Point taken - in some cases, the significance of the gaps is more evident to the outside view.
In that case, we can replace "point out where in their argument they went wrong" with "point out where our underlying value judgments seem to diverge."
If they then try to argue that your values are wrong and theirs are right, either you have to move the discussion up a meta-level or, yes, screaming.
An application of this hierarchy:
Jack the Scarecrow. My crystal healing pills will give you eternal life. For $50.00 each, you need never die, suckers.
--
DH0: "I'm not interested for myself, but can I buy you a border collie and give her some? If you're going to live forever, you're going to need a smart friend to make the really tricky decisions."
DH1: What, exactly, is your profit margin on these crystal healing pills? If we don't live forever, would you still make money off of them?
DH2: Any post that ends in the word "suckers" directed...
Why are my opponents ignoring what I say because I said it angrily, or sadly, or confrontationally, or in passing, or whatever?
The way you say something may signal that you are trying to diminish their status. If you say it with a sufficiently negative tone, it may even be taken as a signal (a generally reliable signal) that you care more about diminishing their status than about having a truth-seeking discussion.
In other words, what wedrifid said, but less simply and more explicitly.
I think that in some contexts, like arguing over mathematical proofs (as orthonormal noted), spending a little time arguing with yourself to bring out X'Y'Z' is polite and a sign of good faith. In other cases, I'd rather just trot out A'B'C' early on, as long as it doesn't require too much effort, and deal with both arguments at once without ever explicitly raising X'Y'Z'.
I was aware of the genre it spoofed, but I didn't know that it was so specifically targeted. I'm tempted to try to find that made-for-TV movie and watch clips just to increase my appreciation of Airplane!
In this case, I'd even drop my initial thoughts about rudeness. If you can prove that somebody's gone down mathematical blind alley, it's downright polite to do so, since there's no ambiguity about the relevance of the steel man here.
Ideally, a reasonable counterargument that applies to the strong form will also apply to the weak form without significant editing. If the person one was arguing with would have been receptive to DH7 in the first place, that alone should stop them from making the strong form argument - the countering evidence has already been provided.
Where this fails... well, I said "at first" in my thread-starter for a reason.
I don't ALWAYS have low confidence in the other arguer's ability to tolerate a steel man version of their own argument. I do have low confidence in the ability of most people, especially me, to decide what constitutes a non-gratuitous steel man. I have an unfortunate, but understandable, bias in favor of my own creations, and I suspect that this bias is widely shared.
I can respect the person I'm arguing with, and consider them to be truth-searching, and still not want to antagonize the part of their hardware that likes winning. I also dislike having my primate hardware antagonized unnecessarily; I tolerate it for the sake of truth-seeking, but it's not fun.
I see two likely cases here:
A) I come up with a tougher version of their argument in my head, in order to be as careful as possible, but I still have a good way to refute it. This is DH7.
In this case, announcing the tougher version doesn't get us any closer to the tr...
DH7 should be kept internal, at least at first. Being misinterpreted as trying to construct a straw man when you've been trying to do the opposite can derail a conversation. To actually believe that you've made a steel man, not a straw man, the person you're arguing with would have to admit that you've created a stronger argument for their own position than they could.
It's probably best to practice up to DH7 internally, and only up to DH6 vocally.
If we imagine arguments as soldiers, as they tend to be, the problem becomes even clearer:
(A and B are about t...
You can be gentle about DH7 by attributing the improved argument to someone with high status. This is my typical strategy and seems to work well. It's a double whammy because you're implicitly associating them with someone of high status e.g. "it's funny you say that, it's very similar to an argument by ". I'm NOT saying that you actually have to know a bunch of famous arguments offhand, the better argument can be attributed fallaciously to anyone who has spoken on a topic and can have little to do with the person's original argument. Few notice and you have the out of being mistaken even if they do.
The way this is done in (good) academic philosophy is "6 then 7". First you show that their central point fails for reason x. Then you suggest how their position can be improved upon then you refute the new position.
