This post seemed helpful for advancing my overall understanding of the “discourse norms landscape.” I agree that “what counts as contextually relevant” is often one of the more important questions to be asking. In general, I think it’s hard to judge an ontological/category-suggesting post, and I think this class of essay is roughly the right way to engage with it from a critical perspective.
I do feel sort of confused about the framing of this post as a rebuttal to “Decoupling vs Contextualization” though – in particular I’m a bit surprised about the combination of opinions you’re expressing here, and elsewhere.
It seems like the main substance you’re responding to is “Decoupling/Contextualization promotes to attention that Contextualization might be a preferred norm-set, and that opens the door to all kinds of political shenanigans.” And I think that’s true – but… it’s not really what I thought of as the point Decoupling/Contextualization was making.
The question I interpreted D/C to be addressing was not “what sort of norms are good?” but “what sort of norm conflicts might you run into in the wild, that will make discourse more confusing and difficult?”. And when evaluating that post, the key question I’d be asking is not “is one of these norm-sets dangerous to encourage?” but “is this actually a meaningful way to carve reality?”
If Decoupled/Contextualized is an common way that different people approach discussions, that’s really important to be able to talk about! Especially if one of those ways is epistemically dangerous!
If it’s not an important difference that’s causing discourse to be confusing/difficult, then it makes sense not to incorporate it into our longterm jargon.
I’m not quite sure your intended reading here, but… it feels like you’re saying “this categorization is promoting to attention a concept that’s harmful to our discourse… therefore we shouldn’t have this categorization”, which… seems very different from what you’ve historically argued for.
What surprises me is the combination of your concern for this here, but your praise of Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization – I think Local Validity was an important concept, and I saw the Decoupled/Contextual norms post as an important complement to it.
(Switching to focus on my own opinions rather than my confusions about yours).
Decoupling seemed to be a key cultural component that enables Local Validity checking. (It’s not identical to local validity, but seems related). And decoupling is hard, or at least not something most people do by default. Language is often muddled together with politics, and it takes a special culture to enable them to be separated.
(When I first read your post, here, I thought “oh, yeah maybe D/C isn’t a useful joint to carve here”, but it was re-reading Local Validity that shifted me back towards “hmm, if D/C isn’t a useful joint to carve, that sort of implies that Local Validity isn’t as important a concept. I’m in fact fairly certain Local Validity is important, and upon reflection there are definitely people who don’t have that concept. And while the Local Validity is essay is good, I think the D/C post is much shorter, while also addressing a different slicing of the problem that is sometimes more relevant)
So my current epistemic state, taking this post and those others all together, is take the arguments in this post as more of a “Yes, and” rather than a “No, but” to the D/C post.
but “what sort of norm conflicts might you run into in the wild, that will make discourse more confusing and difficult?”.
And if both of two purported norm-sets are wrong (i.e., fail to create accurate maps) in different ways, then taxonomizing possible norm-sets along that axis will be even more confusing. If some bids for contextualization are genuinely clarifying (e.g., pointing out that your interlocutor is refuting a weak man, and that readers will be misled if they infer that there do not exist any stronger arguments for the same conclusion), but others are obfuscating (e.g., appeals-to-consequences of the side effects of a belief, independently of whether the belief is true), then lumping them both together under “contextualizing norms” will confuse people who are searching for clarity-creating norms. (In future work, I want to “pry open the black box” of relevance, which I’m relying on for a lot despite being confused about how it works.)
What surprises me is the combination of your concern for this here, but your praise of Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization
The part of you that was surprised by this will be even more surprised by my next planned post, an ultra-”contextualizing” reply to “Meta-Honesty”! (But it should be less surprising when you consider the ways in which my earlier “Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her” is also ultra-”contextualizing.”)
Some upcoming content in my Doublecrux/Frames sequence is that while there is some “arbitrariness” to frames, there are facts of the matter of whether a frame is consistent or self-defeating, and whether it is useful for achieving particular goals.
I think an important skill for a rationalist culture to impart is “how to productively disagree on frames”, and figure out under what circumstances you should change your frame. I think this is harder than changing your beliefs, and some of the considerations are a bit different. But, still an important skill.
Nonetheless, because frames are often wound up in one’s identity (even moreso than beliefs), it’s often actively unproductive to jump to “Frame X is worse than Frame Y”. In my Noticing Frames post, I avoided getting too opinionated about which frames were good for which reasons, because the main point was being able to notice differing frames at all, and it’s easier to focus on that when you’re not defensive.
It feels like something similar is at play in the Decoupled/Contextual post. My impression is that you’re worried about it shifting the overton window towards “arbitrary politically motivated bids for contextual sensitivity”. But one major use case for the D/C post is to introduce people who normally think contextually, to the idea that they might want to think decoupled sometimes. And that’s easier to do without putting them on the defensive.
