All of 7EE1D988's Comments + Replies

Rationality, intelligence, and even evidence are not sufficient to resolve all differences. Sometimes differences are a deep matter of values and preferences. Trivially, I may prefer chocolate and you prefer vanilla. There's no rational basis for disagreement, nor for resolving such a dispute. We simply each like what we like. Less trivially, some people take private property as a fundamental moral right. Some people treat private property as theft. And a lot of folks in the middle treat it as a means to an end. Folks in the middle can usefully dispute the facts and logic of whether particular incarnations of private property do or do not serve other ends and values, such as general happiness and well-being. However perfectly rational and intelligent people who have different fundamental values with respect to private property are not going to agree, even when they agree on all arguments and points of evidence. There are many other examples where core values come into play. How and why people develop and have different core values than other people is an interesting question. However even if we can eliminate all partisan-shaded argumentation, we will not eliminate all disagreements.

'''I posit that people want to find others like them (in a continuum with finding a community of people like them, some place where they can belong), and it stings to realize that even people who hold many similar opinions still aren't carbon copies of you, that their cognitive engine doesn't work exactly the same way as yours, and that you'll have to either change yourself, or change others (both of which can be hard, unpleasant work), if you want there to be less friction between you (unless you agree to disagree, of course).''' Well said.

This understates the case, even. At different times, an individual can be more or less prone to haste, laziness, or any of several possible sources of error, and at times, you yourself can commit any of these errors. I think the greatest value of a well-formulated principle of charity is that it leads to a general trend of "failure of communication -> correction of failure of communication -> valuable communication" instead of "failure of communication -> termination of communication". Actually, there's another point you could make along the lines of Jay Smooth's advice about racist remarks, particularly the part starting at 1:23, when you are discussing something in 'public' (e.g. anywhere on the Internet). If I think my opposite number is making bad arguments (e.g. when she is proposing an a priori proof of the existence of a god), I can think of few more convincing avenues to demonstrate to all the spectators that she's full of it than by giving her every possible opportunity to reveal that her argument is not wrong. Regardless of what benefit you are balancing against a cost, though, a useful principle of charity should emphasize that your failure to engage with someone you don't believe to be sufficiently rational is a matter of the cost of time, not the value of their contribution. Saying "I don't care what you think" will burn bridges with many non-LessWrongian folk; saying, "This argument seems like a huge time sink" is much less likely to.

i tend to express ideas tersely, which counts as poorly-explained if my audience is expecting more verbiage, so they round me off to the nearest cliche and mostly downvote me i have mostly stopped posting or commenting on lesswrong and stackexchange because of this like, when i want to say something, i think "i can predict that people will misunderstand and downvote me, but i don't know what improvements i could make to this post to prevent this. sigh." revisiting this on 2014-03-14, i consider that perhaps i am likely to discard parts of the frame message and possibly outer message - because, to me of course it's a message, and to me of course the meaning of (say) "belief" is roughly what http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Belief says it is for example, i suspect that the use of more intuitively sensible grammar in this comment (mostly just a lack of capitalization) often discards the frame-message-bit of "i might be intelligent" (or ... something) that such people understand from messages (despite this being an incorrect thing to understand)

What do you mean by "noxious" topic?