showing that you’re “strawmanning” Duncan, rather than simply “misunderstanding” him, where “strawmanning” is narrower than “misunderstanding”; then that surely makes the job harder.
Hm, maybe I shouldn’t have said “easy.” I think I want to claim that “The critic is misunderstanding me” is something an author can credibly claim without an explanation (because the author is presumed to be a privileged authority on what their ideas are), but “The critic is strawmanning me” is an accusation that needs an explanation in order to be credible?
(But this position is somewhat awkward insofar as it implies that strawmanning is a crime that can’t be discussed literally; I never expect to say “I think he’s strawmanning me, but I can’t prove it” the way I would sometimes say “I think he’s lying, but I can’t prove it.” Interestingly, I don’t have this intuition about the word “mischaracterize”!)
Maybe some concrete examples will help? (Sorry that these are “political”, specifically gender-political; it’s what I’ve been working on for the past few years.)
Example 1. In “Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal”, I accused Yudkowsky of “haughtily implying that people like [Barra] Kerr [the author of “Pronouns Are Rohypnol”] are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are clearly not making”—namely, thinking that use of gender-identity-based pronouns constitutes “lying”—”if you actually read what they write.” (I didn’t use the specific word “strawman”, but it’s essentially the same complaint.)
I think I adequately support that accusation to my readers: I cited Kerr as a representative example of opponents of gender-identity-based pronouns, quoted text from Kerr’s article to demonstrate that she wasn’t just simplistically calling pronouns “lies”, and pointed out that the article was frequently referenced as evidence that Kerr really was a representative example.
Example 2. In Ozy’s criticism of my criticism of “The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories”, Ozy claimed that I “argue[d] for the existence of a third definition [of gender], based on psychology”, and claimed that my position implied that “any group of women whose interests and personality traits, on average, observably differ from that of women as a whole ought to be classified as not actually women at all” which would imply that lesbians aren’t women, reductio ad absurdum.
Contrast of Examples 1 and 2 to the present case. I think it’s important that in both these cases where I either accused a critic of strawmanning or have explained how I would have done so, I provided an explanation of how the actual text the critic actually published substantively mischaracterizes the actual text the criticism-target actually published. I would not expect readers to just take my word for it; I tried to make it easy for a reader who doubted me to read the quotes for themselves and confirm for themselves whether my explanation made sense, and if someone did question my explanation, I would expect to be able to satisfactorily answer them.
I don’t think Duncan has met this standard, of providing a satisfactory explanation for how the text of “Aiming for Convergence Is Like Discouraging Betting” substantively mischaracterizes the text of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse.” As I explained in this post, in the one case where Duncan objected to the text of “Aiming for Convergence”, he said that the scenario I posed “doesn’t break any of the guidelines listed”. I find this reply very puzzling; it seems to me that the blunt person in my scenario is very much not “behav[ing] as if [his] interlocutor[ ] [is] also aiming for convergence on truth” (from the summary statement of the Fifth Guideline) nor “keep[ing] in touch with the possibility that you might be misunderstanding each other, or that the problem might be in your models, [...] etc.” (from the detailed expansion of the Fifth Guideline). It does not seem to me that the claim that the scenario I posed “doesn’t break any of the guidelines listed” is something a reasonable reader of the text of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse” should have been able to infer.
Perhaps Duncan’s claim that I’m strawmanning him isn’t about that particular paragraph. But if so … what is it, specifically? In what way, specifically does the text of “Aiming for Convergence Is Like Discouraging Betting” mischaracterize the text of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”? If I were a lawyer prosecuting this on Duncan’s behalf, I would try to argue that “Aiming for Convergence”’s arguments against the Fifth Guideline are undermined by the fact that the expansion of the Fifth Guideline includes this paragraph:
If two people disagree, it’s tempting for them to attempt to converge with each other, but in fact the right move is for both of them to try to see more of what’s true.
