A lot can come across differently when you’re trapped behind an inescapable cognitive bias.
ETA: I should probably be more clear about the main implication I intend here: Convincing yourself that you are the victim all the time isn’t going to improve your situation in any way. I could make an argument that even the sympathy one might get out of such a method of thinking/acting is negatively useful, but that might be pressing the matter unfairly.
It sounds like you believe that treating silence as a way of expressing that the opinion enjoys social support is the result of bias, but that treating silence as a way of expressing that the opiner deserves courtesy though the opinion is wrong is not the result of bias.
Do you in fact believe that? If so, can you provide any justification for believing it? Because it seems implausible.
I’d need an expansion on “bias” to discuss this with any useful accuracy. Is ignorance a state of “bias” in the presence of abundant information to the contrary of the naive reasoning from ignorance? Please let me know if my stance becomes clearer when you mentally disambiguate “bias.”
If you feel like responding, you can assume I mean by “bias” whatever you meant by it when you used the word.
Conversely, if you feel like turning this into an opportunity for me to learn to clear up my mental confusions and then demonstrate my learning to you, that’s of course your call.
If I experience such an epiphany I may let you know whether your stance thereby becomes clearer to me.
Hah. I like and appreciate the clarity of options here. I’ll attempt to explain.
A lot about social situations is something we’re directly told: “Elbows off the table. Close your mouth when you chew. Burping is rude, other will become offended.” Others are more biologically inherent; murder isn’t likely to make you popular a party. (At least not the positive kind of popularity...) What we’re discussing here lies somewhere between these two borders. We’ll consider aversion to murderers to be the least biased, having very little bias to it and being more a rational reaction, and we’ll consider asserted matters of “manners” to be maximally biased, having next to nothing to do with rationality and everything to do with believing whatever you’re told.
It’s a fuzzy subject without fully understanding psychology, but for the most part these decisions about social interaction are made consciously. In the presence of a biased individual, for whatever reason and whatever cause, if you challenge them on their strong opinions you’re liable to start an argument. There are productive arguments and unproductive arguments alike, but if the dinner table is terribly quiet already and an argument breaks out between some two members, everyone else has the option of “politely” letting the argument run its course, or intervening to stop this silly discussion that everyone’s heard time and time again and are tired of hearing. Knowing all to well how these kind of things start, proceed, and stop, the most polite thing you can do to not disrupt the pleasant atmosphere that everyone is pleased with is simply not to indulge the argument. Find another time, another place. Do it in private. Do whatever. Just not now at the dinner table, while everyone’s trying to have a peaceful meal.
There’s an intense meme among rationalists that whenever two rational agents disagree, they must perform a grand battle. This is just not true. There are many many opportunities in human interaction to solve the same problem. What you find is that people never work up the courage to do it ever, because of how “awkward” it would be, or any other number of excuses. “What if s/he rejects me? I’ll be devastated!” Intelligent agents are something to be afraid of, especially when their reactions control your feelings.
The courtesy isn’t so much for the opiner as it is for everyone else present. It is a result of bias, but not on the part of the people signaling silence; they’re just trying to keep things pleasant and peaceful for everyone.
Of course my description here could be wrong, but it’s not. The easy way to determine this is to ask each person in turn why they chose to be silent. Pretty much all of them are going to recite some subset of my assessment. Some people may have acquired that manner from being instructed to hold that manner, while others derived it from experience. The former case can be identified by naive confusion, “Mommy, why didn’t anyone tell him he was being racist?” You’ll understand when you’re older because people periodically fail to recognize the usefulness of civility. You’ll see it eventually, possibly coming from the people who were surrounded by mannerly people to the degree that they never were able to acquire the experience that got everyone else to adopt that manner. Even if it makes sense rationally, it could be the result of bias, but it can be hard to convince a child of complex things like that, so the bias doesn’t play a role beyond that that person finding that the things they were told as a child that they distinctly remember never understanding growing up did actually make sense in reality.
