Sorry it’s taken this long for me to reply to this.
”Appeal to consequences” is only a fallacy in reasoning about factual states of the world. In most cases, appealing to consequences is the right action.
For example, if you want to build a house on a cliff, and I say “you shouldn’t do that, it might fall down”, that’s an appeal to consequences, but it’s completely valid.
Or to give another example, suppose we are designing a programming language. You recommend, for whatever excellent logical reason, that all lines must end with a semicolon. I argue that many people will forget semicolons, and then their program will crash. Again, appeal to consequences, but again it’s completely valid.
I think of language, following Eliezer’s definitions sequence, as being a human-made project intended to help people understand each other. It draws on the structure of reality, but has many free variables, so that the structure of reality doesn’t constrain it completely. This forces us to make decisions, and since these are not about factual states of the world (eg what the definition of “lie” REALLY is, in God’s dictionary) we have nothing to make those decisions on except consequences. If a certain definition will result in lots of people misunderstanding each other, bad people having an easier time confusing others, good communication failing to occur, or other bad things, then it’s fine to decide against it based on those grounds, just as you can decide against a programming language decision on the grounds that it will make programs written in it more likely crash, or require more memory, etc.
I am not sure I get your point about the symmetry of strategic equivocation. I feel like this equivocation relies on using a definition contrary to its common connotations. So if I was allowed to redefine “murderer” to mean “someone who drinks Coke”, then I could equivocate “Alice who is a murderer (based on the definition where she drinks Coke)” and also “Murderers should be punished (based on the definition where they kill people) and combine them to get “Alice should be punished”. The problem isn’t that you can equivocate between any two definitions, the problem is very specifically when we use a definition counter to the way most people traditionally use it. I think (do you disagree?) that most people interpret “liar” to mean an intentional liar. As such, I’m not sure I understand the relevance of the Ruby’s coworkers example.
I think you’re making too hard a divide between the “Hobbesian dystopia” where people misuse language, versus a hypothetical utopia of good actors. I think of misusing language as a difficult thing to avoid, something all of us (including rationalists, and even including me) will probably do by accident pretty often. As you point out regarding deception, many people who equivocate aren’t doing so deliberately. Even in a great community of people who try to use language well, these problems are going to come up. And so just as in the programming language example, I would like to have a language that fails gracefully and doesn’t cause a disaster when a mistake gets made, one that works with my fallibility rather than naturally leading to disaster when anyone gets something wrong.
And I think I object-level disagree with you about the psychology of deception. I’m interpreting you (maybe unfairly, but then I can’t figure out what the fair interpretation is) as saying that people very rarely lie intentionally, or that this rarely matters. This seems wrong to me—for example, guilty criminals who say they’re innocent seem to be lying, and there seem to be lots of these, and it’s a pretty socially important thing. I try pretty hard not to intentionally lie, but I can think of one time I failed (I’m not claiming I’ve only ever lied once in my life, just that this time comes to mind as something I remember and am particularly ashamed about). And even if lying never happened, I still think it would be worth having the word for it, the same way we have a word for “God” that atheists don’t just repurpose to mean “whoever the most powerful actor in their local environment is.”
Stepping back, we have two short words (“lie” and “not a lie”) to describe three states of the world (intentional deception, unintentional deception, complete honesty). I’m proposing to group these (1)(2,3) mostly on the grounds that this is how the average person uses the terms, and if we depart from how the average person uses the terms, we’re inviting a lot of confusion, both in terms of honest misunderstandings and malicious deliberate equivocation. I understand Jessica wants to group them (1,2)(3), but I still don’t feel like I really understand her reasoning except that she thinks unintentional deception is very bad. I agree it is very bad, but we already have the word “bias” and are so in agreement about its badness that we have a whole blog and community about overcoming it.
Like, I know my sibling comment is hugely inappropriately socially aggressive of me, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings any more than is necessary to incentivize you to process information, but we’ve been at this for a year! “This definition will make people angry” is not one of the 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong.
