All of Cobblepot's Comments + Replies

I think that if you ask anyone who knows me in-person they will tell you that I'm an unusually emotionally intensive person. My writing is also usually very emotionally intense but it tend to go through getting feedback from like 20 people who tell me to remove all of the excessive language and to tone it down before publication, so it ends up sounding normal. Comment do not go through this kind of process.

I have a tentative guess on why he's doing that, based on Scott Alexander’s post about trapped priors.  I’ll give an example of the basic problem outlined in the post myself, to spare you from having to read all of it before understanding my comment. Suppose that a physicist spends two hours trying to convince you that the Earth is flat. Would you see that as strong evidence that the Earth is flat? Personally, I’d see that as extremely weak evidence. Instead of updating much that the Earth is flat, the conversation would instead make me seriously consider the following more-plausible-to-me hypotheses:  * The physicist really enjoys pulling very elaborate pranks on people. * It’s April fools or something similar and I for some reason just haven’t realized it yet.  * The physicist currently has some sort of untreated psychosis.  * Any physics department the physicist has studied or worked on is extremely terrible and ought not to be trusted in the future.  * I am hallucinating, or otherwise have perceptions of the world that don’t track reality. Perhaps I’m in a dream, perhaps I have extremely-early-onset Alzheimer’s, perhaps I’m on a potent perception-altering drug.  Similarly, if I saw a lot of studies claiming to show something absurd like that prohibited-by-the-laws-of-physics "psychic" phenomena are real, I won’t need to read their methodology to conclude that there’s something wrong with them. And if a group of people claims to have such psychic powers, I won’t think twice before dismissing their personal experience as unreliable. And, at the same time, I'll accept, without batting an eye, studies and anecdotes claiming that such powers are not possible.  So dismissing arguments from experts, studies, and personal anecdotes as horribly flawed and no more than weak evidence — even before trying to assess their quality — is perfectly reasonable and Bayesian if they’re claiming something that you think is absurd. But clearly, if you have that attitude towa

Maybe better to assume good intentions? (And even if someone is biased or motivated by "impure" motives, we try to turn this into a high quality discussion if we can?)

I don't know if this generalizes, but my experience with tone is that it's mostly unintentional. There've been many instances where I've written something that seemed perfectly appropriate to me at the time, only to be horrified at how sound when I read it a month later (and the result pattern-matches to guzey's comment). It also does not require a psychological trigger, it just happens by default when arguing with someone in text form (and it happens more easily when it's about something status-related like who made better arguments). Took a lot of deliberate effort to change the default to sounding respectful. I agree that it's bad enough to be worth mentioning, but I'd be quite surprised if it's the result of a strategic effort rather than of an unconscious signaling-related instinct.

Hey Cobblepot. Super useful link. I was not aware of that concept handle, "conceptual fragmentation"—helps fill in the picture. Not surprising someone else has gotten frustrated with the endless "What is X?" philosophizing. It sounds to me like this idea of "successful" looks a lot like the "bettabilitarian" view of the American pragmatists, like CS Peirce—the cash value of a theory is how it performs predictively. Does that sound right to you? Some links to evolutionary epistemology—what "works" sticks around as theory, what fails to work gets kicked out. Memory is a really good example of how necessary divide-and-conquer is to scientific practice, I think. So much of what we think of as a natural kind, or atomic, is really just a pragmatically useful conflation. E.g., there are a bunch of things that form a set primarily because in our everyday lives they're functionally equivalent. So to a layperson dirt is just dirt, one kind of dirt's the same as the next. To the farmer, subtle differences in composition have serious effects for growing crops, so you carve "dirt" up into a hundred kinds based on how much clay and sand is in it.