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TheAncientGeek comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong
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(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.
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.