This is great. I notice that other people have given caveats and pushback that seems right to me but that I didn’t generate myself, and that makes me nervous about saying I endorse it. But I get a very endorse-y feeling when I read it, at any rate.
(I have a vague feeling there was something that I did generate while reading? But I no longer remember it if so.)
Another feeling I get when I read it is, I remember arguments I’ve had in rat spaces in the past, and I want to use this essay to hit people round the head with.
Track (for yourself) and distinguish (for others) your inferences from your observations.
This one feels awkward to me because I don’t really know where to draw the line.
Or like, I think I know where feels natural to draw the line to me, and I kind of expect most people to agree that’s a sensible place most of the time. (I expect that without really checking—maybe it’s the case that if I expect wrong, I would have noticed something by now? But I’m not sure.) But if I imagine someone disagreeing with me, and trying to explain to them or an audience why I draw the line there, I have trouble coming up with more than “okay, but like, come on”.
(Oh, and come to think of it, I think I have in fact had arguments that seemed to hang on where to draw the line?)
Dumbledore inclined his head. “I went myself, Harry, the moment I heard. But by the time I reached the trophy room, Mr. Malfoy was already unconscious and Miss Granger had gone—”
“No,” said Harry Potter. “You reached the trophy room and saw Draco unconscious. That is all you observed, Headmaster. You did not observe Hermione there, or watch her leave. Let us distinguish observation from inference.”
But what’s more precisely the case is that Dumbledore has a memory of reaching the trophy room and seeing something that looked exactly like an unconscious Draco. The most obvious explanation for this memory is that he reached the trophy room and then photons entered his retinas and blah blah blah, and the most obvious explanation for that involves Draco being unconscious in the trophy room.
(Maybe in the story he did more than just see that, but I think that’s not particularly relevant here.)
But why is it okay to say “I saw Draco unconscious”, and we don’t have to say “I saw what looked exactly like an unconscious Draco” or even “I have a memory of seeing what looked exactly like an unconscious Draco”? It feels right to me, but… well, sometimes people present their inferences as observations and I guess that feels right to them too?
The vague solution I’m currently thinking about is, some inferences are not in question. In the story, it was in question whether Hermione had ever been in the trophy room, and so “unsafe” to infer “Hermione had already left” from “did not see Hermione”. It was not in question whether Draco had been unconscious in the trophy room, and so “safe” to infer “saw Draco” from “saw what looked exactly like Draco”.
This doesn’t feel entirely satisfactory. For one thing it has lowest-common-denominator dynamics, I don’t want someone to be able to start pretending to question everything and be able to bog down all discussion, but then maybe at some point I should just go “not worth it to me to continue this” and that’s fine?
For another it doesn’t really help you catch unexamined assumptions that turn out false. Harry might have let “Hermione had already left” slide because he assumed she was there, and that seems okay according to this—a wrong result, but not because he acted badly by this guideline as modified by that vague solution. Maybe that’s fine if we accept that “catch unexamined assumptions” isn’t really the point here, but idk, I think it’s at least partly the point? And also I still want to say “okay but Dumbledore didn’t observe Hermione there or Hermione leaving”, even if it’s the case that Hermione was there and had left and this is not in question.
So I don’t consider this resolved, but that feels maybe directionally correct? And in particular, if someone had said “but we should double check Draco was actually there—Headmaster, did you check that the thing you saw was in fact Draco? Do we have some way to rule out that you’ve been false memory charmed?” and the answers to those questions were no, then I think I’d be okay with this guideline suggesting “Dumbledore should switch to “I remember seeing something that looked like...”″.
I think one of the goals of the overall piece was to convey the meta-norm of, like … being open to requests to slide in a direction?
So in my world, Dumbledore was making no mistakes when he said “I saw Draco unconscious,” because he was in a standard frame/conforming to ordinary word usage. Harry then made a bid for drawing the boundary between “what we’re going to count as inference” and “what we’re going to count as observation” in a lower, more fundamental place, and Dumbledore consented, and the conversation shifted into that new register.
