My experience is that folk who need support out of tough spots like this have a harder time hearing the deeper message when it’s delivered in carefully caveated epistemically rigorous language.
I kinda feel like my reaction to this is similar to your reaction to frames:
I refuse to comply with efforts to pave the world in leather. I advocate people learn to wear shoes instead. (Metaphorically speaking.)
To be more explicit, I feel like… sure, I can believe that sometimes epistemic rigor pushes people into thinky-mode and sometimes that’s bad; but epistemic rigor is good anyway. I would much prefer for people to get better at handling things said with epistemic rigor, than for epistemic rigor to get thrown aside.
And maybe that’s not realistic everywhere, but even then I feel like there should be spaces where we go to be epistemically rigorous even if there are people for whom less rigor would sometimes be better. And I feel like LessWrong should be such a space.
I think the thing I’m reacting to here isn’t so much the lack of epistemic rigor—there are lots of things on LW that aren’t rigorous and I don’t think that’s automatically bad. Sometimes you don’t know how to be rigorous. Sometimes it would take a lot of space and it’s not necessary. But strategic lack of epistemic rigor—“I want people to react like _ and they’re more likely to do that if I’m not rigorous”—feels bad.
But strategic lack of epistemic rigor—“I want people to react like _ and they’re more likely to do that if I’m not rigorous”—feels bad.
That’s not what I meant.
I mean this much more like switching to Spanish when speaking with a Mexican store clerk. We can talk about the virtues of English all we want to, and maybe even justify that we’re helping the clerk deepen their skill with interfacing with the modern world… but really, I just want to communicate.
You can frame that as dropping standards in order to have a certain effect on them, but that’s a really damn weird frame.
I think this relies on “Val is not successfully communicating with the reader” being for reasons analogous to “Val is speaking English which the store clerk doesn’t, or only speaks it poorly”. But I suspect that if we unpacked what’s going on, I wouldn’t think that analogy held, and I would still think that what you’re doing seems bad.
(Also, I want to flag that “justify that we’re helping the clerk deepen their skill with interfacing with the modern world” doesn’t pattern match to anything I said. It hints at pattern matching with me saying something like “part of why we should speak with epistemic rigor is to help people hear things with epistemic rigor”, but I didn’t say that. You didn’t say that I did, and maybe the hint wasn’t intentional on your part, but I wanted to flag it anyway.)
I kinda feel like my reaction to this is similar to your reaction to frames:
To be more explicit, I feel like… sure, I can believe that sometimes epistemic rigor pushes people into thinky-mode and sometimes that’s bad; but epistemic rigor is good anyway. I would much prefer for people to get better at handling things said with epistemic rigor, than for epistemic rigor to get thrown aside.
And maybe that’s not realistic everywhere, but even then I feel like there should be spaces where we go to be epistemically rigorous even if there are people for whom less rigor would sometimes be better. And I feel like LessWrong should be such a space.
I think the thing I’m reacting to here isn’t so much the lack of epistemic rigor—there are lots of things on LW that aren’t rigorous and I don’t think that’s automatically bad. Sometimes you don’t know how to be rigorous. Sometimes it would take a lot of space and it’s not necessary. But strategic lack of epistemic rigor—“I want people to react like _ and they’re more likely to do that if I’m not rigorous”—feels bad.
That’s not what I meant.
I mean this much more like switching to Spanish when speaking with a Mexican store clerk. We can talk about the virtues of English all we want to, and maybe even justify that we’re helping the clerk deepen their skill with interfacing with the modern world… but really, I just want to communicate.
You can frame that as dropping standards in order to have a certain effect on them, but that’s a really damn weird frame.
I think this relies on “Val is not successfully communicating with the reader” being for reasons analogous to “Val is speaking English which the store clerk doesn’t, or only speaks it poorly”. But I suspect that if we unpacked what’s going on, I wouldn’t think that analogy held, and I would still think that what you’re doing seems bad.
(Also, I want to flag that “justify that we’re helping the clerk deepen their skill with interfacing with the modern world” doesn’t pattern match to anything I said. It hints at pattern matching with me saying something like “part of why we should speak with epistemic rigor is to help people hear things with epistemic rigor”, but I didn’t say that. You didn’t say that I did, and maybe the hint wasn’t intentional on your part, but I wanted to flag it anyway.)