[this comment is >90% theoretical, i.e. not specifically about this thread / topic] [“topic nonspecific”? “topic abstracted”? not off-topic, but not indexed to the specific situation; not meta, but not very object-level]
Why oh why would it somehow no longer be part of appropriate conduct to be a reasonable interlocutor trying to help readers come to true beliefs if you are in the process of getting banned?
I’m not familiar with the whole Said context, but just from perusing this thread, it sounds like he is at least presenting himself as behaving in order to create / maintain / integrate into some set of discourse norms. Presumably, he views those norms as more likely to be good (truth-tracking, successful, justice-making, what have you) than feasible alternatives. In that context, the issue of cognitive labor is a central one.
I just want to flag that I think there are probably major theoretical open questions here. It seems that Said disagrees, in that he performs a presumption that his norms and his implementations are correct. (Or perhaps it is not a disagreement, but a merely-performative stance, perhaps as a method of asserting those norms.)
Example of open question: how do you deal with claims that summarize things, but that are somewhat hard to verify or to publicly demonstrate? E.g. Habryka says “lots of people cite Said as XYZ”. Some of that will be private communications that should not be shared. How to deal with this? In legal contexts that’s not admissible, but that’s not necessarily a great answer outside of highly adversarial contexts. Some of those citations will be not exactly private, but difficult to track down / summarize / prove concisely. How to deal with that?
It sounds like a really obvious basic question, where there shouldn’t be any easy progress to be made—but I’m not even sure about that!
(Further, it’s part of the disagreement here, and maybe in many of Said’s interactions: the question “Examples?”, if we drill down into the agentic matrix of discourse, is a values assertion (e.g. a bid for extension of credit; a bid for cognitive resources; or an assertion that cognitive resources are owed; or a claim of surprising shared value; etc.). In the cases where “Examples?” is an assertion that the author owes the public some cognitive resources (or, maybe or maybe not equivalently: the best distribution of computation would have the author work to give examples here and now), the question is raised about the right distribution of cognitive work. And the answer is quite non-obvious and most likely context specific! For example, an expert (e.g. a professor) might end up being dismissive, or even disdainful, toward a bright-eyed curious undergrad. In many cases this is at least a tragedy, if not a downright moral crime; but in some cases, despite appearances, it is actually correct. The undergrad must learn at some point to think on zer own, and prune zer own babble, and extract more useful bits from experts per time.)
For example: Sometimes if Alice makes a summarizing claim X, and Bob asks Alice for demonstrations, Alice should be able to say “Maybe I will provide that, but first I would like you to actually stake some position—claim “not X”, or say that you are confused about what X means, or claim that X is irrelevant; or if you are not willing to do that right now, then I want you to first go investigate on your own until you reach a preliminary conclusion”. This sort of pattern might currently be insufficiently “ennormed”—in other words, even if Alice is comfortable saying that and aware of it as an option, she might correctly expect others to have a blanket view that her response is, unconditionally, inappropriate. (E.g., Said might say that this response is blanket inappropriate for some roles that Alice is playing in a conversation.)
[this comment is >90% theoretical, i.e. not specifically about this thread / topic] [“topic nonspecific”? “topic abstracted”? not off-topic, but not indexed to the specific situation; not meta, but not very object-level]
I’m not familiar with the whole Said context, but just from perusing this thread, it sounds like he is at least presenting himself as behaving in order to create / maintain / integrate into some set of discourse norms. Presumably, he views those norms as more likely to be good (truth-tracking, successful, justice-making, what have you) than feasible alternatives. In that context, the issue of cognitive labor is a central one.
I just want to flag that I think there are probably major theoretical open questions here. It seems that Said disagrees, in that he performs a presumption that his norms and his implementations are correct. (Or perhaps it is not a disagreement, but a merely-performative stance, perhaps as a method of asserting those norms.)
Example of open question: how do you deal with claims that summarize things, but that are somewhat hard to verify or to publicly demonstrate? E.g. Habryka says “lots of people cite Said as XYZ”. Some of that will be private communications that should not be shared. How to deal with this? In legal contexts that’s not admissible, but that’s not necessarily a great answer outside of highly adversarial contexts. Some of those citations will be not exactly private, but difficult to track down / summarize / prove concisely. How to deal with that?
It sounds like a really obvious basic question, where there shouldn’t be any easy progress to be made—but I’m not even sure about that!
(Further, it’s part of the disagreement here, and maybe in many of Said’s interactions: the question “Examples?”, if we drill down into the agentic matrix of discourse, is a values assertion (e.g. a bid for extension of credit; a bid for cognitive resources; or an assertion that cognitive resources are owed; or a claim of surprising shared value; etc.). In the cases where “Examples?” is an assertion that the author owes the public some cognitive resources (or, maybe or maybe not equivalently: the best distribution of computation would have the author work to give examples here and now), the question is raised about the right distribution of cognitive work. And the answer is quite non-obvious and most likely context specific! For example, an expert (e.g. a professor) might end up being dismissive, or even disdainful, toward a bright-eyed curious undergrad. In many cases this is at least a tragedy, if not a downright moral crime; but in some cases, despite appearances, it is actually correct. The undergrad must learn at some point to think on zer own, and prune zer own babble, and extract more useful bits from experts per time.)
For example: Sometimes if Alice makes a summarizing claim X, and Bob asks Alice for demonstrations, Alice should be able to say “Maybe I will provide that, but first I would like you to actually stake some position—claim “not X”, or say that you are confused about what X means, or claim that X is irrelevant; or if you are not willing to do that right now, then I want you to first go investigate on your own until you reach a preliminary conclusion”. This sort of pattern might currently be insufficiently “ennormed”—in other words, even if Alice is comfortable saying that and aware of it as an option, she might correctly expect others to have a blanket view that her response is, unconditionally, inappropriate. (E.g., Said might say that this response is blanket inappropriate for some roles that Alice is playing in a conversation.)