit later in your post) that the principle of charity implies two things. The second one is a pure politeness rule and it doesn't seem to me that the fashion of withdrawing from a conversation will help me "reliably distinguish" anything.
As to the first point, you are basically saying I should ignore evidence (or, rather, shift the evidence into the prior and refuse to estimate the posterior). That doesn't help me reliably distinguish anything either.
In fact, I don't see why there should be a particular exception here ("a procedural rule") to the bog-standard practice of updating on evidence. If my updating process is incorrect, I should fix it and not paper it over with special rules for seemingly-stupid people. If it is reasonably OK, I should just go ahead and update. That will not necessarily result in either a "closed question" or a "large posterior" -- it all depends on the particulars.
I'll say it again: POC doesn't mean "believe everyone is sane and intelligent", it means "treat everyone's comments as though they were made by a sane , intelligent, person".
As I operationalize it, that definition effectively waters down the POC to a degree I suspect most POC proponents would be unhappy with.
Sane, intelligent people occasionally say wrong things; in fact, because of selection effects, it might even be that most of the wrong things I see & hear in real life come from sane, intelligent people. So even if I were to decide that someone who's just made a wrong-sounding assertion were sane & intelligent, that wouldn't lead me to treat the assertion substantially more charitably than I otherwise would (and I suspect that the kind of person who likes the(ir conception of the) POC might well say I were being "uncharitable").
Edit: I changed "To my mind" to "As I operationalize it". Also, I guess a shorter form of this comment would be: operationalized like that, I think I effectively am applying the POC already, but it doesn't feel like it from the inside, and I doubt it looks like it from the outside.
You have uncharutably interpreted my formulation to mean 'treat everyone's comments as though they were made by a sane intelligent person who may .or may have been having an off day". What kind of guideline is that?
The charitable version would have been "treat everyone's comments as though they were made by someone sane and intelligent at the time".
(I'm giving myself half a point for anticipating that someone might reckon I was being uncharitable.)
A realistic one.
The thing is, that version actually sounds less charitable to me than my interpretation. Why? Well, I see two reasonable ways to interpret your latest formulation.
The first is to interpret "sane and intelligent" as I normally would, as a property of the person, in which case I don't understand how appending "at the time" makes a meaningful difference. My earlier point that sane, intelligent people say wrong things still applies. Whispering in my ear, "no, seriously, that person who just said the dumb-sounding thing is sane and intelligent right now" is just going to make me say, "right, I'm not denying that; as I said, sanity & intelligence aren't inconsistent with saying something dumb".
The second is to insist that "at the time" really is doing some semantic work here, indicating that I need to interpret "sane and intelligent" differently. But what alternative interpretation makes sense in this context? The obvious alternative is that "at the time" is drawing my attention to whatever wrong-sounding comment was just made. But then "sane and intelligent" is really just a camouflaged assertion of the comment's worthiness, rather than the claimant's, which reduces this formulation of the POC to "treat everyone's comments as though the comments are cogent".
The first interpretation is surely not your intended one because it's equivalent to one you've ruled out. So presumably I have to go with the second interpretation, but it strikes me as transparently uncharitable, because it sounds like a straw version of the POC ("oh, so I'm supposed to treat all comments as cogent, even if they sound idiotic?").
The third alternative, of course, is that I'm overlooking some third sensible interpretation of your latest formulation, but I don't see what it is; your comment's too pithy to point me in the right direction.
Yep.
You have assumed that cannot be the correct interpretation of the PoC, without saying why. In light of your other comments, it could well be that you are assuming that the PoC can only be true by correspondence to reality or false, by lack of correspondence. But norms, guidelines, heurisitics, advice, lie on an orthogonal axis to true/false: they are guides to action, not passive reflections. Their equivalent of the true/false axis are the Works/Does Not Work axis. So would adoption of the PoC work as way of understanding people, and calibrating your confidence levels?...that is the question.
OK, but that's not an adequate basis for recommending a given norm/guideline/heuristic. One has to at least sketch an answer to the question, drawing on evidence and/or argument (as RobinZ sought to).
Well, because it's hard for me to believe you really believe that interpretation and understand it in the same way I would naturally operationalize it: namely, noticing and throwing away any initial suspicion I have that a comment's wrong, and then forcing myself to pretend the comment must be correct in some obscure way.
As soon as I imagine applying that procedure to a concrete case, I cringe at how patently silly & unhelpful it seems. Here's a recent-ish, specific example of me expressing disagreement with a statement I immediately suspected was incorrect.