I don’t think someone’s doing something wrong if they say “I saw you make a super angry face!” as long as, if their conversational partner wants to disagree that the face was angry, they’re willing to back up and say, okay, here’s more detail on what I observed and why I concluded it meant “angry.”
(Or, in other words, I agree with what you’re saying toward the end of your comment.)
This is great. I notice that other people have given caveats and pushback that seems right to me but that I didn’t generate myself, and that makes me nervous about saying I endorse it. But I get a very endorse-y feeling when I read it, at any rate.
(I have a vague feeling there was something that I did generate while reading? But I no longer remember it if so.)
Another feeling I get when I read it is, I remember arguments I’ve had in rat spaces in the past, and I want to use this essay to hit people round the head with.
This one feels awkward to me because I don’t really know where to draw the line.
Or like, I think I know where feels natural to draw the line to me, and I kind of expect most people to agree that’s a sensible place most of the time. (I expect that without really checking—maybe it’s the case that if I expect wrong, I would have noticed something by now? But I’m not sure.) But if I imagine someone disagreeing with me, and trying to explain to them or an audience why I draw the line there, I have trouble coming up with more than “okay, but like, come on”.
(Oh, and come to think of it, I think I have in fact had arguments that seemed to hang on where to draw the line?)
Consider this quote from HPMOR:
But what’s more precisely the case is that Dumbledore has a memory of reaching the trophy room and seeing something that looked exactly like an unconscious Draco. The most obvious explanation for this memory is that he reached the trophy room and then photons entered his retinas and blah blah blah, and the most obvious explanation for that involves Draco being unconscious in the trophy room.
(Maybe in the story he did more than just see that, but I think that’s not particularly relevant here.)
But why is it okay to say “I saw Draco unconscious”, and we don’t have to say “I saw what looked exactly like an unconscious Draco” or even “I have a memory of seeing what looked exactly like an unconscious Draco”? It feels right to me, but… well, sometimes people present their inferences as observations and I guess that feels right to them too?
The vague solution I’m currently thinking about is, some inferences are not in question. In the story, it was in question whether Hermione had ever been in the trophy room, and so “unsafe” to infer “Hermione had already left” from “did not see Hermione”. It was not in question whether Draco had been unconscious in the trophy room, and so “safe” to infer “saw Draco” from “saw what looked exactly like Draco”.
This doesn’t feel entirely satisfactory. For one thing it has lowest-common-denominator dynamics, I don’t want someone to be able to start pretending to question everything and be able to bog down all discussion, but then maybe at some point I should just go “not worth it to me to continue this” and that’s fine?
For another it doesn’t really help you catch unexamined assumptions that turn out false. Harry might have let “Hermione had already left” slide because he assumed she was there, and that seems okay according to this—a wrong result, but not because he acted badly by this guideline as modified by that vague solution. Maybe that’s fine if we accept that “catch unexamined assumptions” isn’t really the point here, but idk, I think it’s at least partly the point? And also I still want to say “okay but Dumbledore didn’t observe Hermione there or Hermione leaving”, even if it’s the case that Hermione was there and had left and this is not in question.
So I don’t consider this resolved, but that feels maybe directionally correct? And in particular, if someone had said “but we should double check Draco was actually there—Headmaster, did you check that the thing you saw was in fact Draco? Do we have some way to rule out that you’ve been false memory charmed?” and the answers to those questions were no, then I think I’d be okay with this guideline suggesting “Dumbledore should switch to “I remember seeing something that looked like...”″.
I think one of the goals of the overall piece was to convey the meta-norm of, like … being open to requests to slide in a direction?
So in my world, Dumbledore was making no mistakes when he said “I saw Draco unconscious,” because he was in a standard frame/conforming to ordinary word usage. Harry then made a bid for drawing the boundary between “what we’re going to count as inference” and “what we’re going to count as observation” in a lower, more fundamental place, and Dumbledore consented, and the conversation shifted into that new register.
I don’t think someone’s doing something wrong if they say “I saw you make a super angry face!” as long as, if their conversational partner wants to disagree that the face was angry, they’re willing to back up and say, okay, here’s more detail on what I observed and why I concluded it meant “angry.”
(Or, in other words, I agree with what you’re saying toward the end of your comment.)