You can’t fault the child for being ignorant, but you can fault them for not recognizing the truth of mother’s words when the situation comes up that’s supposed to show them why the wisdom was correct. If they don’t learn it from experience like everyone else does, something went wrong. Possibly they overcompensated when they rejected Christianity and thought that it was a total fluke that their parents were competent enough to take care of a child. All those things that didn’t have to do with Christianity? Nope. Biased by Christianity. Out the window they go, along with the bathwater. When grandma says something racist and everyone goes silent, that is not tacit approval, that is polite disapproval. To not recognize something so obvious is going to be the result of some manner of cognitive bias, whether it’s a mindset of being the victim, white knighting on Tumblr’s behalf, an extreme bias against Christianity, etc.. Whatever it is that makes you think your position that contradicts the wisdom handed down and independently verified by generation after generation of highly intelligent agents capable of abstract reasoning is something that contradicts rationality.
Our ancestors didn’t derive quantum mechanics, no. That doesn’t make them unintelligent by any stretch of the imagination. When it came to interacting with other intelligent agents, we had intense pressure on us to optimize, and we did. Only now are we formally recognizing the principles that underlie deep generational wisdom.
So to answer concisely:
Barring that “treating silence as a way of expressing that the opiner deserves courtesy” is the result of bias, but that the bias originates in the opiner, not the analyzer of the silence, if we’re speaking strictly about the analysis of silence in modern social settings...
Do you in fact believe that?
Yes.
Can you provide any justification for believing it?
I can cite a pretty large chunk of the history of civilized humanity, yes.
The confusion is arising from your misunderstanding that decision theory is embedded more deeply in our psychology than our conscious mind—primitive decision theory (everything we’ve formally derived about decision theory up to this point) is embedded in our evolutionary psychology. There’s a ton more nuance to human interaction than social justice’s founding premise of, “Words hurt!!! (What are sticks and stones?)”
This can come across very differently if you’re the target of the comment.
A lot can come across differently when you’re trapped behind an inescapable cognitive bias.
ETA: I should probably be more clear about the main implication I intend here: Convincing yourself that you are the victim all the time isn’t going to improve your situation in any way. I could make an argument that even the sympathy one might get out of such a method of thinking/acting is negatively useful, but that might be pressing the matter unfairly.
It sounds like you believe that treating silence as a way of expressing that the opinion enjoys social support is the result of bias, but that treating silence as a way of expressing that the opiner deserves courtesy though the opinion is wrong is not the result of bias.
Do you in fact believe that?
If so, can you provide any justification for believing it? Because it seems implausible.
I’d need an expansion on “bias” to discuss this with any useful accuracy. Is ignorance a state of “bias” in the presence of abundant information to the contrary of the naive reasoning from ignorance? Please let me know if my stance becomes clearer when you mentally disambiguate “bias.”
If you feel like responding, you can assume I mean by “bias” whatever you meant by it when you used the word.
Conversely, if you feel like turning this into an opportunity for me to learn to clear up my mental confusions and then demonstrate my learning to you, that’s of course your call.
If I experience such an epiphany I may let you know whether your stance thereby becomes clearer to me.
Hah. I like and appreciate the clarity of options here. I’ll attempt to explain.
A lot about social situations is something we’re directly told: “Elbows off the table. Close your mouth when you chew. Burping is rude, other will become offended.” Others are more biologically inherent; murder isn’t likely to make you popular a party. (At least not the positive kind of popularity...) What we’re discussing here lies somewhere between these two borders. We’ll consider aversion to murderers to be the least biased, having very little bias to it and being more a rational reaction, and we’ll consider asserted matters of “manners” to be maximally biased, having next to nothing to do with rationality and everything to do with believing whatever you’re told.