Like, sibling comments are very not-nice, but I argue that they meet the Slate Star commenting policy guidelines on account of being both true and necessary.
For the record, my opinion is essentially the same as the one expressed in “Bad intent is a disposition, not a feeling”, which gives more detail on the difference between consciousness of deception and intentionality of deception. (Subconscious intentions exist, so intentional lies include subconsciously intended ones; I don’t believe things that have no intentionality/optimization can lie)
“Normal people think you can’t lie unawarely” seems inconsistent with, among other things, this article.
Note also, you yourself are reaching for the language of strategic equivocation, which implies intent; but, how could you know the conscious intents of those you believe are equivocating? If you don’t, then you probably already have a sense that intent can be subconscious, which if applied uniformly, implies lies can be subconscious.
I say “strategic” because it is serving that strategic purpose in a debate, not as a statement of intent. This use is similar to discussion of, eg, an evolutionary strategy of short life histories, which doesn’t imply the short-life history creature understands or intends anything it’s doing.
It sounds like normal usage might be our crux. Would you agree with this? IE that if most people in most situations would interpret my definition as normal usage and yours as a redefinition project, we should use mine, and vice versa for yours?
I don’t think it’s the crux, no. I don’t accept ordinary language philosophy, which canonizes popular confusions. There are some contexts where using ordinary language is important, such as when writing popular news articles, but that isn’t all of the contexts.
but has many free variables, so that the structure of reality doesn’t constrain it completely. This forces us to make decisions, and since these are not about factual states of the world (eg what the definition of “lie” REALLY is, in God’s dictionary) we have nothing to make those decisions on except consequences
Scott, I appreciate the appearance of effort, but I’m afraid I just can’t muster the willpower to engage if you’re going to motivatedly play dumb like this. (I have a memoir that I need to be writing instead.) You know goddamned well I’m not appealing to God’s dictionary. I addressed this shit in “Where to Draw the Boundaries?”. I worked really really hard on that post. My prereaders got it. Said got it. 82 karma points says the audience got it. If the elephant in your brain thinks it can get away with stringing me along like this when I have the math and you don’t, it should think again.
In the incredibly unlikely event that you’re actually this dumb, I’ll try to include some more explanations in my forthcoming memoir (working title: “‘I Tell Myself to Let the Story End’; Or, A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning; Or, The Story About That Time Everyone I Used to Trust Insisted on Playing Dumb About the Philosophy of Language in a Way That Was Optimized for Confusing Me Into Cutting My Dick Off (Independently of the Empirical Facts Determining Whether or Not Cutting My Dick Off Is a Good Idea) and Wouldn’t Even Cut It Out Even After I Spent Five Months and Thousands of Words Trying to Explain the Mistake in Exhaustive Detail Including Dozens of Links to Their Own Writing; Or, We Had an Entire Sequence About This, You Lying Motherfuckers”).
EDIT: Want to talk to you further before I try to explain my understanding of your previous work on this, will rewrite this later.
The short version is I understand we disagree, I understand you have a sophisticated position, but I can’t figure out where we start differing and so I don’t know what to do other than vomit out my entire philosophy of language and hope that you’re able to point to the part you don’t like. I understand that may be condescending to you and I’m sorry.
I absolutely deny I am “motivatedly playing dumb” and I enter this into the record as further evidence that we shouldn’t redefine language to encode a claim that we are good at ferreting out other people’s secret motivations.
(Scott and I had a good conversation today. I think I need to write a followup post (working title: “Instrumental Categories, Wireheading, and War”) explaining in more detail exactly what distinction I’m making when I say I want to consider some kinds of appeals-to-consequences invalid while still allowing, e.g. “Requiring semicolons in your programming language will have the consequence of being less convenient for users who forget them.” The paragraphs in “Where to Draw the Boundaries?” starting with “There is an important difference [...]” are gesturing at the distinction, but perhaps not elaborating enough for readers who don’t already consider it “obvious.”)
