I guess an ending where I throw my hands up and say “oh no my reasoning” was simultaneously the most likely and the most beneficial outcome to finally wading in to throw up a post of my own. Critique is fair enough, and it would seem that least to some degree I have in fact missed the point.
I still think there’s something here beyond just privileging a hypothesis and Orwell’s complaint about double negation as euphemism. Perhaps the real thrust I was trying to make here was that double negation makes it harder to notice that you’ve privileged a hypothesis. Socratic questioning is good but tends to bore an audience, takes a long time, and doesn’t lead to the kind of decisive rhetorical victory you need to win a manoeuvring competition. There might be something in rephrasing socratic questions as propositions instead, but I’m not currently sure what that would look like.
There’s a wealth of valid insight amongst the rationalism community, but it goes unusable if you can’t win the frame in the first place. It’s not sufficient to be right in many contexts, you must also be rhetorically persuasive. I’ve not yet come across a convincing framework for melding the two.
It was a good post! To the extent that whatever I said was value-added or convincing to you, it was only because your quality post prompted me to lay it out.
And like you said, perhaps there is more here. Does a negative (vs. positive) frame make it harder to notice (or easier to forget) that there is a null hypothesis? Preliminary evidence in favor is that people who “own” the null will cede it in a negative frame, whereas they tend to retain it in a positive frame. More thinking/research may be needed though to feel confident about that (I say that as a scientist starting with the null effect of no difference, not as someone proponing the hypothesis of no difference).
“It’s not sufficient to be right in many contexts, you must also be rhetorically persuasive.” Spittin’ facts.
I guess an ending where I throw my hands up and say “oh no my reasoning” was simultaneously the most likely and the most beneficial outcome to finally wading in to throw up a post of my own. Critique is fair enough, and it would seem that least to some degree I have in fact missed the point.
I still think there’s something here beyond just privileging a hypothesis and Orwell’s complaint about double negation as euphemism. Perhaps the real thrust I was trying to make here was that double negation makes it harder to notice that you’ve privileged a hypothesis. Socratic questioning is good but tends to bore an audience, takes a long time, and doesn’t lead to the kind of decisive rhetorical victory you need to win a manoeuvring competition. There might be something in rephrasing socratic questions as propositions instead, but I’m not currently sure what that would look like.
There’s a wealth of valid insight amongst the rationalism community, but it goes unusable if you can’t win the frame in the first place. It’s not sufficient to be right in many contexts, you must also be rhetorically persuasive. I’ve not yet come across a convincing framework for melding the two.
It was a good post! To the extent that whatever I said was value-added or convincing to you, it was only because your quality post prompted me to lay it out.
And like you said, perhaps there is more here. Does a negative (vs. positive) frame make it harder to notice (or easier to forget) that there is a null hypothesis? Preliminary evidence in favor is that people who “own” the null will cede it in a negative frame, whereas they tend to retain it in a positive frame. More thinking/research may be needed though to feel confident about that (I say that as a scientist starting with the null effect of no difference, not as someone proponing the hypothesis of no difference).
“It’s not sufficient to be right in many contexts, you must also be rhetorically persuasive.” Spittin’ facts.