This post seemed helpful for advancing my overall understanding of the “discourse norms landscape.” I agree that “what counts as contextually relevant” is often one of the more important questions to be asking. In general, I think it’s hard to judge an ontological/category-suggesting post, and I think this class of essay is roughly the right way to engage with it from a critical perspective.
I do feel sort of confused about the framing of this post as a rebuttal to “Decoupling vs Contextualization” though – in particular I’m a bit surprised about the combination of opinions you’re expressing here, and elsewhere.
It seems like the main substance you’re responding to is “Decoupling/Contextualization promotes to attention that Contextualization might be a preferred norm-set, and that opens the door to all kinds of political shenanigans.” And I think that’s true – but… it’s not really what I thought of as the point Decoupling/Contextualization was making.
The question I interpreted D/C to be addressing was not “what sort of norms are good?” but “what sort of norm conflicts might you run into in the wild, that will make discourse more confusing and difficult?”. And when evaluating that post, the key question I’d be asking is not “is one of these norm-sets dangerous to encourage?” but “is this actually a meaningful way to carve reality?”
If Decoupled/Contextualized is an common way that different people approach discussions, that’s really important to be able to talk about! Especially if one of those ways is epistemically dangerous!
If it’s not an important difference that’s causing discourse to be confusing/difficult, then it makes sense not to incorporate it into our longterm jargon.
I’m not quite sure your intended reading here, but… it feels like you’re saying “this categorization is promoting to attention a concept that’s harmful to our discourse… therefore we shouldn’t have this categorization”, which… seems very different from what you’ve historically argued for.
What surprises me is the combination of your concern for this here, but your praise of Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization – I think Local Validity was an important concept, and I saw the Decoupled/Contextual norms post as an important complement to it.
(Switching to focus on my own opinions rather than my confusions about yours).
Decoupling seemed to be a key cultural component that enables Local Validity checking. (It’s not identical to local validity, but seems related). And decoupling is hard, or at least not something most people do by default. Language is often muddled together with politics, and it takes a special culture to enable them to be separated.
(When I first read your post, here, I thought “oh, yeah maybe D/C isn’t a useful joint to carve here”, but it was re-reading Local Validity that shifted me back towards “hmm, if D/C isn’t a useful joint to carve, that sort of implies that Local Validity isn’t as important a concept. I’m in fact fairly certain Local Validity is important, and upon reflection there are definitely people who don’t have that concept. And while the Local Validity is essay is good, I think the D/C post is much shorter, while also addressing a different slicing of the problem that is sometimes more relevant)
So my current epistemic state, taking this post and those others all together, is take the arguments in this post as more of a “Yes, and” rather than a “No, but” to the D/C post.
And if both of two purported norm-sets are wrong (i.e., fail to create accurate maps) in different ways, then taxonomizing possible norm-sets along that axis will be even more confusing. If some bids for contextualization are genuinely clarifying (e.g., pointing out that your interlocutor is refuting a weak man, and that readers will be misled if they infer that there do not exist any stronger arguments for the same conclusion), but others are obfuscating (e.g., appeals-to-consequences of the side effects of a belief, independently of whether the belief is true), then lumping them both together under “contextualizing norms” will confuse people who are searching for clarity-creating norms. (In future work, I want to “pry open the black box” of relevance, which I’m relying on for a lot despite being confused about how it works.)
The part of you that was surprised by this will be even more surprised by my next planned post, an ultra-”contextualizing” reply to “Meta-Honesty”! (But it should be less surprising when you consider the ways in which my earlier “Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her” is also ultra-”contextualizing.”)
Some further potentially relevant thoughts:
Some upcoming content in my Doublecrux/Frames sequence is that while there is some “arbitrariness” to frames, there are facts of the matter of whether a frame is consistent or self-defeating, and whether it is useful for achieving particular goals.
I think an important skill for a rationalist culture to impart is “how to productively disagree on frames”, and figure out under what circumstances you should change your frame. I think this is harder than changing your beliefs, and some of the considerations are a bit different. But, still an important skill.
Nonetheless, because frames are often wound up in one’s identity (even moreso than beliefs), it’s often actively unproductive to jump to “Frame X is worse than Frame Y”. In my Noticing Frames post, I avoided getting too opinionated about which frames were good for which reasons, because the main point was being able to notice differing frames at all, and it’s easier to focus on that when you’re not defensive.
It feels like something similar is at play in the Decoupled/Contextual post. My impression is that you’re worried about it shifting the overton window towards “arbitrary politically motivated bids for contextual sensitivity”. But one major use case for the D/C post is to introduce people who normally think contextually, to the idea that they might want to think decoupled sometimes. And that’s easier to do without putting them on the defensive.