i may be should (and probably will not) write my own post about Goodwill. instead i will say in comment what Goodwill is about, by my definition.
Goodwill, the way i see it, on the emotional level, is basically respect and cooperation. when someone make an argument, do you try to see to what area in ConceptSpace they are trying to gesturing, and then asking clarifying questions to understand, or do you round it up to the nearest stupid position, and not even see the actual argument being made? do you even see then saying something incoherent and try to parse it, instead of proving it wrong?
the standard definition of Goodwill does not include the ways in which failure of Goodwill is failure of rationality. is failure of seeing what someone is trying to say, to understand their position and their framing.
civility is good for its own sake. but almost everyone who decided to be uncivil end up strawmanning their opponents, end up with more wrong map of the world. what may look like forgiveness from outside, for rationalist, should look from inside like remembering that we expect short inferential distances and that politics wrecks your ability to do math and your believes filter yourreceptions, so depends on your side in argument.
i gained my understanding of those phenomenons mostly from the Rational Blogosphere, and saw it as part of rationality. there is important difference between person executing the algorithm “being civil and forgiving”, and people executing algorithm “remember about biases and inferential distances, and try to overcome them”, that implemented by understanding the importance of cooperating even after perceived defection in noisy environment, in the prisoner’s dilemma, and by assuming that communication is hard ind miscommunications are frequent, etc.
I think that’s right, but in my list I’m trying to factor out non-strawmanning as “alternative-minding”, and civility under “goodwill”.
I think there are anti-strawmanning benefits to being friendly, but I’m wary of trying to cash out everything that’s a good idea as “oh yeah, this is good because it helps individuals see the truth better”, when that’s not actually true for every good idea.
In this case, I think there are two things worth keeping distinct: the goal of understanding others’ views in a discussion, and the goal of making discussion happen at all. Civility helps keep social environments fun and chill enough that people stick around, are interested in engaging, and don’t go into the conversation feeling triggered or defensive. That’s worth protecting, IMO, even if there’s no risk that yelling at people (or whatever) will directly cause you to straw-man them.
so i thought about you comment and i understand why we think about that in different ways.
in my model of the world, there is important concept—Goodwill. there are arrows that point toward it, things that create goodwill—niceness, same side politically, personal relationship, all sort of things. there are also things that destroy goodwill, or even move it to the negative numbers.
there are arrows that come out of this Goodwill node in my casual graph. things like System1 understand what actually said, tend to react nicely to things, able to pass ITT. some things you can get other ways—people can be polite to people they hate, especially on the internet. but there are things that i saw only as result of Goodwill. and System1 correct interpretation is one of them/ maybe it’s possible—but i never saw it. and the politeness you get without Goodwill, is shallow. people’s System1 notice that in body language, and even in writing.
now, you can dial back on needless insulting and condescension. those are adversarial moves that can be chose consciously or avoided, even with effort. but from my point of view, when there is so little Goodwill left, the chance for good discussion already lost. it can only be bad and very bad. avoiding very bad is important! but my aim in such situations is to leave the discussion when the goodwill come close to zero, and have mental alarm screaming at me if i ever in the negative numbers of feel like the other person have negative numbers of Goodwill toward me.
so, basically, in my model of the world, there is ONE node, Goodwill. in the world, there is no different things. you write: “even if there’s no risk that yelling at people (or whatever) will directly cause you to straw-man them.”. but in my model, such situation is impossible! yelling at people WILL cause you to strawman them.
in my model of the world, this fact is not public knowledge, and my model regarding that is important part of what i want to communicate when I’m talking about Goodwill.
thanks for the conversion! it’s the clearest way i ever described my concept of Goodwill, and it was useful for my to formulate that in words.
i may be should (and probably will not) write my own post about Goodwill. instead i will say in comment what Goodwill is about, by my definition.
Goodwill, the way i see it, on the emotional level, is basically respect and cooperation. when someone make an argument, do you try to see to what area in ConceptSpace they are trying to gesturing, and then asking clarifying questions to understand, or do you round it up to the nearest stupid position, and not even see the actual argument being made? do you even see then saying something incoherent and try to parse it, instead of proving it wrong?
the standard definition of Goodwill does not include the ways in which failure of Goodwill is failure of rationality. is failure of seeing what someone is trying to say, to understand their position and their framing.
civility is good for its own sake. but almost everyone who decided to be uncivil end up strawmanning their opponents, end up with more wrong map of the world. what may look like forgiveness from outside, for rationalist, should look from inside like remembering that we expect short inferential distances and that politics wrecks your ability to do math and your believes filter your receptions, so depends on your side in argument.
i gained my understanding of those phenomenons mostly from the Rational Blogosphere, and saw it as part of rationality. there is important difference between person executing the algorithm “being civil and forgiving”, and people executing algorithm “remember about biases and inferential distances, and try to overcome them”, that implemented by understanding the importance of cooperating even after perceived defection in noisy environment, in the prisoner’s dilemma, and by assuming that communication is hard ind miscommunications are frequent, etc.
I think that’s right, but in my list I’m trying to factor out non-strawmanning as “alternative-minding”, and civility under “goodwill”.
I think there are anti-strawmanning benefits to being friendly, but I’m wary of trying to cash out everything that’s a good idea as “oh yeah, this is good because it helps individuals see the truth better”, when that’s not actually true for every good idea.
In this case, I think there are two things worth keeping distinct: the goal of understanding others’ views in a discussion, and the goal of making discussion happen at all. Civility helps keep social environments fun and chill enough that people stick around, are interested in engaging, and don’t go into the conversation feeling triggered or defensive. That’s worth protecting, IMO, even if there’s no risk that yelling at people (or whatever) will directly cause you to straw-man them.
so i thought about you comment and i understand why we think about that in different ways.
in my model of the world, there is important concept—Goodwill. there are arrows that point toward it, things that create goodwill—niceness, same side politically, personal relationship, all sort of things. there are also things that destroy goodwill, or even move it to the negative numbers.
there are arrows that come out of this Goodwill node in my casual graph. things like System1 understand what actually said, tend to react nicely to things, able to pass ITT. some things you can get other ways—people can be polite to people they hate, especially on the internet. but there are things that i saw only as result of Goodwill. and System1 correct interpretation is one of them/ maybe it’s possible—but i never saw it. and the politeness you get without Goodwill, is shallow. people’s System1 notice that in body language, and even in writing.
now, you can dial back on needless insulting and condescension. those are adversarial moves that can be chose consciously or avoided, even with effort. but from my point of view, when there is so little Goodwill left, the chance for good discussion already lost. it can only be bad and very bad. avoiding very bad is important! but my aim in such situations is to leave the discussion when the goodwill come close to zero, and have mental alarm screaming at me if i ever in the negative numbers of feel like the other person have negative numbers of Goodwill toward me.
so, basically, in my model of the world, there is ONE node, Goodwill. in the world, there is no different things. you write: “even if there’s no risk that yelling at people (or whatever) will directly cause you to straw-man them.”. but in my model, such situation is impossible! yelling at people WILL cause you to strawman them.
in my model of the world, this fact is not public knowledge, and my model regarding that is important part of what i want to communicate when I’m talking about Goodwill.
thanks for the conversion! it’s the clearest way i ever described my concept of Goodwill, and it was useful for my to formulate that in words.