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Alejandro1 comments on Rationality Quotes September 2014 - LessWrong
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--Megan McArdle
While I agree with your actual point, I note with amusement that what's worse is the people who claim they do understand: "I understand that you want to own a gun because it's a penis-substitute", "I understand that you don't want me to own a gun because you live in a fantasy world where there's no crime", "I understand that you're talking about my beauty because you think you own me", "I understand that you complain about people talking about your beauty as a way of boasting about how beautiful you are."... None of these explanations are anywhere near true.
It would be a sign of wisdom if someone actually did post "I'm stupid: I can hardly ever understand the viewpoint of anyone who disagrees with me."
Ah, but would it be, though?
it would probably be some kind of weird signalling game, maybe. On the other hand, posting:"I don't understand how etc etc, please, somebody explain to me the reasoning behind it" would be a good strategy to start debating and opening an avenue to "convert" others
It probably would. Usually a person who writes something like this is looking for an explanation.
I like this and agree that usually or at least often the people making these "I don't understand how anyone could ..." statements aren't interested in actually understanding the people they disagree with. But I also liked Ozy's comment:
Hacker School has a set of "social rules [...] designed to curtail specific behavior we've found to be destructive to a supportive, productive, and fun learning environment." One of them is "no feigning surprise":
I think this is a good rule and when I find out someone doesn't know something that I think they "should" already know, I instead try to react as in xkcd 1053 (or by chalking it up to a momentary maladaptive brain activity change on their part, or by admitting that it's probably not that important that they know this thing). But I think "feigning surprise" is a bad name, because when I'm in this situation, I'm never pretending to be surprised in order to demonstrate how smart I am, I am always genuinely surprised. (Surprise means my model of the world is about to get better. Yay!)
I don't think that sort of surprise is necessarily feigned. However, I do think it's usually better if that surprise isn't mentioned.
I am imagining the following exchange:
"I don't understand how anyone could believe X!"
"Great, the first step to understanding is noticing that you don't understand. Now, let me show you why X is true..."
I suspect that most people saying the first line would not take well to hearing the second.
I suspect the same, but still think "I can't understand why anyone would believe X" is probably better than "people who believe X or say they believe X only do so because they hate [children / freedom / poor people / rich people / black people / white people / this great country of ours / etc.]"
We could charitably translate "I don't understand how anyone could X" as "I notice that my model of people who X is so bad, that if I tried to explain it, I would probably generate a strawman".
Or add a fourth laying: I think that I will rise in status by publically signalling to my facebook friends: "I lack the ability or willingness to attempt even a basic understanding of the people who disagree with me."
People do lots of silly things to signal commitment; the silliness is part of the point. This is a reason initiation rituals are often humiliating, and why members of minor religions often wear distinctive clothing or hairstyles. (I think I got this from this podcast interview with Larry Iannaccone.)
I think posts like the ones to which McArdle is referring, and the beliefs underlying them, are further examples of signaling attire. "I'm so committed, I'm even blind to whatever could be motivating the other side."
A related podcast is with Arnold Kling on his e-book (which I enjoyed) The Three Languages of Politics. It's about (duh) politics--specifically, American politics--but it also contains an interesting and helpful discussion on seeing things from others' point of view, and explicitly points to commitment-signaling (and its relation to beliefs) as a reason people fail to see eye to eye.
Hmmm... let's try filling something else in there.
"I don't understand how anyone could support ISIS/Bosnian genocide/North Darfur."
While I think a person is indeed more effective at life for being able to perform the cognitive contortions necessary to bend their way into the mindset of a murderous totalitarian (without actually believing what they're understanding), I don't consider normal people lacking for their failure to understand refined murderous evil of the particularly uncommon kind -- any more than I expect them to understand the appeal of furry fandom (which I feel a bit guilty for picking out as the canonical Ridiculously Uncommon Weird Thing).
You don't have to share a taste for, or approval of "...refined murderous evil of the particularly uncommon kind..." It can be explained as a reaction to events or conditions, and history is full of examples. HOWEVER. We have this language that we share, and it signifies. I understand that a rapist has mental instability and other mental health issues that cause him to act not in accordance with common perceptions of minimum human decency. But I can't say out loud, "I understand why some men rape women." It's an example of a truth that is too dangerous to say because emotions prevent others from hearing it.
You can (and did) say that, you just can't say it on Twitter with no context without causing people to yell at you. ETA: you like language? Gricean maxims.
Or, (4), "I keep asking, but they won't say"....