That is, if “Aiming for Convergence” claimed that the Fifth Guideline claimed that people should attempt to converge with each other—effectively ignoring the “on truth” part—then it would be mischaracterizing the Fifth Guideline. But I don’t think a reasonable reader of “Aiming for Convergence” would characterize the text as ignoring the “on truth” part. Rather, I said:
But given that you’re already in the (unusual!) situation of making a trade or prosecuting a disagreement, “aim for convergence on truth” doesn’t seem like particularly useful advice, because the “for convergence” part isn’t doing any work.
That is, I’m not claiming that the Fifth Guideline says people should just try to converge with each other. That would be stupid, and I know Duncan is not claiming the stupid thing. Rather, the post is trying to illustrate why even though I know Duncan is not saying the stupid thing, it still seems super-weird to me to summarize “both of them to try to see more of what’s true” as “[a]im[ing] for convergence on truth, and behav[ing] as if your interlocutors are also aiming for convergence on truth”, because I just don’t think that’s what approximations of Bayesian updating look like, even though we have theorems about how perfect Bayesian reasoners with common priors would in fact converge on truth.
Did I do a perfect job of explaining this? No, I don’t think I did; thanks to critical commenters including Duncan, I have some vague ideas on how I might revise the post to be clearer if I get around to it. Should I, perhaps, have made it clearer that I know Duncan doesn’t believe the stupid thing, perhaps by quoting and acknowledging the paragraph starting with “If two people disagree”? Maybe! I will definitely consider that if I get around to revising the post! Is such a revision necessary in order for my post to not be guilty of strawmanning? Again, I argue No.
(Again, replying relatively-quickly, not in depth.)
These seem semantically equivalent to me?
Not to me. I would say someone is “objecting to a strawman” if someone else had constructed the strawman, but I wouldn’t say they’re “strawmanning” in that situation.
(E.g. Alice: “X”. Bob: “Alice says Y.” Carol: “According to Bob, Alice says Y. She’s wrong because...”.)
(Even if they were semantically equivalent, that doesn’t mean they have the same valence. But I think in this case the valency difference is mostly downstream of the semantic difference.)
...But in this case: there’s no third party, the quote continued ”...of his own creation”, and Duncan explicitly says “strawmanning” elsewhere, so sure. This point doesn’t seem relevant.
Hm, maybe I shouldn’t have said “easy.”
“Easy” is a large part of what I was replying to.
Paraphrasing, you said something like: “I’m inclined to tentatively reject (accusation). If it were true, it would be easy to prove. This hasn’t been done.” If it’s not easy to prove, even when true, then the justification to reject is weaker.
I think I want to claim that “The critic is misunderstanding me” is something an author can credibly claim without an explanation (because the author is presumed to be a privileged authority on what their ideas are), but “The critic is strawmanning me” is an accusation that needs an explanation in order to be credible?
Like, from a Bayesian perspective? I don’t see why this would be the case—if we agree that these accusations aren’t easy to prove even when true, then lack of proof isn’t strong Bayesian evidence of falsehood.
(Even when they are easy to prove, someone might have various reasons not to provide the proof, so I still don’t think it’s particularly strong evidence.)
(Replies to possible objections. 1. You said “explanation” rather than “proof”, but I think explanations aren’t easy to give either. 2. We could say that if an accusation isn’t easy to explain/prove then the accuser also shouldn’t be confident in it—but I don’t think that would be true.)
Another thing I want to say is that with accusations of strawmanning, I don’t think the relevant context is limited to “here is what I said, here is what you said when replying”. It might be the case that there are patterns appearing over a long timeframe and many conversations. Such patterns, if they appear, are the sort of thing that an accuser can be very confident in while also being very hard to prove. Especially given that things on the internet sometimes disappear.
And from my understanding of the history between you and Duncan, I’d say that’s almost certainly part of the picture, in this instance.
So to summarize:
If you are mischaracterizing Duncan in “Aiming for convergence...”, I think this is something Duncan could demonstrate “locally”, i.e. by quoting your text and quoting his text and comparing. I don’t think this would be easy.
If you are strawmanning Duncan in that piece, I think this is not necessarily—in fact, probably not—something Duncan could demonstrate “locally”. And any demonstration, if possible at all, would be harder than in the above case.
