A wonderful post by greyenlightenment that touches on contrarian and intellectualism signalling. It mentions the dilemma between agreeing with the broad thrust of a piece, and agreeing with factual claims of the piece. We are suggested to consider not criticising a piece when we agree with the message but find little factual inaccuracies—a norm against nitpicking so to speak.
I suspect a norm against nitpicking would destroy a chesterton fence and lead down a slippery slope into anti-intellectualism and greater irrationality.
As Julia Galef says:
Not caring about validity of an argument, as long as conclusion is true ~=
Not caring about due process, as long as guilty guy is convicted
I think the same criticism appears to relaxing the norm against factual inaccuracies.
If we stop caring about whether the facts of the matter are very correct, then what next? I suspect the long term consequences of such a norm to be detrimental.
If it leads to a reduction in the quantity of articles I’ll otherwise agree with (because the authors wanted to be as accurate as possible), then that’s a trade off I would gladly accept.
I do recognise that I am a contrarian and love to signal intellectualism—for what it’s worth.
What are your thoughts?
In my view, the article advocates being mindkilled. The willingness to overlook flaws and factual inaccuracies in your own side, because that would be perceived as “stabbing one’s own soldiers in the back” is exactly what Eliezer warns us about in Politics is the Mindkiller.
I think there’s a big difference between saying, “Your argument has x, y, and z flaws, but I support your point anyway,” and choosing to keep silent.
If we define nitpicking as openly saying “the supposed facts you built your argument on are actually false”, then I agree that a general norm against nitpicking would quickly lead to insanity. But there are also other possible definitions.
Somehow I didn’t find the “norm against nitpicking” you reacted to, so I am not sure how much much this applies to the original argument.
I am not saying such a norm exists, I am saying adopting such a norm seems to have bad consequences.
Personally, I am caring about the former but not about the latter in your Julia Galef quote… “Due process” seems largely a way to abuse loopholes, and in this, give the upper hand to the more professional lawyer rather than the correct side. Due process makes argument less valid, in a way.