Does that happen?
It does to me.Have you tried getting sense out of an NRx or HBD.er?
Haven't tried it myself, but it seems to work for Scott Alexander
NRx are so bad at communicating their position in language inline can understand that they refer to Scotts ANTI reaction faq to explain it. This is the guy who steelmanned Gene "Timecube" Ray. He has superpowers.
“Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell” is where he explain what the NR position is and “The Anti-Reactionary FAQ” is where he explains why he disagrees with it. The former is what neoreactionaries have linked to to explain it.
Yes. That's why I'm somewhat surprised he seems to interpret “reptilian aliens” literally.
There no reason to use those nonstandard abbreviations. Neither of them are in Urban dictionary.
NRx is probably neoreactionism but doesn't make it into the first 10 Google results. HBD.er in that spelling seems to be wrong as HBD'er is found when you Google it.
Bracket neoreaction for the time being. I get that you disagree with HBD positions, but do you literally have trouble comprehending their meaning?
Yes. One time someone was moaning about imigrants from countries that don't have a long history of Democracy, and genuinely thought he meant eastern Europeans. He didn't, because they are white Christians and he doesn't object to white Christians. So to understand who he is objecting to, I have to apply a mental filter he has and I don't.
Yes, what they say frequently makes a lot more sense than the mainstream position on the issue in question.
I completely disagree. Their grasp of politics is largely based on meta-contrarianism, and has failed to "snap back" into basing one's views on a positive program whose goodness and rationality can be argued for with evidence.
Huh? HBD'ers are making observations about the world, they do not have a "positive program". As for NRx, they do have a positive program do use evidence to argue for it, see the NRx thread and the various blogs linked there for some examples.
Now repeat the same statement, only instead of abortions and carbon taxes, substitute the words "believe in homeopathy". (Creationism also works.)
People do say that--yet it doesn't mean any of the things the quote claims it means (at least not in a nontrivial sense).
Then what does it mean in those cases? Because the only ones I can think of are the three Megan described.
If you mean "I can't imagine how anyone could be so stupid as to believe in homeopathy/creationism", which is my best guess for what you mean, that's a special of the second meaning.
"I don't understand how someone could believe X" typically means that the speaker doesn't understand how someone could believe in X based on good reasoning. Understanding how stupidity led someone to believe X doesn't count.
Normal conversation cannot be parsed literally. It is literally true that understanding how someone incorrectly believes X is a subclass of understanding how someone believes in X; but it's not what those words typically connote.
Most people who say: "I don't understand how someone could believe X" would fail a reverse Turing test that position. They often literally don't understand how someone comes to believe X.
I don't think that applies here. Your addition "based on good reasoning" is not a non-literal meaning, but a filling in of omitted detail. Gricean implicature is not non-literality, and the addition does not take the example outside McArdle's analysis.
As always, confusion is a property of the confused person, not of the thing outside themselves that they are confused about. If a person says they cannot understand how anyone could etc., that is, indeed, literally true. That person cannot understand the phenomenon; that is their problem. Yet their intended implication, which McArdle is pointing out does not follow, is that all of the problem is in the other person. Even if the other person is in error, how can one engage with them from the position of "I cannot understand how etc."? The words are an act of disengagement, behind a smokescreen that McArdle blows away..
Sure it is. The qualifier changes the meaning of the statement. By definition, if the sentence lacks the qualifier but is to be interpreted as if it has one, it is to be interpreted differently than its literal words. Having to be interpreted as containing detail that is not explicitly written is a type of non-literalness.
No, it's not. I understand how someone can believe in creationism: they either misunderstand science (probably due to religious bias) or don't actually believe science works at all when it conflicts with religion. Saying "I don't understand how someone can believe in creationism" is literally false--I do understand how.
What it means is "I don't understand how someone can correctly believe in creationism." I understand how someone can believe in creationism, but my understanding involves the believer making mistakes. The statement communicates that I don't know of a reason other than making mistakes, not that I don't know any reason at all.
Because "I don't understand how" is synonymous, in ordinary conversation, with "the other person appears to be in error." It does not mean that I literally don't understand, but rather that I understand it as an error, so it is irrelevant that literally not understanding is an act of disengagement.
Now I just thought of this, so maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think "I don't understand how someone can think X" is really meant as any sort of piece of reasonable logic, or a substitution for one. I suspect this is merely the sort of stuff people come up with when made to think about it.
