I feel like I must be missing something? The post seems to be about something else, and I don’t really know how it relates to this. Or maybe you are misunderstanding the metaphor here?
Contemplating these basics, it should be clear that there’s just not going to be anything like a unique style of “rationalist discourse”, any more than there is a unique “physicist motor.” There are theoretical ideals describing how discourse needs to work in principle, like Bayesian reasoners with common priors exchanging probability estimates, but you can’t actually build an ideal Bayesian reasoner. Rather, different discourse algorithms (the collective analogue of “cognitive algorithm”) leverage the laws of rationality to convert information into optimization in somewhat different ways, depending on the application and the population of interlocutors at hand, much as electric motors and jet engines both leverage the laws of physics to convert energy into work without being identical to each other, and with each requiring their own engineering sub-specialty to design.
This feels to me like it’s actually making a very similar point.
The OP isn’t arguing that there should be a single “rationalist discourse”. It’s pretty explicitly saying that “different discourse algorithms (the collective analogue of ‘cognitive algorithm’) leverage the laws of rationality to convert information into optimization in somewhat different ways, depending on the application and the population of interlocutors at hand”. The Art of Discourse should indeed be general and we should be careful to distinguish between what is the locally correct application of those rules (i.e. what we do around here given our local constraints) and what the general rules are and how they would apply to different environments. This is what I understood the part about “the moderators try to learn the art of discourse, and then separately the moderators will set rules and guidelines and write explanations based on their best understanding of the art, and how it applies to this specific forum” to be about.
I feel like I must be missing something? The post seems to be about something else, and I don’t really know how it relates to this. Or maybe you are misunderstanding the metaphor here?
To quote you directly from your post:
This feels to me like it’s actually making a very similar point.
The OP isn’t arguing that there should be a single “rationalist discourse”. It’s pretty explicitly saying that “different discourse algorithms (the collective analogue of ‘cognitive algorithm’) leverage the laws of rationality to convert information into optimization in somewhat different ways, depending on the application and the population of interlocutors at hand”. The Art of Discourse should indeed be general and we should be careful to distinguish between what is the locally correct application of those rules (i.e. what we do around here given our local constraints) and what the general rules are and how they would apply to different environments. This is what I understood the part about “the moderators try to learn the art of discourse, and then separately the moderators will set rules and guidelines and write explanations based on their best understanding of the art, and how it applies to this specific forum” to be about.