and the sentence “broccoli is good for you” is making a bid to circumvent that machinery entirely and just write a result into my value-cache.
I think this has some truth to it, but that is missing important nuance.
When I imagine eg. my mom telling me that broccoli is good for you, I imagine her having read it on some unreliable magazine’s cover. Or maybe she heard it from some unreliable friend of hers.
But when I imagine a smart friend of mine telling me that broccoli is good for you, I start making some educated guesses about the gears. Maybe it is because broccoli has a lot of fiber. Or because of some micronutrients.
In the latter scenario, I think a relevant follow-up question is about the extent to which it bypasses the gear-level machinery. And I think the answer is an unfortunate “it depends”. In the broccoli example, I have enough knowledge about the domain such that I think I can make some pretty good educated guesses, and so it actually doesn’t bypass the gears too much. Maybe we can say it bypasses it a “moderate amount”. In other contexts though where I don’t have much domain knowledge I think it’d frequently bypass the gears “a lot” though.
(All of that said, I agree with the broad gist of this post. In particular, with things like “value judgements usually pull on the wrong levers.”)
I think this has some truth to it, but that is missing important nuance.
When I imagine eg. my mom telling me that broccoli is good for you, I imagine her having read it on some unreliable magazine’s cover. Or maybe she heard it from some unreliable friend of hers.
But when I imagine a smart friend of mine telling me that broccoli is good for you, I start making some educated guesses about the gears. Maybe it is because broccoli has a lot of fiber. Or because of some micronutrients.
In the latter scenario, I think a relevant follow-up question is about the extent to which it bypasses the gear-level machinery. And I think the answer is an unfortunate “it depends”. In the broccoli example, I have enough knowledge about the domain such that I think I can make some pretty good educated guesses, and so it actually doesn’t bypass the gears too much. Maybe we can say it bypasses it a “moderate amount”. In other contexts though where I don’t have much domain knowledge I think it’d frequently bypass the gears “a lot” though.
(All of that said, I agree with the broad gist of this post. In particular, with things like “value judgements usually pull on the wrong levers.”)