That is not the thing that Kelsey is doing. Kelsey is saying, “it is unproductive to continue conversations with people who make claims that their opponents are self-deceived in order to win political arguments; talking more with those people just gives them more sentences to convert into ammunition against their opponents.”
If your steelman of someone else is returning the result, “and therefore I must conclude that Kelsey freaking Piper, of all people, is trying to ban bridging gaps with others and questioning self-models,” something has gone catastrophically wrong with your steelmanning process.
But if it’s “unproductive to continue conversations with people who make claims that their opponents are self-deceived in order to win political arguments”, that would seem to be a stance against “bridging gaps with others” and “questioning self-models” in the specific case where the others with self-model questions are trying to win political arguments. Right?
To be clear, I think that’s a coherent position: in a world of good-faith actors who want the truth and bad-faith actors who want to win political arguments, probably you don’t want to waste your time talking to bad-faith actors when you can get all the information you need from good-faith actors. The reason I disagree with it is that I don’t think we live in that kind of binary world: I think that mixed motives are ubiquitous and that you lose information by refusing to talk to people who want to win political arguments against you. People trying to win political arguments selectively attend to information that supports their preferred policy, but that doesn’t make them wrong about the information they do report, which might not be available from other sources.
Kelsey freaking Piper, of all people
I see this kind of hero-worship occasionally (Piper being perhaps the most common “beneficiary” behind Alexander and Yudkowsky), and I think it’s bad: bad for you and bad for Kelsey. Your favorite writers are not gods! They—”of all people” and like all people—make mistakes sometimes, including politically motivated mistakes.
If a critic is claiming that they got something simple wrong, maybe it’s not worth your time to consider (if your favorite writer is usually right and the critic doesn’t have a track record you care about), but it shouldn’t occasion a (bold and italic!) pronouncement that the critic has gone catastophically wrong in some supposed duty to steelman your favorite writer.
I was not claiming that Kelsey Piper in particular feels like her self-models are sacred or inviolable, or that she gets super triggered when people question them. I rarely read Kelsey Piper, I don’t have much of a take on her at all.
That is not the thing that Kelsey is doing. Kelsey is saying, “it is unproductive to continue conversations with people who make claims that their opponents are self-deceived in order to win political arguments; talking more with those people just gives them more sentences to convert into ammunition against their opponents.”
If your steelman of someone else is returning the result, “and therefore I must conclude that Kelsey freaking Piper, of all people, is trying to ban bridging gaps with others and questioning self-models,” something has gone catastrophically wrong with your steelmanning process.
Kelsey has been called out on motivated reasoning before.
Edit: And this certainly counts as being self-deceived.
But if it’s “unproductive to continue conversations with people who make claims that their opponents are self-deceived in order to win political arguments”, that would seem to be a stance against “bridging gaps with others” and “questioning self-models” in the specific case where the others with self-model questions are trying to win political arguments. Right?
To be clear, I think that’s a coherent position: in a world of good-faith actors who want the truth and bad-faith actors who want to win political arguments, probably you don’t want to waste your time talking to bad-faith actors when you can get all the information you need from good-faith actors. The reason I disagree with it is that I don’t think we live in that kind of binary world: I think that mixed motives are ubiquitous and that you lose information by refusing to talk to people who want to win political arguments against you. People trying to win political arguments selectively attend to information that supports their preferred policy, but that doesn’t make them wrong about the information they do report, which might not be available from other sources.
I see this kind of hero-worship occasionally (Piper being perhaps the most common “beneficiary” behind Alexander and Yudkowsky), and I think it’s bad: bad for you and bad for Kelsey. Your favorite writers are not gods! They—”of all people” and like all people—make mistakes sometimes, including politically motivated mistakes.
If a critic is claiming that they got something simple wrong, maybe it’s not worth your time to consider (if your favorite writer is usually right and the critic doesn’t have a track record you care about), but it shouldn’t occasion a (bold and italic!) pronouncement that the critic has gone catastophically wrong in some supposed duty to steelman your favorite writer.
I was not claiming that Kelsey Piper in particular feels like her self-models are sacred or inviolable, or that she gets super triggered when people question them. I rarely read Kelsey Piper, I don’t have much of a take on her at all.