Often it feels like the thing I need to do in order to explain something to somebody is load a new ontology into them, which doesn’t feel like it has much to do with either motivated reasoning or Bayesian evidence; I’m giving them the mental tools they need to understand the actual explanation which will only make sense once they have the ontology. (This is separate from the task of justifying why the ontology is useful.)
The cleanest example I can think of off the top of my head is teaching somebody the basic definitions of a field of math that’s unfamiliar to them so you can give a proof using those definitions. That’s a gears example, but I think I can also do this with fake frameworks in a way that’s useful but not gearsy.
I like the frame of explaining the ontology in which your claim is true separately from arguing for it. I agree that this can happen with very non-gears-y models, but I imagine that’s because the models are still sufficiently gears-like…
For example, the MTG color-wheel isn’t very gears-y, because it taps into subjective conceptual clusters which differ from person to person. But, the extent that I’m using it as an explanation rather than a rationalization seems like it has to do with the extent to which I’m relying on stuff that definitely follows from the framework vs stuff that’s more subjective (and it depends on the extent to which it’s a canonical application of the MTG color wheel vs a case where you usually wouldn’t invoke it).
Well, so one thing I’m sometimes trying to do is not justify a claim but justify paying attention to the claim, so the kind of thing I’m doing is not presenting evidence that it’s true but just evidence that something sufficiently interesting is happening near the claim that it’s worth paying attention to. I think this can get pretty non-gearsy in some sense; I’m often relying on mostly nonverbal intuitions in myself and hoping to trigger analogous nonverbal intuitions in someone else.
Often it feels like the thing I need to do in order to explain something to somebody is load a new ontology into them, which doesn’t feel like it has much to do with either motivated reasoning or Bayesian evidence; I’m giving them the mental tools they need to understand the actual explanation which will only make sense once they have the ontology. (This is separate from the task of justifying why the ontology is useful.)
The cleanest example I can think of off the top of my head is teaching somebody the basic definitions of a field of math that’s unfamiliar to them so you can give a proof using those definitions. That’s a gears example, but I think I can also do this with fake frameworks in a way that’s useful but not gearsy.
I like the frame of explaining the ontology in which your claim is true separately from arguing for it. I agree that this can happen with very non-gears-y models, but I imagine that’s because the models are still sufficiently gears-like…
For example, the MTG color-wheel isn’t very gears-y, because it taps into subjective conceptual clusters which differ from person to person. But, the extent that I’m using it as an explanation rather than a rationalization seems like it has to do with the extent to which I’m relying on stuff that definitely follows from the framework vs stuff that’s more subjective (and it depends on the extent to which it’s a canonical application of the MTG color wheel vs a case where you usually wouldn’t invoke it).
Well, so one thing I’m sometimes trying to do is not justify a claim but justify paying attention to the claim, so the kind of thing I’m doing is not presenting evidence that it’s true but just evidence that something sufficiently interesting is happening near the claim that it’s worth paying attention to. I think this can get pretty non-gearsy in some sense; I’m often relying on mostly nonverbal intuitions in myself and hoping to trigger analogous nonverbal intuitions in someone else.