Sorry it’s taken this long for me to reply to this.
”Appeal to consequences” is only a fallacy in reasoning about factual states of the world. In most cases, appealing to consequences is the right action.
For example, if you want to build a house on a cliff, and I say “you shouldn’t do that, it might fall down”, that’s an appeal to consequences, but it’s completely valid.
Or to give another example, suppose we are designing a programming language. You recommend, for whatever excellent logical reason, that all lines must end with a semicolon. I argue that many people will forget semicolons, and then their program will crash. Again, appeal to consequences, but again it’s completely valid.
I think of language, following Eliezer’s definitions sequence, as being a human-made project intended to help people understand each other. It draws on the structure of reality, but has many free variables, so that the structure of reality doesn’t constrain it completely. This forces us to make decisions, and since these are not about factual states of the world (eg what the definition of “lie” REALLY is, in God’s dictionary) we have nothing to make those decisions on except consequences. If a certain definition will result in lots of people misunderstanding each other, bad people having an easier time confusing others, good communication failing to occur, or other bad things, then it’s fine to decide against it based on those grounds, just as you can decide against a programming language decision on the grounds that it will make programs written in it more likely crash, or require more memory, etc.
I am not sure I get your point about the symmetry of strategic equivocation. I feel like this equivocation relies on using a definition contrary to its common connotations. So if I was allowed to redefine “murderer” to mean “someone who drinks Coke”, then I could equivocate “Alice who is a murderer (based on the definition where she drinks Coke)” and also “Murderers should be punished (based on the definition where they kill people) and combine them to get “Alice should be punished”. The problem isn’t that you can equivocate between any two definitions, the problem is very specifically when we use a definition counter to the way most people traditionally use it. I think (do you disagree?) that most people interpret “liar” to mean an intentional liar. As such, I’m not sure I understand the relevance of the Ruby’s coworkers example.
I think you’re making too hard a divide between the “Hobbesian dystopia” where people misuse language, versus a hypothetical utopia of good actors. I think of misusing language as a difficult thing to avoid, something all of us (including rationalists, and even including me) will probably do by accident pretty often. As you point out regarding deception, many people who equivocate aren’t doing so deliberately. Even in a great community of people who try to use language well, these problems are going to come up. And so just as in the programming language example, I would like to have a language that fails gracefully and doesn’t cause a disaster when a mistake gets made, one that works with my fallibility rather than naturally leading to disaster when anyone gets something wrong.
And I think I object-level disagree with you about the psychology of deception. I’m interpreting you (maybe unfairly, but then I can’t figure out what the fair interpretation is) as saying that people very rarely lie intentionally, or that this rarely matters. This seems wrong to me—for example, guilty criminals who say they’re innocent seem to be lying, and there seem to be lots of these, and it’s a pretty socially important thing. I try pretty hard not to intentionally lie, but I can think of one time I failed (I’m not claiming I’ve only ever lied once in my life, just that this time comes to mind as something I remember and am particularly ashamed about). And even if lying never happened, I still think it would be worth having the word for it, the same way we have a word for “God” that atheists don’t just repurpose to mean “whoever the most powerful actor in their local environment is.”
Stepping back, we have two short words (“lie” and “not a lie”) to describe three states of the world (intentional deception, unintentional deception, complete honesty). I’m proposing to group these (1)(2,3) mostly on the grounds that this is how the average person uses the terms, and if we depart from how the average person uses the terms, we’re inviting a lot of confusion, both in terms of honest misunderstandings and malicious deliberate equivocation. I understand Jessica wants to group them (1,2)(3), but I still don’t feel like I really understand her reasoning except that she thinks unintentional deception is very bad. I agree it is very bad, but we already have the word “bias” and are so in agreement about its badness that we have a whole blog and community about overcoming it.
Like, I know my sibling comment is hugely inappropriately socially aggressive of me, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings any more than is necessary to incentivize you to process information, but we’ve been at this for a year! “This definition will make people angry” is not one of the 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong.
Like, sibling comments are very not-nice, but I argue that they meet the Slate Star commenting policy guidelines on account of being both true and necessary.
For the record, my opinion is essentially the same as the one expressed in “Bad intent is a disposition, not a feeling”, which gives more detail on the difference between consciousness of deception and intentionality of deception. (Subconscious intentions exist, so intentional lies include subconsciously intended ones; I don’t believe things that have no intentionality/optimization can lie)
“Normal people think you can’t lie unawarely” seems inconsistent with, among other things, this article.
Note also, you yourself are reaching for the language of strategic equivocation, which implies intent; but, how could you know the conscious intents of those you believe are equivocating? If you don’t, then you probably already have a sense that intent can be subconscious, which if applied uniformly, implies lies can be subconscious.
I say “strategic” because it is serving that strategic purpose in a debate, not as a statement of intent. This use is similar to discussion of, eg, an evolutionary strategy of short life histories, which doesn’t imply the short-life history creature understands or intends anything it’s doing.
It sounds like normal usage might be our crux. Would you agree with this? IE that if most people in most situations would interpret my definition as normal usage and yours as a redefinition project, we should use mine, and vice versa for yours?
I don’t think it’s the crux, no. I don’t accept ordinary language philosophy, which canonizes popular confusions. There are some contexts where using ordinary language is important, such as when writing popular news articles, but that isn’t all of the contexts.
Scott, I appreciate the appearance of effort, but I’m afraid I just can’t muster the willpower to engage if you’re going to motivatedly play dumb like this. (I have a memoir that I need to be writing instead.) You know goddamned well I’m not appealing to God’s dictionary. I addressed this shit in “Where to Draw the Boundaries?”. I worked really really hard on that post. My prereaders got it. Said got it. 82 karma points says the audience got it. If the elephant in your brain thinks it can get away with stringing me along like this when I have the math and you don’t, it should think again.
In the incredibly unlikely event that you’re actually this dumb, I’ll try to include some more explanations in my forthcoming memoir (working title: “‘I Tell Myself to Let the Story End’; Or, A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning; Or, The Story About That Time Everyone I Used to Trust Insisted on Playing Dumb About the Philosophy of Language in a Way That Was Optimized for Confusing Me Into Cutting My Dick Off (Independently of the Empirical Facts Determining Whether or Not Cutting My Dick Off Is a Good Idea) and Wouldn’t Even Cut It Out Even After I Spent Five Months and Thousands of Words Trying to Explain the Mistake in Exhaustive Detail Including Dozens of Links to Their Own Writing; Or, We Had an Entire Sequence About This, You Lying Motherfuckers”).
EDIT: Want to talk to you further before I try to explain my understanding of your previous work on this, will rewrite this later.
The short version is I understand we disagree, I understand you have a sophisticated position, but I can’t figure out where we start differing and so I don’t know what to do other than vomit out my entire philosophy of language and hope that you’re able to point to the part you don’t like. I understand that may be condescending to you and I’m sorry.
I absolutely deny I am “motivatedly playing dumb” and I enter this into the record as further evidence that we shouldn’t redefine language to encode a claim that we are good at ferreting out other people’s secret motivations.
(Scott and I had a good conversation today. I think I need to write a followup post (working title: “Instrumental Categories, Wireheading, and War”) explaining in more detail exactly what distinction I’m making when I say I want to consider some kinds of appeals-to-consequences invalid while still allowing, e.g. “Requiring semicolons in your programming language will have the consequence of being less convenient for users who forget them.” The paragraphs in “Where to Draw the Boundaries?” starting with “There is an important difference [...]” are gesturing at the distinction, but perhaps not elaborating enough for readers who don’t already consider it “obvious.”)