In both cases, I think failure on Duncan’s part to demonstrate the accusation, is not strong evidence that the accusation is false. (Which obviously doesn’t mean it’s true, either.)
These seem semantically equivalent to me? Duncan’s description of me as “enthusiastically leap[ing] to recalcitrant strawmanning” would seem to suggest they’re equivalent in his usage, too?
Hm, maybe I shouldn’t have said “easy.” I think I want to claim that “The critic is misunderstanding me” is something an author can credibly claim without an explanation (because the author is presumed to be a privileged authority on what their ideas are), but “The critic is strawmanning me” is an accusation that needs an explanation in order to be credible?
(But this position is somewhat awkward insofar as it implies that strawmanning is a crime that can’t be discussed literally; I never expect to say “I think he’s strawmanning me, but I can’t prove it” the way I would sometimes say “I think he’s lying, but I can’t prove it.” Interestingly, I don’t have this intuition about the word “mischaracterize”!)
Maybe some concrete examples will help? (Sorry that these are “political”, specifically gender-political; it’s what I’ve been working on for the past few years.)
Example 1. In “Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal”, I accused Yudkowsky of “haughtily implying that people like [Barra] Kerr [the author of “Pronouns Are Rohypnol”] are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are clearly not making”—namely, thinking that use of gender-identity-based pronouns constitutes “lying”—”if you actually read what they write.” (I didn’t use the specific word “strawman”, but it’s essentially the same complaint.)
I think I adequately support that accusation to my readers: I cited Kerr as a representative example of opponents of gender-identity-based pronouns, quoted text from Kerr’s article to demonstrate that she wasn’t just simplistically calling pronouns “lies”, and pointed out that the article was frequently referenced as evidence that Kerr really was a representative example.
Example 2. In Ozy’s criticism of my criticism of “The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories”, Ozy claimed that I “argue[d] for the existence of a third definition [of gender], based on psychology”, and claimed that my position implied that “any group of women whose interests and personality traits, on average, observably differ from that of women as a whole ought to be classified as not actually women at all” which would imply that lesbians aren’t women, reductio ad absurdum.
I thought Ozy’s post was quite bad, and very much failed to understand my position. I did not accuse them of stawmanning or similar, but if I were to make such an accusation, I would support that to my readers by pointing out that nowhere in the text of my post did I say that I wanted to define gender based on psychology, and that the text of my post explicitly anticipated and replied to the subgroup-different-from-women-as-a-whole objection in the paragraph starting with “To this it might be objected that [...]”.
Contrast of Examples 1 and 2 to the present case. I think it’s important that in both these cases where I either accused a critic of strawmanning or have explained how I would have done so, I provided an explanation of how the actual text the critic actually published substantively mischaracterizes the actual text the criticism-target actually published. I would not expect readers to just take my word for it; I tried to make it easy for a reader who doubted me to read the quotes for themselves and confirm for themselves whether my explanation made sense, and if someone did question my explanation, I would expect to be able to satisfactorily answer them.
I don’t think Duncan has met this standard, of providing a satisfactory explanation for how the text of “Aiming for Convergence Is Like Discouraging Betting” substantively mischaracterizes the text of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse.” As I explained in this post, in the one case where Duncan objected to the text of “Aiming for Convergence”, he said that the scenario I posed “doesn’t break any of the guidelines listed”. I find this reply very puzzling; it seems to me that the blunt person in my scenario is very much not “behav[ing] as if [his] interlocutor[ ] [is] also aiming for convergence on truth” (from the summary statement of the Fifth Guideline) nor “keep[ing] in touch with the possibility that you might be misunderstanding each other, or that the problem might be in your models, [...] etc.” (from the detailed expansion of the Fifth Guideline). It does not seem to me that the claim that the scenario I posed “doesn’t break any of the guidelines listed” is something a reasonable reader of the text of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse” should have been able to infer.
