I’m not sure I have a name for it, but I often feel like I’m being tricked into agreeing to more than I do. Out-debated? Like someone is trying to motte-and-bailey me, in a way that I don’t have the knowledge/energy/whatever to identify fully.
“agree to these obvious things, and I’ll be forced to agree with a non-obvious thing that seems to follow from them (but is generally much more complicated, so hard to prove or disprove, and even hard to argue about the causality), but with which I don’t agree”.
I sympathize. And I don’t know what else to say. If someone is trying to get you to agree that “2+2=4”, you know it’ll end with you buying into the whole algebra thing and then math and then who knows what else. Every piece of information you take in sets you up to learn / update on other information in a different way.
My most charitable interpretation (and please correct me if I’m wrong) of your comment is something like: “Hmm, this sounds interesting, but, man oh man, I’m not sure where this guy is trying to lead me. What will happen to my mind / to my behavior / to me if I start doing this? Or if I just start thinking about this?”
And if my interpretation is correct, then the only thing I can say is: look at the people who are pointing this way. And see if you want to be more or less like them. See if they have happy / successful lives. Which parts of them do you like and want to emulate? Which parts seem off? I don’t think we know each other, but you can probably find other people in your life who would make a decent substitute.
You are being outdebated because you are arguing with a memeplex evolved for dragging people into paroxysms of ambiguous guilt. (More prosaically, you can be outargued by, say, a car salesman; if they have convinced you to spend much more money than you intended and there is this really good offer available right now, this means they are better at this than you, which is their job).
I suspect the ambiguity is important. As Said said, equivocation; Motte and Bailey is similar.
My problem with all this: sometimes intense guilt IS the appropriate response. There may be an aspect from which your behaviour is, in fact, reprehensible! This seems to rule out hard and fast “well, don’t let people make you feel guilty” heuristics.
In passing, taboo “narrative”. It has least two distinct meanings: a particular story (usually linear), or something more like a worldview, ideology or doctrine.
From the other side, agreement is often not real. People agree out of politeness, or agree with a distorted (perhaps more salient but less relevant to the discussion) version of a claim, without ensuring it’s not a bucket error. There’s some use in keeping beliefs unchanged, but not in failing to understand the meaning of the claim under discussion (when it has one). So agreement (especially your own, as it’s easier to fix) should be treated with scepticism.
I’m not sure I have a name for it, but I often feel like I’m being tricked into agreeing to more than I do. Out-debated? Like someone is trying to motte-and-bailey me, in a way that I don’t have the knowledge/energy/whatever to identify fully.
“agree to these obvious things, and I’ll be forced to agree with a non-obvious thing that seems to follow from them (but is generally much more complicated, so hard to prove or disprove, and even hard to argue about the causality), but with which I don’t agree”.
I sympathize. And I don’t know what else to say. If someone is trying to get you to agree that “2+2=4”, you know it’ll end with you buying into the whole algebra thing and then math and then who knows what else. Every piece of information you take in sets you up to learn / update on other information in a different way.
My most charitable interpretation (and please correct me if I’m wrong) of your comment is something like: “Hmm, this sounds interesting, but, man oh man, I’m not sure where this guy is trying to lead me. What will happen to my mind / to my behavior / to me if I start doing this? Or if I just start thinking about this?”
And if my interpretation is correct, then the only thing I can say is: look at the people who are pointing this way. And see if you want to be more or less like them. See if they have happy / successful lives. Which parts of them do you like and want to emulate? Which parts seem off? I don’t think we know each other, but you can probably find other people in your life who would make a decent substitute.
(Epistemic status: improvising wildly)
You are being outdebated because you are arguing with a memeplex evolved for dragging people into paroxysms of ambiguous guilt. (More prosaically, you can be outargued by, say, a car salesman; if they have convinced you to spend much more money than you intended and there is this really good offer available right now, this means they are better at this than you, which is their job).
I suspect the ambiguity is important. As Said said, equivocation; Motte and Bailey is similar.
My problem with all this: sometimes intense guilt IS the appropriate response. There may be an aspect from which your behaviour is, in fact, reprehensible! This seems to rule out hard and fast “well, don’t let people make you feel guilty” heuristics.
In passing, taboo “narrative”. It has least two distinct meanings: a particular story (usually linear), or something more like a worldview, ideology or doctrine.
In my post I mean neither of those definitions. I’m taking about the thing your mind does during recounting a particular story.
In that case, I have completely misunderstood.
From the other side, agreement is often not real. People agree out of politeness, or agree with a distorted (perhaps more salient but less relevant to the discussion) version of a claim, without ensuring it’s not a bucket error. There’s some use in keeping beliefs unchanged, but not in failing to understand the meaning of the claim under discussion (when it has one). So agreement (especially your own, as it’s easier to fix) should be treated with scepticism.