What specifically would I have done if I'd treated the seemingly patently wrong comment as cogent instead? Read the comment, thought "that can't be right", then shaken my head and decided, "no, let's say that is right", and then...? Upvoted the comment? Trusted but verified (i.e. not actually treated the comment as cogent)? Replied with "I presume this comment is correct, great job"? Surely these are not courses of action you mean to recommend (the first & third because they actively support misinformation, the second because I expect you'd find it insufficiently charitable). Surely I am being uncharitable in operationalizing your recommendation this way...even though that does seem to me the most literal, straightforward operationalization open to me. Surely I misunderstand you. That's why I assumed "that cannot be the correct interpretation" of your POC.
If I may step in at this point; "cogent" does not mean "true". The principle of charity (as I understand it) merely recommends treating any commenter as reasonably sane and intelligent. This does not mean he can't be wrong - he may be misinformed, he may have made a minor error in reasoning, he may simply not know as much about the subject as you do. Alternatively, you may be misinformed, or have made a minor error in reasoning, or not know as much about the subject as the other commenter...
So the correct course of action then, in my opinion, is to find the source of error and to be polite about it. The example post you linked to was a great example - you provided statistics, backed them up, and linked to your sources. You weren't rude about it, you simply stated facts. As far as I could see, you treated RomeoStevens as sane, intelligent, and simply lacking in certain pieces of pertinent historical knowledge - which you have now provided.
(As to what RomeoStevens said - it was cogent. That is to say, it was pertinent and relevant to the conversation at the time. That it was wrong does not change the fact that it was cogent; if it had been right it would have been a worthwhile point to make.)
Yes, and were I asked to give synonyms for "cogent", I'd probably say "compelling" or "convincing" [edit: rather than "true"]. But an empirical claim is only compelling or convincing (and hence may only be cogent) if I have grounds for believing it very likely true. Hence "treat all comments as cogent, even if they sound idiotic" translates [edit: for empirical comments, at least] to "treat all comments as if very likely true, even if they sound idiotic".
Now you mention the issue of relevance, I think that, yeah, I agree that relevance is part of the definition of "cogent", but I also reckon that relevance is only a necessary condition for cogency, not a sufficient one. And so...
...I have to push back here. While pertinent, the comment was not only wrong but (to me) obviously very likely wrong, and RomeoStevens gave no evidence for it. So I found it unreasonable, unconvincing, and unpersuasive — the opposite of dictionary definitions of "cogent". Pertinence & relevance are only a subset of cogency.
That's why I wrote that that version of the POC strikes me as watered down; someone being "reasonably sane and intelligent" is totally consistent with their just having made a trivial blunder, and is (in my experience) only weak evidence that they haven't just made a trivial blunder, so "treat commenters as reasonably sane and intelligent" dissolves into "treat commenters pretty much as I'd treat anyone".
Then "cogent" was probably the wrong word to use.
I'd need a word that means pertinent, relevant, and believed to have been most likely true (or at least useful to say) by the person who said it; but not necessarily actually true.
Okay, I appear to have been using a different definition (see definition two).
I think at this point, so as not to get stuck on semantics, we should probably taboo the word 'cogent'.
(Having said that, I do agree anyone with access to the statistics you quoted would most likely find RomeoSteven's comments unreasonable, unconvincing and unpersuasive).
Then you may very well be effectively applying the principle already. Looking at your reply to RomeoStevens supports this assertion.
Yes, that was an example of PoC, because satt assumed RomeoStevens had failed to look up the figures, rather than insanely believing that 120,000ish < 500ish.
Yes, but that's beside the original point. What you call a realistic guideline doesnt work as a guideline at all, and therefore isnt a a charitable interpretation of the PoC.
Justifying that PoC as something that works at what it is supposed to do, is a question that can be answered, but it is a separate question.
Thats exactly what I mean.
Cogent doesn't mean right. You actually succeeded in treating it as wrong for sane reasons, ie failure to check data.
You brought it up!
I continue to think that the version I called realistic is no less workable than your version.
Again, it's a question you introduced. (And labelled "the question".) But I'm content to put it aside.
But surely it isn't. Just 8 minutes earlier you wrote that a case where I did the opposite was an "example of PoC".
See my response to CCC.
But not one that tells you unambiguously what to do, ie not a usable guideline at all.
There's a lot of complaint about this heuristic along the lines that it doesn't guarantee perfect results...ie, its a heuristic
And now there is the complaint that its not realistic, it doesn't reflect reality.
Ideal rationalists can stop reading now.