DH7 does happen between mathematicians now and then. Person A has an idea of a proof for X. Person B could show a problem with Person A's proof (DH6) or an unrelated disproof of X (DH4? DH6?), but the best response is to show A a disproof of X that makes it clear why A's strategy is futile.
This is often done well enough that it doesn't even hurt feelings. But math is kind of a special case.
If the original work is itself a satire, do you try to make a humorless version of it?
Hmm...
"In the seminal Zucker, Zucker, and Abrams opus Airplane!, one character, played by Leslie Nielsen, asks another to pilot an passenger airliner in an emergency. The would-be pilot responds with incredulity, but is coolly rebuffed by the Leslie Nielsen character. This evinces laughter from the audience, as the exchange involves a confusion between two near-homophones."
Heh, heh... still funny.
For less goofy, more drily satirical stuff, I think that making a satire of the satire is still a viable option.
Because I accidentally derailed my last post into pedantry, let me try again with a clearer heuristic:
A TEST FOR ART YOU REALLY LIKE:
Try to make fun of it.
If you can make fun of it, and you still like it, then you don't like it just because it's sacred.
This doesn't have to be a deep parody - I don't really think I could write a deep parody of Bach's Magnificat in D. But I can definitely imagine the parts that move me the most, the sublime moments that touch me to my core, played by a synthesizer orchestra that only does fart noises.
If somebody enjoys something that they read or experience alone, then they must get some utility from art that isn't connected with the associated social signals. I suspect that there are many people who are capable of appreciating art without talking about it.
(This does not apply if they read something alone, brag about it, and try to signal super-high status and nonconformity by only liking obscure things. THAT is the status game that I associate with hipsters.)
I consider that sort of social signaling basically orthogonal to liking art for being pretty, ...
That's common to every art, apart from perhaps cinema or literature. Modern art? Just a load of paint thrown at canvases and unmade beds. Modern music? Just a load of random notes strung together. Modern poetry? Doesn't even rhyme.
I'm not sure which is worse - liking all modern art because one is supposed to like it, or hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it. Either way, the category lines are not being drawn usefully. As the original post notes, there ought to be more to this than just going along with social signals.
hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it.
I don't think this actually happens. In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it's more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful. In my experience even the "good" pieces of modern art are only good compared to the absolute drek that is most modern art.
Edit: By modern art I mean "art belonging the the genre commonly called 'modern art' ", not "any art produced since the mid 20th century".
W. H. Auden had an excellent heuristic for dealing with this problem:
"Between the ages of 20 and 40, the surest sign that a man has a taste of his own is that he is unsure of it."
I can like or dislike anything I want, as long as I'm willing to update. The space of possible art is huge, and I would cheat my future self if I excluded entire genres from consideration on the belief that they exist solely as pedant-bait.
I was slightly unhappy to see "Prufrock" mentioned in the same rhetorical breath as modern poetry that relaxes the demand...
I dislike The Catcher in the Rye, feel as if I ought to like Animal Farm, and genuinely like Moby-Dick. I can see why other people would dislike Moby-Dick, but I still like the damn thing.
My hypothesis: Because I was not taught Moby-Dick in school, I did not associate reading it with work, but with relaxation. This is borne out by my love of David Copperfield (read alone) and only vague enjoyment of Great Expectations (assigned in school).
Downvoted for telling me what I'm arguing for and against, for something like the third time now, when I am fairly certain that our intuitive ideas of how abstraction works are somewhat different. This is one of the few things that breaks my internal set of "rules for a fair argument."t.
(Note: I am NOT downvoting for the paragraph beginning "OF COURSE they do", because it's given me a hunch as to what is going on here, is clearly written, and makes your actual objections to the candy bowl case clearer.
I SHOULD not be downvoting for the ...