It’s a fuzzy subject without fully understanding psychology, but for the most part these decisions about social interaction are made consciously. In the presence of a biased individual, for whatever reason and whatever cause, if you challenge them on their strong opinions you’re liable to start an argument. There are productive arguments and unproductive arguments alike, but if the dinner table is terribly quiet already and an argument breaks out between some two members, everyone else has the option of “politely” letting the argument run its course, or intervening to stop this silly discussion that everyone’s heard time and time again and are tired of hearing. Knowing all to well how these kind of things start, proceed, and stop, the most polite thing you can do to not disrupt the pleasant atmosphere that everyone is pleased with is simply not to indulge the argument. Find another time, another place. Do it in private. Do whatever. Just not now at the dinner table, while everyone’s trying to have a peaceful meal.
There’s an intense meme among rationalists that whenever two rational agents disagree, they must perform a grand battle. This is just not true. There are many many opportunities in human interaction to solve the same problem. What you find is that people never work up the courage to do it ever, because of how “awkward” it would be, or any other number of excuses. “What if s/he rejects me? I’ll be devastated!” Intelligent agents are something to be afraid of, especially when their reactions control your feelings.
The courtesy isn’t so much for the opiner as it is for everyone else present. It is a result of bias, but not on the part of the people signaling silence; they’re just trying to keep things pleasant and peaceful for everyone.
Of course my description here could be wrong, but it’s not. The easy way to determine this is to ask each person in turn why they chose to be silent. Pretty much all of them are going to recite some subset of my assessment. Some people may have acquired that manner from being instructed to hold that manner, while others derived it from experience. The former case can be identified by naive confusion, “Mommy, why didn’t anyone tell him he was being racist?” You’ll understand when you’re older because people periodically fail to recognize the usefulness of civility. You’ll see it eventually, possibly coming from the people who were surrounded by mannerly people to the degree that they never were able to acquire the experience that got everyone else to adopt that manner. Even if it makes sense rationally, it could be the result of bias, but it can be hard to convince a child of complex things like that, so the bias doesn’t play a role beyond that that person finding that the things they were told as a child that they distinctly remember never understanding growing up did actually make sense in reality.
You can’t fault the child for being ignorant, but you can fault them for not recognizing the truth of mother’s words when the situation comes up that’s supposed to show them why the wisdom was correct. If they don’t learn it from experience like everyone else does, something went wrong. Possibly they overcompensated when they rejected Christianity and thought that it was a total fluke that their parents were competent enough to take care of a child. All those things that didn’t have to do with Christianity? Nope. Biased by Christianity. Out the window they go, along with the bathwater. When grandma says something racist and everyone goes silent, that is not tacit approval, that is polite disapproval. To not recognize something so obvious is going to be the result of some manner of cognitive bias, whether it’s a mindset of being the victim, white knighting on Tumblr’s behalf, an extreme bias against Christianity, etc.. Whatever it is that makes you think your position that contradicts the wisdom handed down and independently verified by generation after generation of highly intelligent agents capable of abstract reasoning is something that contradicts rationality.
Our ancestors didn’t derive quantum mechanics, no. That doesn’t make them unintelligent by any stretch of the imagination. When it came to interacting with other intelligent agents, we had intense pressure on us to optimize, and we did. Only now are we formally recognizing the principles that underlie deep generational wisdom.
So to answer concisely:
Barring that “treating silence as a way of expressing that the opiner deserves courtesy” is the result of bias, but that the bias originates in the opiner, not the analyzer of the silence, if we’re speaking strictly about the analysis of silence in modern social settings...
Yes.
I can cite a pretty large chunk of the history of civilized humanity, yes.
The confusion is arising from your misunderstanding that decision theory is embedded more deeply in our psychology than our conscious mind—primitive decision theory (everything we’ve formally derived about decision theory up to this point) is embedded in our evolutionary psychology. There’s a ton more nuance to human interaction than social justice’s founding premise of, “Words hurt!!! (What are sticks and stones?)”
OK. Thanks for the clarification.