Everybody else: you're biased. Specifically, overconfident,. Overconfidence makes people overestimate their ability to understand what people are saying, and underestimate the rationality of others. The PoC is a heuristic which corrects those. As a heuristic, an approximate method, it i is based on the principle that overshooting the amount of sense people are making is better than undershooting. Overshooting would be a problem, if there were some goldilocks alternative, some way of getting things exactly right. There isn't. The voice in your head that tells you you are doing just fine its the voice of your bias.
I don't see how this applies any more to the "may .or may have been having an off day"" version than it does to your original. They're about as vague as each other.
Understood. But it's not obvious to me that "the principle" is correct, nor is it obvious that a sufficiently strong POC is better than my more usual approach of expressing disagreement and/or asking sceptical questions (if I care enough to respond in the first place).
Mine implies a heuristic of "make repeated attempts at re-intepreting the comment using different background assumptions". What does yours imply?
As I have explained, it provides its own evidence.
Neither of those is much good if interpreting someone who died 100 years ago.
I don't see how "treat everyone's comments as though they were made by a sane , intelligent, person" entails that without extra background assumptions. And I expect that once those extra assumptions are spelled out, the "may .or may have been having an off day" version will imply the same action(s) as your original version.
Well, when I've disagreed with people in discussions, my own experience has been that behaving according to my baseline impression of how much sense they're making gets me closer to understanding than consciously inflating my impression of how much sense they're making.
A fair point, but one of minimal practical import. Almost all of the disagreements which confront me in my life are disagreements with live people.
Ie, its a defeasible assumption. If you fail, you have evidence that it was a dumb comment. Ift you succeed, you have evidence it wasn't. Either way, you have evidence, and you are not sitting in an echo chamber where your beliefs about people's dumbness go forever untested, because you reject out of hand anything that sounds superficially dumb, .or was made by someone you have labelled , however unjustly,as dumb.
That's fine. I have limited information processing capacity -- my opportunity costs for testing other people's dumbness are fairly high.
In the information age I don't see how anyone can operate without the "this is too stupid to waste time on" pre-filter.
The PoC tends to be advised in the context of philosophy, where there is a background assumption of infinite amounts of time to consider things, The resource-constrained version would be to interpret comments charitably once you have, for whatever reason, got into a discussion....with the corollary of reserving some space for "I might be wrong" where you haven't had the resources to test the hypothesis.
LOL. While ars may be longa, vita is certainly brevis. This is a silly assumption, better suited for theology, perhaps -- it, at least, promises infinte time. :-)
If I were living in English countryside around XVIII century I might have had a different opinion on the matter, but I do not.
It's not a binary either-or situation. I am willing to interpret comments charitably according to my (updateable) prior of how knowledgeable, competent, and reasonable the writer is. In some situations I would stop and ponder, in others I would roll my eyes and move on.
Users report that charitable interpretation gives you more evidence for updating than you would have otherwise.
Are you already optimal? How do you know?
I don't like this rule. My approach is simpler: attempt to understand what the person means. This does not require me to treat him as sane or intelligent.
How do you know how many mistakes you are or aren't making?
The PoC is a way of breaking down "understand what the other person says" into smaller steps, not .something entirely different, Treating your own mental processes as a black box that always delivers the right answer is a great way to stay in the grip of bias.
The prior comment leads directly into this one: upon what grounds do I assert that an inexpensive test exists to change my beliefs about the rationality of an unfamiliar discussant? I realize that it is not true in the general case that the plural of anecdote is data, and much the following lacks citations, but:
In other words, I do not often see the case in which performing the tests implied by the principle of charity - e.g. "are you saying [paraphrase]?" - are wasteful, and I frequently see cases where failing to do so has been.
What you are talking about doesn't fall under the principle of charity (in my interpretation of it). It falls under the very general rubric of "don't be stupid yourself".
In particular, considering that the speaker expresses his view within a framework which is different from your default framework is not an application of the principle of charity -- it's an application of the principle "don't be stupid, of course people talk within their frameworks, not within your framework".
I might be arguing for something different than your principle of charity. What I am arguing for - and I realize now that I haven't actually explained a procedure, just motivations for one - is along the following lines:
When somebody says something prima facie wrong, there are several possibilities, both regarding their intended meaning:
...and your ability to infer such:
What my interpretation of the principle of charity suggests as an elementary course of action in this situation is, with an appropriate degree of polite confusion, to ask for clarification or elaboration, and to accompany this request with paraphrases of the most likely interpretations you can identify of their remarks excluding the ones I marked with asterisks.
