The sense of “charity”I like is curiosity about the facts relevant to passing ITT, but exercise of charity in this sense doesn’t involve intention to actually gain practical skills needed to pass ITT. It’s a theoretician’s counterpart to ITT, a more natural concept of curiosity that doesn’t pull in the additional requirements of producing something sufficiently comprehensive to have a chance of possibly being applicable in practice.
An uncharitable attitude in this sense is lack of curiosity about the nature of someone’s thinking, especially apparently illegible thinking in an unfamiliar paradigm, or illegible thinking that produces stupid or abhorrent conclusions. Intending to master this sort of thinking well enough to pass ITT sets a high bar, pointing towards what is almost always wasted effort, but glimpsing some additional elements of the unfamiliar paradigm is often enlightening, and an uncharitable attitude in this sense prevents that, doesn’t keep the model-building process going.
To quote Scott Alexander, what serves as the original source for this sense of the word as introduced to LW:
This blog does not have a subject, but it has an ethos. That ethos might be summed up as: charity over absurdity.
Absurdity is the natural human tendency to dismiss anything you disagree with as so stupid it doesn’t even deserve consideration. In fact, you are virtuous for not considering it, maybe even heroic! You’re refusing to dignify the evil peddlers of bunkum by acknowledging them as legitimate debate partners.
Charity is the ability to override that response. To assume that if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs.
The sense of “charity” I like is curiosity about the facts relevant to passing ITT, but exercise of charity in this sense doesn’t involve intention to actually gain practical skills needed to pass ITT. It’s a theoretician’s counterpart to ITT, a more natural concept of curiosity that doesn’t pull in the additional requirements of producing something sufficiently comprehensive to have a chance of possibly being applicable in practice.
An uncharitable attitude in this sense is lack of curiosity about the nature of someone’s thinking, especially apparently illegible thinking in an unfamiliar paradigm, or illegible thinking that produces stupid or abhorrent conclusions. Intending to master this sort of thinking well enough to pass ITT sets a high bar, pointing towards what is almost always wasted effort, but glimpsing some additional elements of the unfamiliar paradigm is often enlightening, and an uncharitable attitude in this sense prevents that, doesn’t keep the model-building process going.
To quote Scott Alexander, what serves as the original source for this sense of the word as introduced to LW: