One is “We must never abandon this relentless commitment to precise truth. All we say, whether to each other or to the outside world, must be thoroughly vetted for its precise truthfulness.” To which my reply is: how’s that been working out for us so far?
[...]
We can win without sacrificing style and integrity.
But you just did propose sacrificing our integrity: specifically, the integrity of our relentless commitment to precise truth. It was two paragraphs ago. The text is right there. We can see it. Do you expect us not to notice?
To be clear, in this comment, I’m not even arguing that you’re wrong. Given the situation, maybe sacrificing the integrity of our relentless commitment to precise truth is exactly what’s needed!
But you can’t seriously expect people not to notice, right? You are including the costs of people noticing as part of your consequentialist decision calculus, right?
No, I just expressed myself badly. Thanks for keeping me honest. Let me try to rephrase—in response to any text, you can write ~arbitrarily many words in reply that lay out exactly where it was wrong. You can also write ~arbitrarily many words in reply that lay out where it was right. You can vary not only the quantity but the stridency/emphasis of these collections of words. (I’m only talking simulacrum-0 stuff here.) This is no canonical weighting of these!! You have to choose. The choice is not determined by your commitment to speaking truth. The choice is determined by priorities about how your words move others’ minds and move the world. Does that make more sense?
‘Speak only truth’ is underconstrained; we’ve allowed ourselves to add (charitably) ‘and speak all the truth that your fingers have the strength to type, particularly on topics about which there appears to be disagreement’ or (uncharitably) ‘and cultivate the aesthetic of a discerning, cantankerous, genius critic’ in order to get lower-dimensional solutions.
When constraints don’t eliminate all dimensions, I think you can reasonably have lexically ordered preferences. We’ve picked a good first priority (speak only truth), but have picked a counterproductive second priority ([however you want to describe it]). I claim our second priority should be something like “and accomplish your goals.” Where your goals, presumably, = survive.
OK, I am rereading what I wrote last night and I see that I really expressed myself badly. It really does sound like I said we shoudl sacrifice our commitment to precise truth. I’ll try again: what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff. where those practices include things like “never appearing to ‘rally round anything’ in a tribal fashion.” Or, at a 20degree angle from that: “doing rhetoric not with an aim toward an external goal, but orienting our rhetoric to be ostentatious in our lack of rhetoric, making all the trappings of our speech scream ‘this is a scrupulous, obsessive, nonpartisan autist for the truth.’” Does that make more sense? it’s the performative elements that get my goat. (And yes, there are performative elements, unavoidably! All speech has rhetoric because (metaphorically) “the semantic dimensions” are a subspace of speech-space, and speech-space is affine, so there’s no way to “set the non-semantic dimensions to zero.”)
This is important enough that you should clarify in your own words. Raymond Arnold, as a moderator of lesswrong.com, is it in fact your position that “what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff”?
The word and actual connotations of anal-retentive are important to my sentence. (Also, I said “this feels righter-to-me” not “this is right” and I definitely did not make an explicit defense of exactly this wording as aspirational policy)
We absolutely should have more practices that drive at the precise truth than saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff.
Some of those practices should include tracking various metaphorical forests-vs-trees, and being some-kind-of-intentional about what things are worth arguing in what sort of ways. (This does not come with any particular opinion about what sort of ways are worth arguing what sort of things, just, that there exist at least some patterns of nerdy pedantry that do not automatically get to be treated as actively good parts of a good truthseeking culture)
(I think this was fairly obvious and that you are indeed being kind of obnoxious so I have strong downvoted you in this instance)
You replied to a comment that said, verbatim, “what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff”, with, “This paragraph feels righter-to-me”.
That response does prompt the reader to wonder whether you believe the quoted statement by Malcolm McLeod, which was a prominent thesis sentence of the comment that you were endorsing as feeling righter-to-you! I understand that “This feels righter-to-me” does not mean the same thing as “This is right.” That’s why I asked you to clarify!
In your clarification, you have now disavowed the quoted statement with your own statement that “We absolutely should have more practices that drive at the precise truth than saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff.”
But you just did propose sacrificing our integrity: specifically, the integrity of our relentless commitment to precise truth. It was two paragraphs ago. The text is right there. We can see it. Do you expect us not to notice?
