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ArisKatsaris comments on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance - LessWrong
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I in another subthread referenced the "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" 'fanfic' written by Eliezer, when he mentioned how many fewer digits of Pi rational!Harry knew as compared to rational!Hermione.
The point is that I'm concerned not with charity nor with clarity, but rather with sufficiency to the current medium. Each of those little "costs next to nothing" statements actually do have a cost, one that isn't necessarily clear initially.
Are you familiar at all with how errors propagate in measurements? Each time you introduce new provisos, those statements affect the "informational value" of each dependent statement in its nest. This creates an analogous situation to the concept of significant digits in discourse.
For a topic like lukeprog's, in other words, the difference between 99% and 80% of women is below the threshold of significance. Eliminating it altogether (until such time as it becomes significant) is an important and valuable practice in communication.
Failure to effectively exercise that practice will result in needless 'clarifications' distracting from the intended message, hampering dialogs with unnecessary cognitive burden resultant from additional nesting of "informational quanta." In other words; if you add too many provisos to a statement, an otherwise meaningful and useful one will become trivially useless. An example of this in action can be found in another subthread of this conversation where someone stated he felt that there is a 'trend among frequent LessWrongers to over-generalize". This has informational meaning. He later added a 'clarification' that he hadn't intended the statement as an indication of population size, which totally reversed the informational value of his statement from an interesting one to a statement so utterly trivial that it is effectively without meaning or usefulness.
Not adding those statements also has a cost.
Honestly, you don't know how many potential rationalists may find a post seemingly making unchallenged sweeping generalizations about women, and decide that these so-called rationalists are just a group of bigoted idiots that are less rational than your average person-in-the-street.
It's okay for someone to to say that pi is "3.14" if the other person knows that you know in reality it has more digits than that, and you're just being sufficient for your purposes. In short if there's actual transparency, not a double illusion of such.
But if they don't know that, if every post of yours may be perceived as an indication of complete positions (not hasty approximations thereof), it costs less to do things like say "most women" instead of "women" (or add a general disclaimer at the beginning) rather than not do it.
This is trivially true. What does adding them add to a conversation to which they are not relevant or significant?
This is uncontestably true. But the opposite is also true; you don't know how many potential rationalists may find a post filled with provisos and details and, upon discovering a massive gulf of an inferential gap, give up on even attempting to understand.
Certainly.
This is a gross misrepresentation of my statements, to the point of being nothing remotely like what I advocate. I have repeatedly advocated not the elimination of precision but the application of only the relevant degree of precision to the nature of the discourse at hand.
My point is not restricted to '''"most women" instead of "women"'''. It is a generalized principle which happens to apply here. For any given conversation there are thousands of such details we must choose to parse for relevance to a conversation. Demanding unerring accuracy beyond relevance is simply damaging to dialogue.