The quoted passage from Chris is actually a beautiful exposition of how Alasdair MacIntyre describes the feeling of encountering reasoning from an alternate “tradition of thought” to which one is an alien: the things that such a tradition says seems alternately obviously true or confusingly framed; the tradition focuses on things you think are unimportant; and the tradition seems apt to confuse people, particularly, of course, the noobs who haven’t learned the really important concepts yet.
MacIntyre talks a lot about how, although traditions of thought make tradition-independent truth claims, adjudicating between the claims of different traditions is typically hard-to-impossible because of different standards of rationality within them. Thus, here’s someone describing MacIntyre.
MacIntyre says [that conflicts between traditions] achieve resolution only when they move through at least two stages: one in which each tradition describes and judges its rivals only in its own terms, and a second in which it becomes possible to understand one’s rivals in their own terms and thus to find new reasons for changing one’s mind. Moving from the first stage to the second “requires a rare gift of empathy as well as of intellectual insight”
This is kinda MacIntyre’s way of talking about what LW talks about as inferential distances—or, as I now tend to think about it, about how pretraining on different corpora gives you very different ontology. I don’t think either of those are really sufficient, though?
I’m not really going anywhere with this comment, I just find MacIntyre’s perspective on this really illuminating, and something I broadly endorse.
I think LW has a pretty thick intellectual tradition at this point, with a pretty thick bundle of both explicit and implicit presuppositions, and it’s unsurprising that people within it just find even very well-informed critiques of it mostly irrelevant, just as it’s unsurprising that a lot of people critiqueing it don’t really seem to actually engage with it. (I do find it frustrating that people within the tradition seem to take this situation as a sign of the truth-speaking nature of LW though.)
Not taking critiques of your methods seriously is a huge problem for truth-speaking. What well-informed critiques are you thinking of? I want to make sure I’ve taken them on board.
The quoted passage from Chris is actually a beautiful exposition of how Alasdair MacIntyre describes the feeling of encountering reasoning from an alternate “tradition of thought” to which one is an alien: the things that such a tradition says seems alternately obviously true or confusingly framed; the tradition focuses on things you think are unimportant; and the tradition seems apt to confuse people, particularly, of course, the noobs who haven’t learned the really important concepts yet.
MacIntyre talks a lot about how, although traditions of thought make tradition-independent truth claims, adjudicating between the claims of different traditions is typically hard-to-impossible because of different standards of rationality within them. Thus, here’s someone describing MacIntyre.
This is kinda MacIntyre’s way of talking about what LW talks about as inferential distances—or, as I now tend to think about it, about how pretraining on different corpora gives you very different ontology. I don’t think either of those are really sufficient, though?
I’m not really going anywhere with this comment, I just find MacIntyre’s perspective on this really illuminating, and something I broadly endorse.
I think LW has a pretty thick intellectual tradition at this point, with a pretty thick bundle of both explicit and implicit presuppositions, and it’s unsurprising that people within it just find even very well-informed critiques of it mostly irrelevant, just as it’s unsurprising that a lot of people critiqueing it don’t really seem to actually engage with it. (I do find it frustrating that people within the tradition seem to take this situation as a sign of the truth-speaking nature of LW though.)
Not taking critiques of your methods seriously is a huge problem for truth-speaking. What well-informed critiques are you thinking of? I want to make sure I’ve taken them on board.