The article says:
Second-order simulacra, a term coined by Jean Baudrillard, are symbols without referents, that is, symbols with no real object to represent. Simply put, a symbol is itself taken for reality and further layer of symbolism is added. This occurs when the symbol is taken to be more important or authoritative of the original entity, authenticity has been replaced by copy (thus reality is replaced by a substitute).
If I'm reading this correctly, it leaves me even more leery about the value of second-order simulacra.
Also from the article:
...B
I'm hoping I can butt in and explain all this.
Logos01 probably shouldn't have brought up Baudrillard, who is among the sloppiest and most obscure thinkers of the last century. Baudrillard's model of abstraction is pretty terrible. Much better to user analytic philosophy's terminology rather than post-structuralism's terminology. In analytic philosophy we talk about abstract objects, "types" or "kinds". These are ubiquitous, not especially mysterious, and utterly essential to the representation of knowledge. "Electron", &quo...
Wait, wait, I think I see something here. I think I see why we are incapable of agreeing.
If and only if you meant "always" in the first place and want to be less than perfectly accurate. "In the majority of cases" is an inaccurate method of expressing how S-O S's work -- as I mentioned above, with "the largest minority" being the representative entity of the body.
This seems more like a description of how S-O S's fail.
Can you offer any reason why I should treat S-O S's as a useful or realistic representational scheme if my...
Upvoted for clear communication.
I'm sort of puzzled, though, as to how I could have possibly interpreted your statements as applying to anything but the post and the comments on it; I saw no context clues suggesting that you meant "in everyday conversation." Did I miss these?
That said, if one of us had added just three or four words of proviso earlier, limiting our generalizations explicitly, we could have figured the disconnect out more quickly. I could have said that my generalizations apply best to essays and edited posts. You could have said ...
When someone adds that proviso "asexual/homosexual" -- they are changing the relevant level of precision necessary to the conversation.
No, they are pointing out that in order to apply to a case they are interested in, the conversation must be made more precise.
...For example; if I say "Men and women get married because they love each other", then the fact that some men/women don't marry, or the fact that intersex people aren't necessarily men or women, or the fact that GLBT people who marry are also likely to do so because of love, or
Each of those little "costs next to nothing" statements actually do have a cost, one that isn't necessarily clear initially.
The cost of omitting them isn't clear initially, either.
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.
I was generally taught to carry significant figures further than strictly...
I did quite a bit of EEG neurofeedback at the age of about 11 or 12. I may have learned to concentrate a little better, but I'm really not sure. The problem is that once I was off the machine, I stopped getting the feedback!
Consider the following interior monologue:
"Am I relaxing or focusing in the right way? I don't have the beeping to tell me, how do I know I am doing it right?"
In theory, EEG is a truly rational way to learn to relax, because one constantly gets information about how relaxed one is and can adjust one's behavior to maximize rela...
A statement like "Women want {thing}" leaves it unclear what the map is even supposed to be, barring clear context cues. This can lead to either fake disagreements or fake agreements.
Fake disagreements ("You said that Republicans are against gun control, but I know some who aren't!") are not too dangerous, I think. X makes the generalization, Y points out the exception, X says that it was a broad generalization, Y asks for more clarity in the future, X says Y was not being sufficiently charitable, and so on. Annoying to watch, but not ...
The fact that it sounds accurate is what makes it a funny category error, rather than a boring category error. "2 + 2 = 3 is morally wrong" is not funny. "Deontological ethics is morally wrong" is funny.
It calls to mind a scenario of a consequentialist saying: "True, Deontologist Dan rescued that family from a fire, which was definitely a good thing... but he did it on the basis of an morally wrong system of ethics."
That''s how I reacted to it, anyway. It's been a day, I've had more sleep, and I STILL find the idea funny. Ever...
Cracked you up? Rather than just seeming like a straightforward implication of conflicting moral systems?
I think it is not a straightforward implication at all. Maybe this rephrasing would make the joke clearer:
"A deontological theory of ethics is not actually right. It is morally wrong, in principle."
