This largely rings true to me but is missing one (in my opinion) absolutely crucial caveat/complication:
Most people (including, as experience has repeatedly confirmed, the vast majority of rationalists/LWers) will do “Ask what physical process generated the words. Where did they come from? Why these particular words at this particular time?” wrong, by virtue of being far too confident in the first answer that their stereotype centers generate, and not accounting for other-people’s-minds-and-culture-being-quite-different-from-their-own.
I think most people do an ok job of this most of the time, as long they stop to think about it. The sorts of situations you seem to be pointing to are mainly about politics, which kills the mind when applying “why these words?” just as it does in so many other ways.
More generally, the skill of asking “what physical process produced these words?” is limited by one’s ability to accurately model the physical processes which produce words. If someone produces systematically terrible models (as most people do when discussing politicized subjects), then obviously it’s not going to work very well, but I don’t think that has much to do with this skill specifically. It’s more about the general skill of producing good models.
This largely rings true to me but is missing one (in my opinion) absolutely crucial caveat/complication:
Most people (including, as experience has repeatedly confirmed, the vast majority of rationalists/LWers) will do “Ask what physical process generated the words. Where did they come from? Why these particular words at this particular time?” wrong, by virtue of being far too confident in the first answer that their stereotype centers generate, and not accounting for other-people’s-minds-and-culture-being-quite-different-from-their-own.
I think most people do an ok job of this most of the time, as long they stop to think about it. The sorts of situations you seem to be pointing to are mainly about politics, which kills the mind when applying “why these words?” just as it does in so many other ways.
More generally, the skill of asking “what physical process produced these words?” is limited by one’s ability to accurately model the physical processes which produce words. If someone produces systematically terrible models (as most people do when discussing politicized subjects), then obviously it’s not going to work very well, but I don’t think that has much to do with this skill specifically. It’s more about the general skill of producing good models.