Depending on their actual intent, this has a good chance of making them:
In the first three or four cases, you have managed to advance the conversation with a well-meaning discussant without insult; in the latter two or three, you have thwarted the goals of an ill-intentioned one - especially, in the last case, because you haven't allowed them the option of distracting everyone from your refutations by claiming you insulted them. (Even if they do so claim, it will be obvious that they have no just cause to be.)
I say this falls under the principle of charity because it involves (a) granting them, at least rhetorically, the best possible motives, and (b) giving them enough of your time and attention to seek engagement with their meaning, not just a lazy gloss of their words.
Minor formatting edit.
Belatedly: I recently discovered that in 2011 I posted a link to an essay on debating charitably by pdf23ds a.k.a. Chris Capel - this is MichaelBishop's summary and this is a repost of the text (the original site went down some time ago). I recall endorsing Capel's essay unreservedly last time I read it; I would be glad to discuss the essay, my prior comments, or any differences that exist between the two if you wish.
A small addendum, that I realized I omitted from my prior arguments in favor of the principle of charity:
Because I make a habit of asking for clarification when I don't understand, offering clarification when not understood, and preferring "I don't agree with your assertion" to "you are being stupid", people are happier to talk to me. Among the costs of always responding to what people say instead of your best understanding of what they mean - especially if you are quick to dismiss people when their statements are flawed - is that talking to you becomes costly: I have to word my statements precisely to ensure that I have not said something I do not mean, meant something I did not say, or made claims you will demand support for without support. If, on the other hand, I am confident that you will gladly allow me to correct my errors of presentation, I can simply speak, and fix anything I say wrong as it comes up.
Which, in turn, means that I can learn from a lot of people who would not want to speak to me otherwise.
Again: I completely agree that you should make your best effort to understand what other people actually mean. I do not call this charity -- it sounds like SOP and "just don't be an idiot yourself" to me.
You're right: it's not self-evident. I'll go ahead and post a followup comment discussing what sort of evidential support the assertion has.
My usage of the terms "prior" and "posterior" was obviously mistaken. What I wanted to communicate with those terms was communicated by the analogies to the dice cup and to the scientific theory: it's perfectly possible for two hypotheses to have the same present probability but different expectations of future change to that probability. I have high confidence that an inexpensive test - lifting the dice cup - will change my beliefs about the value of the die roll by many orders of magnitude, and low confidence that any comparable test exists to affect my confidence regarding the scientific theory.
I think you are talking about what's in local parlance is called a "weak prior" vs a "strong prior". Bayesian updating involves assigning relative importance the the prior and to the evidence. A weak prior is easily changed by even not very significant evidence. On the other hand, it takes a lot of solid evidence to move a strong prior.
In this terminology, your pre-roll estimation of the probability of double sixes is a weak prior -- the evidence of an actual roll will totally overwhelm it. But your estimation of the correctness of the modern evolutionary theory is a strong prior -- it will take much convincing evidence to persuade you that the theory is not correct after all.
Of course, the posterior of a previous update becomes the prior of the next update.
Using this language, then, you are saying that prima facie evidence of someone's stupidity should be a minor update to the strong prior that she is actually a smart, reasonable, and coherent human being.
And I don't see why this should be so.
Oh, dear - that's not what I meant at all. I meant that - absent a strong prior - the utterance of a prima facie absurdity should not create a strong prior that the speaker is stupid, unreasonable, or incoherent. It's entirely possible that ten minutes of conversation will suffice to make a strong prior out of this weaker one - there's someone arguing for dualism on a webcomic forum I (in)frequent along the same lines as Chalmers "hard problem of consciousness", and it took less than ten posts to establish pretty confidently that the same refutations would apply - but as the history of DIPS (defense-independent pitching statistics) shows, it's entirely possible for an idea to be as correct as "the earth is a sphere, not a plane" and nevertheless be taken as prima facie absurd.
(As the metaphor implies, DIPS is not quite correct, but it would be more accurate to describe its successors as "fixing DIPS" than as "showing that DIPS was completely wrongheaded".)
Oh, I agree with that.
What I am saying is that evidence of stupidity should lead you to raise your estimates of the probability that the speaker is stupid. The principle of charity should not prevent that from happening. Of course evidence of stupidity should not make you close the case, declare someone irretrievably stupid, and stop considering any further evidence.
As an aside, I treat how a person argues as a much better indicator of stupidity than what he argues. YMMV, of course.
...in the context during which they exhibited the behavior which generated said evidence, of course. In broader contexts, or other contexts? To a much lesser extent, and not (usually) strongly in the strong-prior sense, but again, yes. That you should always be capable of considering further evidence is - I am glad to say - so universally accepted a proposition in this forum that I do not bother to enunciate it, but I take no issue with drawing conclusions from a sufficient body of evidence.