If that doesn't help:
"It is morally wrong to make decisions for deontological reasons."
What makes it funny is that moment wherein the reader (or at least, this reader) briefly agrees with it before the punchline hits.
"But what's actually right probably doesn't include a component of making oneself stupid with regard to the actual circumstances in order to prevent other parts of one's mind from hijacking the decision.
What you probably meant: "Rational minds should have a rational theory of ethics; this leads to better consequences."
My late-night reading: "A deontological theory of ethics is not actually right. It is wrong. Morally wrong."
I am not sure what caused me to read it this way, but it cracked me up.
This doesn't strike me as an inherently bad objection. Even the post offers the caveat that we're running on corrupt hardware. One can't say that consequentialist theories are WRONG on such grounds, but one can certainly object to the likely consequences of combining ambiguous expected values with brains that do not naturally multiply and are good at imagining fictional futures.
I think the argument can be cut down to this:
How to step outside the rational box without going off the deep end. Essentially, techniques for maintaining a lifeline back to normality so you can explore the further reaches of the psyche in some degree of safety.
I developed some of these!
I had a manic episode as well, but it was induced by medication and led to hypersocial behavior. I quickly noticed that I was having bizarre and sudden convictions, and started adopting heuristics to deal with them. I thought I was normal, or even better than normal. Then I realized that such a thought was very ab...
This is one reason why I worry about overemphasis on "learning styles" in teaching. Yes, we shouldn't overgeneralize from our own brains to those of others, and different people learn differently. But it's too easy to say that because I am Not a Visual Person, Having Been Born Blind and Treated By Surgery, I therefore can't learn to excel at visual tasks.
This internal sense that I am "not a visual learner" caused me serious difficulty in training to do many tasks, until I learned to just compensate by practicing for a longer period of t...
In a universe that contained no minds, a clean table and a cluttered table would both be neutral objects, but in the world-simulation that Mary’s brain builds, a cluttered table is obviously bad and cleaning is neutral.
In a universe that contained no minds, a table with an image painted on it that offends most people in this universe's US would also be a neutral object. As it stands, it would not be a good idea to keep such a table uncovered if you were expecting guests and wanted to maintain positive social status.
The same goes for a messy house. It ma...
The general US norm is not that drawing the prophet Muhammed is forbidden, it's not that violent videogames are a sin, it's not that the casual treatment of women as nothing but sex objects is unacceptable.
Either I'm being confused by a triple-negative, or we are living in very different contexts. Even people who are avowedly anti-feminist will usually say that casually treating women as nothing but sex objects breaks their norms. They might disagree that a model on a billboard is a sex object.
More generally, the problem is not manufacturing offense whe...
Level 1: Trying to deal with problems that cause human suffering.
Level 2: Using programs to help deal with those problems more effectively.
Level 3: Optimizing the way that those programs think and solve problems in general.
Level 4: Figure out better ways to think about programs that think, so that they are not only optimal at problem-solving, but also optimal at not killing us.
Level 5: Sharing essays on how we can be more rational about the level 4 problem without succumbing to bias.
Level 6: Commenting on those essays to support strong conclusions, question weak ones, and make them more memorable and effective by contributing to a community ethos.
Level 7: Upvoting my comment.
Thinking of Level 1 actions as maintenance is an excellent analogy.
This talk of swimming suggests another analogy for spending too much time on high level actions:
Overoptimizing is like trying to infer the properties of an optimal raft while you are drowning.
I'd say that the incoherent speaker is arguing at DH(-1). DH0 would be an improvement. You would be counterarguing at DH(No) - argument by pointing out conversational emptiness.
(edited to clarify that it is the person who makes the incoherent argument who is arguing badly, and the person arguing against that who is doing something entirely outside the hierarchy.
Other DH(No) arguments-that-are-about-non-argument include "We aren't actually arguing about the same thing" and "let me take some time to do more reading before I reply.")