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.
I Can Tolerate Anything Except Factual Inaccuracies
Link post
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:
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?