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Right, but I was reacting to a prior history with that particular commenter, who has been especially prone to doing this (very often where, in my view, it isn't appropriate).
But also: I regard concept-creation as being a large part of what we're in the business of doing, here. (At least, it's a large part of what I'm here for.) That's what theorization is, and I think we're here to theorize (maybe among other things). So it's a cost that I think one has signed up to bear in a context of this sort.
For the most part, it's great if one has the motivation to write up a thorough exposition of a new concept, starting from very elementary premises (although there's also the negative aspect of potentially reinforcing a norm of this level of effort being generally expected every time one wants to introduce a new concept). However, one doesn't always have that motivation (or time, etc.), so it should be allowed sometimes to just point and say "look over here; if you think about this for a while, you may traverse the same inferential path I have, which leads to this conclusion."
Indeed, that's basically exactly what I want out of this forum: a place where people can state inferentially-distant conclusions you might not hear elsewhere (without necessarily needing to justify them from first principles -- such requirements might, after all, be part of why they're not heard elsewhere!). This, of course, requires a community where a certain amount of epistemic trust has been built up, but I think that happened already (c. 2009-11).
For epistemic norms designed to avoid false positives, there are skeptics' forums, and scientific journals. And your grandmother (to paraphrase Feynman). Here, we could use more of the opposite approach (avoiding false negatives). Who else specializes in that (high-quality speculation)? It's basically an empty niche.
Perhaps I can "strike a chord" with you in particular by talking about value uncertainty in this context. Even to the extent it's clear that not all of the "subskills" are equally valuable (which I don't necessarily concede, in part because its not even clear to me what the right decomposition into subskills is!), it's not necessarily clear which ones are more valuable, and by how much.
To be honest, I'm a little bit suspicious of the whole approach of trying to decompose something like music (or the "physical cognition" involved therein) into its component subskills, with the aim of measuring their relative values. The reason for this is that I doubt anyone currently understands either music, psychology, or 'values' well enough to do this -- at least, at any level of detail much beyond what I've already done by pointing to the physicality of music. To me, the relation between physicality of this sort and certain especially valuable forms of thought (precise, imaginative) is intuitively obvious, and I think consideration and investigation into the matter will reveal this to others; but I don't think this translates easily into something like "music study trains Cognitive Skill S X% more effectively than [rival activity]", especially where we can be confident that S is ontologically sound, and X numerically accurate, "enough".
What is on more solid ground at the moment is the heuristic, correlational case that it is better to be the kind of person who is interested and experienced in things like music than the kind of person who isn't. And it's better to live in the kind of society where such pursuits are enjoyed and admired than in the kind where they're not.
It would be nice to have a more detailed idea of why this is the case -- but I think the study of music, and the other activities in this reference class, is itself a conceptual prerequisite for more fully understanding the phenomenon.
I don't think that's a reasonable expectation or norm. The expected return from a reader doing something like that is way too low, even in a community like this one. Most new ideas are wrong, and if your idea is wrong then people trying to traverse the same inferential path will get nowher... (read more)