So I can’t speak for Romeo, but there’s an important sense in which “logical arguments” are often not the ideal they present themselves to be as a class. Making clean and correct logical arguments requires imposing a consistent ontology, and such an ontology is necessarily not complete. Thus someone can make a correct logical argument and still fail to convince because thankfully people are better Bayesian reasoners than we often give them credit for, and if they are not convinced by logic there is a decent chance it’s because the logic left out some part of reality that is holding up the belief.
In the ‘keep the organization from being overrun’ sense, see also sealioning. The search space of worthwhile things is very large and idiosyncratically explored by well meaning, intelligent people. Aggressive value laden ‘logical arguments’ often point to a tacit value to have everyone converge on the same set of metaheuristics. This is because the person doing this has a strong need for internal consistency that they are externalizing onto their social space. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting internal consistency. But if pressed hard, it is anti-truth seeking as an aggregate strategy because you lose out on the consilience of having different people pursuing different search methods. Epistemology is a team sport. The objection would be ‘but if we don’t then argue about what we’ve discovered what’s the point?’ The point is that adversarial processes as a part of the truth seeking process needs to be consensual. This applies doubly when you aren’t in a 101 space and people might be sick of a dynamic where simple seeming questions with complicated answers make newer members feel entitled to the effort needed to explain said complicated answers. This is one of the reasons well written blog posts that can be referenced by name can be so helpful for community discourse.
I like this post by the way and my comment wasn’t an objection to it.
So I can’t speak for Romeo, but there’s an important sense in which “logical arguments” are often not the ideal they present themselves to be as a class. Making clean and correct logical arguments requires imposing a consistent ontology, and such an ontology is necessarily not complete. Thus someone can make a correct logical argument and still fail to convince because thankfully people are better Bayesian reasoners than we often give them credit for, and if they are not convinced by logic there is a decent chance it’s because the logic left out some part of reality that is holding up the belief.
Yes, I get the argument, but am unsure of how Romeo sees it relating to this post.
In the ‘keep the organization from being overrun’ sense, see also sealioning. The search space of worthwhile things is very large and idiosyncratically explored by well meaning, intelligent people. Aggressive value laden ‘logical arguments’ often point to a tacit value to have everyone converge on the same set of metaheuristics. This is because the person doing this has a strong need for internal consistency that they are externalizing onto their social space. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting internal consistency. But if pressed hard, it is anti-truth seeking as an aggregate strategy because you lose out on the consilience of having different people pursuing different search methods. Epistemology is a team sport. The objection would be ‘but if we don’t then argue about what we’ve discovered what’s the point?’ The point is that adversarial processes as a part of the truth seeking process needs to be consensual. This applies doubly when you aren’t in a 101 space and people might be sick of a dynamic where simple seeming questions with complicated answers make newer members feel entitled to the effort needed to explain said complicated answers. This is one of the reasons well written blog posts that can be referenced by name can be so helpful for community discourse.
I like this post by the way and my comment wasn’t an objection to it.