Like to explain why I think as I do, I‘d need to go through some basic rational concepts.
I believe that if the rational concepts are pulling their weight, it should be possible to explain the way the concept is showing up concretely in your thinking, rather than justifying it in the general case first.
As an example, perhaps your friend is protesting your use of anecdotes as data, but you wish to defend it as Bayesian, if not scientific, evidence. Rather than explaining the difference in general, I think you can say “I think that it’s more likely that we hear this many people complaining about an axe murderer downtown if that’s in fact what’s going on, and that it’s appropriate for us to avoid that area today. I agree it’s not the only explanation and you should be able to get a more reliable sort of data for building a scientific theory, but I do think the existence of an axe murderer is a likely enough explanation for these stories that we should act on it”
If I’m right that this is generally possible, then I think this is a route around the feeling of being trapped on the other side of an inferential gap (which is how I interpreted the ‘weird tension’)
I think you’re right, when the issue at hand is agreed on by both parties to be purely a “matter of fact.”
As soon as social or political implications crop in, that’s no longer a guarantee.
But we often pretend like our social/political values are matters of fact. The offense arises when we use rational concepts in a way that gives the lie to that pretense. Finding an indirect and inoffensive way to present the materials and let them deconstruct their pretenses is what I’m wishing for here. LW has a strong culture surrounding how these general-purpose tools get applied, so I’d like to see a presentation of the “pure theory” that’s done in an engaging way not obviously entangled with this blog.
The alternative is to use rationality to try and become savvier social operators. This can be “instrumental rationality” or it can be “dark arts,” depending on how we carry it out. I’m all for instrumental rationality, but I suspect that spreading rational thought further will require that other cultural groups appropriate the tools to refine their own viewpoints rather than us going out and doing the convincing ourselves.
I believe that if the rational concepts are pulling their weight, it should be possible to explain the way the concept is showing up concretely in your thinking, rather than justifying it in the general case first.
As an example, perhaps your friend is protesting your use of anecdotes as data, but you wish to defend it as Bayesian, if not scientific, evidence. Rather than explaining the difference in general, I think you can say “I think that it’s more likely that we hear this many people complaining about an axe murderer downtown if that’s in fact what’s going on, and that it’s appropriate for us to avoid that area today. I agree it’s not the only explanation and you should be able to get a more reliable sort of data for building a scientific theory, but I do think the existence of an axe murderer is a likely enough explanation for these stories that we should act on it”
If I’m right that this is generally possible, then I think this is a route around the feeling of being trapped on the other side of an inferential gap (which is how I interpreted the ‘weird tension’)
I think you’re right, when the issue at hand is agreed on by both parties to be purely a “matter of fact.”
As soon as social or political implications crop in, that’s no longer a guarantee.
But we often pretend like our social/political values are matters of fact. The offense arises when we use rational concepts in a way that gives the lie to that pretense. Finding an indirect and inoffensive way to present the materials and let them deconstruct their pretenses is what I’m wishing for here. LW has a strong culture surrounding how these general-purpose tools get applied, so I’d like to see a presentation of the “pure theory” that’s done in an engaging way not obviously entangled with this blog.
The alternative is to use rationality to try and become savvier social operators. This can be “instrumental rationality” or it can be “dark arts,” depending on how we carry it out. I’m all for instrumental rationality, but I suspect that spreading rational thought further will require that other cultural groups appropriate the tools to refine their own viewpoints rather than us going out and doing the convincing ourselves.