Come to think, you might be amused by this fictional dialogue about a mendacious former politician, illustrating the ridiculousness of conflating "never assume that someone is arguing in bad faith" and "never assert that someone is arguing in bad faith". (The author also posted a sequel, if you enjoy the first.)
I'm afraid that I would have about as much luck barking like a duck as enunciating how I evaluate the intelligence (or reasonableness, or honesty, or...) of those I converse with. YMMV, indeed.
People tend to update too much in these circumstances: Fundamental attribution error
The fundamental attribution error is about underestimating the importance of external drivers (the particular situation, random chance, etc.) and overestimating the importance of internal factors (personality, beliefs, etc.) as an explanation for observed actions.
If a person in a discussion is spewing nonsense, it is rare that external factors are making her do it (other than a variety of mind-altering chemicals). The indicators of stupidity are NOT what position a person argues or how much knowledge about the subject does she has -- it's how she does it. And inability e.g. to follow basic logic is hard to attribute to external factors.
This discussion has got badly derailed. You are taking it that there is some robust fact about someones lack of lrationality or intelligence which may or may not be explained by internal or external factors.
The point is that you cannot make a reliable judgement about someone's rationality or intelligence unless you have understood that they are saying,....and you cannot reliably understand what they ares saying unl ess you treat it as if it were the product of a rational and intelligent person. You can go to "stupid"when all attempts have failed, but not before.
I disagree, I don't think this is true.
I think it's true, on roughly these grounds: taking yourself to understand what someone is saying entails thinking that almost all of their beliefs (I mean 'belief' in the broad sense, so as to include my beliefs about the colors of objects in the room) are true. The reason is that unless you assume almost all of a person's (relevant) beliefs are true, the possibility space for judgements about what they mean gets very big, very fast. So if 'generally understanding what someone is telling you' means having a fairly limited possibility space, you only get this on the assumption that the person talking to you has mostly true beliefs. This, of course, doesn't mean they have to be rational in the LW sense, or even very intelligent. The most stupid and irrational (in the LW sense) of us still have mostly true beliefs.
I guess the trick is to imagine what it would be to talk to someone who you thought had on the whole false beliefs. Suppose they said 'pass me the hammer'. What do you think they meant by that? Assuming they have mostly or all false beliefs relevant to the utterance, they don't know what a hammer is or what 'passing' involves. They don't know anything about what's in the room, or who you are, or what you are, or even if they took themselves to be talking to you, or talking at all. The possibility space for what they took themselves to be saying is too large to manage, much larger than, for example, the possibility space including all and only every utterance and thought that's ever been had by anyone. We can say things like 'they may have thought they were talking about cats or black holes or triangles' but even that assumes vastly more truth and reason in the person that we've assumed we can anticipate.
Generally speaking, understanding what a person means implies reconstructing their framework of meaning and reference that exists in their mind as the context to what they said.
Reconstructing such a framework does NOT require that you consider it (or the whole person) sane or rational.
Well, there are two questions here: 1) is it in principle necessary to assume your interlocutors are sane and rational, and 2) is it as a matter of practical necessity a fact that we always do assume our interlocutors are sane and rational. I'm not sure about the first one, but I am pretty sure about the second: the possibility space for reconstructing the meaning of someone speaking to you is only manageable if you assume that they're broadly sane, rational, and have mostly true beliefs. I'd be interested to know which of these you're arguing about.
Also, we should probably taboo 'sane' and 'rational'. People around here have a tendency to use these words in an exaggerated way to mean that someone has a kind of specific training in probability theory, statistics, biases, etc. Obviously people who have none of these things, like people living thousands of years ago, were sane and rational in the conventional sense of these terms, and they had mostly true beliefs even by any standard we would apply today.
I believe this disagreement is testable by experiment.
Do elaborate.
If you would more reliably understand what people mean by specifically treating it as the product of a rational and intelligent person, then executing that hack should lead to your observing a much higher rate of rationality and intelligence in discussions than you would previously have predicted. If the thesis is true, many remarks which, using your earlier methodology, you would have dismissed as the product of diseased reasoning will prove to be sound upon further inquiry.
If, however, you execute the hack for a few months and discover no change in the rate at which you discover apparently-wrong remarks to admit to sound interpretations, then TheAncientGeek's thesis would fail the test.
Because you are not engaged in establishing facts about how smart someone is, you are instead trying to establish facts about what they mean by what they say.