Perhaps Duncan’s claim that I’m strawmanning him isn’t about that particular paragraph. But if so … what is it, specifically? In what way, specifically does the text of “Aiming for Convergence Is Like Discouraging Betting” mischaracterize the text of “Basics of Rationalist Discourse”? If I were a lawyer prosecuting this on Duncan’s behalf, I would try to argue that “Aiming for Convergence”’s arguments against the Fifth Guideline are undermined by the fact that the expansion of the Fifth Guideline includes this paragraph:
That is, if “Aiming for Convergence” claimed that the Fifth Guideline claimed that people should attempt to converge with each other—effectively ignoring the “on truth” part—then it would be mischaracterizing the Fifth Guideline. But I don’t think a reasonable reader of “Aiming for Convergence” would characterize the text as ignoring the “on truth” part. Rather, I said:
That is, I’m not claiming that the Fifth Guideline says people should just try to converge with each other. That would be stupid, and I know Duncan is not claiming the stupid thing. Rather, the post is trying to illustrate why even though I know Duncan is not saying the stupid thing, it still seems super-weird to me to summarize “both of them to try to see more of what’s true” as “[a]im[ing] for convergence on truth, and behav[ing] as if your interlocutors are also aiming for convergence on truth”, because I just don’t think that’s what approximations of Bayesian updating look like, even though we have theorems about how perfect Bayesian reasoners with common priors would in fact converge on truth.
Did I do a perfect job of explaining this? No, I don’t think I did; thanks to critical commenters including Duncan, I have some vague ideas on how I might revise the post to be clearer if I get around to it. Should I, perhaps, have made it clearer that I know Duncan doesn’t believe the stupid thing, perhaps by quoting and acknowledging the paragraph starting with “If two people disagree”? Maybe! I will definitely consider that if I get around to revising the post! Is such a revision necessary in order for my post to not be guilty of strawmanning? Again, I argue No.
(Again, replying relatively-quickly, not in depth.)
Not to me. I would say someone is “objecting to a strawman” if someone else had constructed the strawman, but I wouldn’t say they’re “strawmanning” in that situation.
(E.g. Alice: “X”. Bob: “Alice says Y.” Carol: “According to Bob, Alice says Y. She’s wrong because...”.)
(Even if they were semantically equivalent, that doesn’t mean they have the same valence. But I think in this case the valency difference is mostly downstream of the semantic difference.)
...But in this case: there’s no third party, the quote continued ”...of his own creation”, and Duncan explicitly says “strawmanning” elsewhere, so sure. This point doesn’t seem relevant.
“Easy” is a large part of what I was replying to.
Paraphrasing, you said something like: “I’m inclined to tentatively reject (accusation). If it were true, it would be easy to prove. This hasn’t been done.” If it’s not easy to prove, even when true, then the justification to reject is weaker.
Like, from a Bayesian perspective? I don’t see why this would be the case—if we agree that these accusations aren’t easy to prove even when true, then lack of proof isn’t strong Bayesian evidence of falsehood.
(Even when they are easy to prove, someone might have various reasons not to provide the proof, so I still don’t think it’s particularly strong evidence.)
(Replies to possible objections. 1. You said “explanation” rather than “proof”, but I think explanations aren’t easy to give either. 2. We could say that if an accusation isn’t easy to explain/prove then the accuser also shouldn’t be confident in it—but I don’t think that would be true.)
Another thing I want to say is that with accusations of strawmanning, I don’t think the relevant context is limited to “here is what I said, here is what you said when replying”. It might be the case that there are patterns appearing over a long timeframe and many conversations. Such patterns, if they appear, are the sort of thing that an accuser can be very confident in while also being very hard to prove. Especially given that things on the internet sometimes disappear.
And from my understanding of the history between you and Duncan, I’d say that’s almost certainly part of the picture, in this instance.
So to summarize:
If you are mischaracterizing Duncan in “Aiming for convergence...”, I think this is something Duncan could demonstrate “locally”, i.e. by quoting your text and quoting his text and comparing. I don’t think this would be easy.
If you are strawmanning Duncan in that piece, I think this is not necessarily—in fact, probably not—something Duncan could demonstrate “locally”. And any demonstration, if possible at all, would be harder than in the above case.
In both cases, I think failure on Duncan’s part to demonstrate the accusation, is not strong evidence that the accusation is false. (Which obviously doesn’t mean it’s true, either.)