Rather, "I don't understand how..." is an appeal to the built in expectation that things make obvious sense. If I want to claim that "what you're saying is nontribal and I have nothing to do with it", stating that you're not making sense to me works whether or not I can actually follow your reasoning. Since if you really were not making sense to me with minimum effort on my part, this would imply bad things about you and what you're saying. It's just a rejection that makes no sense if you think about it, but it's not meant to be thought about - it's really closer to "la la la I am not listening to you".
Am I making sense?
Yes.
This is close, but I don't think it captures everything. I used the examples of creationism and homeopathy because they are unusual examples where there isn't room for reasonable disagreement. Every person who believes in one of those does so because of bias, ignorance, or error. This disentangles the question of "what is meant by the statement" and "why would anyone want to say what is meant by the statement".
You have correctly identified why, for most topics, someone would want to say such a thing. Normally, "there's no room for reasonable disagreement; you're just wrong" is indeed used as a tribal membership indicator. But the statement doesn't mean "what you're saying is nontribal", it's just that legitimate, nontribal, reasons to say "you are just wrong" are rare.
Well that's true for every false belief anyone has. So what's so special about those examples?
You say "there isn't room for reasonable disagreement", which taken literally is just another way of phrasing "I don't understand how anyone could believe X". In any case, could you expand on what you mean by "not room for reasonable disagreement" since in context it appears to mean "all the tribes present agree with it".
You're being literal again. Every person who believes in one of those primarily does so because of major bias, ignorance, or error. You can't just distrust a single source you should have trusted, or make a single bad calculation, and end up believing in creationism or homeopathy. Your belief-finding process has to contain fundamental flaws for that.
And "it has three sides" is just another way of phrasing "it is a triangle", but I can still explain what a triangle is by describing it as something with three sides. If it wasn't synonymous, it wouldn't be an explanation.
(Actually, it's not quite synonymous, for the same reason that the original statement wasn't correct: if you're taking it literally, "I don't understand how anyone could believe X" excludes cases where you understand that someone makes a mistake, and "there isn't room for reasonable disagreement" includes such cases.)
You can describe anything which is believed by some people and not others in terms of tribes believing it. But not all such descriptions are equally useful; if the tribes fall into categories, it is better to specify the categories.
Non-literality isn't a get-out-of-your-words-free card. There is a clear difference between saying "you appear to be in error" and "I can't understand how anyone could think that", and the difference is clearly expressed by the literal meanings of those words.
And to explicate "I don't understand etc." with "Of course I do understand how you could think that, it's because you're ignorant or stupid" is not an improvement.
Non-literalness is a get-out-of-your-words-free card when the words are normally used in conversation, by English speakers in general, to mean something non-literal. Yes, if you just invented the non-literal meaning yourself, there are limits to how far from the literal meaning you can be and still expect to be understood, but these limits do not apply when the non-literal meaning is already established usage.
The original quote gives the intended meaning as "I am such a superior moral being that I cannot even imagine the cognitive errors or moral turpitude that could lead someone to..." In other words, the original rationality quote explicitly excludes the possibility of "I understand you believe it because you're ignorant or stupid". It misinterprets the statement as literally claiming that you don't understand in any way whatsoever.
The point is that the quote is a bad rationality quote because it makes a misinterpretation. Whether the statement that it misinterprets is itself a good thing to say is irrelevant to the question of whether it is being misinterpreted.
Established by whom? You are the one claiming that
These two expressions mean very different things. Notice that I am claiming that you are in error, but not saying, figuratively or literally, that I cannot understand how you could possibly think that.
That is not how figurative language works. I could expand on that at length, but I don't think it's worth it at this point.
"A is synonymous with B" doesn't mean "every time someone said B, they also said A". "You've made more mistakes than a zebra has stripes" is also synonymous with "you're in error" and you clearly didn't say that, either.
(Of course, "is synonymous with" means "makes the same assertion about the main topic", not "is identical in all ways".)
The art of condescension is subtle and nuanced. "I'm always fascinated by..." can be sincere or not--when it is not, it is a variation on, "It never ceases to amaze me how..." If you were across the table from me, Alejandro, I could tell by your eyes. Most FB posts, tweets, blog posts and comments on magazine and newspaper articles are as bad or worse than what is described here. Rants masquerading as comments. That's why I like this venue here at LessWrong. Commenters actually trying to get more clarity, trying to make sure they understand, trying to make it clear with sincerely constructive criticism that they believe a better argument could be stated. If only it could be spread around the web-o-spehre. Virally.