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wedrifid comments on The elephant in the room, AMA - Less Wrong Discussion

22 Post author: calcsam 12 May 2011 02:59PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 12 May 2011 08:45:51PM *  0 points [-]

Show how the position I attributed to you differs from the position you actually took.

This is a form of question that is usually unreasonable to ask. It places a burden on the recipient of the straw man of trying to guess what on earth the speaker was thinking to make them think they were the same in the first place. It is a rare instance where the worse the misrepresentation is the harder it is to demonstrate exactly why. Sometimes you just have to say "Yes, I know Chewbacca is a wookie but why on earth do you think that means he's a scarecrow?"

In this case I can at least point to some of the bits that don't match.

If being B1 refuses to update to being B2's beliefs on account of B2 being stupid, and this judgment of B2's stupidity, in turn, is solely based on B2 satisfying B1 =/= B2, then B1 is "begging the question" (assuming a conclusion to prove it).

  • 'Refuses to update' doesn't come into it. "Questioning the expected value of listening to advice from" would fit or even "Considering the possibility that absorbing the advice of someone with different values could result in net disutility".
  • The 'begging the question' part verges on 'too nonsensical for a diff to even produce compression' (ie. They are just two completely different things.) A recursive evaluation of the plausibility of the Mormon beliefs to questionable thinking back to Mormon beliefs being implausible just isn't going on. Calcsam has been rather careful not to (look like he is trying to) persuade people about his brand of religion. The relevance in terms of epistemic value would be from a possible association between the beliefs of a religious group and the beliefs of one of their missionaries about how rationalists should behave.
  • Not only did I not beg the question I didn't even privilege the hypothesis enough to ask it. I don't go around thinking "I have no particular evidence singling it out from all the other supersitions but what if the Mormon spinoff religion is the ultimate source of Truth?"
Comment author: Clippy 12 May 2011 09:12:15PM *  6 points [-]

This is a form of question that is usually unreasonable to ask.

If you perceive it as unreasonable to be asked to explain how your position differs from the one attributed to you, then you almost certainly have insufficient grounds to accuse others of strawmanning. If you really are being strawmanned, you can just say, "I said XY. You claimed I just said X." Because there is no such difference you can point to, that should have made you extremely hesistant to diagnose errors you feel I made as being type:strawman.

(Strangely, you seem to think that the bigger the difference, the more unreasonable the request for proof of strawmanning, as when you say "too nonsensical for a diff to even produce compression" -- a diff failing to produce compression would make your job easier and your claim stronger!)

'Refuses to update' doesn't come into it. "Questioning the expected value of listening to advice from" would fit [...]

The distinction between the two is not large enough to justify claiming that my point was irrelevant at strawman level. Whether you are refusing to update, or refusing to listen to things on the basis that they are intended to persuade you to update, is irrelevant, and the fact that my argument specifically called out only one of those does not thereby make it a strawman.

It is not enough that I failed to use a full blockquote of the your remarks, there must be substantive mis-attribution before a strawmanning claim is justified.

The 'begging the question' part [...]

Not only did I not beg the question [...]

Whether or not you begged the question is irrelevant to your claim of being strawmanned. That you begged the question was an argument I made. Proving that you didn't beg the question would do nothing to prove I misrepresented your position -- only that my argument regarding your position is wrong.

You seem to be making the common human error of equating, "You made arguments against my position I find to be in error" with "you responded to a position I never took."

It is unfortunate that we cannot spend more time at the object level since this baseless charge of misattribution must be resolved first. Please do not make such claims in the future unless you can prove it with "I said XY. You claimed I just said X" or something of similar simplicity. Rather, focus on the object level without bringing in the additional distraction of whether you were misrepresented.

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