To be clear, in this comment, I’m not even arguing that you’re wrong. Given the situation, maybe sacrificing the integrity of our relentless commitment to precise truth is exactly what’s needed!
But you can’t seriously expect people not to notice, right? You are including the costs of people noticing as part of your consequentialist decision calculus, right?
No, I just expressed myself badly. Thanks for keeping me honest. Let me try to rephrase—in response to any text, you can write ~arbitrarily many words in reply that lay out exactly where it was wrong. You can also write ~arbitrarily many words in reply that lay out where it was right. You can vary not only the quantity but the stridency/emphasis of these collections of words. (I’m only talking simulacrum-0 stuff here.) This is no canonical weighting of these!! You have to choose. The choice is not determined by your commitment to speaking truth. The choice is determined by priorities about how your words move others’ minds and move the world. Does that make more sense?
‘Speak only truth’ is underconstrained; we’ve allowed ourselves to add (charitably) ‘and speak all the truth that your fingers have the strength to type, particularly on topics about which there appears to be disagreement’ or (uncharitably) ‘and cultivate the aesthetic of a discerning, cantankerous, genius critic’ in order to get lower-dimensional solutions.
When constraints don’t eliminate all dimensions, I think you can reasonably have lexically ordered preferences. We’ve picked a good first priority (speak only truth), but have picked a counterproductive second priority ([however you want to describe it]). I claim our second priority should be something like “and accomplish your goals.” Where your goals, presumably, = survive.
OK, I am rereading what I wrote last night and I see that I really expressed myself badly. It really does sound like I said we shoudl sacrifice our commitment to precise truth. I’ll try again: what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff. where those practices include things like “never appearing to ‘rally round anything’ in a tribal fashion.” Or, at a 20degree angle from that: “doing rhetoric not with an aim toward an external goal, but orienting our rhetoric to be ostentatious in our lack of rhetoric, making all the trappings of our speech scream ‘this is a scrupulous, obsessive, nonpartisan autist for the truth.’” Does that make more sense? it’s the performative elements that get my goat. (And yes, there are performative elements, unavoidably! All speech has rhetoric because (metaphorically) “the semantic dimensions” are a subspace of speech-space, and speech-space is affine, so there’s no way to “set the non-semantic dimensions to zero.”)
This paragraph feels righter-to-me (oh, huh, you even ended up with the same word “ostentatious” as pointer that I did in my comment-1-minute-ago)
This is important enough that you should clarify in your own words. Raymond Arnold, as a moderator of lesswrong.com, is it in fact your position that “what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff”?
The word and actual connotations of anal-retentive are important to my sentence. (Also, I said “this feels righter-to-me” not “this is right” and I definitely did not make an explicit defense of exactly this wording as aspirational policy)
We absolutely should have more practices that drive at the precise truth than saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff.
Some of those practices should include tracking various metaphorical forests-vs-trees, and being some-kind-of-intentional about what things are worth arguing in what sort of ways. (This does not come with any particular opinion about what sort of ways are worth arguing what sort of things, just, that there exist at least some patterns of nerdy pedantry that do not automatically get to be treated as actively good parts of a good truthseeking culture)
(I think this was fairly obvious and that you are indeed being kind of obnoxious so I have strong downvoted you in this instance)
Thank you for clarifying.
No, it was not obvious!
You replied to a comment that said, verbatim, “what we should indeed sacrifice is our commitment to being anal-retentive about practices that we think associate with getting the precise truth, over and beyond saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff”, with, “This paragraph feels righter-to-me”.
That response does prompt the reader to wonder whether you believe the quoted statement by Malcolm McLeod, which was a prominent thesis sentence of the comment that you were endorsing as feeling righter-to-you! I understand that “This feels righter-to-me” does not mean the same thing as “This is right.” That’s why I asked you to clarify!
In your clarification, you have now disavowed the quoted statement with your own statement that “We absolutely should have more practices that drive at the precise truth than saying true stuff and contradicting false stuff.”
I emphatically agree with your statement for the reasons I explained at length in such posts as “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think” and “Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists”, but I don’t think the matter is “fairly obvious.” If it were, I wouldn’t have had to write thousands of words about it.