Suber seems to concentrate on tactics where one person avoids responding to the argument by making some statement about the arguer (“you’re saying that because of your hopeless confirmation bias!”) That sort of rudeness is a potential problem if someone has a belief which includes explanations of why other people don’t believe it. I’m not sure what to do to about that, since I certainly have such beliefs. As far as I can make out, if I want to avoid being rude, I end up having to respond to arguments against my belief even though I think those arguments aren’t reason the arguer doesn’t share my belief.
The rudeness that Eliezer is talking about seems different from the rudeness that Suber is talking about.
What Eliezer is talking about might be grouped under the heading “Failure to keep score.” The interlocutor refuses to acknowledge that a point has been undermined. Maybe the interlocutor pretends that the point was never made. Or maybe the interlocutor returns to the point as though it had never been undermined.
What Suber is talking about is the kind of rudeness where you refuse to play the game altogether. In reply to arguments, you don’t even pretend to address them. Instead, you say, “According to my position, I don’t even need to address your arguments on their merits.”
I’m generalizing Suber’s lovely term in a way that seems appropriate; if he actually objects to this, I’ll find a different term. But it seems that once you go so far as to coin a lovely term like “logically rude”, then doing nothing but questioning the other person’s motives is just a specialized kind of logical rudeness.
which I’m pretty sure I first found here, HT
Glad you liked it.
Suber seems to concentrate on tactics where one person avoids responding to the argument by making some statement about the arguer (“you’re saying that because of your hopeless confirmation bias!”) That sort of rudeness is a potential problem if someone has a belief which includes explanations of why other people don’t believe it. I’m not sure what to do to about that, since I certainly have such beliefs. As far as I can make out, if I want to avoid being rude, I end up having to respond to arguments against my belief even though I think those arguments aren’t reason the arguer doesn’t share my belief.
Your example of people who concede Y but then switch to Z reminds me of When Theism is Like an M.C. Escher Drawing.
[edit: remove spurious “aren’t’]
The rudeness that Eliezer is talking about seems different from the rudeness that Suber is talking about.
What Eliezer is talking about might be grouped under the heading “Failure to keep score.” The interlocutor refuses to acknowledge that a point has been undermined. Maybe the interlocutor pretends that the point was never made. Or maybe the interlocutor returns to the point as though it had never been undermined.
What Suber is talking about is the kind of rudeness where you refuse to play the game altogether. In reply to arguments, you don’t even pretend to address them. Instead, you say, “According to my position, I don’t even need to address your arguments on their merits.”
I’m generalizing Suber’s lovely term in a way that seems appropriate; if he actually objects to this, I’ll find a different term. But it seems that once you go so far as to coin a lovely term like “logically rude”, then doing nothing but questioning the other person’s motives is just a specialized kind of logical rudeness.
Just to be clear, I myself wasn’t objecting.