A criticism of practices on LW that are attractive now but which will hinder “the way” to truth in the future; that lead to a religious idolatry of ideas (a common fate of many “in-groups”) rather than objective detachment. For example,
(1) linking to ideas in original posts without summarizing the main ideas in your own words and how they apply to the specific context—as this creates short-cuts in the brain of the reader, if not in the writer
(2) Use of analogies without formally defining the ideas behind them leads to content not only saying more than it intends to (or more than it strictly should) but also having meta-meanings that are attractive but dangerous because they’re not explicit. [edit: “formally” was a poor choice of words, “clearly” is my intended meaning]
And any other examples people think of, now and as LW develops.
I am not sure I agree with your second concern. Sometimes premature formalization can take us further off track than leaving things with intuitively accessible handles for thinking about them.
Formalizing things, at its best, helps reveal the hidden assumptions we didn’t know we were making, but at its worst, it hard-codes some simplifying assumptions into the way we start talking and thinking about the topic at hand. For instance, as soon as we start to formalize sentences of the form “If P, then Q” as material implication, we adopt an analysis of conditionals that straightjackets them into the role of an extensional (truth-functional) semantics. It is not uncommon for someone who just took introductory logic train themselves into forcing natural language into this mold, rather than evaluating the adequacy of the formalism for explaining natural language.
(1) linking to ideas in original posts without summarizing the main ideas in your own words and how they apply to the specific context—as this creates short-cuts in the brain of the reader, if not in the writer
I plan to keep doing this; it saves time.
(2) Use of analogies without formally defining the ideas behind them leads to content not only saying more than it intends to (or more than it strictly should) but also having meta-meanings that are attractive but dangerous because they’re not explicit. [edit: “formally” was a poor choice of words, “clearly” is my intended meaning]
Isn’t this inherent in using analogies? Are you really saying “Don’t use analogies”?
A criticism of practices on LW that are attractive now but which will hinder “the way” to truth in the future; that lead to a religious idolatry of ideas (a common fate of many “in-groups”) rather than objective detachment. For example,
(1) linking to ideas in original posts without summarizing the main ideas in your own words and how they apply to the specific context—as this creates short-cuts in the brain of the reader, if not in the writer
(2) Use of analogies without formally defining the ideas behind them leads to content not only saying more than it intends to (or more than it strictly should) but also having meta-meanings that are attractive but dangerous because they’re not explicit. [edit: “formally” was a poor choice of words, “clearly” is my intended meaning]
And any other examples people think of, now and as LW develops.
I am not sure I agree with your second concern. Sometimes premature formalization can take us further off track than leaving things with intuitively accessible handles for thinking about them.
Formalizing things, at its best, helps reveal the hidden assumptions we didn’t know we were making, but at its worst, it hard-codes some simplifying assumptions into the way we start talking and thinking about the topic at hand. For instance, as soon as we start to formalize sentences of the form “If P, then Q” as material implication, we adopt an analysis of conditionals that straightjackets them into the role of an extensional (truth-functional) semantics. It is not uncommon for someone who just took introductory logic train themselves into forcing natural language into this mold, rather than evaluating the adequacy of the formalism for explaining natural language.
I plan to keep doing this; it saves time.
Isn’t this inherent in using analogies? Are you really saying “Don’t use analogies”?
I like analogies. I think they are useful in introducing or explaining an idea, but shouldn’t be used as a substitute for the idea.