I think your first paragraph is functionally equivalent to “if someone feels that the dominant discourse is at war with them (committed to not acknowledging their critiques) they may sympathetically try to sabotage it.” Does that seem right?
“Conclusions are often drawn from data in ways that are logically invalid” seems sufficiently well-attested to be a truism.
Yeah, that’s a good generalization of my first paragraph. It seems good to point out the generalization that they are sympathetically sabotaging, and in particular using the “everyone’s valid” incantation as their method of sabotage, because that implies first that their position is sympathetic and second that there could be other strategies they are or could be employing.
I probably wouldn’t use the term “dominant discourse” or “at war”, I might rather say “some entity professing some adjudication” and “not good ROI to attempt meaningful communication”.
The issue with the term “dominant discourse” is I don’t think this necessarily refers to a context where the adjudicator holds dominant power or any power at all. For example, the saboteur could be attempting to dismiss an opinionated schitzophrenic adjudicator.
And “war” implies particularly focused malice which need not be present in the adjudicator or imagined by the saboteur. For example, I don’t believe many bureaucratic systems are “at war” with me, but I definitely believe that attempting to communicate intelligently with them would almost always be a massive, frustrating, waste of my time.
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I’m glad the invalid conclusions thing seems obviously true, but it’s also a pretty big problem. Ideally we could be more sure of a lot of our assumptions than we are, and have better and more well known epistemological understanding of where our assumptions may be more likely to fail, and in what ways. Obviously easier said than done.
When the problematic adjudicator isn’t the dominant one, one can either safely ignore them, or escalate to someone less problematic who does hold power, so there’s no benefit in sabotage, and there’s reputational harm.
Relatedly I think the only real solution to the “lying with statistics” problem is the formation of epistemic communities where you’re allowed to accuse someone of lying with statistics, it’s adjudicated with a preponderance-of-evidence standard, and both false accusations and evidence that you’re lying with statistics are actually discrediting, proportionate to the severity of the offense and the confidence of the judgment.
I think we might be imagining slightly different situations. I’m imagining, for example, situations like while riding the bus or out shopping where a stranger has the power to talk to you and you do technically have the power to like, call security or the police if they are harassing you, but they aren’t really harassing you and that would make the situation worse for you. They don’t have real or enduring power but in that situation they do have that power to force an interaction. It would feel incredibly wrong to call what they are saying the “dominant discourse” but I suppose in that context maybe that’s what it is. Also, I like to avoid ignoring people who engage with me unless I have a compelling reason not to. That may be a personal quirk.
The idea of an epistemic community like you describe sounds nice, though it seems unfortunate that the focus has to be on transgression and accusation rather than a system that focuses on identifying particularly good epistemics and just… ignoring the epistemics that aren’t identified, which may be because they involve lying with data or just poor use of statistics and analysis… But since lying with statistics seems common, it probably would be good to make a point of identifying and cataloguing it.
I think your first paragraph is functionally equivalent to “if someone feels that the dominant discourse is at war with them (committed to not acknowledging their critiques) they may sympathetically try to sabotage it.” Does that seem right?
“Conclusions are often drawn from data in ways that are logically invalid” seems sufficiently well-attested to be a truism.
Yeah, that’s a good generalization of my first paragraph. It seems good to point out the generalization that they are sympathetically sabotaging, and in particular using the “everyone’s valid” incantation as their method of sabotage, because that implies first that their position is sympathetic and second that there could be other strategies they are or could be employing.
I probably wouldn’t use the term “dominant discourse” or “at war”, I might rather say “some entity professing some adjudication” and “not good ROI to attempt meaningful communication”.
The issue with the term “dominant discourse” is I don’t think this necessarily refers to a context where the adjudicator holds dominant power or any power at all. For example, the saboteur could be attempting to dismiss an opinionated schitzophrenic adjudicator.
And “war” implies particularly focused malice which need not be present in the adjudicator or imagined by the saboteur. For example, I don’t believe many bureaucratic systems are “at war” with me, but I definitely believe that attempting to communicate intelligently with them would almost always be a massive, frustrating, waste of my time.
...
I’m glad the invalid conclusions thing seems obviously true, but it’s also a pretty big problem. Ideally we could be more sure of a lot of our assumptions than we are, and have better and more well known epistemological understanding of where our assumptions may be more likely to fail, and in what ways. Obviously easier said than done.
When the problematic adjudicator isn’t the dominant one, one can either safely ignore them, or escalate to someone less problematic who does hold power, so there’s no benefit in sabotage, and there’s reputational harm.
Relatedly I think the only real solution to the “lying with statistics” problem is the formation of epistemic communities where you’re allowed to accuse someone of lying with statistics, it’s adjudicated with a preponderance-of-evidence standard, and both false accusations and evidence that you’re lying with statistics are actually discrediting, proportionate to the severity of the offense and the confidence of the judgment.
I think we might be imagining slightly different situations. I’m imagining, for example, situations like while riding the bus or out shopping where a stranger has the power to talk to you and you do technically have the power to like, call security or the police if they are harassing you, but they aren’t really harassing you and that would make the situation worse for you. They don’t have real or enduring power but in that situation they do have that power to force an interaction. It would feel incredibly wrong to call what they are saying the “dominant discourse” but I suppose in that context maybe that’s what it is. Also, I like to avoid ignoring people who engage with me unless I have a compelling reason not to. That may be a personal quirk.
The idea of an epistemic community like you describe sounds nice, though it seems unfortunate that the focus has to be on transgression and accusation rather than a system that focuses on identifying particularly good epistemics and just… ignoring the epistemics that aren’t identified, which may be because they involve lying with data or just poor use of statistics and analysis… But since lying with statistics seems common, it probably would be good to make a point of identifying and cataloguing it.